By the New Year of 1945 I had been confirmed as Director of Jugoslav Health and Relief Services. Had the ambiguity of my position continued, I would have got myself sent back to England to rejoin my Air Marshall. Both he and Janetta knew in their separate ways about my position. Janetta had told me that the Exeter Labour Party wanted me as their Parliamentary candidate, and the Air Marshall had let me know that he had found no one to take my place. Before going to Belgrade I simply had to see Janetta and our daughter, Nicolette. I had to have leave; it was now or never.

Considering that there were several million men with exactly the same problems it must be rated a miracle that I succeeded in getting back to England. We were not far from Caserta (Field Marshal Alexander's H/Q) so Lt Colonels were two a penny but I put my friends and my ranking to work and managed to get from Bari to Ham Spray inside 36 hours. I did at any rate have valid movement orders and thanks to the connivance of both the Poles and the Free French, I got to Paris via Vienna in their planes. It was a tight connection at the American field that later became Orly Airport. I was too scared of missing my seat to take the risk of going in to Paris so I ate supper in the American Transit Camp. On leaving the Mess most of the officers walked straight onto the shuttle-bus for Paris, an orderly stood by shaking in a bored way a bread panier under the noses of those boarding the bus for town. The basket was full of condoms. To exchange this military Babel for the quiet pavane of life with Ralph and Frances Partridge at Ham Spray made my immediate past seem quite unreal. All I could do was revel in the incredible present. It was wonderful to be with Janetta again but, no sooner had I arrived on that ridiculously short ten day leave, than the shadow of my return became imminent. She had not forgiven me for going off in the first place, but she would have, had I indeed been coming back for good. She was more beautiful than ever, her nimbleness of mind and the penetration of her emotional perceptions were unerring. We were immensely happy in each others re-found presence. Had we but secured our future, had we pledged our confidence in that future by starting the second child we had always wanted, had I put first in my priorities getting myself sent back to England as soon as possible, all would indeed have been well.

I had never calculated my life, neither in Spain, nor during the war, on the basis of avoiding risk; rashly I was doing the same with my personal life. In my own mind I knew that in ten days I would be flying into some Jugoslav air-strip, flying into a country that was still fifty per cent in German hands. All this presented opportunities for my sudden exit. In the event of my not returning I did not want to leave Janetta alone with a second child; but I saw our whole future with boundless optimism. As Janetta saw it, I was turning my back on her own intensely personal view of our life together. We were each as right as the other. Good navigators do not leave the “worst case” forecast out of their reckoning. I did.

To my surprise I had found Frances Partridge utterly opposed to any thought of Janetta and Nicolette moving from England into a newly liberated Belgrade, the uncertain environment of which I knew I could control. I had already started to set up ways of getting them both to join me as soon as I myself got established there. Even in Cairo I had known of clandestine arrivals. As soon as actual hostilities ceased, I could get them onto a Free French or Polish flight. But to those at Ham Spray all that was pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by. It attracted no support from Ralph and Frances - in fact, though it was not yet evident to me, their tolerance was veering towards active opposition.

I had failed to break through Janetta's embargo on discussion of my work and my reasons for staying with it; on her side she said little about the future, she must have been profoundly disappointed in me. Though neither she nor I realised it at the time, I had been putting the skids under myself. Substantially, from that moment on, I must have been on the way out, though the two of us had not yet realised it. My leave ended with our inner unity seemingly intact but our two separate visions of our future were becoming irreconcilable - to which I was quite blind. How can she plead with him who brings no gift, bright eyes with tears grow dim, and little's left. I went back to Bari and lulled myself with a surfeit of work. The next few weeks were spent lining up the movements into Jugoslavia. This was in fact a major piece of staff-work for which UNRRA was totally unprepared. For me it was Spain all over again. Everyone was demanding Transport and Equipment: Supply Officers, Sanitary Engineers and Doctors, a Chief Nurse who was a Major with her five nurses - all Commisioned Officers in the US Public Health Service. They were disciplined professionals, all clamouring for instant attention as they (quite rightly) wished to establish the tactical planning of their work. They were technically very well informed but absolutely devoid of relevant field experience. Moreover none of them had any supplies or equipment relevant to their speciality.

I turned to the Friends Ambulance Unit for help. The FAU had drawn transport from the Army. It was booked out to the FAU officially and had become virtually inalienable. The FAU Medical Stores Units and Field Medical Laboratory, with its qualified personnel, were put on standby to move across the Adriatic. The FAU's trucks provided the only transport for UNRRA's first moves. UNRRA had thought of sociology at this early stage but not of its own transport needs. The FAU had been running Refugee Camps and were a competent group who knew their way around the military labyrinth and their personnel had all taken the trouble to learn Balkan languages. The administration of my office in Bari began to make sense when the Friends Ambulance Unit allowed Angela de Renzy Martin to take charge of it. She had left Oxford without her degree because she was not prepared to take academic shelter from the consequences of her conscientious objection to military service. Her father was a distinguished Indian Army Officer who had been finishing his career in our Madrid Embassy. The Ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, had found his activities risked ruffling Spanish pro-axis sentiments and had had him recalled. He had given evidence for his daughter before the Conscientious Objector's Tribunal. Someone with such a background does not stint effort and very soon, together with the newly arrived Americans, who were mostly wearing the uniform of Majors, we developed a remarkably effective team. Angela de Renzy Martin with her competent knowledge of Serbo-Croat (learnt working with the Dalmatian refugees in the Egyptian Camps) did much to complete it. Unfortunately her detachment to UNRRA could only be temporary for the duration of our stay in Santo Spirito.

