The British arrived three days after we secured the northern ridge. They came not as saviours but as equals — tired men in uniforms much like our own, their faces carrying the same weariness I saw each morning in my shaving mirror. They had been fighting too, somewhere to the south, and it showed in the careful way they moved and the economy with which they used words.
Captain William Blackwood did not waste time with formalities. The moment his boots hit Norwegian soil, he unfurled maps across Lieutenant Haugen’s makeshift command table, his fingers moving with the quiet confidence of a man who had done this before and expected to do it again.
“The Germans have established artillery positions here and here,” he said, his English accent crisp against the mountain silence. “Our intelligence suggests they’re planning to push through this valley within forty-eight hours.”
I stood at attention behind Lieutenant Haugen, translating where needed. Haugen’s English was functional for orders and reports but lost its footing in the kind of rapid, technically specific exchange that Blackwood favoured — the clipped shorthand of an officer used to other officers who shared his vocabulary. I watched the moments when Haugen’s face tightened slightly, the way it did when he was working to follow something that was moving faster than his comprehension, and I stepped in before he had to ask.
Blackwood’s eyes found mine at one point and held them.
“You speak English well, soldier.”
“My father traded fish with Scottish merchants, sir. I learned as a boy.”
Something shifted in his expression — not quite respect, but the precursor to it. “And your name?”
“Corporal Erik Solberg, sir.”
“Solberg knows these mountains better than any man in the company,” Haugen said. “He can guide your men through terrain the Germans would consider impassable.”
Blackwood studied me for a moment longer than was comfortable, as though weighing something that had nothing to do with the maps in front of him. Then he looked back at Haugen.
“The German artillery position here.” He tapped the map. “Can it be approached from the north face?”
Haugen looked to me. I studied the position. “That’s above the tree line from five hundred metres up. Exposed. The western approach is longer but it has cover almost to the guns.”
Blackwood tilted his head. “The western approach isn’t on my map.”
“It isn’t a road,” I said. “It’s a shepherd’s path. Very old. Barely visible if you don’t know to look for it.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then, to Haugen: “I’d like to use Corporal Solberg in a coordinating capacity going forward. His language skills and local knowledge are both relevant.”
Haugen’s expression was carefully neutral. “I’ll need him available for my own operations, Captain.”
“Of course.” Blackwood’s tone was pleasant and entirely unmoved. He was, I came to understand over the following weeks, a man who got what he wanted through the very effective tactic of never appearing to want anything particularly. “A shared arrangement. My operations won’t conflict with yours.”
He said it with complete confidence, which I supposed was what came from having a navy and an air force.
Haugen agreed. He did not look especially happy about it, but he had fought this war long enough to understand that the British resources Blackwood represented were not something to be quarrelled with over protocol.
As we left the command tent, I fell into step beside Haugen, who said nothing for fifty metres. Then, without looking at me: “Don’t let them use you as a translator when they want to leave us out of a conversation. If Blackwood says something to his officers that you understand and we should know, I expect to hear it.”
“Yes, sir.”
He gave me a brief, direct look. “Good.”
That night, huddled around a small fire carefully shielded from enemy view, I found Kristian waiting with the particular stillness that meant he had been working himself up to say something.
The firelight caught the lines tiredness had carved into his face over the past weeks — deeper than they had any right to be on a man his age. Across the camp, the British soldiers had established their own fires at what was not quite a deliberate distance but felt like one. The two groups coexisted with the carefully maintained indifference of men who were politely uncertain about each other.
“So you’re running errands for the British now,” Kristian said. Not a question.
“I’m following orders,” I replied, stirring the thin stew in my mess tin. “Same as you.”
“Haugen’s orders, or Blackwood’s?”
“Both, apparently.”
He looked across the camp at the British fires. One of the British soldiers had produced a harmonica, and the thin sound of it drifted across the gap between the groups — something slow and minor-keyed that I didn’t recognise. A few of the Norwegian men were listening without appearing to listen.
“They’ve been here three days and they already have a musician,” Kristian said. “We’ve been here three weeks and we have Dahl.”
“Dahl is more useful than a harmonica.”
“That’s a low standard.”
Sergeant Dahl arrived and settled beside us, cradling a tin mug of coffee so weak it was barely coloured. He had the habit of appearing at conversations that concerned him without any particular explanation of how he had known to appear.
“The British have resources we don’t,” he said, as though continuing a discussion that had been underway. “Artillery, air support when the weather permits. We’d be fools not to work with them.”
“I’m not saying don’t work with them,” Kristian said. “I’m saying know what the arrangement actually is. They need us more than they’re admitting. Without Norwegian guides, without men who know this terrain, they’re fighting blind in country that was going to kill them well before the Germans got a chance to.”
“True,” Dahl said. “Which is why they’re working with us.”
“Which is why they’re using us,” Kristian replied. “There’s a difference.”
Dahl considered this with the unhurried seriousness he brought to most things. “Not a useful difference, right now.”
The harmonica continued across the camp. A British soldier I didn’t recognise walked over to our fire, stopped at a respectful distance, and held up a bar of chocolate. His Norwegian was nonexistent; he communicated primarily through the universal language of holding out something valuable and raising his eyebrows.
Kristian took the chocolate with the minimum of ceremony that still qualified as courtesy, broke off a piece, and handed it back. The soldier nodded, looked briefly at the rest of us, and went back to his side of the camp.
“Right,” Kristian said, looking at the chocolate. “So they’re not completely useless.”
“Cigarettes too,” Dahl said. “Better than ours.”
Kristian ate his piece of chocolate. I watched his expression change slightly — the flavour arriving, real chocolate, something none of us had had in weeks — and then go carefully neutral again.
“My loyalty is to Norway,” I said. “It’s never been anywhere else.”
