We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (27 page)

In the comparatively roomy space behind the snow wall, he could
wriggle one leg at a time out of the sleeping-bag and look carefully at
his feet, which he had never been able to do inside the grave. They were
a very disgusting sight. His toes were still worse than anything else, but
the whole of each foot was so bad that it was frost-bitten right through
from one side to the other between the Achilles tendon and the bone.
All the way up to his knees where were patches of black and grey. He
had quite given up thinking of ever being able to walk on them again.
As soon as he got to a hospital, he supposed, somebody would put him
straight on an operating table and cut off his feet without thinking
twice about it. He was resigned to that, but he still very much wanted
not to lose his legs. Apart from the problems of keeping himself alive,
he had thought more about his legs than anything else, wondering
whether there was anything he could do to help to save them. He had
made up his mind some time before about one drastic course of
action, but in the grave there had not been enough room to put it into
effect. He was still under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that gangrene would go on spreading, unless one got rid of it, like dry rot in a
house. The source of it all was his toes. They were not part of him any
more, although they were still attached to him, and it seemed only
common sense that he would be better without them. There was
nobody he could expect to help him; but now the time and the chance
had come, and he made his preparations to cut off his toes himself.

He still had his pocket-knife, and he still had some brandy. With
the brandy as anoesthetic, and the knife as a scalpel, lying curled up
on his side in the snow with his leg drawn up so that he could reach
it, he began carefully to dissect them one by one.

It would have been best to get it all over quickly, but apart from
the pain and the sickening repulsion, it was difficult to cut them;
more difficult than he had expected. He had to find the joints. His
hands were rather clumsy and very weak, because there had been
some frostbite in his fingers too, and the knife was not so sharp as it
had been. He grimly persevered, and slowly succeeded. As each one
was finally severed, he laid it on a small ledge of rock above him
where he could not see it, because he no longer had strength to throw
it far away. After each one he had to stop, to get over the nausea and
dope himself with brandy. Someone had brought him some cod liver
oil ointment, and he smeared a thick slab of it on each wound and
tied it in place with a strip of blanket.

This grisly operation was spread out over nearly three days. At the
end of it, there were nine toes on the ledge. The little toe on his left
foot did not seem so bad as the others, so he kept it. When he had finished, he felt very much better in his mind. Of course, there was no
immediate improvement in his legs, but it gave him some satisfaction
to have done something which he hoped would help to save them; it
was better to know that the rotten revolting things were gone and
could not poison him any more. It made him feel cleaner.

After it was all done, he went back with relief to the simple routine of his daily life: feeding himself, collecting ice-water, mixing
milk, trying to clean his pistol; once in a while, as seldom as he could,
rolling a cigarette with infinite care and finding the box of matches
which he kept inside his underclothes next to his skin; trying to put
ointment on the sores on his back without getting too cold; sometimes treating himself to a sip of brandy; and always keeping on the
watch for new attacks of frostbite. It was terribly difficult not to lie
there listening, imagining the sound of skis or the distant snarl of wolves. Sometimes he stopped up his ears to keep out the ghastly
silence, and sometimes he talked to himself so that there was something to listen to. When people did come from Mandal, shouting
"Hallo, gentleman," from far off, the sudden disturbance of the
silence was a shock, and often it took him some time to find his voice
to answer.

They paid him faithful visits all those weeks, toiling up the long
climb every third or fourth night. When they came, they always
brought fresh food, and usually some dry wood to make a fire to heat
a drink for him; but lighting fires always made them uneasy in case
the smoke or the light was seen. Whenever he heard them coming, he
pulled himself together and tried to look as alive as he could, because
he had a fear at the back of his mind that they might get depressed
and give him up as a bad job and stop coming any more. On their
side, they felt they had to cheer him up, so that the meetings were
usually happy, although the happiness was forced. Sometimes there
was even something to laugh at, like the time when one man forgot
the password. The story of how Jan had shot the Gestapo officer had
got around, and he had the reputation in Mandal of being triggerconscious and a deadly shot. So when this man found that the words
"Hallo, gentleman" had quite escaped his mind at the critical
moment, he hurriedly dropped on his hands and knees and crawled
up to Jan on his stomach, keeping well under cover till he was close
enough to talk to him and make perfectly certain that there would
not be any unfortunate misunderstanding.