When I went ahead to Belgrade to reconnoiter, it became immediately evident that we would have to come to grips with a Government that viewed society from within a heavy layer of not too well digested Marxism and that we would have to rebuild a totally destroyed economy based on a wrecked infrastructure. On leaving Ham Spray I had thought I would be facing a few months work in Jugoslavia. I soon saw that this was hopelessly unrealistic; in fact I ended up by staying four years. On my very first morning in Belgrade I had a violent introduction to the realities of the German occupation. I had landed at Zemun from a DC3, the jeep had come down the slide, we had crossed the Sava and been assigned quarters in a dependency of the Patriarchate. Next morning it was very cold. I had noticed that there was drift wood coming down the Sava just above its juncture with the Danube. With my ML driver - a cheerful 8th Army cockney - I went down to salvage some of this wood for fires in that freezing ex-seminary. We found our way down to the river, where some women were already waiting for the sluggish current to bring in the logs. I had told the driver to give them first pick and two women stepped forward onto a little sand-spit to pull in a slowly drifting log.

I saw that it was not a log, it was all that was left of a man. Slowly down the river on the early spring current came corpses with their throats cut. Their hands had been tied behind their back with electric light wire. The Concentration Camp of Jasenovac, a hundred kilometers upstream in Croatia, was being evacuated by the Ustasha, the Croat Free State militia. Their protectors and allies, the Prinz Eugen SS Division was withdrawing to the Reich. Before retreating the Croat Ustasha were butchering their Serb Resistance prisoners by cutting their throats on the river-bank landing stage. They had a mystique about bullets being too good for Serbs or Reds. The SS would have machine-gunned prisoners they did not wish to keep, but that would not do for the Ustasha. They do not seem to have left a bad memory with everyone: when Croatia had another shot at being independant in 1990 its leaders chose that same Ustasha ensign as the National Flag of the new Republic - so today it floats over 'ethnic cleansing' stations just as yesterday it did over Nazi protected death-camps.

They even worried their friends, did the Ustasha. Count Ciano tells in his diary of his visit to Ante Pavelic, the head of the Axis-installed Independant Croat State. Their discussion had been interrupted by two Ustasha officers who had brought in a basket which they opened to show its contents to their Poglavnik. Ciano wrote that it seemed to be filled with shucked oysters. Pavelic excused this interruption saying something about the necessity of encouraging keen officers, even if they had been somewhat over zealous in bringing in a basket-full of Serbian eyeballs.

From Nada and Neubauer in the Bari Partisan Mission I had begun to get some idea of the cultural complexity of Jugoslavia. Those two were Slovenes from the North. The Slovenes are most certainly Slav but they had experienced the renaissance and been nurtured in the cultural cradle of the Habsburg Empire. Serbs had - and still have today - another birth-right.

A day or so after my arrival in Belgrade, I met a most friendly Serb who exemplified this difference. We were speaking English when suddenly he asked for the box of matches that I had in my hand. I passed it to him and he wrote something on one side, handed it back to me asking "what is that?" I read off the number he had written. It was, say, one million six hundred thousand. He asked for the matchbox again, turned it over and wrote again. He gave it back with the same question, a very similar million number showed up. I wanted to know what these two numbers meant. He stood up saying "One million six hundred thousand was the population of Serbia when the Turks defeated Tsar Lazar at Kossovo in 1389." and the other number I asked. "One million six hundred and forty thousand was the population of England on that same date." "Yes" I said, " but those are surely fourteenth century•figures, I don't quite see..." Bogdan Petrovic interrupted me gently, "If the battle of Kosovo had gone otherwise it would have been I, Bogdan Petrovic, who would be visiting you in England, offering to help you in your misery. You would be standing up saying 'Gospodin Petrovic, pray be you seated, I am shamed; I have nothing to offer you except the end of a bottle of very bad whiskey.' Instead it is I, Bogdan Petrovic, who must say Gospodin Sinclair, be welcome under my roof, pray help my children to find work under your protection and deign to accept what is left of this bottle of very bad slivovic." As a good Serb my friend was an Orthodox Christian with a culture continuous with that of the Byzantine Empire. The Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution with its work-ethic, the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, none of this had touched him. His intellectual strength sprung from his pride in his Orthodox Serbian birthright. He was not particularly pan-slav, for him the Russians had showed their unreliability when they had failed to back Serbia in her Balkan wars at the beginning of this century. The Jugoslav case is not made any easier to understand when one includes the several million Bosnian Moslems--all perfectly slav. Then there are the extra-ordinarily Mediterranean Dalmatians, who once rivalled the Venetians in sea-power. Even with all this accepted, you still have the Macedonians and the Montenegrins to reckon with, before going on to consider the Hungarian minorites in the Banat or the Albanians of Kosovo. There is some substance to Bogdan Petrovic's thesis. Had the Serbs won the battle of Kosovo their country might well have become a major Medieval Kingdom and have outshone Britain, driving ahead empowered by the Renaissance and the enlightenment, to emerge as a major (or even the major) European power.

