The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 25. NIGHTMARE JOURNEY Now BEGAN A MOST EERIE RIDE, unreal as a nightmare. The busses, of course completely unlighted, tore madly through the night. Bomb holes ahead? No one seemed to give it a thought: the children must be taken as far and as quickly as possible away from the horror. Soon we discovered that our chauffeur had himself that morning lost his wife and three small babies in the bombardment. Imagine the bitterness in his heart to be saving only other people's children! Huge-eyed, stiff in their seats, the children seemed concerned only with protecting the sleeping tidies in their laps from the bumps. They showed no sign of either fear or excitement. Rain had begun to fall heavily. And now in the starless, stormy night we began to pass dim, black silhouettes, an endless column of troops on the march; artillery, wagons piled high with munitions and hay; cavalry, the men humped in their saddles against the rain. They were moving up toward Belgrade-but too late, too late. Now and then a Chetnik, belt heavy with bunches of hand grenades, coolly intent upon his business, would jump on the step of the bus, ride a few miles, and be gone again. They noted my uniform but made no sign. At last we arrived in Mladenovats and alighted in the midst of a huge crowd of refugees. It was now pouring very heavily. The children were quickly led away. How often afterwards I thought of the rows of small white faces with their huge black eyes and wondered what had become of them! We had stopped near the railroad station in a crowd packed almost solid. Every hour or so a train would come in and the whole mass of us would sway forward in a desperate scramble, so solid that if one had fallen there would be no chance of getting up. Yet that vast crowd, too, was absolutely silent. We three held on tightly to each other, the little dogs well hidden. At last we arrived on the platform. It was now about two o'clock in the morning, and my friends could hardly stand with exhaustion. I managed to shove them on top of someone's bundles under an overhanging roof and seated myself on the steps just outside, almost on their feet. The trains had stopped coming. There we stayed until dawn, I in the happy position of having not only the pelting rain but also the heavy gush from the roof going down the back of my neck. Towards six o'clock the rain let up, then stopped. In the gray and ghostly light of a somber dawn we saw each other clearly for the first time: women still in their nightclothes as they had jumped from bed the morning before; hair still in curlers or in straggling wisps; no make-up; all tired, harassed, and half-drowned. Thus stripped of artifice, we looked at each other-and burst into roars of laughter! After that it was haute mode to look like nothing ever seen before, and no one lifted a hand to beautify. As our railway line appeared to have stopped operating, the station master urged us to cross the fields toward a near-by branch line where trains were running. But in the growing light I had seen a row of boxcars drawn up on a siding. And now, as I watched, the doors opened and strings of horses were unloaded. Would not these horse vans have to return south? Sure enough: hardly had the horses been unloaded when a little engine came puffing up. Quickly I signaled to my friends to return. The crowd from the fields and more crowds from the town made a mad dash to fill them. We three were first in, but the van became so jammed that, at risk of missing my place, I decided to scout around. I ran along the line and found better luck than I could have hoped for. The door of one van had jammed. Then I blessed the heavy dagger I wore, for with it I succeeded in prying the doors apart. Just as the train began to move I hoisted my friends in and clambered after them. We had a whole van entirely to ourselves. How lovely, how dreamlike was that day-long journey! Most of the straw was wet, but some in the corners was dry and sweet. This we piled under and over us. The little white curly dogs hopped merrily about for a while and then snuggled down, content. Hour after peaceful hour we lay, sometimes chatting and sometimes dozing when the bumps of the springless truck allowed. The train moved so slowly we could almost have run beside it. It made countless stops. Two men jumped in, both elderly, to ride awhile and share with us their food and their news: only the wildest rumors, of course, always with the one refrain: "The British are coming-America will send help." Like an endless exquisite ribbon the sweet spring scenery moved slowly by. We might have been across the world from the rage and agony of war. Between the delicate gold-green shimmer of new herbage the patient oxen turned the deep brown soil as they had done these thousand years. Few men were to be seen, and these were old. All the young ones had gone to kill; to kill men whose deepest wish too, perhaps, was to return again to their plows in other, northern valleys. In their bright headshawls the women plodded stoically behind the oxen. Soon they would be frantically herding their children up into the mountains; soon the snug, pleasant villages among their groves of fruit trees would be gone-scattered, burned, wiped from this fruitful earth, at once so blessed and so bitterly cursed. In the twilight we arrived at Chachak, that little town one day to be famous as the birthplace of Draja Mihailovich. Again we descended into the solidly packed crowd of refugees. Again it was almost a shock to see no demonstrations of despair or even great regret, no terror of the future. Just patient grimness. Suddenly a voice in my ear: "Ha, here you are. I have lost my mother in the crowd. Please hold this while I try to find her." I turned and saw the fat and usually urbane but now very worried face of a journalist friend, V., from Belgrade. He thrust into my hands a large parcel loosely wrapped in newspaper. It was heavy, it was slippery, and it was hot, so burning hot that soon I could hardly hold it. Boiling grease began to trickle down my fingers. An enticing fragrance stole upon the breeze. Those nearest me began to sniff excitedly; they crowded closer till I was hemmed in by a tight ring of eager noses, greedy eyes, and watering mouths. That delicious odor was unmistakable: I was holding, oh joy, oh miracle-a freshly roasted suckling pig! A train came in. V. fought his way back to me, defeated-no mother! We ran for the train, room was made for us in a freight car; and promptly the little pig fulfilled its glorious destiny by vanishing into twenty famished mouths. Never on that journey of many days did I see anyone open a package of food and eat alone: everything was shared. There was nothing to buy, of course, and no food except what newcomers brought with them, mostly the peasants' usual fare of whole-meal bread, cheese, and onions, with sometimes a piece of fat sausage or that ghastly delicacy, a sheep's head. As we slowly chugged our bumpy way up into the mountains it became very cold. There was no room to lie down, and the doors were tightly closed. The air in the packed freight car became unendurably foul. Just when I thought we must all surely faint, the train would stop with a crash and, with a rush of fresh air, more people would pile in on top of us until we seemed to be three deep. Endless were those creeping night hours, while V. muttered anxiously about his mother-until at last, when again we stopped and the doors were opened, we saw that dawn had come. Snow was falling heavily, and in the gray, wan light V. found his mother in the same car with us, where she had been all night. They had escaped the fate of so many other families: to be separated in the crush of uprooted humanity, perhaps for years, perhaps for ever. We all piled out. We were in Ujitse. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel