We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (29 page)

Four days and nights dragged by before they broke it to him that
this Lapp had also changed his mind and made the excuse that he
was ill. It was no surprise. Jan knew it before they told him. This time,
nobody could think of any alternative. To take Jan down to the valley again in the quickly melting snow was a final admission of defeat, because they could never get him up again over naked rock. Down in
the valley, there was nothing they could do except feed him till the
Germans found him and took them all. To leave him where he was
only condemned him to a quicker, kinder death. It seemed to them
all, and to Jan too, that they had reached the end. For the first time,
they had no plans whatever for the future, no hopes to offer him,
nothing to say which would encourage him. The only thing they
could have done in mercy would have been to deny him the food
which had served to spin out his existence, and to let him fade out as
quickly as possible and in peace. Whatever they did, they knew it
would not be long. It was useless even to promise to come to see him
again. When they left him they gave him food, but they made him no
promise. They expected to come again, twice: once to find his body
and protect it from the birds and wolves, and again, when the snow
was gone and the earth was thawed, to bury him.

When their voices had faded and the last of them had gone, Jan
lay quite still. The doleful wind ruffled his hair and sifted a little snow
across his face. His mind was at rest in the peace which sometimes
follows the final acceptance of death.

WHEN HE opened his eyes there was a man standing looking at him.

Jan had never seen a Lapp before, except in pictures. The man
stood there on skis, silent and perfectly motionless, leaning on his
ski-sticks. He was very small. He had a lean swarthy face and narrow
eyes with a slant. He was wearing a long tunic of dark blue embroidered with red and yellow, and leather leggings, and embroidered
boots of hairy reindeer skin with turned-up pointed toes. He had a
wide leather belt with two sheath-knives hanging from it. He was
wearing it loosely round his hips, not round his waist, so that he
looked all body and no legs, like a gnome. Jan had not heard him
coming. He was simply there.

They stared at each other for a long time before Jan could speak.
His brain was slow to readjust itself, and his memory was muddled.
Had someone told him this man was coming? Had he dreamed it was
all over? Was this a dream? At last, with supreme inadequacy, he said:
"Good morning." The Lapp did not more or answer, but he gave a
grunt, and Jan dimly remembered then that he probably could not
understand a word he said. He shut his eyes again because he was too
tired to make an effort to think what to say or do.

He had an uneasy feeling that he ought to know who the man was
and where he had come from. There had been a lot of talk about
Lapps coming to help him, he could remember that; but it had all been a long time ago, and it had all come to nothing in the end. They
had given it up as a bad job. He could not think of any sense or reason in a Lapp being there on the plateau all alone. He looked again
to make sure if he had seen what he thought he had seen, and the
man was still standing there just the same, with his ski-sticks tucked
under his armpits and no expression whatever on his face.

Jan could not rest with the feeling whenever he shut his eyes that
someone was silently staring at him. He could not even tell if the stare
was friendly or hostile, if the extraordinary creature he had seen was
wanting to help him or fingering the long knives at the belt. He wished
he would go away. It seemed to him that the man stood there for hours
and did not move or speak or change his curious stooped position.
But then, without any sound the man had gone. Jan was relieved, and
sank back into the daze which this sudden apparition had disturbed.

In fact, this was one of the Lapps whom the ski-runner from
Kaafjord had gone to see on his journey a month before. He had just
arrived with his herds and his tents and family in the mountains at
the head of Kaafjord, and he must have been thinking over the message all that time. When he had first been asked, the whole matter
was in a vague imponderable future. Now it was in the present, and
the first thing he had done when he got to Kaafjord had been to find
out where Jan was lying, and then to go himself to see whether the
story was true. He did stand looking at Jan for three or four hours.
He was making up his mind. As soon as he had done so, he went
down into the valley and announced that he was going to the frontier. Immediately the gifts which had been prepared for the Lapps
who had defaulted were pressed upon him; the blankets, coffee,
brandy, and tobacco which had been bought here and there at enormous prices and carefully hoarded for this purpose.

