The Press: Down the Blue Hip

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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."