On one of their visits, Jan asked them for something to read. What
he really wanted was an English thriller or a French one, because during the last couple of years he had got more used to reading foreign
languages than his own. But nobody knew of anything like that in
Mandal, and the man he happened to ask could only offer him religious works in Norwegian. He declined that offer, but afterwards the
man remembered an annual edition of a weekly magazine which he
could borrow. Jan thanked him, and the heavy volume was carried up the mountain. But as a matter of fact, Jan did not read very much of
it. He never seemed to have time.

Somebody had the brilliant idea, when Jan had been up there for
some time, of bringing up a roll of the kind of thick paper which is
used for insulating buildings. They bent this over Jan in an arch, like
a miniature Nissen hut, and covered it over with snow, and blocked
up one end with a snow wall. It was just big enough for Jan to lie in,
and it protected him quite well. In fact, it sometimes seemed warm
inside. But it had its drawbacks; whenever it seemed to be going to
get tolerably warm, the snow on top of it melted and dripped
through on him mercilessly, and made him even wetter than before.

Sometimes his visitors came with high hopes, but more often the
news they brought him from the valley was disappointing. On one
night soon after they left him there, two men came up full of excitement to say that a Lapp had arrived in Kaafjord and promised to take
him either that night or the next, and they waited all night to help Jan
when he came. But the morning came without any sign of him. For
the next three successive nights men came from the valley to wait
with Jan for the Lapp's arrival, and to make sure he did not miss the
place. They kept watch for him hour by hour; but no movement
broke the skylines of the plateau. On the fourth day they heard that
the Lapp had changed his mind because of a rumour that the
Germans had sent out ski patrols on the frontier.

During the next few days this rumour was confirmed from a good
many different sources. Recently, everyone had been so completely
absorbed by the problems of Jan's health, and the weather, and the
journey across the plateau, that they were well on the way to forgetting about the Germans. It was a long time since the garrison had
come to Mandal, and that had been the last German move, so far as
anyone knew, which had seemed at the time to be part of a deliberate search. The Mandal men had got used to the garrison and begun
to despise it. But now it began to look as if the Germans were still on
the hunt for Jan and even had a rough idea of where he was. When Jan was told about it, he reflected that the Germans had got a jump
ahead of him for the first time in his flight. In the early days, when he
was on the move, they had never done more than bark at his heels;
but now, it seemed, they had thrown out a patrol line right on the
part of the frontier which one day he would have to cross; and unless
he crossed it within a few days, he would have to do it in daylight. If
only he had been fit, both he and the Mandal men would have treated
the patrol as a joke, because like all Norwegians they had a profound
contempt, which may not have been justified, for the Germans' skill
on skis. Even as things were, nobody except the Lapp was deterred by
this extra danger. If they could only get to the frontier, they were sure
they would get across somehow.

But soon after this rumour started, there was an extraordinary
event on the plateau which really did make them take the danger of
Germans more seriously. The most remarkable thing about life on the
plateau had always been that nothing happened whatever. Day after
day could pass without any event, even of the most trivial kind; and
Jan discovered that most of the events which he seemed to remember
were really things he had dreamed or imagined. His commonest
dream or hallucination was that he heard someone coming. One day,
when he was dozing, he heard voices approaching. It had often happened before; but this time, as they came near him, he realised that
they were speaking German. He could not understand what they were
saying, and they soon faded away again; and when he was fully awake,
he thought no more of what seemed a slight variation of his old familiar dream. But the next night, when a party from Mandal came up to
seem him, they arrived in consternation, because there were two sets
of ski tracks which passed thirty yards from the place where Jan was
lying, and none of the Mandal men had made them.

It was one of those utterly mysterious things which start endless
speculation. Up till then, they had always regarded the plateau as a
sanctuary from the Germans, partly because they had never thought
the Germans would venture to go up there, and partly because the job of looking for one man in all those hundreds of miles of snow
was so hopeless that they had been sure that the Germans would not
waste time in trying it. Nobody could imagine where the small party
of men who had made the tracks could have come from, or where
they had been going, or what they had meant to do. They were not
from the Mandal garrison, because they were always kept under
observation, and the place was more than a day's journey from any
other German post. They could not have been part of a frontier
patrol, because it was much too far from the frontier. Yet if they were
searching for Jan, it seemed an incredible coincidence that they
should have passed so near him, unless they had a very good idea of
where he was. Besides, to search in that secretive way was unGerman. If they did know where he was, they would know he could
not be living up there unless Mandal was looking after him, and their
reaction to that would certainly be to use threats and arrests in
Mandal in the hope of finding someone who would give him away
and save them losing face by having to scour the mountains.

