White Eagles Over Serbia

Roman bridge near Janko Stone

 A few years ago, after a night camping in the North Cascades near Leavenworth, a friend and I found ourselves on an early morning hike up a long, open meadow.  A mist hung over the fairly steep meadow, and I was reminded of the moors of Scotland. 

I asked my friend to imagine ourselves struggling uphill with heavy packs on our backs, facing an emplacement of English troops above, firing down at us with rifles. 

My friend, familiar with my fantasies, rolled his eyes and shrugged.  And for me, as for him, the hike was all about the beauty of the area -- the emerald greenness of the grass, the dark, shadowy trees whose tops disappeared into the drifting mist, the silence broken only by the occasional calling of birds and my occasional tiresome babbling.  My thoughts of the violence of battle were merely an added fillip, a grace note, adding only slightly to the richness of the experience.

Lawrence Durrell has similar priorities in his novel of British espionage, White Eagles Over Serbia (1957). 

His hero, Methuen, is an old hand in the British "Special Operations Q Branch," (SOq), affectionately known as the "Awkward Shop."  He has just returned from four months in the jungles of Malaya -- yes, "Malaya," the story takes place in 1948 -- and is looking forward to possible retirement, or at least a long rest, when he is summoned by his superior.  Some odd things are going on in Tito's Yugoslavia, he learns.  They need someone with his background in the Balkans to ferret out what the deuce is happening, eh?  A recent agent, experienced, had been poking around in that area and turned up quite dead.  Awkward.

Methuen feels rebellious, but the Balkans have an irresistible appeal to him.  Especially in the mountains of Serbia near the Bosnian border, where they want to send him  The scenery is magnificent, and the fishing?  Incredible!  

The situation in Communist Yugoslavia is tricky -- Tito was on the verge of breaking up with Stalin -- and the British Ambassador is totally opposed to anyone from Britain snooping around in an area that is off-limits to foreigners.  Implacably opposed, and hostile to Methuen's arrival.  But he quickly softens when he and Methuen discover that they both -- like Methuen's superior back in Whitehall -- are avid fishermen.

Hey, they're British.  Izaak Walton, and all that.  

The British are permitted a weekly drive by their courier between the Belgrade embassy and a consulate in Skopje, Macedonia.  The area that has attracted the Awkward Shop's interest is in southwestern Serbia, near the courier's highway route.  Methuen is dumped off with a pistol, a few supplies -- and a fishing pole -- in an area where they are briefly out of sight of the Yugoslav tailing vehicle.  Luckily, as it turns out, Methuen not only speaks Serbian like a native peasant -- which he successfully passes himself off as -- but Bulgarian, as well.

From this point on, the novel is a magical travelogue of a primitive and mainly roadless area of Serbia, as it was in 1948.  Yes, there's a plot, involving an operation by Yugoslav royalist resistance forces -- the Chetniks.  An absorbing plot, but -- similar to my Highlands fantasy -- merely a device on which to hang some beautiful descriptive writings of the Serbian and neighboring Bosnian back country.

 The sun was sinking though its warmth still drugged the windless air and on this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage grew more and more luxurious, while the woods were full of tits and wrens and blackbirds.  The woods were carpeted with flowers, sweet-smelling salvia, cranesbill, and a variety of ferns.  Here and there, too, bright dots of scarlet showed him where wild strawberries grew, and in these verdant woods the pines and beeches increased in size until he calculated that he was walking among glades of trees nearly a hundred feet in height.

The novel shows Durrell's detailed knowledge of this country.  The plot involves a rendezvous at the Janko Stone.  Is there really a "Janko Stone," I wondered?  Yes, I find after a little research; it is the highest peak in Serbia (6,014 feet), and marks the boundary between Serbia and Bosnia. (A landmark now, unlike in 1948, reachable by road.)  I totally trust Durrell's descriptions of the country through which the rest of his hero's adventures occur. 

Lawrence Durrell is well known for his alluring and often impressionistic descriptions of Corfu, Rhodes, Cyprus, other Mediterranean islands, and -- less connected to reality -- Alexandria.  White Eagles was one of his earlier published writings, and showed the promise that was realized in his better known later works.

My knowledge of the former Yugoslavia is limited to cities.  The area has of course developed greatly since the 1950s.  But once travel is again possible, I would love to explore some of the mountains and forests of the area in which White Eagles takes place.

Even though I'm not a fisherman.