this kind was no place for love. But such criticisms were made within the spirit of comradeship, with a simple frankness, without spite or need to hurt. There was nothing we could not say to each other. There was no criticism we could not make and which, thought over, and followed or resisted, did not become of a conscious growth which—this was assumed by every one of us, was the greatest of our contributions to this war which was a war not only against the bad in our own nation (while I was with them I felt with them, felt Yugoslav) collaborators, Chetniks, the selfish rich, but against all the evil in the world. In those high mountains we fought against Evil, and were sure to win, for the stars in their courses were on our side, whose victory would be at last when the poor and meek and the humble had inherited the earth, and the lion would lie down with the lamb, and a loving harmony would prevail over the earth. We knew all this because—it was as if we remembered it. And besides, did we not live like this now, loving each other and the world? With rifles in our hands, grenades in our pockets, gelignite in our packs, moving as silently as thieves among the towering trees of those magnificent forests, we knew ourselves to be pledges for the future, and utterly unimportant in ourselves, because as individuals we could have no importance, and besides, we were already as good as dead. Of the men and women I lived with, fought with, during those months, very many were killed, the majority—as they knew they would be. It did not matter. What was spilt could not be lost, because at last love had come to birth in man, communism and its Red Star of hope shone out for all the working poor, for all the suffering everywhere, to see and to follow. Within that general Love, I and the Partisan girl loved each other. We hardly spoke of it, were seldom alone, were soldiers, thinking soldiers’ thoughts. When we did find ourselves together and alone, it was not because it had been planned by us. An accident of our group life had sent us off to forage for food in an abandoned village, or we were put together on guard duty. But we were on duty and so had to be responsible. I do not remember when I kissed her first, but I remember our jokes that it had taken us so long to kiss. We slept together once in the frenzy of sorrow after I was told that in a week I would be finished with my mission and with Yugoslavia—and with Konstantina.
That was after I had been taken to Tito’s headquarters, had given and taken information—had done what I had come to do. It was then a question of how I could get away again. That could not be by air. It was dangerous enough dropping men in, but at that stage impossible for aircraft to land. I had to make my way to the coast, from where I was taken in a small boat by fishermen to an island where I met up with others who had been on missions in Greece and Yugoslavia. And how we got back to North Africa from there is another story.
The weeks before I made liaison with the guide who was to take me to the coast were full of dangerous fighting. Our group blew up a railway, destroyed a couple of bridges, fought two bloody battles with groups of Chetniks much larger than ours. After these battles we were weakened and depleted. Some of us were wounded. Vido, the leader, was dead, and Miloš, who was an old school-friend of Konstantina’s, became group leader. She became his second-in-command, and was even more busy than she had been. For there was much more to do, and many fewer people to do it all. But new people kept coming in. I remember one evening we were on a mountain flank above a village which we knew to be occupied by German and Croat troops. It was a village where Miloš had friends—or rather, had had friends. He was talking of how, next day, he might slip down, with one of the girls, to the village, in disguise. It was a question of getting hold of an ordinary peasant dress and kerchief. Vera, one of the girls, had had such an outfit, but it had been lost in recent fighting. As we sat there that night, talking in