White Eagles Over Serbia

CHAPTER FOURTEEN. The Ambush

Whenever he thought of the ambush in later years Methuen always recalled the suddenness of it with a shudder. The long march had made them confident of evading capture by the enemy, and their spirits were high as they knew that the path would lead them out on to the crest of a remote mountain-top near Durmitor — far from roads and rivers. Each man felt his spirits rise as he heard his own tramping feet echo against the rocks in a silence punctuated only by the creaking of girths, the occasional snort of a mule, or the faint clink of a weapon touching a coat of coin. Below them slept the lake.

Dawn was already beginning to break, and Methuen was in a fever of impatience to make his bid for freedom. The men marched on in exhausted silence, and as far as he could judge Branko was all but asleep on his feet. At any rate he had not noticed that the rope-end he held was tied to the saddle of a mule.

The path widened now into a rocky defile which gave some space for manoeuvre and the press behind grew greater as the leading mule-section halted — perhaps to tighten a loose girth. All at once there came a rapid rattle of sound from over the rocky hillock — like the sound of a stick being dragged across iron railings. That was all. And in the following silence a flock of geese rose off the surface of the lake and circled nervously a thousand feet below. A man coughed loudly, and there came the sound of running feet. Then once more came that ominous rattle, and this time it swelled into a roar, being echoed from three or four different points of the compass. A group of scouts came running, bent double across the rocky corridors and among them Methuen recognized Black Peter waving a tommy-gun. His face was contorted with rage. He shouted a sharp order and the supports surged forward, leaving the mules with only their guards; they clustered round him as he shouted and then loped off to the end of the defile and were lost to sight. Rapid fire now sounded from the entrance and whitish chips of rock began to peel off and fly into the air. It was as if a dozen pneumatic drills had suddenly started up in competition.

Methuen sprang forward and grasped Peter by the arm. “What has happened?” he said and Black Peter suddenly burst into tears of rage as he answered: “They are over the path. We must fight our way out.” The rocky cliff prevented any serious estimate of the situation and Methuen shouted: “Come up the cliff and let us see.” Black Peter was already giving orders to line up the mules under cover of the cliff. A rush of guerillas swept past them towards the firing-point, shouting hoarsely. “Come,” said Methuen in an agony of impatience and seizing Black Peter’s arm he pulled him towards the cliff.

Even though the guerilla leader was cumbered by a heavy automatic weapon he climbed like a goat and Methuen had a job to keep up with him. They climbed to the highest spur and cautiously edged themselves between two great rocks from which point they could look down over the crown of the hill. Methuen gave a groan for it was clear that in another five minutes the path would have led them out into the open, on to a wooded promontory. And it was here that he saw, squinting through his glasses, the long ominous grey line of squatting infantry. “Machine-guns,” he said gloomily, “and by God!” There was a faint crash and a puff of smoke which sailed languidly into the air while over to the left of their position, on the rocky crown of the next hill, came a jarrying spout of stone and gravel which whizzed about their ears like a choir of gnats. “Mortars!” said Methuen.

“Mortars!” echoed Black Peter. “We must fight our way through. God’s death! It’s getting light. We must give the word for a general advance.”

They rejoined the guerillas on the ledge below. There was considerable confusion of men coming back and others going forward. Several were wounded.

Methuen rushed across the path and into the defile in order to see for himself what things were like at the point of action. As he turned the corner the air swished and whooped about him and he flopped to his stomach and began to crawl. The path debouched on to the crown of a hill and here he saw the scrambling kicking bundle of wounded men and mules. The advance guard were returning the fire of the troops over this barrier but it was quite clear that there was little chance of a break out of the narrow entrance where the noise of the firing was simply deafening. Some of the guerillas had climbed the sides of the gorge to take up firing positions and the noise of their tommy-guns was like the noise of giant woodpeckers at work. Fragments of stone were flying everywhere.

As he lay, pressed against the side of the cliff, he heard the ragged roar of the supports coming up. They surged over him like a wave and burst out of the opening towards the crest where the troops were entrenched. A blinding smoke hung over everything and the noise redoubled in volume. It was impossible to see, but Methuen could imagine the line of charging figures racing down the slope towards the machine guns, shouting and firing as they ran. “What a party to be caught in,” he kept muttering to himself as the seconds ticked away.

