All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [294]
In a society in which rival nationalisms, feuds and the cult of vengeance were endemic, by 1944 brutality was institutionalised. All the warring parties shared responsibility for dreadful bloodshed, much of it inflicted upon people whose only crime was to belong to another race or creed. The partisans often accepted into their own ranks captured Chetniks willing to change sides. Djilas was dismayed by the fate of a tall, dark girl who rejected her captors’ advances, saying defiantly, ‘It would be immoral to change one’s views!’ He was impressed by her courage, and saddened to hear that she diminished herself in his eyes by collapsing into trembling sobs at her execution. He consoled himself with the reflection that, while all her group were shot, none was tortured in accordance with the usual custom: ‘The executions were carried out by Montenegrins, who volunteered so as to avenge their comrades killed … The condemned were led away at night, in groups of twenty.’ Both executioners and their victims appeared equally uncomfortable with their role: ‘They couldn’t be told apart, except that some had rifles and stars while others had wire around their wrists … As usual no effort was made to bury them properly; their legs and arms stuck out of the mound. Civil war has little regard for graves, funerals, requiems.’ The partisans were embarrassed only when their accompanying British military mission stumbled upon the ‘spilled brains, smashed faces, contorted bodies’. Tito demanded tetchily, ‘Couldn’t they have done it somewhere else?’
Meanwhile, Axis forces contributed their own share of slaughter. A squeamish soldier of the Italian Alpini wrote: ‘After we had been at Podgorica for a couple of days, we all set off together to a nearby pass where the partisans have come off best in an attack on one of our columns. Thirty-eight vehicles have been destroyed, the drivers and escorts massacred – all of them! The bodies are mutilated. An order goes out: two days of carte blanche. We destroy or rather are present at the destruction of anything we meet. Our veterans are the chief perpetrators. We are shocked and appalled by the yells of soldiers and the terror of the hapless inhabitants … This is the first, unforgettable confrontation with a reality that shames us as men.’
The partisans were amazed that Italy’s surrender in September 1943, which removed the principal prop of Croat domination, prompted no lessening of the Ustaše appetite for slaughter. When Tito’s men taunted captured fascists that they had lost the war, the doomed prisoners shouted back, ‘We know, but there’s still time to rub out a lot of you!’ Condemned Croats sang, ‘Oh Russia, all will belong to you/But of Serbs there will be few.’ Djilas wrote: ‘This was war with no quarter, no surrender, no letting bygones be bygones.’ He reflected in Tolstoyan terms on the fates that drove the struggle: ‘Why were doctors from Berlin and professors from Heidelberg killing off Balkan peasants and students? Hatred for Communism was not sufficient. Some other terrible and implacable force was driving them to insane death and shame. And driving us, too, to resist and pay them back. Perhaps Russia and communism could account for this to some extent. Yet this passion, this endurance which lost sight of suffering and death, this struggle for one’s manhood and nationality in the face of one’s own death – this had nothing to do with ideology or with Marx and Lenin.’ The partisans often found themselves obliged to abandon their own casualties, or to dispatch the most gravely wounded. Djilas described how one husband acceded to the pleas of his desperately injured wife to finish her off, choosing a moment when she was dozing. A father did the same for his daughter: ‘He survived the war, withered and sombre, and his friends regarded him as a living saint.’
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