The next thing that brought Jan to his senses was a sound of
snorting and shuffling, unlike anything he had ever heard before,
hoarse shouts, the clanging of bells and a peculiar acrid animal smell,
and when he opened his eyes the barren snow-field round him which had been empty for weeks was teeming with hundreds upon hundreds of reindeer milling round him in an unending horde, and he
was lying flat on the ground among all their trampling feet. Then two
Lapps were standing over him talking their strange incomprehensible tongue. They both bent down and picked him bodily up, talking
all the time, but not to him. For a moment he could not imagine
what they were going to do; but then he understood he was being
moved from his own sledge to a larger one. They muffled him up to
his eyes in blankets and skins, and stowed packages and bundles on
top of him and around him and lashed him and everything down
with thongs of reindeer hide and sinew. There was a jerk, and the
sledge began to move.

This had all happened so fast that Jan was bewildered. A few minutes before he had been lying torpid and alone; now he was being
dragged feet first at increasing speed in the middle of a wild tumult,
and nobody had given him a word of explanation. He squinted along
his body, and saw the hindquarters of a deer which was harnessed to
the sledge. A Lapp on skis was leading it. It was one of the bell deer
of the herd, and as it snorted and pawed the snow and the sledge got
under way and the bell on its neck began a rhythmic clang, the herd
fell in behind it, five hundred strong, anxiously padding along in its
wake. From the corner of his eye he could see a few dozen of the leaders, jostling for position. The mass of deer flowed on behind; it
streamed out in a hurrying narrow column when the sledge flew fast
on the level snow, and when the sledge was checked the herd surged
round it and also halted. Sometimes in these involuntary halts Jan
found himself looking up from where he lay on his back a foot above
the ground at the ungainly heads and large mournful eyes and snuffling nostrils immediately above him. But when this happened, one
or the other of the two Lapps appeared, urging on the draught deer
which pulled the sledge, and sometimes giving the sledge a heave
himself till the obstacle was passed and the rumble of hoofs began
again, and the snow-hiss beneath the runners.

All day the enormous mass of beasts swept on across the plateau,
cutting a wide swath of trampled snow which hid the tracks of the
sledge which carried Jan: the most strange and majestic escort ever
offered to a fugitive in war. Jan lay on the sledge feeling that events
had got beyond him; but he was content to let them take their course,
because he had seen the position of the sun and knew that at last,
whatever happened next, he was on his way towards the south and
towards the border.

Some time in the evening they halted. The two Lapps gave him
some dried reindeer meet and some reindeer milk to drink, and then
he saw them pitching a little tent made of skins. The reindeer were
wandering aimlessly round and digging in the snow with their
forelegs to look for the moss on the rocks far down below. Jan was
left lying on the sledge. On the whole he was glad for this, because the
tent was certainly only made for two; but when he was left alone
among the deer he still found them alarming. They came and sniffed
at him, most obviously wondering whether he was fit to eat, and Jan,
who knew very little about the tastes of reindeer, was not sure if he
was or not. If ever he shut his eyes, hot breath and wet hairy muzzles
woke him.

After the Lapps had disappeared inside the tent, a most peculiar
noise began to come out of it: a monotonous kind of chant which
rose to howls and died away to moaning. When the first eerie shrieks
rolled out across the plateau Jan thought they must be fighting, and
when one of them burst out of the tent after a little while and staggered through the snow towards him with the knives dangling at his
belt, he thought an entirely unexpected death was in store for him.
But the Lap stooped over him and a waft of his breath explained the
whole fearsome interlude. The Lapps were drunk, and they were
singing. They had been getting to work on the brandy which had
been given to them as a reward, and one had come reeling forth on
his short bow legs with no more evil intention than to offer Jan a
swig at the bottle. It came back to Jan then that years before he had either read or been told about Lappish singing. It is called yoicking.
It is said to be a kind of ballad which tells stories of heroic Lappish
deeds, but it is not in the least like the usual conception of music, and
to people who have not been instructed in its arts it is apt to seem no
more than a mournful wail, like a dog's howling at the moon, but
somewhat sadder.