A wounded man came crawling back out of the smoke crying something which he could not hear above the roaring of the fusillade. Methuen dragged him to the nearest cover and laid him down beside the path. Then he raced back to the central amphitheatre where the greater part of the mules were. Here confusion reigned. The wounded were lying everywhere groaning and cursing, and the skeleton team of muleteers divided its attention between attempts to quieten the animals and vain attempts to help those who had been hurt. A wave of yellow smoke filled the cave entrance through which occasional figures darted or lurched but it was impossible to know how the battle was going. They were like the comrades of entombed miners waiting at a pit entrance after a heavy fall of rock, thought Methuen grimly; and in the general confusion he shed his bandoliers and coin-coat unnoticed, hoping to retreat down the path and make his way out.

But he had hardly started down the path when a new outbreak of firing from the opposite direction set his pulse racing. Were there troops behind them as well as in front? Once more there came the violent scramble of men running for their lives, and stopping to fire short snarling bursts with their tommy-guns before resuming their flight. “We are cut off,” said Methuen, and sat down despairingly on a pack-saddle. A panic was about to start when suddenly a majestic figure was seen to materialize from the smoke which blocked the first entrance. A shout went up for it was Black Peter. He walked slowly — with the calculated slowness of a drunkard who knows he is drunk and is elaborately anxious to seem sober. He walked with tremendous circumspection, holding his shoulder with his hand. His face was white and his eyes staring. Methuen jumped forward with a cry of “Black Peter!” but the figure advanced at the same slow speed, giving no sign of having heard.

Black Peter walked towards the group of muleteers like a somnambulist. He drew his whistle from his pocket and slowly put it to his lips to blow a long shrill blast. Once, twice, three times he sounded and a hoarse cry went up for this was the pre-arranged signal which told them that the battle was lost. “Destroy the treasure!” he shouted once, weakly, but his voice was lost in the rattle of firing.

Now Methuen was swept aside by the press of mules which were driven to the edge of the path and pushed screaming into space. This was by no means an easy operation as the poor animals, already half-crazed by the din, were terrified to see the immense drop before them and fought madly to escape, snorting and screaming. Some had to be shot and some clubbed, and Methuen’s gorge rose as he saw them plunging into space.

Black Peter had fallen to his knees and Methuen caught hold of the young giant and dragged him away from the mêlée. It was clear that he was dying. His eyes were rapidly glassing and his breath came in harsh gulps. “Black Peter,” whispered Methuen as he propped the wounded man’s head with a rolled-up coat, “is the action really finished?” But there was not a shadow of response in those dark eyes.

The firing had become thinner and more spasmodic now, though it sounded nearer, and was definitely coming from two opposite quarters. The muleteers were working like fiends, throwing their bandoliers and coats into the Black Lake, and urging the screaming and reluctant animals forward to their deaths with wild yells. But even in the confusion Methuen could not help noticing the methodical way they worked. Each mule was led to the edge; its front legs were worked over the precipice and while one man held it another cut the girth and the ropes binding the treasure with a knife. Then the animal was pushed over, or if it showed reluctance was clubbed.

For his own part Methuen was filled with a sort of blank indecision. What should he do, since the enemy was both before and behind? As always in moments like these when there seemed to be no way out of a dilemma he was careful not to panic, not to start running — but to wait upon events. They alone could show him a way out, if way there was to be. Accordingly he busied himself by making Black Peter as comfortable as he could. He took back his cherished pistol from the leather sling at Peter’s hip, and refilled a clip of cartridges. From a discarded parcel of food lying on the path he took a piece of bread and some cheese. Then he started off down the path in the direction from which they had been marching when the attack started. He had gone perhaps twenty yards along the path, picking his way over the bodies of men and mules, discarded ammunition boxes and derelict saddles, when he reached a point where the path made a steep turn and here he could see the tell-tale cloud of smoke which indicated that the rear guard was still putting up a fight. Methuen halted in indecision for it was clear that he would never find a way both through his own men and through the ranks of the Communists.

Then it was that his luck changed abruptly for the better. A dead mule lay wedged between two rocks at the very edge of the precipice with the body of its muleteer lying dead across it. The man had been killed as he was trying to urge the mule over the edge. From the high wooden saddle Methuen saw a long coil of rope which had untied itself and hung dangling over the edge, and all of a sudden an idea occurred to him. Would it be possible to find a way of climbing out of his present predicament by lowering himself down the cliff a good way?

In a second he was lying beside the mule staring down into the gulf, his eyes hunting keenly for some vestiges of a path, or a fault in the rock-face which might give him a foothold. He could not resist a sharp cry of joy, for there, forty feet below, was a narrow path running parallel to the one upon which he now was, a path graven in the side of the cliff face. It is true that it was narrow — a mere shelf of rock above the gulf. But Methuen was by now desperate and prepared to follow his luck wherever it led.

