Julian Amery, Sons of Eagle: A Study in Guerila War, published by Macmillan, first edition 1948

……set in green and shady gardens. There lay the prize for the victors in this many-sided struggle.

Ihsan’s house was situated in the plain to the north-west of Tirana and some five hours’ march from the mountain village of Priske, where we stopped for our evening meal. The presence of German patrols made it dangerous to go do\n into the plain before dark and required us to reach our destination before dawn. Ihsan had sent an escort of his bodyguards to meet us, but we sat too long over our meal and scarcely led ourselves true for the journey. The darkness of the night concealed us from the enemy, but it equally obscured from us the many pitfalls by which our path was beset. The tracks leading down from the mountain were slippery, for it had been raining; and I fell over several times. Once in the plain the way led along a dry watercourse, filled with ankle-spraining stones and short, thorny scrub. (Down at sea-7 v el the, night was hot and dank; and clouds of mosquitoes tormented our brief halts. But brief they were; for the guides kept an anxious watch on the eastern mountains, where the sky would first grow pale, and loped ahead, coaxing us on with false assurances that we should soon be there. At last the rumble of lorries warned us that we were approaching a road. This was the dust track along which traffic between Tirana and the North had been diverted since the destruction of the Gyoles bridge. We crossed the track between two convoys — a pleasing tribute to Smiley’s work — and, passing through a. stretch of woodland, merged into a broad meadow just as day was breaking.

In the meadow stood Ihsan’s house, one-storied and whitewashed, like many of the smaller country houses in Hungary. A light was burning in one of the windows; and, as we crossed the lawn, Ihsan Bey came out to welcome us. He led the way indoors through mosquito curtains, for the plains are malarial; and we found ourselves for the first time in two months in a civilised room. There were armchairs and sofas; books and magazines lay on the table; pictures hung on the walls; and in a corner stood a luxurious radiogram. We stacked our submachine-guns and accoutrement of war beside it and sat down, feeling distinctly out of place amid these comfortable surroundings, with our unkempt hair, dirty uniforms, and heavy boots.

Ihsan Bey was still in his early thirties, a well-built and `rather studious-looking man, dressed in a grey flannel suit with a: white shirt open at the neck. He had studied in Vienna, and indeed might well have been an Austrian country gentleman from his small talk, the cut of his clothes, and the slightly German turn of his English sentences. An attentive host, he plied us in quick succession with tea, coffee, and a very potent raki, while we explained the purpose of our visit. Then, seeing that we were tired, he led us to our bedrooms, where clean pyjamas had been laid out. For the first time in months we slept between linen sheets and forgot the fatigues of the march in the delights of a spring mattress. It was after midday when we awoke to the comforts of modern lavatories and hot, scented baths; superfluous luxuries for a guerilla, but doubly welcome for their strangeness.

In the morning, while we still slept, Ihsan had driven into Tirana on our business. He returned about two o’clock, accompanied by Nureddin Bey Vlora, the friend of Count Carlo Frasso, our host at Brindisi, and by a younger man with a charming, French-speaking wife. Nureddin Bey was a son of the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Ferid Pasha, and a nephew of Ismail Kemal, the founder of the first Albanian Republic. A great landowner in the region of Valona, he had been condemned to death, though later pardoned, for his part in the Fieri revolution against King Zog and had long been one of the most influential supporters of the Republican Party. He was too great a patriot and too proud to “collaborate” with either the Italians or the Germans, but his counsels weighed heavily with the political leaders in Tirana, and especially with the Republican chiefs of the Balli Kombetar.

Still in his forties, Nureddin was fit-looking, debonair, and very much a man of the world. He was dressed in a smart white suit and might just have stepped out of the casino at Mentone or the Mohammed Ali Club in Cairo. His English was faultless, and with a sure understanding of the British character he brought us whisky, for which he had combed Tirana, and excellent cigarettes made of Albanian tobaccos specially blended to his taste. At lunch the talk skimmed lightly from anecdotes to mutual acquaintances in the capitals of Europe; and, with the added charms of feminine company, the barriers of nationality and politics were seemingly dissolved by the pleasures of social intercourse. Such a gathering of Albanian landowners and British officers must have appeared to a Partisan observer as proof positive of the sinister machinations of international reaction. The thought passed through my mind, but I cannot pretend that it seriously diminished my enjoyment of the occasion.

When we had eaten, Ihsan took the other guests apart, and we remained alone with Nureddin. He told us at once that he had just been invited by the Germans either to assume the Premiership or to enter the Council of Regency. His natural instinct had been to decline the thankless task, but he would accept the responsibility if he could thereby assist the Allied cause. The idea of having a friend as head of the “collaborationist” government was certainly tempting and might offer opportunities for attacking the Germans from within. Nevertheless, we strongly advised Nureddin to refuse an invitation which might lead other Albanian Nationalists to line up with the Germans in an anti-Communist front. We then expounded our general policy’, condemning collaboration in any form and stressing that we could only support those Albanians who fought against the Germans. We spoke, too, of our concern that the Ballists should be fighting with the enemy against the Partisans and appealed to Nureddin to use his influence with their leaders to bring about a change of policy. He told us that the Ballists would not only cease fighting the Partisans but would gladly co-operate with them against the Germans if only Enver Hoja would abandon his attempt to impose a social revolution on Albania by force. If we could restrain the L.N.Ç. Iie was confident that the Ballists would prove amenable; if we could not, then they must fight as best they could, for their lives and property were at stake.

