of mountains and valleys and rivers and hillsides: it was the wildest scene on earth, with nothing moving there in all that space but a bird hanging on the air, or, very far away, the smoke rising from a village too distant to see if it was the smoke of pillage, or from an ordinary hearth. Empty. Emptiness. The world as it was before man filled and fouled it. But, as you stood there and waited and watched, a different conviction took hold. On the slope of a mountain high on the other side of a racing mountain stream there was a flash of metal which, no matter how you stared and peered, was not repeated: the sun had caught a rifle barrel, or a knife. Trees two miles away that were painted yellow sage and viridian and blue-grey by spring had a smudge of indistinctness over them that was—a tree late-in-leaf, a green so lightly spread over the structure of bough that it seemed grey?—or was it smoke from a Partisan’s fire? The binoculars brought the hillside opposite close into the eye, and the smudge was indeed smoke, not new leafage, but the people under the trees, who had made the fire, were wearing grey indistinct clothing, and it was hard to say whether they were villagers, Chetniks, or Partisans. Or, at night, keeping our cooking fire low behind an earthwork or a pile of cut branches, making the flames clear and bright to forbid the sight of smoke to an enemy on a near slope, a quick leap of red faded out again into the dark opposite and we knew that a mile or half a mile away another fire had escaped the shield of banked earth or brush or branch and had been caught and confined again—but by whom, friend or foe? One of us would then, with a smile and a nod, or the stern dedication of the very young, whose duty forbids smiling and lightness, slide away from our low circle of flamelight into the trees and reappear an hour or five hours later with: “People from the village.” Or, “Croats.” Or, with him (or her) would come in from the trees a group of soldiers wearing the Red Star, greeting us with the handshake that was the promise of the life we would all live after the war, when the fighting was over.
Those vast mountains, in which we moved like the first people on earth, discovering riches at every opening of the forest, flowers, fruit, flocks of pigeons, deer, streams of running splashing water full of fish, these mountains were host to a hundred, no, a thousand groups, all moving quietly, beneath the great trees, eyes always on the alert for enemies, people who slept with their hands on their rifles, and who were skilled to know a friend as much by an instant recognition of comradeship and optimistic heroism as by the Red Star.
When this war was over, we all knew, and our trusting hands, our smiles, our dedication promised this—this land that was so rich and so beautiful would flower into a loving harmony that was as much a memory as a dream for the future. It was as if every one of us had lived so, once upon a time, at another time, in a country like this, with sharp sweet-smelling air and giant uncut trees, among people descended from a natural royalty, those to whom harmfulness and hate were alien. We were all bound in together by another time, another air. Anything petty and ignoble was an outlaw. We could remember only nobility.
If I say all this and put my love in a sound place it was because it was a love that flowered from the time and the place. No, of course I don’t mean that if I had met her in an ordinary way, in peace, we would not have recognised each other. But our love in those weeks was an aspect of the fine high comradeship of the group, whose individuals did not matter, because an individual could only be important insofar as he or she was a pledge for the future, and where individuals came and went and were always the same, being by shared nature high and fine and foreign to the consciousness of ugliness of race or region or a hostile religiosity. Our love was carried, or contained by the group, a flower of it, and this although some comrades did not approve of it, thought and said that a war of