He tested the rope after giving it an extra turn or two round the wooden saddle-frame and then, to make it even more secure, he passed it round a smooth rock projection. It bore him easily: and with a final glance around him he lowered himself gingerly into the gulf with a prayer on his lips, not daring to look down into the depths of the Black Lake below.

In his younger days he had been a rock-climber of promise and this experience stood him in good stead now, for he reached the rocky ledge below in a matter of moments and saw with relief that it did indeed continue along the side of the mountain, though here and there it was blocked by a projecting shrub or a fault. Above him he could still hear the unearthly racket of the battle and from time to time a shower of boulders or a grotesque dummy-like figure of man or mule fell slowly past him and produced a dull thick splash in the lake below. It was strange to see how slowly objects seem to fall as they reached the level of the ledge upon which he stood, turning over and over and giving the impression of trying to unfold in space as they travelled towards the dark water below. The noise of the firing too, seemed to change into a number of different variations of the same sound; one set of guns sounded like woodpeckers, another crisp as whip-strokes, while from above him where the rear guard was still fighting, the firing sounded like a series of dull cracks and hisses — as of a red-hot poker thrust into water.

He was bathed in sweat and trembling with fatigue in every limb, yet he set off at a good pace towards the eastern end of the massif. At times he had to travel with his back pressed to the rock, so narrow did the path become; and at others he was forced to climb out of his way in places where the path abruptly ceased. Once he was forced to take the risk of swinging across a gap on a shrub.

In half an hour he had put the sounds of the battle well behind him and the path at last petered out on the side of a hill made of rugged outcrops where climbing was again possible, and he was able to travel upwards towards the mountain-top along a narrow funnel. By the time he reached the top the sun had already risen and the mists were steaming up from the lowland meadows.

He had emerged on the crown of the mountain and could see, with a thrill of relief, that the scene of the ambush lay well to the west of his present position. As he crouched in a rocky hollow and ate some bread and cheese with a ravenous appetite he combed the country with his precious glasses. The battle was still going on among the cliffs of the mountain-top and he could see lines of infantry taking up position among the beech woods which crowned the range beyond.

In the valley below him he saw a long train of mounted troops deploying across the watershed they had crossed the previous day. The whole operation had been a masterpiece of planning and had caught the White Eagles at the most vulnerable point of the whole journey — the last defile which might lead them to Durmitor and safety. There was a small reconnaissance plane in the sky hovering over the scene of the battle. As Methuen watched and considered, his heart came into his mouth for he heard the sound of horses’ hoofs from near at hand; up the steep mountain path which had been hidden from him by a fold of rock came a cavalcade of troops in the familiar grey uniforms and forage-caps marked with the red star. Methuen flattened himself against the rock and held his breath.

They passed him without seeing him and clattered across the rough paths towards the battle — their weapons at the ready. Methuen drew a breath of relief as he heard their horses’ hoofs dying away among the rocky defiles, and he for his part made haste to take the path which would lead him back over the watershed and into the country where — how remote in space and time it seemed — the cave was.

Danger always gave one reserves of unexpected strength he had discovered in the past, and now the narrowness of his escape spurred him on. On the crest of the mountain the cover was not good though the path along which they had so laboriously marched was clearly marked. He forced himself to adopt a regular pace in order not to tire too easily, and every hour he took a three-minute rest during which he checked his course with the compass he had recovered from Branko. A fearful thirst was his only trouble and hereabouts there seemed to be no spring or rivulets; he investigated several ravines which looked as if they might have rivers running in them but without any luck.

Away to the east he could see the great mist-encircled massifs of the range which was crowned by the Janko Stone, and he steered for it, bearing right the whole time so that he could cross the foothills and avoid climbing the central range once more. In this way he hoped to find himself back once more in the valley from which he had started on his journey to contact the mule-teams.

The sun was hot now and he was tempted to shed his heavy coat and hat in order to make his march the lighter, but he thought it wiser to keep these articles for he did not as yet know where he was going to spend the night. At his present pace he calculated that he might reach the cave at dusk — provided he did not meet with any mishap. As far as he could see the countryside was more or less deserted. He caught a glimpse of several roads in the distance and could see the plumes of dust left by wheeled traffic, but it was too far to see clearly.

As far as he could judge the concentrations of troops were in the area he had left behind him, but he took no chances; before crossing each range where the cover was sparse he studied his route carefully. Once he was forced to make a long detour owing to the presence of some sheep and a group of shepherds who sat indolently under a cherry tree, playing on reed pipes — a strangely peaceful and reassuring sound to ears accustomed to the rattle and bark of machine-guns. Methuen listened to them as he crouched under cover in a fir forest and devoured the scanty remains of his bread and cheese.

