‘Come back,’ I called out to them. ‘Something has happened to Anton.’
They clambered back, I hauled in the rope and tied the loose end about my waist. ‘I am going down to see if I can find him,’ I said.
I reached the point where, from above, the slope appeared to fall gently away. Zaro took in the slack of the rope and I turned around as I had seen Paluchowicz do. The sight made me catch my breath. The mountain yawned open as though it had been split clean open with a giant axe blow. I was looking across a twenty-yard gap, the narrowest part of the chasm which dropped sickeningly below me. I could not see the bottom. I felt the sweat beading out on my forehead. Futilely I yelled, ‘Anton, Anton!’ I turned and went back, so shaken that I held tightly to the rope all the way.
They all talked at once. Had I seen him? Why was I shouting? Where was he?
I told them what it was like down there, that there was no sign of Paluchowicz.
‘We will have to find him,’ said Kolemenos.
‘We will never find him,’ I told them. ‘He is gone.’
Nobody wanted to believe it. I did not want to believe it myself. With difficulty we broke a way round to a new point from which we could look down into the abyss. Then they understood. We heaved a stone down and listened for it to strike. We heard nothing. We found a bigger stone and dropped that down and there was still no echo of the strike.
We hung around there a long time, not knowing what to do. The disaster was so sudden, so complete. Paluchowicz was with us and then he was gone, plucked away from us. I never thought he would have to die. He seemed indestructible. Tough, toothless, devout old Sergeant Paluchowicz.
‘All this way,’ said the American. ‘All this way, to die so stupidly at the last.’ I think he felt it more than any of us. As the two older men, they had been close together.
Kolemenos took his sack from his back and very deliberately tore it down the seams. We all stood silent. He put a stone in the corner and threw it out into space. The stone fell out and the sack floated away, a symbolic shroud for Paluchowicz. He took his stick and with the blunted axe chopped an end off and made a cross and stuck it there, on the edge.
We climbed on down, trying to keep in sight the spot from which Paluchowicz had disappeared, vaguely hoping we might find his body. But we never found the bottom of the great cleft and we never found Paluchowicz.
There were some quite warm days after this and we could look back and see the majesty of the mountains we had crossed. We were in terrible need of food and now that the supreme effort was over we could barely keep ourselves moving. One day we saw a couple of long-haired wild goats, which bounded off like the wind. They need not have been afraid. We hardly had the strength to kill anything bigger than a beetle. The country was still hilly, but there were rivers and streams and birds in trees.
We had been about eight days without food when we saw far off to the east on a sunny morning a flock of sheep with men and dogs in charge. They were too far off to be of any help to us and were moving away from us, but our hopes rose at the sight of them. Soon we must be picked up. We pulled some green-stuff growing at the edge of a stream and tried to eat it, but it was very bitter and our stomachs would not take it.
Exhausted, walking skeletons of men that we were, we knew now for the first time peace of mind. It was now that we lost, at last, the fear of recapture.
They came from the west, a little knot of marching men, and as they came closer I saw there were six native soldiers with an N.C.O. in charge. I wanted to wave my hands and shout, but I just stood there with the other three watching them come. They were very smart, very clean, very fit, very military. My eyes began to fill and the tears brimmed over.
Smith stepped forward and stuck out his hand.
‘We are very glad to see you,’ he said.
23
Four Reach India
IT WAS HARD to comprehend that this was the end of it all. I leaned my weight forward on my stick and tried to blink my eyes clear. I felt weak and lightheaded like a man in a fever. My knees trembled with weakness and it required real effort to prevent myself slumping down on the ground. Zaro, too, was hunched over his stick, and one of Kolemenos’s great arms was drooped lightly about his shoulders. The rough, scrubby country danced in the haze of a warm noon sun. The soldiers, halted but five yards from us, were a compact knot of men in tropical shorts and shirts swimming in and out of my vision.
I dropped my head forward on my chest and heard the voice of Mister Smith. He talked in English, which I did not understand, but there was no mistaking the urgency in the tone. It went on for several minutes. I flexed my knees to stop their trembling.
The American came over to us, his face smiling. ‘Gentlemen, we are safe.’ And because we remained unmoving and silent, he said again in Russian, very slowly, ‘Gentlemen, we are safe.’
Zaro shouted and the sound startled me. He threw down his stick and yelled, his arms above his head and fingers extended. He threw his arms about the American and Smith had to hold him tight to prevent his running over to the patrol and kissing each man individually.
‘Come away, Eugene,’ he shouted. ‘Come away from them, I have told them we are filthy with lice.’
Zaro started to laugh and jig inside the restraining arms. Then he had the American going round with him in a crazy, hopping polka, and they were both laughing and crying at the same time. I do not remember starting to dance but there we were, the four of us, stamping round, kicking up the dust, hugging one another, laughing hysterically through the blur of tears, until we collapsed one by one on the ground.
Kolemenos lay sprawled out repeating softly to himself the American’s words. ‘We are safe . . . we are safe . . .’
The American said, ‘We shall be able to live again.’
I thought a little about that. It sounded a wonderful thing to say. All that misery, all that sorrow, the hardship of a whole year afoot, so that we might live again.
We learned from Mister Smith that this was a patrol on exercise which would take us, if we were not too weak to march, a few miles to the nearest rough road where they had a rendezvous with a military truck from their main unit. He had told them that we had come so far a few more miles would not kill us. With the main unit there would be real food.
The patrol produced groundsheets from their packs and rigged up a shelter from the sun. We lay beneath it resting for about an hour. My head throbbed and I felt a little sick. We were handed a packet of cigarettes and some matches. Even more than food just then I wanted to smoke. To handle so ordinary a civilized commodity as a box of matches gave me a warm thrill. The smoke itself was bliss. From somewhere came a big tin of peaches, ready opened, and we dug our fingers in, stuffed them in our mouths and crushed the exquisite juice and pulp from them. We drank water from Army water-bottles and were ready to go.
It seemed to me that none of us could have recalled details of that cross-country trek. The patrol adjusted its pace to our weary shamble and it must have taken about five hours to cover ten miles. Zaro marched with me and we buoyed ourselves up with the pretence that we were getting along at a swinging military pace.
‘The heroes’ return,’ Zaro grinned. ‘All we need now is a band to lead us.’
The altogether delightful quality of everything that happened to us at the end of the march was that it required no resolution or decision from us. There was a bumping ride by lorry at that breakneck speed which is the hallmark of Army driving anywhere in the world. We were as thrilled as schoolboys with the trip – our first on wheels since we left the Russian train at Irkutsk eighteen months ago. We were in process of being gathered up and looked after, told what to do, tended, and later, even cosseted. The British took over completely.
I never found out exactly where we were. At that time I did not care. Any guess I might make from perusal of maps could be hundreds of miles out. Smith must have found out, but if he ever told me, the information did not register. I hugged to myself
only the great revelation that this was India.
The young British Lieutenant who watched us ease ourselves down over the lorry tailboard was amazingly clean, spruce and well-shaven. I observed him as the American told him our story. His expression as he stood listening in the shade of the trees at the small roadside encampment was incredulous. His eyes kept wandering from Smith to us. He was trying to understand. He put several questions, nodding his head slowly at each answer. I thought how young he looked. Yet, he was about my own age.
The American told us, ‘He believes me now. He says he will make arrangements for us to be deloused and cleaned up here because he can’t take us back to base in this condition. He says he will have to isolate us from his troops until this is done but that we will be well fed and cared for. He says we need not worry.’
That night we were given a hot meal that ended with stewed fruit and steamed pudding. I had my first experience of hot, strong, tinned-milk Army tea, lavishly sweetened. We were given cigarettes. We were given first-aid treatment for our torn and bruised feet. And that night we slept secure, wrapped in Army blankets, in a tent.
The novelty, the bustle and the excitement of it all kept me going. There was no time for me to stand still and discover how near to collapse I was. Breakfast the next day absorbed my attention – more tea, corned beef, Australian cheese and butter from tins, unbelievably white bread, tinned bacon rashers and marmalade.
The delousing was a thorough affair. We stripped off all our clothes – the sheepskin surcoats, fufaikas, fur waistcoats, caps, masks, padded trousers, sacks and skin gaiters – and piled them in the open. The blankets we had slept in were thrown on top of the heap. Head and body hair was shorn off, bundled and thrust among the clothes. Over the lot they poured petrol and suddenly it erupted into a roaring bonfire, billowing black smoke into the sunny, clear air. Everything went, consumed in flame.
Kolemenos said, ‘I hope those bloody lice die hard. They have had a good time at my expense.’
I turned to him and he to me. Then we were all exchanging looks and the laughter bubbling out of us. We had realized we were seeing one another for the first time – really seeing for the very first time the lines, the set of the mouth, the angle of the chin and the character of the faces of men who for twelve months and four thousand miles had shared the wretched struggle for survival. It seemed the most comical thing that had ever happened to us. I had never thought of what might lie beneath the matted hair, and neither, I suppose, had they. It was like the midnight revelation from some fantastically-prolonged masked ball.
‘Why, Zaro,’ I said, ‘you are a good-looking man.’
‘You look all right yourself,’ Zaro answered.
And Mister Smith was not as old as I had thought him, now that he was shorn of his greying hair. And Kolemenos, in spite of the ravages that marked us all, was as handsome as a big, fine-bodied man could be. We sat there laughing and joking in our nakedness while the fire roared.
Scrubbed clean, our cuts, sores and scratchings anointed, we were made ready for our re-entry into a civilized community. We received white, crisp new underwear, bush shirts, stockings and canvas shoes, and, to top the lot, dashing Australian-type light felt hats. Smith dressed in a leisurely, careful way, but the other three of us hurried through the operation in an enthusiastic race to be first ready. We looked one another over and liked what we saw. We joked about the stark whiteness of our knees.
They drove us away westward. I had a curiously detached feeling about it, like an exhausted swimmer allowing himself to be carried along in a tide race. We came to a small military town, but I had no chance to look at it. We were immediately lodged in sick quarters.
