Down the Blue Hip

Last month TIME Correspondent Stoyan Pribichevich told the dramatic story of his capture and escape from Nazi parachutists sent to seize Marshal Tito (TIME, June 26). Herewith the sequel--the report of a mass march by Partisans and Allied associates through Yugoslavia's German-infested mountains.

The frost woke me and my two Partisan guards at dawn on May 26 in the primeval forest of the Yavorusha Mountain. We climbed the ankle-deep carpet of dry leaves up to the top, and all around us the thick highland woods teemed with refugees and lowing cattle.

At noon we slid down a vertiginous slope to a peasant hut, and just as I was gulping sour milk from a wooden bowl, a rifle shot rang out outside. I ran out and beheld, some 150 yards off at the edge of the forest, two grey timber wolves tearing at the udders of a prostrate cow. As the peasant's boy fired his second bullet, the big beasts looked at us with pricked-up ears and dignifiedly trotted off into the woods.

That afternoon I watched from a hill the burning of Drvar and counted 80 German planes that bombed the surrounding cliffs. In the evening an old peasant a Serb of ancient make, hung a kettle on a chain above the wood fire lit on the earthen floor of his hut, cooked pura (corn gruel), and invited me and some 20 refugee women and children to dinner. There I saw a child, bayoneted through the right upper arm by the Germans, and listened to accounts of German atrocities.

Before dawn my guards announced: "The route is clear, but perhaps not for long." As we were about to start, the peasant's wife, in shabby garments and with a strangely radiating face, appeared from nowhere and spoke to me with downcast eyes, "I have only one son left. If he stays here, the Germans will sooner or later catch him and kill him. Please take him with you and ask Tito to accept him as a soldier." I looked at the handsome 16-year-old boy behind her. "Are you ready to fight under Tito?" "Yes," he said. "Then come with me, and I will speak to one of the Marshal's commanders." The woman tucked a piece of bread into the hands of her last son, made the sign of the cross above his head, and vanished. Up and down we marched, first through the woods and then through a lunar panorama, of fierce broken crags. We overtook a Partisan soldier, shot through the chest, gasping and struggling toward the nearest wood hospital.

The cold north wind was lashing under a bleak sky. Up a steep ravine we toiled again, and plunged through a glorious mountain field, sprinkled with red flowers, silvery brooks and green pine woods, with the wind roaring before us like a boisterous symphony. Above the woods, 4,000 feet up, I finally found the staff of the 8th Corps and Major Randolph Churchill.

Russian Spit. In a tiny hut filled with wood smoke, crowded with two cots and a rough-hewn table carrying a candle and scattered papers, ragged, tousle-haired young Churchill shook hands with me. Pribichevich, you have the biggest story of the war! In fact since my father escaped from the Boers, no one has had such a story to tell."

The Partisans could never figure out Major Randolph Churchill--his fits, bravado and geniality. They generally defined him as "the incredible Englishman." Randolph was constantly hunting up his batman. "Salmon! Where is Salmon? Salmon, I say, you must be with me!" Then he would praise Salmon in public, whereupon Salmon would draw himself up: "Sir, I don't like to be made fun of!" During the rest pauses, super-active Randolph would think up various picnic pleasures, such as constructing a nice bivouac when all we wanted was to be left alone and lie in the grass. He never fussed about the cold, hunger, thirst, sore feet or German bullets, and only raised hell when the Partisan barber wanted to give him a shave without hot water. He smoked what the rest of us did, and the Russian general and I rolled cigarets for him, pasting them with our tongues. Mine would always fall apart in Churchill's fingers, which caused him to remark, "Pribichevich, the Russian spit is stronger than yours."

Secret Pokret. I soon learned the meaning of pokret (movement)--the secret of the Partisan war strategy. It is a mass march across trackless rocks and forests, usually at night. The idea is to break through the German encirclement or to get, by intricate maneuvering, behind the pursuing German columns and pursue them in turn. It is like a slow-motion air dogfight, performed on the ground.

Partisan detachments and pack animals in pokret, often camouflaged by green branches tied on their backs, sneak through the wilderness in single file, some times stretching out several miles. Every man must shout, "Veza!" (Contact!) when he loses sight of the man in front or behind. Orders are continually passed from mouth to mouth along the Indian file. Our first pokret covered 25 miles of wilderness in 14 hours at night.

No Luck, Again. On the sunny after noon of June 1, the Anglo-American Air Force staked off a natural landing field for transport planes to take some 40 of us Allies to Italy. But on the following morn ing, the din of the fighting came closer, German stray shells dropped into the val ley, and we picked another natural field for June 2. No luck, again. Just as the tightlipped, bomb-scarred squadron leader was measuring off the new landing ground, machine guns burst out on a nearby hill and the order came, "Pokret." The Germans, guided by the Chetniks, were breaking into the highland. At dusk 60 Partisan gunners held off the nearest group of 400 Germans at a ridge while our single file slithered west into the woods.

On Misery Mountain. Thus began my second pokret, a seven-day affair along the 5,500-ft. Yadovnik (Misery) Mountain.

After two days our water supply ran out. Then we ran out of salt and bread and all the canned food, later lost the cattle which the Partisan quartermasters drove with them. After that we were down to one meal a day of rice boiled without salt in snow water.

On June 4 a strong German force suddenly encircled our largely noncombatant columns. I was walking wearily with a column of fresh recruits and nurses when shots rang out in front of us. The line swayed and broke up, the people started streaming back through the forest.

Within less than an hour Colonel Chet-kovich, a shy, cunning Montenegrin, thrice wounded in this war, had the situation under control and decided upon an ingenious, reckless plan. A few hundred yards in front of us rose a sharp cliff, and beyond it gaped a gigantic precipice--a sheer drop of 2,000 feet, called the Blue Hip. He led us over it.

Into the Pit. With infinite caution, breathlessly, we lowered ourselves in single file along a huge, nearly vertical canyon slope of bush and rock, sinking into a pitch-black pit at an angle of 70 to 80 degrees. It was like a descent into Dante's Inferno. We felt around for the bush twigs to hang on, swung on both hands from the rocks, embraced with both arms the stones projecting above the precipice, each man dangling his feet above the head of his precursor.

It took us four hours to slide down the Blue Hip, and I shall never know how we did it without a single sprained ankle.

Well after midnight we threw ourselves on our stomachs, plunged our heads into a roaring brook, and sprawled on the damp earth. Then indefatigable Chetkovich ordered the pokret again.

In a few days Allied planes dropped food and ammunition and Major Church, ill signaled for transport planes for the Allied mission members. This time the squadron leader staked off a mountain field without enemy molestation.

When several big machines, escorted by fighters, had landed on the handmade runway to take us off to Italy, the commissar of the 8th Corps shook hands with me and said confidentially: "We have already sent a message .to the Allied authorities, but you, please, remind them: what we now need urgently is air evacuation of 50 gravely wounded whom we have hidden in caves in the woods. And," he hesitated, "we most urgently need ten battledresses." "Why just ten?" I asked, surprised. "Well," he blushed, "ten of our girl fighters have torn clothes and are almost half naked, and . . . and . . . it doesn't look proper."

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