Later, from Sarajevo to Tuzla, I followed with unbelieving eyes the trail of devastation left by the retreating SS Prinz Eugen Division . War is about killing and destroying, it is waged for the purpose of placing ones own force in a particular position; or to deny a particular position to the adversary. Wanton destruction, purposeless slaughter, lacks military logic. In the midst of such widespread desolation I had some comfort when I saw the remains of that SS Division being led back as prisoners. I was coming into Belgrade over the River Sava by the battered iron bridge from Zemun when I saw that column of prisoners. The German soldiers, together with a small number of men in civilian clothes, were all utterly exhausted. The SS Prinz Eugen Division had been largely recruited from the Volksdeutsch settlements in the Danubian plains; they had all been rolled up together as the German armies collapsed back into the Reich. That column staggered on towards me, the Jugoslav Partisan Army Guards were marching wearily along with rifles slung, packs on backs, many were supporting their trudging paces with newly-cut hand staffs; a single Major on a pony led the column. He kept an eye on its two or three hundred yard length, waiting to be overtaken by it and then trotting up to its head. The Germans were staggering along in the somnambulistic depths of total fatigue; the escort was almost as tired as their prisoners. A German fell out of line, a Partisan guard used his handstaff to strike the prisoner back into file, acting much as a drover turning a bullock. He hit the prisoner a second time, a great thump across his shoulders and a few more for good measure, cursing as he struck. The officer in charge of the Column trotted up, we were on the bridge and he was not two feet away from me. He took the soldier's hand staff and threw it into the river Sava saying "V'nisti Nemac, mismo Jugosloveni." (You're not a German, we are Jugoslavs). When that long wooden staff had been thrown into the river I believed that I had witnessed the proof of the survival of civilisation. Today, with Serbs and Croats competing in the campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' and perpetuating extraordinary atrocities, I have to accept that tragically I was wrong--but the fact that this happened in 1945 may give us, fifty years later, hope for tomorrow. In the winter of 1944/45 there had been near starvation in some parts of the country so our first priority had to be the landing and the distribution of food. For this we had to set up an administrative base with international communications. The Jugoslav Government gave UNRRA the Belgrade Hotel that, a month or so before, had lodged the German Military Command. The Blitzmädchen (German ATS) had left behind penciled on the wall-paper the placement of the various services. Their work stations had been well thought out in relation to power points, light, phone and telex lines. We followed their plan implicitly and had a functioning office going in a couple of days.

The Jugoslav Government gave UNRRA a great welcome culminating in a ceremonial dinner. To some of us it was too good. The old protestant ethic, that streak of northern puritanism, found this banquet, with its whole sturgeons, its roast sucking pigs, and its generous wines, misplaced. The idea of the frugal rice-bowl dinner, propagated so well in war-time London by Wellington Koo in the Chinese Embassy, could find no sympathetic echo in Serbia hospitality. Of course everybody hated the Germans, but this did not mean that everyone in Belgrade loved Tito. The Milutinovics, a well placed Serbian Merchant family, with whom I stayed before I found a furnished flat, typified this state of mind. I had taken over their garçonnière, a dependency meant for a bachelor son, attached to their own large apartment. They had clearly enjoyed a very good standard of living and were continuing to do so. Madame Milutinovic spoke quite reasonable French. She was a Church-goer with two daughters who were never allowed out after dark, not even in the respectable street in which they lived, right next to the Hotel Majestic and over the way from a once fashionable café still called the Ruski Tsar. Madame was terrified of the Red Army, whose reputation for rape and robbery had always seemed to me to be exaggerated, but, not long after moving into their garçonnière, I obtained a more objective view. Gospodin Milutinovic, my landlord, had that invaluable merchant quality of responsiveness to market fluctuations. Before the war he had been a big grain broker. The complete breakdown of transport, together with Partisan Socialist constraints, had led him to trade in produce of lesser volume and higher value. He had become a purveyor of high-quality black-market food. He had solved his transport problems by bringing into partnership, on a profit sharing basis, a Soviet Officer from the Danube Flotilla. This Soviet association also provided protective cover for his whole operation. Customers were very largely official•; much of the menu for our welcoming State Banquet may well have been supplied by his enterprise. My garçonnière could be entered through the family apartment. This connection enabled it to be the more readily serviced and its independent front-door had been barricaded from inside. The owners liked it that way so I always came in via the family front-door to which they had given me a key.

One day, about a week after my first arrival in Belgrade, I had let myself in at about five o'clock and was turning from the hall to go through the dining room to my own quarters when I saw the twentyish daughter, Katerina, standing with her hands on the side of the table as though she was ready to run around it. She looked frankly dishevelled and was obviously out of breath. On the other side of the table was a young Soviet Officer, his cap with his revolver and belt lay on the table next to the drinks-tray with its decanter and glasses.

