whispers, huddled in together, very hungry and cold because we did not dare light a fire, we saw two people move out of the bushes towards us. Rifles flew up, but Miloš shouted out, No—and it was just in time. Two boys ran forward silently over the grass, smiling. Miloš embraced them. They were from the village, had heard of our presence near them in the mountains, had come to join us. They were brothers, sixteen, and seventeen. Neither had so much as held a rifle before. They had brought with them two old revolvers from the 1914 war. Also some bread and sausage—even more welcome than the revolvers. That night we began training them in the art of guerrilla warfare and in a couple of weeks these two boys were as skilled and resourceful as any one of us. If memories of wartime are frighteningly precious, the main reason is that in wartime we learn again that peacetime should never allow to be forgotten. That “every cook can learn to govern the state.” In wartime every little clerk, every confined housewife, learns what he or she is capable of. In peacetime these two schoolboys would have become what the pettiness of village life would have allowed them to become. In England boys of that age, or certainly middle-class boys, are spoiled children. In war, in our guerrilla group, they were trackers, crack shots, brilliant spies, thieves and pilferers, able to march twenty-four hours at a stretch remaining lively and alert, able to find berries, mushrooms, edible roots, able to track down a deer or a pheasant and kill it silently without wasting precious ammunition. What could possibly happen to them in the life after the war—to them and the millions like them in the countries where guerrillas and partisans and the underground operated—to match up to what they were given in war? That is, unless they went to prison (where many still are) and learned a different kind of skilled endurance. In the less than a month that I was with the two boys, I had learned again what I had already understood in my first day with the Partisans—that any human being anywhere will blossom into a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to use them. Both those boys survived the war. Both are now high in the government of their country. They had their education with the guerrillas in the mountains and the forests.
They were not the only ones to come secretly from the villages. By such recruitment, our group went up again to nearly thirty, seeming always to get younger and younger. The “old ones” would joke about “the children.” Miloš was “the old man.” He was twenty-four.
Although it was summer, we were always short of food, and our medical supplies were low. Konstantina was reduced to a few bandages and ointment. It was decided that she and I would go to a village where her aunt lived, to try and get supplies. The plan was for us to move up to the edge of a field above the village, where the women would be at work among the maize. Konstantina knew the village well, and the habits of the people. She knew they were sympathetic to us, and hated the occupying Croats. The women would bring a skirt, a blouse, a kerchief. Konstantina would put them on, join the working women, return with them to the village at midday, and go to her aunt’s house. There she would get her aunt to find bandages, disinfectants, medicines, and food. There was only one point of danger that we could foresee, which was that at this time of the year the women often did not return to their homes for the midday meal, but took it in the fields as they worked. But one of them could run back to the village and fetch Konstantina’s aunt to us in the forest. Or, if all this was too dangerous, if the occupying troops were too alert, then we would have to stay at the edge of the field above the village, and one of the women would take the message down to the aunt, and the supplies could be brought to where we were.
But it all went off very simply. We left our friends early, before the sun was up, and had reached the village by mid-morning. We slid on our