The day's sudden journey had revived Jan's interest in life, and
when the Lapp thrust the brandy bottle at him he laughed: for a
moment, with the wry humour which never left him except on the
verge of death, he had had a glimpse of the ludicrous indignity, after
all that had happened before, of being slaughtered by a drunken
Lapp on the very last stage of the way to the frontier. He took a small
sip from the bottle and was glad of it, but the Lapp began to talk. Not
a single word he said conveyed anything to Jan, but the general
meaning was clear enough. He was pressing Jan to drink more, with
the embarrassing hospitality of drunk people of any nation, and he
was going to be offended if Jan refused. But Jan knew from the experience of the last few weeks that one sip was enough to make him feel
better, and that two might make him a great deal worse. So he smiled
and shut his eyes and shammed unconscious, and after a while the
Lapp finished the bottle himself and wandered back to the tent to
start yoicking again.

It was a good thing to be relieved of the expectation of being
murdered, but the situation was alarming still. As the lugubrious
sounds of revelry rolled out again, Jan thought of the German voices
he had heard in the night, and of the ski patrols which were said to
be out on the frontier, but the dreadful noise in the quiet frosty air
sounded as if a patrol might hear it miles away. It made him nervous
and there was no possible way he could hope to persuade them to
stop it.

From time to time the Lapps made further sorties to offer him
drinks or merely to look at him. Sometimes the bottles they brought
were full, and sometimes nearly empty. He wondered how many bottles the organisation had bought, and how long it would be
before the two men got over this rare and splendid orgy and were fit
to go on with the journey again. He was so helplessly in their hands.
He felt as a passenger in an aeroplane might feel if he discovered the
pilot and crew were very far from sober. All in all, he spent an anxious night.

But during the night the singing slowly flagged and gave a place
to a blessed silence, and some time in the morning the tent shook
and the Lapps emerged, apparently none the worse, and immediately
set about striking the tent and harnessing the reindeer. They seemed
as brisk as ever. He thought they must have remarkable constitutions.
Soon the heard was rounded up, the sledge started, and the headlong
rush of hoofs began again.

On this second day Jan lost the last of his sense of position and
direction. He did not know where he was being taken, and he could
not ask what plans the Lapps had made, or try to change them whatever they might be. But simply because there was something happening, some positive action going on at last, he had roused himself
out of his mental apathy, and even felt physically better than he had
when all hope had seemed to have come to an end. The lurching and
swaying of the sledge and its sudden stops and starts were sickening
and tiring, but he summoned up every bit of strength which he still
possessed, inspired if not by hope, at least by curiosity. He wanted to
see what was going to happen next. This wish in itself must have
helped him to keep alive.

Everything happened, very quickly. The sledge lurched to a halt,
perhaps for the hundredth time. The herd, swept on by its own
momentum, came milling all round him again. Then he found that
both the Lapps were trying to tell him something. They were pointing with their ski-sticks. He tried to look in the direction they
showed him but he could not see very much between the hundreds
of legs of deer. He listened to what they were saying, but it meant
nothing to him at all. And then he caught a single word, the first word they had ever said which he understood. It was "Kilpisjarvi,"
and he remembered it. It is the name of a lake. He looked again, with
a sudden uncontrollable excitement, and caught a glimpse of a steep
slope which fell away from where the herd was standing, and down
below, at the foot of the slope, an enormous expanse of smooth
unsullied snow. It was the frozen lake, in sight; and he had remembered that the frontier runs across the middle of it. The low banks of
snow on the other side were Sweden. Slowly there dawned the wild
incredible hope that he was going to win.