I felt that I had come in at the wrong moment; my only way of escape was to go on through the room as though there was nothing special to notice. Suddenly, there was a burst of uproarous laughter from that Soviet Captain. He kept repeating some phrase including the words Engleski Offitzier which obviously referred to me; I was still in battle dress. He clapped his cap on his head, pulled tight his belt with its side-arm and went out still laughing. Katerina, who spoke adequate French (I was not yet fluent in Serbian), more or less collapsed in tears onto my shoulder, thanking me for saving her. Anything could have happened had I not arrived. By now we were both on the same side of the table and I was able to get the gist of her story. The Soviet Captain was her father's business partner who’s Unit (the Danube flotilla) provided a vital transport link. The Captain had come round to see her father, who had happened to be out. She, like any well brought up Serbian daughter, had done what was expected and customary: she had offered the guest a drink. Instead of taking the polite thimble-full of slivovic he had helped himself well and had then attempted the most appalling liberties. He had chased her around the table until, to gain a respite, she had been forced to use certain much recommended subterfuges. Basically the ploy was to talk the man down by insisting on a drink of water. Then the girl had to say that what he was seeking was very much against his interest because, most unfortunately, she has a venereal disease. This earthy formula was reputed to be most effective in repulsing Russians; but, in the case of her father's Soviet partner, it had miscarried. When I arrived he had just been telling her that he did not mind a bit, because he too had a similar infection. As soon as I came in, and this is why he left laughing, he saw in me the source of her health problem. My interruption made it pointless for him to stay, so off he went, not really giving a damn, and making scurvy jokes.

Though she was no longer with her head on my shoulder, the traces of tears were still on her cheeks and we were, perforce, standing close to each other. The front door opened and in came Daddy. Before his eyes were the traces of an emotional scene. At a glance he took in the situation, suddenly he saw my potential as the son-in-law with the right passport. He was about to come and shake hands with me when, fortunately, Katerina flung herself into Daddy's arms to sob out the horrid details of her narrow escape and of my own providential arrival. Mama came in a few seconds later so I was able to retire to my quarters.

Half an hour later Daddy surfaced again; he wanted to talk to me. He had a caviar tray set out with some very good slivovic. He wanted me to know that the worst had not occurred, his daughter was virgo intacta. He was inviting a school-mate of his wife's, the lady professor of gynaecology, to come round. She would confirm this, should I wish I could assist at this verification which was to be made in the dining room. He particularly wished me to be assured of the total well-being of his daughter Katerina. His wife then came in to tell me that my arrival in their house had been an act of Divine Providence. I must regard it as my home; she would wish to regard me as her son. While I really liked Katerina, who was lively and intelligent, all the same it was becoming clear that for my own peace of mind a change of lodgings had become indispensable. I had to invent a cock-and-bull story about being assigned an official apartment by the Narodni Odbor - the People's Committee - which fortunately they accepted, so no one was insulted by my going. On my final evening in the Milutinovic household there was a dinner, with the lady professor of gynaecology as the guest of honour. It was in fact a solemn gastronomic celebration of Katerina's undisputed virginity, designed to seal the invitation that I relieve her of the problem via the altar. I had shown photos of Janetta and of our daughter to Katerina; she was a splendid girl who did not want to be disposed of by her parents as though she were a parcel. She insisted on her parents being kept in ignorance of my unavailability, she wanted to use me to cover certain sentimental projects of her own. She would let her parents think she was meeting me when in fact she would be going out with the young Serb of her choice.

We had no sooner sat down on the evening of the great dinner when came a knock at the door. It was the Captain of the Danube Flotilla. He had carried the geese and sucking-pigs down the river, so he knew there was a good meal. Daddy's merchant interests prevailed over the rigour of his paternal care. The Captain had to be seated, but not where he could meet Katerina's eye. He could see me all right and, across the table, he kept up a battery of obviously ribald toasts which, maybe fortunately, I could not understand. He was what used to be called a valiant trencherman and clearly his laughing, sanguine, nature did not allow him to be upset by trifles. The proceedings became more and more unreal, as we sat at this table, groaning with succulent black-market luxuries, celebrating the survival of a virginity that, only a couple of days before, had been anxiously verified on the very same boards as our current feast. The fact that the would-be rapist was clinking glasses with me, clearly assuming that it was I who had won the jack-pot, made the whole thing seem like a scene from a Restoration comedy. The more so because the whole company drank enormously, while Katerina, giving me complicit smiles, happily nursed her secret love for her absent Serbian boy-friend. After my short stay with the Milutinovic family I got a very good furnished flat, quite close to the office, at a ridiculously low rent because it had been the scene of a great misfortune. I wanted to find out about this before moving in as I did not want to live with gruesome associations. The flat had belonged to the editor of a defunct Nazi subsidised newspaper. It seems that it had been the site of a scandal involving the editor’s wife who, in the absence of her husband, tended to entertain over generously. A year before my own arrival she had invited an Orthodox Prelate to diner at which she not only offered him the joys of the table but also those of the chaise-longue. This hospitality had been so complete that the clergyman had had a heart attack. Telephonic appeals to the Patriarchate had procured the arrival of a couple of Deacons. They re-cassocked the deceased prelate, frog-marched him into the lift and then into a cab. Thus he was able to receive in a seemly fashion and in his Official Residence the final medical and liturgical rights. Friar Tuck qualities, and a great deal more, were often attributed to the Orthodox clergy in Serbia. This did nothing to reduce popular esteem for the Church. It was the Partisans who were the puritans. This legend did not inhibit me so I took the flat.

