Tapped for Skull & Bones

An American woman last week joined an anti-Nazi Fifth Column, a Fifth Column that operated in the Balkans before Adolf Hitler was born. It was a secret band of Serbian and Bulgarian patriots who called themselves Chetniks (home guards), were scornfully referred to as Komitadji (guerrillas) by their Turkish overlords. Pledged neither to give nor accept quarter, the Chetniks plotted assassinations, harassed the Turks, kept the pot of Balkan independence boiling. In World War I the Serbian Chetniks circulated behind the enemy's lines, blew up bridges, destroyed communications, fanned revolts among Austria-Hungary's Balkan minorities. Denied the rights of soldiers, they were shot on sight, usually preferred to commit suicide rather than let the enemy kill them.

Today 38,000 Yugoslavs wear the Chetnik uniform (blue serge tunic with skull-&-bones insignia, dagger, black socks embroidered with roses) and there are many more secret members, but among them are not more than ten women. The American woman who joined them was Ruth Mitchell, a native of Milwaukee, sister of the late, famed U.S. airman, General William ("Billy") Mitchell, ex-wife of two Britons, mother of a son with the R.A.F. in Africa.

Ruth Mitchell had been busy writing a guidebook, studying native folklore in Albania when the Iralians seized it. She has since been living in Yugoslavia. One day last week she walked into a peasant hut on the outskirts of Belgrade and stood before 70-year-old Kosta Pechanatz, leader of the Chetniks. A veteran Komitadji, stationed on the Salonika Front during World War I, Kosta Pechanatz got a French aviator to drop him in Serbia, there made so much trouble for the Germans that it took three Army divisions to quiet things down.

On the wall behind white-bearded Leader Pechanatz hung a picture of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who shot and killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, thus started World War I. In a corner, on the floor, lay the bleached skeleton of a Chetnik hero. Said Leader Pechanatz, with a casual wave of his arm: "His mother comes to see me every few weeks. She often asks whose skeleton that is. I have never told her. I am hard, but not that hard."

Then Leader Pechanatz gravely handed Mrs. Mitchell a phial of poison, showed her how to sew it in the collar of her tunic so that she could suck it out, even though her hands were manacled. He told her to practice killing with a knife, by plunging and twisting it in a sack of flour. These amenities attended to, Leader Pechanatz gave Mrs. Mitchell a job as dispatch rider on his general staff. From a list of names before him, he crossed hers off. Said he: "We just cross the name off, my girl, because we consider you dead when you become one of us. I expect to die myself this time. How about you?" "I am willing too," said Ruth Mitchell stoutly.

To her Milwaukee sister, Mrs. Martin Fladoes, Ruth Mitchell sent a curt cable. It said: "Am leaving for the front."

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