Free We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by Stephen E. Ambrose, David Howarth Page A

never been able to see more
than the foothills of the island. The sea had always been there on his
left to guide him. But now he entered a long deep valley, into the barren wilderness of peaks which the map had dismissed so glibly. Above
him, especially on the right, there were hanging valleys and glimpses of
couloirs, inscrutable and dark and silent, and of snow cornices on their
crests. To the left was the range of crags called Soltinder, among which
he somehow had to find the col which would lead him to Bjorneskar.
    Into these grim surroundings he advanced slowly and painfully.
Here and there in the valley bottom were frozen lakes where the
going was hard and smooth; but between them the snow lay very
deep, and it covered a mass of boulders, and there he could not tell
as he took each step whether his foot would fall upon rock or ice, or
a snow crust which would support him, or whether it would plunge
down hip deep into the crevices below. Sometimes a single yard of
progress was an exhausting effort in itself, and he would have to
pause and rest for a minute after dragging himself out of a hidden
hole, and look back at the ridiculously little distance he had won.
When he paused, he was aware of his solitude. The whole valley was
utterly deserted. For mile upon mile there was no trace of life whatever, no sign that a man had ever been there before him, no track of
animals, no movement or sound of birds.
    Through this solemn and awful place he walked for the whole of
a night and the whole of a day, and at dusk on the third of April he came to the top of the col in the Soltinder, four days after Toftefjord.
Below him he saw three houses, which he knew must be Bjorneskar,
and beyond them the final sound; and on the other side, at last, the
mainland. He staggered down the final slope to throw himself on the
kindness of Einar Sorensen.

    He need never have had any doubt of his reception. Einar and his
wife and his two little boys all made him welcome, as if he were an
old friend and an honoured guest. Their slender rations were
brought out and laid before him, and it was not till he had eaten all
he could that Einar took him aside to another room to talk.
    To Einar's inevitable question, Jan answered without thinking
that he had heard of his name in England, though he had really only
heard it the day before. At this, Einar said with excitement, "Did they
really get through to England?" Jan knew then that this was not the
first time escapers had been to that house. He said he did not know
whether they had reached England or only got to Sweden, but at least
their report had got through.
    After this, there was no limit to what Einar was willing to do. Jan
felt ashamed, when he came to think of it later, to have deceived this
man on even so small a point. But the fact is that a secret agent's existence, whenever he is at work, is a lie from beginning to end; whatever he says is said as a means to an end, and the truth is a thing he
can seldom tell. The better the agent is, the more thorough are his
lies. He is trained with such care to shut away truth in a dark corner
of his mind that he loses his natural instinct to tell the truth, for its
own sake, on the few occasions when it can do no harm. Yet when,
through habit, he had told an unnecessary lie to a friend, it would
often involve impossible explanations to put the thing right. So Jan
left Einar with the belief that whoever it was he had helped had got
somewhere through to safety.
    They sat for an hour that night and talked things over. Einar
thought Jan should move at once. He house was the telegraph office
as well as the telephone exchange, and people were in and out of it all day; and there were German camps within a mile in two directions.
As for crossing the sound, there was no time better than the present.
It was a dirty night, which was all to the good. The patrol boats ran
for shelter whenever the weather was bad, and