Ihsan drove Nureddin back to Tirana in the afternoon, and returned for dinner, bringing with him Midhat Bey Frasheri, the President of the Balli Kombetar. Midhat Bey had been in turn an official of the Sublime Porte, a member of the Committee of Union and Progress, and a powerful. influence in the early struggles of the Albanian state. He had retired from public life under the monarchy, for he was a strong Republican, and since then had eked out his living from the proceeds of a bookshop. Steeped in the cultures of Europe and of the Near East, he was a man of austere ways, a romantic conservative, possessed of burning patriotism and a Catonian faith in the virtues of aristocracy. Now over seventy years old, he was a spare, straight figure, with determined yet sensitive features and a skin like parchment. On first acquaintance he seemed inordinately shy and was afflicted with a slight stutter. He vas gifted, however, with a dry but sparkling wit, and his talk at dinner that night assured our entertainment and compelled our admiration.

When the meal was over, we turned to grimmer topics. We bluntly accused the Balli Kombetar of “collaborating” with the Germans and threatened to denounce the movement and its leaders as enemies of the Allies unless they at once abandoned their fight against the Partisans. Midhat Bey was too honest to dissemble and answered that it was now too late. A revolution was in progress in South Albania in which the Communists, organised in the L.N.Ç., sought to overthrow the existing social order defended by the Balli Kombetar. Both movements had their origin in the resistance to the Italians, and at Mukai, in 943, had concluded an alliance for joint operations against the Axis armies. The Ballists had been loyal to the alliance; but, after the Italian capitulation, Enver Hoja had attacked them, so that he should not have to share with rivals the prize of political power. This civil war had no connection with the struggle for National Liberation, which both parties had at first continued to prosecute. The Partisans, however, had shown themselves reckless of the cost of war to the civilian population and strong in the arms they received from the British. They had pressed hard upon the Ballists; and the latter, unable to sustain a war on two fronts, had been forced to suspend their attacks on the Germans that they might defend themselves against the Partisans.

It was regrettable that the civil war should have taken precedence oven- the is of .1 iteration, but it w4 as not unnatural. The Germans were already beaten, and the Albanians could do little to hasten or retard their destruction. `I he out come of the civil war, however, was still in doubt, and affected every aspect of the daily life of each Albanian. Nor could he really blame those Ballist leaders who, for particular actions, had accepted help from the German army. They had done so neither out of love for the Germans nor from any calculation that Germany might still win, but simply because men will adopt almost any expedient whereby they may prolong, even if they cannot hope to preserve, the enjoyment of life and property. The Partisans might still be fighting the Germans, but they did so on a small scale and solely so as to obtain arms and subsidies from the Allies with which to prosecute their revolution. Out of every hundred rounds which we sent them ninety would be fired against Albanians. He begged us, therefore, to restrain the Partisans, adding that if Enver Hoja would abandon the attempt to carry out a social revolution under the guise of patriotic resistance, then the Ballists would gladly join once more in the struggle against the Germans. The Ballists, he argued, were our friends; the Partisans were only agents of Russia. He urged us, therefore, to consult our imperial interests and not to sign away our influence in Albania for the sake of killing a few more soldiers of an army that was already beaten.

We sternly rejected his arguments lest any sign of’ sympathy from us should encourage the formation of an anti-Communist front. Nevertheless, we had to admit to ourselves that there was much truth in what he said. Those is from a distance; observe the course of revolutions too often fore et that in them there can be no neutrality. When a battle is in progress in a particular village or district no able-bodied man, let alone any man of influence, who is physically present, in avoid taking sides. Those who would seek to remain passive inevitably arouse the suspicion or the greed of the combatants, and it is only a question of chance whether they are shot as spies, muredered for their property, or killed by a stray bullet. In. time of revolution, “He that is not with me is against me”.

Next day we enjoyed the comforts of Ihsan’s house and expounded our inflexible opposition to an anti-Communist front to various lesser politicians who came out from Tirana Jo meet us. The rest of the time we spent in discussions with Ilhsan and his cousin., Liqa, who was renowned as a hunter. Ihsan disapproved of blood sports but, since the chasse a l’homme was a frequent feature of Albanian country life, he kept two machine-guns, a mortar, and a stock of hand-grenades in his gun-room as a matter of course. In the house he carried only a light automatic, but when he drove to Tirana, or went for a walk, he armed himself with a Mauser parabellum. Such precautions seemed incongruous in so civilised a man; but, if blood feuds were less common in the plain than in the mountains, the preventive assassination of opponents was a time-honoured method of government. It was interesting, indeed, to see how centuries of despotic rule had engrained the habits of conspiracy in the life of an Albanian country gentleman. One evening at dinner I heard what I thought was an owl hooting in the garden.

“It must be my cousin Liqa”, said Ihsan, going to the French windows, “it is his call.”

Sure enough it was.

We left Ihsan by night and set out towards our base, stopping in the mountains above Tirana to meet Jem al [tern, Jemal had once been chief of Zog’s secret police, and, along with Muharrem. Bairaktar, Prenk Previsi, and Fikri Dine, had formed the quadrumvirate by whose efforts the royal regime had been established. Like his colleagues, he had fallen from favour, but had followed Zog into exile in 1939, returning to Albania in 1941 with Oakley-Hill and the forces of the Unites! Front. Now he stood second to Abas Kupi in the Zogist movement and had built up a small but efficient force of his own….