His detour served a good purpose, too, for it led him to water; he found himself entangled in the debris of a recent forest fire — a steep bank clothed with fern and dwarf elder where the ground was covered with sharp splinters of charred and fractured rock, and where he had to scale high barricades of sooty timber in order to reach a cliff edge from where one could hear the distant ripple of a summer river. He slipped and skidded his way down and was delighted to find a shallow pebbled pool brimming with ice-cold water, and he plunged into it bodily, clothes and all, revelling in the icy sharpness of the water and feeling immediately refreshed.

It was here, while he was drying his clothes that a large and extremely savage sheep-dog spotted him from the hill-top and rushed down upon him, barking. Methuen scrambled for his pistol and covered the beast with it. He was standing in the middle of the stream on a rock, and he hurled a boulder at the animal as a warning to keep off. But it came on down the bank and showed every intention of attacking him. He shot it with great reluctance, for he knew how valuable dogs must be to the peasantry of this remote countryside. But he could not afford to take the chance of being given away; and lest the dog’s owner should be anywhere in the vicinity he gathered up his possessions and set about climbing the opposite hill in his squelching and waterlogged boots. It was a full two hours before his clothes had dried out on his body, and the sun by this time was baking. Despite his hunger and weariness he was encouraged to look at the distance he had covered through his glasses — the long shallow spine of the mountain range which backed the stony watershed.

Once or twice he saw small isolated patrols of grey infantry mounted on mules, but they were always a good way off and he was able to pass them by without being seen. Once or twice, too, he happened upon a long line of peasant muleteers carrying wood down to the valleys and was forced to hide in whatever cover was available. Much of the terrain hereabouts was planted with firs and beeches, and the dense growth of heather and fern made hiding easy.

By midday he had reached the second range of mountains which were crowned by the Janko Stone and he took half an hour’s rest. His feet had begun to hurt intolerably and despite every precaution he had managed to blister both heels. The flesh was raw and painful. But now he was on the great shelving meadow upland with its carpet of thick grass, like coarse brushed hair, and he started out to walk barefoot, carrying his boots round his neck, tied with string. This relieved him somewhat and as the going was all downhill he made good time along the range, his pulse quickening every time he came upon a familiar landmark pointing the way to the valley of the cave which he had begun to think of almost as home.

The long fatigue of the journey had begun to make itself felt and he found himself falling into a pleasant stupefaction as he walked; it was as if he had detached himself from his body and allowed it to walk on towards the horizon like an automaton, leaving his mind suspended up here on the windless pasture land which buzzed with crickets and shone with butterflies. This, he recognized, was the sort of state in which one became careless and unobservant and he did his best to remain alert and fully wide awake; but in vain. His mind kept wandering off on a tack of its own.

He thought of the Awkward Shop — the rabbit warren of corridors in some corner of which Dombey sat, turned green by his desk-lamp like a mandarin in stage-spotlight, brooding over his collection of moths; he thought of the companions who usually accompanied him on missions like the present one — the Professor with his absent-minded air, and Danny with his huge hands and yellow hair. And thinking of it all with nostalgia he cursed himself for a fool to have left it all behind, to have given way to an impulse. “If I get out of this,” he said aloud, “I’m turning up my cards,” and then he laughed aloud, for he remembered the many occasions when, in the face of strain and fatigue, he had made himself the same idiotic promise — a promise which he had never managed to keep.

He had crossed the whole range by now and the sun was rapidly westering. He had come to familiar country, the soft shallow hills whose limestone curves foretold the passage of a dozen mountain rivers towards the Ebar gorge. He was replete with the excitement of a mission accomplished and the knowledge that he would be in time for the rendezvous at dawn. The path he followed hugged the banks of a stream rising and falling along the curvature of the hillside like a swallow and he walked swiftly and decisively along it, hoping that it would not be too dark by the time he reached the cave to recover and reassemble his cherished fishing-rod. The rushing river below him deadened the sound of his feet on the flinty path. He rested for a few moments on the bank to drink and bathe his face, and made a half-hearted attempt to put his boots on, but his feet were by now too swollen and too painful. It was obvious that he would have to carry on barefoot. He was meditating upon this unlucky chance when a shout from somewhere behind him sent his heart into his mouth. He stood up and turned a dazed face towards the cliff.

A young soldier stood on a spur of rock above him covering him with a carbine. He did not look unduly menacing, and a cigarette hung from the corner of his lip. He waved his hand and shouted: “You there! Come here for questioning.” Methuen put his hand to his ear as if he did not hear very well and pointed to the river. “What do you say?” He was thinking rapidly as he moved slowly away from the bank. If there were more troops on the hill behind he was finished. “What cursed luck,” he exclaimed involuntarily as he obeyed.