The Army doctor had been waiting for us. He examined us gravely, eyes narrowed behind thin tortoiseshell spectacles. He nodded his head, thinning on top, in acknowledgment of Smith’s answers to terse questions. He was aged about forty, quick-moving, sympathetic behind the professional facade of impersonal efficiency. We needed a lot of care, he told Smith. We needed to take things easy. Recovery might take a long time.
For a few days they kept us there. The doctor dosed us with medicines and pills. We lounged and lay about. We ate most magnificently and were plied with fresh fruit. Kolemenos amused the small staff with his huge appetite. We were allowed to smoke as often as we pleased.
Here it was that we temporarily parted from Smith. He said be was being taken away to see the American authorities. ‘You three will be taken to Calcutta. Whatever happens I shall see you there.’
We shook him by the hand. There didn’t seem to be anything we could say.
‘Just keep your spirits up,’ he said. ‘The doctor tells me we are all going to be very sick before we recover from our trip. But he says that with the proper attention we shall get in a big hospital we should pull through.’
I thought we were not as ill as that and said so. I did not appreciate then that I was feeling a quite spurious sense of well-being, that I was a little drunk with the excitement of these wonderful last few days, that the reckoning was yet to come.
He went away from us like a figure slipping out of a dream. Zaro said, ‘We shall be seeing him in Calcutta,’ as though India were a small place and Calcutta was just around the corner. It was the way we felt. Everything was taken care of. We were spent forces, content to be carried along. All the hammering urgency and the iron-hard resolution of the last bitter year had drained from us. We were more sick than we knew.
I have small recollection of the journey to Calcutta, except that it was long and tiresome and I was shrouded in black depression. We smoked incessantly.
It was a symptom of our condition, I suppose, that when we were driven in a bus through the teeming, noisy Calcutta streets we were as bright as crickets, pointing out the sights one to the other, almost hysterically good-humoured. I could have persuaded myself then that recovery had already begun. I was being fooled again by the fever of a new excitement.
The bus drove between the tall main gates of a hospital and a medical orderly took Zaro, Kolemenos and I away for a preliminary medical examination. At first we were bogged down in language difficulties. After some time it was understood that between us we spoke Russian, Polish, French and German – but no English. Eventually we were interviewed by an orderly who spoke French. They wanted a medical history from childhood, so Zaro told the orderly about our measles and our whooping cough and our operations. It all went down on a set of stiff cards. We were examined by doctors, weighed, measured, given a bath, decked out in pyjamas and tucked in bed in a long ward, Zaro and Kolemenos in adjoining positions on one side and I facing them from directly opposite.
Quite clearly I remember my awakening the next morning, a spotless vision of a nursing sister standing beside my bed laying her strong brown arm against my white one and joking with me until I smiled up at her. Then came the breakfast, of fresh eggs with wafer-thin white bread and butter.
I went back to sleep that morning and dropped into a bottomless pit that stole all mind and recollection from me for nearly a month. I learned all about it later, and it was Mister Smith who gathered the story and told it to me.
They gave me sedatives, they kept a day and night watch on me. Meanwhile Zaro and then Kolemenos went under. At night I screamed and raved in madness. I ran from the Russians all over again, I crossed my deserts and my mountains. And each day I ate half my bread and slyly tucked the remainder under the mattress or in the pillow case. Each day they gently took away my precious little hoard. They talked to me and brought in great white loaves from the kitchens and told me I should never have to worry again. There would always be bread. The assurances meant nothing. I kept collecting bread for the next stage of my escape.
The climax came after about ten days, I was told. After that I was quieter, very weak, exhausted and on the danger list. Kolemenos and Zaro, too, were in a bad way.
But, said the hospital staff, neither of the others matched the performance I put on during th
e second night of my stay in the ward. I fetched out my saved-up bread, rolled my mattress, bedclothes and pillows and, to their astonishment because they had not believed I had that much strength left, set off staggering under the load for the door. By the time I had rolled my bedding, the night sister had the doctor there. He had said, ‘Leave him; let us see what he does.’
At the door the doctor, the sister and two male orderlies blocked my way. The doctor talked quietly as he would have done to a sleep-walker. I went on. The orderlies held me and I dropped my burden and fought with savage fury. It took all four of them to get me back to bed. I have no memory of the incident.
Four weeks after my admission to the hospital I woke one morning feeling refreshed, as though I had slept the night through dreamlessly and restfully. I could not believe when I was told that my night had been a month long.
Mister Smith came to see us. He looked lean and spruce in a lightweight civilian suit. For a week, he said, he had been close to death. He had been to see me a couple of days earlier but I had shown no signs of recognizing him. He had talked to the doctors about us, told them in detail what we had been through.
‘You are going to be all right now, Slav,’ he said. He gestured over to where Zaro and Kolemenos were sitting up in bed and beaming across at us. ‘And so are they.’
One of the soldier patients in the ward wanted to know our names. The American told him but the soldier had difficulty in getting his tongue around the unfamiliar syllables. A compromise was reached. We became Zaro, Slav and ‘Big Boy’.
Our story got round. From other parts of the hospital staff members came along to take a peep at us. The British soldiers in our ward showered us with kindnesses. One of them went round with his hat collecting cigarettes, money, chocolate, little personal gifts, and shared the offering between us.