The war was not yet over, on our side, war-time political alliances were still holding together, though not with the same fervour as at the time of Stalingrad. On the German side, Hitler's quisling allies were falling over themselves in their efforts to broker a change of sides. We in the Balkans were at what sociologists have come to call the “interface”. By definition, unless there is total immobility, it is at interfaces that friction occurs. The work we had come to do had been, quite simply, a matter of life and death for the Jugoslavs in the winters of 1944 and 1945. As the points of contact multiplied, so did the possibility of friction, but so also did both sides work the harder to avoid sterile disputes. UNRRA showed that oil and water can mix perfectly well; the emulsifying agent we used in Belgrade was a mixture of complete frankness plus very hard work. Our counterparts in the Jugoslav Government met us in equal measure; consequently, immediately on the war's end, the population had been fed, basic medical services had been assured, and the utterly destitute provided with emergency shelter.

This early relief work involved no controversy and it certainly helped the Partisan war-establishment to show a more acceptable civilian face to that part of the population whose political allegiance had been to the right of centre. In the new year of 1946 industries were starting to produce, rail transport was being re-established and the spring-sowing had been achieved. More important than anything else: after the hard years, once again there was the time, the inclination and a little money to spare for ordinary pleasures. But here I am ahead of the sequence of events; before I got to those better times I personally had to cross a very bad patch. If the Chief of the UNRRA Jugoslav Mission had a well organised office, that was not initially my own lot. The Medical programme amounted to twenty million dollars (multiply by ten for today's value) and we also had a lot of reporting to do. Although I had managed to get hold of one excellent American secretary, she was monolingual. We then found a white Russian, Madame Gudim-Levkovitch, who was most able, eminently likeable and polyglot but whose reservations on the whole political situation made it difficult for us to integrate her into our work. Health and Relief Services involved not only a continuous liaison with our Jugoslav counterparts but also a major supply operation with reporting and requisitioning responsibilities. The office simply had to be multilingual, most fortunately I managed to bring back Angela de Renzy Martin from the Friends Ambulance Unit .

On my leaving Bari she had reverted to her Unit and had been put into the group trucking food and medical supplies from Split into Bosnia. She came back to UNRRA Headquarters by driving through on her own from the coast to Belgrade in a five ton truck. At that time this was a daunting cross-country trip and she was the first person in UNRRA to have done it. This experience made her one of our best informed witnesses of the devastation left behind by the retreating Nazi occupation Forces. It was a great relief to be joined by someone who spoke Serbian, as well as the French and German which we also had to use in our daily work. It was an even greater relief to work with a friend who knew my exact position with Janetta. Angela de Renzy Martin herself had major personal questions of her own to solve. We rapidly got very close but were each so wrapped up in another person that, as lovers, our potential was pre-empted.

One week end, it must have been in the spring of 1945 soon after I had got myself issued with a personal jeep, I desperately needed a day out of the Belgrade circuit and asked Angela to join me for a picnic. I had the things in the jeep and went round to fetch her from her lodgings in Fransuska ulitsa. She came down, all ready to go. When she learnt of my plan to go out to Avala, a round trip of say thirty or forty kilometres, she hesitated a moment, checked the proposed road circuit and then said that she did not think that we could possible do it. When I asked why, she said that to use that amount of petrol, just for fun, simply would not do. I reassured her that such a movement was well within my authority and that it would be entirely in order. Angela then made the point that petrol had been crossing the Atlantic at the cost of sailor's lives. The war was not yet over. She could not have a tranquil picnic at such a price, nor, once I had thought about it, could I. There was nothing more than logic in this approach, but it was logic more comfortable to forget. Today, fifty years afterwards, such morality seems alien in our present-day consumer society. But here again, just as in 1940 with the Finsbury girl insisting on the obligations of watch-keeping, was another example of that high level of social conscience which, applied in Britain at all levels of work, helped us to win the war.

I was of course disappointed. The reasons for abandoning this proposed country break seemed a bit over scrupulous, but I was learning to respect that purity of intention which went hand-in-hand with Angela's total reliability. I was of course taking both strength and comfort from being able to share my enthusiasm, and my worries, with someone who took the UNRRA job seriously. I was in love with Janetta - and Angela's feelings were centered on someone serving in India - but we were both, Angela and myself, becoming more and more involved with each other. Had we gone through with it our planned outing to Avila, we might have turned into a major diplomatic embarrassment. Very soon after our own non-starter picnic, James Gregory, a British Supply Officer and a good Russian speaker, had quite simply deviated a jeep from the motor-pool to drive out into the country with a Jugoslav girl whom he was planning to seduce. The couple had settled down in a neat little arcadian glade they had made for themselves. Having previously made a competent preliminary reconnaissance, Gregory had inserted their jeep inside a dense little stand of trees which was itself surrounded by high maize crops. Later on, to get him off the hook with the Jugoslav Authorities, I needed full details of his afternoon. He told me that everything had gone extraordinarily well, except that after an hour or so there seemed to be a lot of wild-life in the maize fields. He kept hearing odd noises, occasionally the tops of the six foot corn swayed as if small animals were moving around. They had had lunch and were lying very contented on the rug, inside their little dell, listening to the early model portable radio for which Gregory had extemporised a whip antenna when, suddenly, there was a piercing whistle and they found themselves looking up at rifle muzzles. Gregory had chosen his picnic site with care, after an earlier quick look at what the countryside had to offer. His jeep tyres had a military tread, their imprints would have been clear on the damp spring earth. From the crossing and recrossing of the tyre patterns, it may have seemed that more than one vehicle had been there. When he came back with his girl to the same locality, he had driven directly into concealment. An alert observer could have noted an antenna glinting above the greenery betraying a secret camp site. To a Partisan none of this would have spelt sweet music designed to make a girl happy Jeeps and radios could only have a military explanation.

The multiple tyre marks left by Gregory's recce had been noted and the Partisans had verified that there had been no authorised movements in that area. Clearly all this could only be the work of Reactionary Elements protected by Western Embassies. The unreclaimed Serbian extreme right had dreamed of Anglo-American force stopping communism and restoring the King. Vigilant Partisans had heard such talk. What was this concealed jeep up to? It could only be up to mischief.

The duty officer in the Belgrade garrison sent out a seasoned Company to reconoiter. What they found confirmed that there was indeed a clandestine operation centered on a small copse. They watched all afternoon, were reinforced and they finally decided to rush the concealed command-post. They found a courting couple. For them it was easy to see this as a blind, as an unscrupulous camouflage of villainy. They brought the who1e lot in, jeep, picnic, girl and the radio-operator spy. Gregory survived the interrogation; he came clean and told all. He spoke good Russian, the girl - in so far as was consistent with preserving her pose of modest innocence--confirmed his story. After all UNRRA really did exist, they checked with us. The Belgrade Garrison cancelled its alert and the two were released. The interrupted seduction was resumed elsewhere; the ice, as it were, had been broken and the liaison proved to be a considerable success. The girl moved in with Gregory, and ended by marrying him. Their daughter survives them both and is a Canadian Ballerina.

On VE day, May the eighth 1945, I spent the evening in the French Embassy; they had flown in munificent quantities of good champagne. The small French Mission was very friendly and it was from their Chief that I had had the assurances that all I had to do was get Janetta and Nicolette to Paris; then the Free French would look after the rest of their journey. So, on the evening of that Tuesday I was looking out over the Kalemegdan Fortress towards the Danube-Sava junction from the French Embassy terrace which was relatively safe. The Partisans were loosing off feux-de-joie, their automatic weapons pointing to the heavens and vaguely in the direction of the river - but everything that goes up has to come down, as the whistle of spent rounds kept reminding us. This went on all night. It was the end of the war; it had started for me personally in a direct military sense on the 23rd of August 1936, when the Spanish Medical Aid Unit entrained for Barcelona. After those nine years I felt a fantastic elation, an unbounded optimism for the future. Soon, Janetta and Nicolette would be in Belgrade.

One of Marshall Tolbukhin's interpreters was alongside me on the Embassy terrace. He had been left in Belgrade for liaison duties and our casual meetings had always given us both real pleasure. I still hope, but alas it is only a hope, that he remains alive. I shall never forget that night's conversation. Senior Captain Petrov's English was perfect, we were drinking that good champagne and we were both genuinely moved by the immensity of our realisation that the fighting was at last over. I turned to Petrov, saying something banal like "Isn't it wonderful, to be celebrating this together on this French Embassy terrace in Belgrade...." Petrov met my eye and, moved also, clinked his glass with mine, drained it to the last drop throwing it out from the balcony into the darkness. I pulled myself together and did the same. We remained silent and I said, "Yes, I'm thinking of them too, those with whom we cannot share this moment " Petrov looked up at me very slowly saying, "Yes, its a wonderful night, a wonderful instant in time..." he paused, obviously he had more to say--" Yes... yes it is almost as though we were all friends." We stayed together for a while but that "almost" was no accident. He had already talked enough; Senior Captain Petrov had nothing more he cared to say so he set himself to drinking as can only a Red Army Officer. Within a matter of weeks he moved on and we lost sight of each other. A brief last meeting had, by its very restraint, showed that his silence was not from lack of words but rather from a deliberate prudence. He too, all too probably, will have passed into Stalin's nacht und nebel along with Vladimir Glushkin and so many others. Not all the many White Russians in Belgrade had been made unhappy by the approach of the Reds; indeed in some cases there was even a reciprocal attraction. The pre-war Professor of Romance Languages in Belgrade University had become one of my good friends. In the Almanach de Gotha he was listed as Prince Kutuzov. In deference to the more democratic climate of exile, he never used his title. One day he came to see me in a state of some worry; he had just received a written summons to present himself to the Soviet Embassy. He was in good standing with the Jugoslav Authorities and had just been re-confirmed in his University teaching post, but I saw that he would have felt more secure without this unprecedented Soviet attention.