They argued round and round the mystery for a long time on the
plateau that night, with a new feeling of insecurity and apprehension. It had been pure luck that the Germans, whatever they were
doing, had not seen Jan when they passed him. There had been a
snowfall earlier in the day which had covered the trampled snow
around his lair and all the old ski tracks which led up to it from
Mandal. But if they came back again, they would find the new tracks
and follow them straight to the spot. Altogether, it was alarming, and
the only comforting suggestion that anybody thought of was that the
tracks might possibly have been made by German deserters trying to
get to Sweden. Nobody ever found out the truth of it. Those voices in
the night remained a vague menace in the background ever after.

When the Lapp lost courage and changed his mind, it was only
the first of a series of disappointment. Hopeful stories of reindeer
sledges expected at any moment kept coming in from Kaafjord and
other valleys in the district; but every time the hope was doomed to die. After a fortnight in which all their plans were frustrated and
came to nothing, the Mandal men got desperate. Every time they
went up to look at Jan they found him a little weaker. He seemed to
be dying by very slow degrees. Besides that, the spring thaw was
beginning in earnest, and with every day the crossing of the plateau
and even the climb out of the valley were getting more difficult. The
snow was rotten and sticky already on the southern slopes, and the
next week or two would see the last chance of a sledge journey before
the following winter. During the thaw every year the plateau becomes
a bog, criss-crossed by swollen streams, and nobody can cross it; and
after the thaw, when the snow is all gone, the only way to move a
helpless man would be to carry him, which would be even slower and
more laborious than dragging him on a sledge.

So they decided to make a final attempt to man-haul the sledge to
Sweden while there was still time, using a larger party which could
work in relays. Accordingly, six men went up on the night of the
ninth of May, and dragged Jan out of the paper tent and started off
again to the southward. But this attempt achieved nothing except to
raise false hopes once more. They had only covered a mile or two
when clouds came down so thickly that they could only see a few feet
ahead of them. They could not steer a course in those conditions, so
they turned round and followed their own tracks back to where they
had started, and put Jan into the paper tent again.

After this failure, Jan really began to get despondent. He never
lost faith in the Mandal men, and still believed they would get him to
Sweden somehow if they went on trying long enough; but he began
to doubt if it was worth it. Nobody had told him much about what
was going on, but he could see for himself what an enormous effort
Mandal and the surrounding district were making on his behalf. So
many different men had come up from the valley by then that he had
lost count of them, and he had some vague idea of the organisation
which must lie behind such frequent visits. As time went on, it
seemed more and more fantastic that the German garrison could go on living down there in the valley, in the midst of all this hectic
activity, and remain in happy ignorance of what was happening.
Every new man who came up to help him meant a new family more
or less involved in his affairs, so that the longer Mandal had to go on
looking after him the more awful would be the disaster in the valley
if the Germans did find out about it. Jan knew, and so did the
Mandal men, the results of the uncontrolled anger of Germans
when they found out that a whole community had deceived them. It
had happened on the west coast, and villages had been systematically burnt, all the men in them shipped to Germany and the
women and children herded into concentration camps in Norway.
There was no doubt this might happen to Mandal, now that so
many people were involved, and Jan had to ask himself what the
reward for running this risk would be. To save his live was the only
objective. When he looked at it coolly, it seemed a very bad bargain.
There was no patriotic motive in it any more, no idea of saving a
trained soldier to fight again; looking at his legs, and the wasted
remains of what had once been such a healthy body, he did not think
he would be any use as a soldier any more. If he died, he thought, it
would be no loss to the army: he was a dead loss anyway. And it was
not as if he were married, or even engaged. Nobody depended
entirely on him for their happiness or livelihood. His father had
another son and daughter: his brother Nils would be quite grown up
by now: and even Bitten, his young sister whom he had loved so
much, must have learned, he supposed, to get on without him, and
perhaps would never depend on him again as much as he had always
imagined. He wondered whether they had all given him up for dead
already, and whether he would ever see them again even if he did live
on. As for his war-time friends of the last two years in England, he
knew they would all have assumed he was dead if they knew where
he was at all.