Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness. Martin Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ tackle the monstrously large kit list found in an annex to the Op HANWOOD deployment instruction. This was somewhat confusing since the Bosnia deployment had been given the operational name GRAPPLE. The kit list was exhaustive and might just as well have said everything but the kitchen sink; my house quickly began to look like a quartermaster’s stores. Piles of military junk sprang up in every room – socks, shirts, trousers, boots, shoes and trainers, towels and washing kit, webbing and mess tins, helmet and Combat Body Armour, polish and brushes and a plethora of bits and pieces gathered and hoarded over the years. I managed to stuff the whole lot into a bergen, a large sausage-shaped kit bag, a grip bag and a daysack. Each item weighed a ton. I should have heeded my instincts. I barely used a quarter of this baggage in all my time in Bosnia.

      While I’d been struggling with the kit list the gang of interpreters had been undergoing some sort of brush up military training at the Guards Depot at Pirbright. Foot drill had not been on the agenda but pistol training, first aid, mine awareness and basic fitness had been. On 21 December we gathered at HQ United Kingdom Land Forces for a briefing. I’d met none of my new colleagues before and was curious to see just who these people were who’d been brave or foolish enough to expose themselves to the little-known Balkan language of Serbo-Croat.

      They turned out to be quite a mixed bunch drawn from the Army and Navy. Their self-appointed guru was an elderly, plump and slightly fussy major from the Royal Army Pay Corps called Martin Strong. The other officers were mainly captains: Neil Greenwood, a keen medal collector from the Gunners: Nick Short, an infantryman from the Gloucesters, and a number of others, including Sue Davidson from the Woman’s Royal Army Corps. The Senior NCOs were even more curious: a Scottish Warrant Officer called ‘Jock’ McNair, and a thin, wiry Colour Sergeant with black, mischievous, ferrety eyes – Bob Edge, also a Gloucester. There were others of various ages, ranks and backgrounds. Seeming to have nothing in common save the course they’d just attended, they reminded me more than anything else of the cast of The Dirty Dozen.

      The briefing was a fairly traumatic affair delivered by a worn-out looking watchkeeper, Major Windsor, who’d just finished the night shift. With the aid of a huge map of the Balkans and Bosnia-Hercegovina, across which snaked an impossibly contorted front line drawn in red, he attempted to explain what was going on out there: Serbs here, Croats there, Muslims here, Bosnian Croats there, Bosnian Serbs here and here, Krajina Serbs, Croat Serbs, Croat Croats, Serb Serbs, HVO, HV, JNA, JA, ABiH, BSA, UNHCR, ICRC, BRITBAT, BRITFOR, COMBRITFOR, BHC, UNSC, NGOs, ICFY, ECMM, Route Circle, Route Diamond, Route Square, TSG, GV, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was all gobbledegook, meaningless confusion that went straight over our heads. I don’t think they really understood it either.

      Christmas at home had been strained. My father had worked himself up into a real lather over the whole thing. ‘You don’t know what you’ve let yourself in for. You don’t know what they’re like, those people down there, the mentality. They’re not like us here in the Diaspora. All the decent people were either killed off or fled into exile … Tito might have gone but they’re still old Communists. They’re born and bred that way and they’re rotten – Yugovici, all of them. And you can’t trust them. They’re cheats and liars and they’ll use you if they can. I haven’t suffered here in the West for fifty years, struggled to bring you up and educate you, just to watch you disappear off to the Balkans and be killed …’

      On and on it went. He was distressed, inconsolable. It was dreadful and I felt guilty that I was causing him such pain by opening up old wartime wounds and bitter memories. Suddenly, I was no longer sure I was doing the right thing. My plans started to look less like a great adventure designed to keep at bay the dreaded desk job and were beginning to take on a much more sinister hue. The thought that I might be killed, particularly in a UN mission, hadn’t even entered my head.

      ‘And that blue beret won’t protect you and they won’t be fooled by that Laurel name they’ve given you. They’ll see through that immediately.’ I had to agree with him on that one. The Laurel thing was particularly absurd and unfunny.

      My mother was far more pragmatic about it all. ‘Here you go, son, a little Christmas present for you to take out to Bosnia.’

      I took the small, soft package from her. It felt like a handkerchief. Mothers! I wasn’t too far off the mark. It was an old Second World War silk escape map, the kind issued to aircrew and SOE agents. Although slightly frayed, yellowed around the edges and musty through decades of storage, it was still soft and had lost none of its rich colour. Printed in exquisite detail on both sides, it depicted the Balkans and middle Europe – Sheets F and G. The legend read ‘Frontiers as at September 1943 … owing to frontiers being constantly changed in Eastern Europe, those marked on the map must be accepted with reserve.’ The scale was lmm:lkm. It was all there: Vitez where the Cheshires were, Gornji Vakuf, which was also featuring in the news, and Split on the Dalmatian coast, where we’d be going in four days’ time. I’d never seen the map before.

      ‘Where did this come from?’

      ‘Oh, we were each issued with one,’ my mother replied cryptically.

      ‘What! In the desert?’ I was mystified. I knew she’d been in North Africa, but what on earth was she doing with an escape map of the Balkans? The only ones issued with those had been the Cairo-based SOE agents. ‘You weren’t in SOE were you?’

      ‘Well, not exactly. For a while I worked for Colonel James Klugmann, the head of SOE Cairo … that Communist traitor!’ she’d almost spat out his name, ‘… but no I wasn’t SOE. But I was sent to Yugoslavia with Dr McPhail’s Save the Children.’

      Her story was all completely new to me. I’d vaguely been aware that she’d finished her war somewhere in Italy, but not that she’d been part of the first ever UN mission to the Balkans in 1945. The candles flickered on the table as she spoke. Recruited into Dr McPhail’s unit in 1944 she’d acted as an interpreter in a large Croat refugee camp in the Sinai desert. In late 1944 the unit had moved to Italy and in March 1945 my mother and her three-tonne ambulance had landed in Dubrovnik. She’d spent the rest of that year driving around Bosnia, Hercegovina and Montenegro looking after orphaned children.

      ‘… anyway, we were each issued with one of these maps and I think you should have it out there.’

      I looked carefully at the silk and found Dubrovnik some way to the south of Split; to think that this had been in her pocket in that place nearly half a century ago! My father had never mentioned his war and my mother rarely hers. Now it was as if my imminent departure for the Balkans had spurred them both into revealing things that had for decades been locked away.

      Another peculiar thing happened that evening. Mark Etherington, an old friend from the Regiment, rang up to wish us all a happy Christmas. He’d been out of the Army for over a year and had last been seen heading out of Wandsworth in south-west London bound for Cape Town on a motorbike. On the phone his voice sounded faint, distant, distorted by terrible static and a hollow, irregular thumping sound. I had to shout down the phone.

      ‘Mark! Where are you?’ No doubt he was stuck somewhere in darkest Africa.

      ‘Bihac … I’m in Bihac …’ He too was yelling.

      ‘What? Sorry? Where did you say?’

      ‘Bihac … in Bosnia … thought I’d ring and wish you all a happy Christmas.’

      ‘Mark! What’re you doing there … and what’s that banging noise?’ The thumping in the background was incessant.

      ‘Shelling! It’s shelling.’

      ‘What!’ СКАЧАТЬ