The next day he turned up beaming; he was carrying what I took to be a battered leather music case. That morning he had been received in a salon of the Soviet Embassy where with solemn and polite attention they had asked him where he had been born and whether his name really was Kutuzov. Other verificatory questions led to him being asked by the Soviet diplomat "Have I then the honour to be speaking to the direct descendant of Field Marshall Golenichev-Kutusov•?" His affirmative reply then brought out the key question, the very reason for his convocation, "Do you possess the Patent of Nobility granted to the Prince, your illustrious ancestor, by the Emperor Alexander I•?" When he revealed that he did indeed have this document, his host showed great relief. It was obvious that much research had been done to track him down. He had then been asked whether, since Marshal Stalin had inaugurated the Military Order of Kutusov, he would lend the patent for exhibition at a most important ceremony. He could not very well refuse, so that afternoon he was going to deliver it to the Embassy. It was in the thin leather case he had in his hand. Prince Kutuzov had long suffered from all the inconvenience of being stateless, so, when the Soviet Chargé d'Affairs indicated that a Soviet passport was his for the asking, he had accepted the offer; he shared the then common enough view that the World had been completely changed, had been reborn, by the Allied victory. Three years later, when Stalin's paranoia led to his denunciation of Titoism, Prince Kutusov was caught in the countercurrent. Poor Kutuzov was no politician, he had not reckoned with the continuity of change, but the Jugoslavs had noted his option for a Soviet passport. This earned him, his nobility not withstanding, a year's re-education in a Jugoslav camp along with a few hundred Stalinist zealots. The Jugoslavs were taking no risks. The British Embassy had been re-established in its pre-war Residence, which, miraculously escaping bomb-damage, had survived absolutely intact without so much as an ash-tray missing. It had been put at the disposal of the Vollbemächtigs Führer_ who had kept the place locked-up. Before the war, for some reason the Embassy had never received the new issue of Royal Portraits so it still had hanging on its big staircase the old life-size oil-paintings of the late King George the Fifth and of Queen Mary. The Ambassador, Sir Charles Peake, had all the qualities that one could expect to find in the older diplomatic generation. He had a dignified physical presence, High Church tastes and his whole culture seemed to reflect a kindly conservatism. One day as I was going down the staircase with him on the way to the Chancery wing, Sir Charles suddenly stopped dead. He turned towards the portrait of King George the fifth, whose reign had in fact ended some nine years past. Totally abandoning his usual diplomatic discretion, he raised his head to this great symbol of our Imperial past and intoned, "Sinclair-Loutit, this election.... now at last I can serve both my Sovereign" (a slight reverential bending of his head) "and my Conscience...." his head rose high as he gazed ahead at this new future.

The General election of July 1945 had rejected Churchill, and had chosen Labour. The Ambassador had been discussing the Jugoslav's general amazement at the Labour victory. I had been having my own wry thoughts and could not help remembering that perhaps I too might have been in that new Parliament. My name had stayed on the Labour Party's list of acceptable candidates and only a month or so before Janetta had sent me an urgent note about Exeter considering me as candidate and asking if I could come home for interview. I was in Bari at the time and this would only have been possible had I abandoned my new responsibilities. To have done so would very probably have led to my adoption in a Constituency which would have placed me in that post-war Labour landslide as well as deciding my personal life. At the time I had failed to realise the implications of the choice with which I was then faced. That Sir Charles Peake was a crypto-labourite would have occurred to no-one, least of all to me. There was nothing even vaguely Menshevik in his aristocratic liberalism. He had developed a good humoured hide-and-seek relationship with the Peoples Authority of the Municipal District in which the Embassy was situated. As head of a household at that particular street address, he qualified for summons to participate in collective work, such as clearing bomb damage, re-establishing neglected public gardens or road surfaces. The People's Authority would always get a polite note back regretting that, due to injuries received in an earlier war against the common enemy, Comrade Peake could not manage to help with the gardening or whatever it was. The bearer of the note (quite often Dugald Stewart, then third secretary and years later himself to be Ambassador in Belgrade) was instructed to offer himself as a substitute as long as the People's Authority undertook to make the necessary arrangements through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This whimsical treatment of the stiff-necked side of the People's Democracy was much more effective than the humourless moral indignation affected by other Diplomatic Missions. UNRRA had many brushes with Jugoslav susceptibilities when new political ways collided with those of foreign technocrats in a hurry.

We had but one head-on collision, it involved powerful, and potentially dangerous, forces. If, on VE day, Marshall Tolbukhin's Interpreter could say to me that it "was almost as though we were all friends", he would have been even more cautious as 1945 approached 1946 and the descent of the Iron Curtain accelerated. In a way it was the more noticeable because of the relatively lenient attitude of the Jugoslav Government towards the remains of the 'stara reakcia' (the unrepentant old guard of the former governing class) whose antics served to throw the political scene into a sharper relief. There was a persistent belief amongst these old-timers that the Allies - the French, British and Americans - would be coming soon to restore the King and 'normal' life. It was enough for a stray plane engine to be heard (planes were not yet a daily peace-time event) for people in the 'good' suburb of Dedinje to run into their gardens scanning the sky hopefully.

