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By Root 1047 0

a hunk of rough bread. A can of water was being passed around. For me it was a powerfully emotional moment: I was joining the famed Partisans whose exploits people were talking of everywhere. Their heroism had the simplicity of other days, a clean straightforwardness, like the heroes outside Troy. These were people like those. When I had time to look around, and examine their guns and equipment, I saw that this must be a very rough and simple fighting. If they had uniforms, they were taken from dead enemies, so that boots, caps, jackets, belts were of every sort of design. Some had no uniform, they wore anything that could serve as protection in these wild mountains, peasants’ boots, students’ winter knitted caps. The Red Star on their caps or on their breasts was what linked them.

This group of young soldiers contained Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Catholics, and Moslems. Nowhere but in these mountains, among these soldiers, these comrades, could it be possible for two people to meet, take each other’s hands, call each other by name, Miro, Miloš, Konstantina, Slobo, Vido, Edvard, Vera, Mitra, Aleksa … take the Red Star as their bond, and forget the rest.

Now, re-creating in imagination that moment, when I came out of the forest with that group, and sat down with them all eating the peasant bread and drinking cold mountain water, I think most of all of something that I took for granted then—their extreme youth. No one was more than twenty-five. I was not myself. Among them, and among those I met in the mountains in the next few weeks were men and women who after the war became the rulers of the new Yugoslavia, a nation fought for and created by the very young.

I believe that a man who fought with those young people who now has to stand up on a platform in a big hall to lecture, or teach, must often, a quarter of a century later, look down on the upturned faces of students who are rioting and sullen and critical and undisciplined and who in every country of the world reject what their society offers them … this man, a professor perhaps, with responsibility, a place in society, looks at those faces and thinks how young people exactly like them, “children” to their elders, fought the most vicious and terrifying army in history, Hitler’s, fought short of weapons, short of warm clothes, often without food, always outnumbered—fought and won, and created a new nation.

I was with them for—I could say three months. It is only in love and in war that we escape from the sleep of necessity, the cage of ordinary life, to a state where every day is a high adventure, every moment falls sharp and clear like a snowflake drifting slowly past a dark glistening rock, or like a leaf spinning down to the forest floor. Three months of ordinary living can be not much more than the effort of turning over from one side to another in a particularly heavy uncomfortable sleep. That time in the mountains with that band of young soldiers—it is as if I remember every breath I took. Remembering that time is as if a friend’s eyes rest in loving curiosity on your face, and you feel your face spread in a smile because of the warmth the two of you generate.

The band remained in numbers between twelve and thirty. A man, or a girl, would come quietly into the camp with a handshake, a smile, slide off his—or her—pack and rifle, and become one of us. Or someone would leave quietly to take a message, or to reconnoitre, or to slip back to a home village to fetch food or supplies. We stayed on that mountainside outside the caves for not more than two days. I had to be taken to the H.Q. of the Partisans, to transfer messages and to collect their messages and news to take back to North Africa. We had to move carefully, because the mountains were full not only of Chetniks but of ordinary villagers who had fled away from their homes to live the life of outlaws until the coming winter’s snows would force them down again, to death, or to servitude under the Germans or Chetniks.

To stand on a high mountain’s shoulder, and look down and around over hundreds of miles