Canepa, a Genoese intellectual who, as Marzo, had led the Ligurian Partisans and who now represented the Italian daily "Unita" in Belgrade, carried out in my presence an experiment demonstrating the force and universality of the Bourgeois hope that an allied aerial armada would come to their rescue.

At about noon one working day he parked his Vespa in the middle of Belgrade and placed himself on a corner pavement at a principal crossroads. He then propped himself against a lamp-post and gazed up at the sky. He was soon joined by a passer by who asked him what he was looking at. Canepa (who spoke no Serbian) pointed up towards a corner of a small cloud in the sunny sky answering (in Italian) that he could not see anything. Although neither party could understand the other, they were not alone for long; very soon there was a knot of local gazers and pointers which became a crowd. Canepa left them all to it, he had created a self-sustaining operation of sky searching which generated a rumour that a Western Air Fleet had over flown Belgrade. The authorities, particularly at lower, shallower, levels, were not immune to the nervousness that such persistent rumours created. As Western reaction against the growing Soviet hegemony became more evident, and as the United States Embassy in Belgrade showed quite openly its sympathy with the local 'opposition', some parts of the Jugoslav Administration came to believe that there was a real possibility of Western intervention. This atmosphere was not lightened by the extra-curricular activities of one of our consultants.

The distribution of supplies inside the country had been hindered by the war-time destruction of bridges over rivers that, fordable in summer, were but raging torrents in winter. We had started a crash highway rehabilitation programme and were importing machinery and Bailley bridges so as to avoid a repetition of the near famine of the winter before. To plan this urgent rehabilitation we needed exact engineering reports on the load bearing capacity of key cross-country highways and on the state of the few old bridges that were still standing. For this rapid road survey, we had brought in a highly qualified civil engineer, specially released to UNRRA by the US army. A staff-member had taken him off the Orient Express at the station and had seen him into his room in the Hotel Majestic. Next morning, when the car went round for him, he was not in the lobby, and it soon turned out that he had not slept in his bed. Belgrade had virtually no violent crime; we were troubled, but not as alarmed as we would have been in Naples. At eleven o'clock we informed the Police; there was no record of accident. By evening we were asked to get in touch with the Ministry of External Affairs.

At the Ministry we learnt that our road expert was in jail. We were shown a photo of the engineer which had been scissored in two in a zig-zag fashion and a wide strip of silk on which there was, typed in English, a questionaire about specific bridges and roads relating to their capacity to take convoy and tank traffic.

What had happened was that our temporary consultant engineer had left his Hotel for a walk before dinner. Finding his way by consulting a piece of paper, he had arrived at a villa where he had rung the door bell and had been admitted. We were informed that he then had asked his host whether he had news of Paul. His host asked which Paul, the engineer replied the one that was sick. His host then asked whether he had a photo, the engineer produced his half of the picture which fitted exactly the other half produced by his host. As they were sitting down to have a drink the garden window of the villa's salon was kicked in and the two of them had been handcuffed. A body-search of our engineer revealed the silk questionnaire inside the lining of his jacket. The obvious question was whether this was a plant and the fitting-up of a case against a wretched innocent. So, of course, we wanted to see the prisoner but that was not possible until three more days had passed.

The trend of his interrogation was indicated to us each day when we enquired after our man. It seems that the Engineer had very rapidly decided that the prudent course was to tell all. We learnt later from the wretched man himself that he had not been physically ill-treated, he had simply succumbed to the old, well tried, technique by which the interrogator establishes himself as his client's only remaining friend. "UNRRA and the US Embassy will have nothing more to do with you. They are furious with you and they wish the law to take its course. You would have been shot three months ago, now its only 20 years. Come clean and, if you help us, we can certainly ensure that you will get off light." They then paid by results, a cooperative conversation got a cup of coffee and a cigarette; a useless bluff got a return to cell and a long, lonely, silence. Once he had been milked dry we were allowed to take him straight from detention onto a plane. In return for this quiet clemency there was a bargain that neither side would say anything more about the incident. That bargain is now time expired. It is striking fact that someone in the American Army should have been bothering, so soon after VE day, to make tactical appreciations concerning heavy traffic movements in the Balkans. It was in Trieste that the American Army had set up the engineer's covert job. The Jugoslavs must have penetrated the US network in that city which had the task of passing the half photo to the Belgrade contact, where it was needed to mate with the other half held by the engineer in order to authenticate him.

US Intelligence was at that time showing a fatal tendency to recruit former Nazi collaborators; this made them dependant on mercenary double-agents who only wished to increase their income (and to purge their pasts) by accepting employment with both sides. OZNA had been sitting around waiting for the road engineer, so they had either turned the Belgrade agent, or they may have even owned the whole of the local US set-up from Trieste onwards. We managed to get the bridges and highways fixed before the next winter without the luxury of an outside consultant.

 

 

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