Kristian looked at me steadily. “I know that. I’m not questioning your loyalty. I’m questioning theirs.” He flicked a glance toward the British fires. “They’re here because it’s strategically useful to be here. The day it’s not useful anymore, they’ll leave. I want to know you’ve thought about that.”
I had thought about it. I kept not being able to find a satisfying answer to it.
“Then we make ourselves indispensable for as long as possible,” I said.
He held my gaze for a moment. “That’s not an answer, Erik.”
He was right, and we both knew it, and there was nothing useful to add to that, so we sat with the fire and the distant harmonica and finished our stew.
Dawn found me at Captain Blackwood’s tent, my breath forming clouds in the frigid air. The mountains above the camp were beginning to separate from the sky, the peaks losing their darkness as the first light found them, turning pink and then gold at the very tops while the lower slopes were still in grey shadow. It was the kind of morning that looked magnificent from inside a building. On the slope it was simply cold.
Two British soldiers emerged from the tent behind Blackwood. The first was Sergeant Mills — broad-shouldered, with a scar along his jaw that he wore with the unconscious ease of someone who had stopped noticing it years ago. He had the manner of a man who had learned to read people quickly or had paid for the failure to do so, and I felt his assessment of me before he said anything.
The second was Private Cooper. He was younger than I had expected — perhaps twenty, perhaps slightly less — with the alert, slightly-too-awake eyes of someone who had seen enough to know that alertness was worth the effort. He had the build of someone who had been strong before rationing and was still strong, just differently. He stood with the patient readiness of a man who had made peace with not knowing what would be required of him in the next hour.
“Solberg,” Blackwood said. “These men tell me you know a route that gives us eyes on the German forward position without exposing ourselves.”
“Yes, sir. There’s a shepherd’s path above the eastern ridge. Narrow, but it’ll take us where we need to go.”
Mills looked me over with his unhurried assessment. “Ever been shot at before yesterday, lad?”
“More times than I’d like in the past month, Sergeant.”
A smile broke through his expression. “Good enough for me, Captain.”
We set out as the first light pierced the valley. The mountains were turning gold above us, the fjord below a mirror of the sky’s slow brightening. Moving single file along a path my grandfather had likely walked, in a country I had known all my life, I could almost forget why we were there. Almost. The rifle slung across my back and the sound of Blackwood’s controlled breathing behind me tended to make forgetting difficult.
The path narrowed as we climbed, forcing us into a line — me at the front, Cooper behind, then Mills, with Blackwood bringing up the rear. The only sounds were our breathing and the occasional scrape of a boot on loose stone. The wind came off the ridge in cold, periodic gusts, carrying the particular smell of high ground in late spring — snow still on the peaks, the first green beginning below, a clean and indifferent smell that had nothing to do with what we were doing on this slope.
I set the pace deliberately. Fast enough to make the timing work, slow enough that nobody’s breathing became a problem on the steep sections. Behind me, Cooper matched it without complaint. He moved quietly for a British soldier — better than I had expected. He watched where he placed his feet and didn’t crowd my heels, which are the two things that matter on steep ground and which men who learned their mountain skills from a training manual rather than a childhood tend to get wrong.
At a wide flat section where an old stone wall ran along the path — a boundary marker, older than anyone alive could remember — I held up my fist and we stopped. I put my ear to the air. Nothing from above. I signalled to continue.
“Your English really is excellent,” Cooper said quietly as we walked. “Where did you learn?”
“My father traded with Scottish merchants. And books — I had a teacher who believed in them.” I scanned the slope ahead. “I’d read my way across most of Britain without leaving Narvik.”
“Which parts?”
“Dickens, mostly. Hardy. Some Stevenson. London in fog, Edinburgh on a hill — I’d been to both of them in my mind.”
He was quiet for a moment, navigating a section where the path narrowed to a shelf barely wide enough for a boot. “I’m from Wakefield. Not much fog but plenty of hills.” He steadied himself with one hand on the rock face. “When this is over you should come. I’d show you round. Nothing special, but the pubs are decent and my mum makes a good pie.”
The casual certainty that there would be an afterwards — that we would both be in it — struck me as equal parts naïve and necessary. He was young enough that this certainty probably felt like realism to him rather than something that needed to be maintained against evidence.
“I’ll hold you to that,” I said, because it was the right answer and because some part of me wanted it to be true.
We climbed for another twenty minutes, the path working along the contour of the ridge, mostly screened from below by the rock face to our right. I had been on this path in autumn hunting with my father, and in winter when Kristian and I took a wrong turning in a snowstorm and ended up considerably further from home than intended. It looked different now — not because it had changed but because I had, and the same country read differently depending on what you were carrying into it.
At the high point I knew from memory as the best overlook — a natural shelf where the rock dropped away on the valley side and you had a clean line of sight for two kilometres in both directions — I went flat and signalled the others down.
I raised my fist and the column stopped. Below, through a natural notch in the rock, the valley road was visible — and on it, movement.
“Down,” I said quietly, and we were already moving, crawling to the edge of a rocky outcrop.
The convoy was longer than I had expected. Trucks and light armoured vehicles wound along the valley road in a column that took three minutes to pass our position from head to tail. Blackwood had his binoculars up before he had finished settling behind the rock, scanning methodically from front to rear, his expression carefully empty in the way of an officer processing information before deciding what it meant.
“Supply trucks in the main body,” he murmured. “Standard configuration. But look at the rear section.”
Mills took the binoculars. His expression did not change, but something behind his eyes went still in the way of a man who has just revised his expectations downward. “Troop transports. Loaded. At least thirty men per vehicle.”
I counted the transports. Four of them, with another two that I thought might be carrying heavy equipment rather than men. Whatever was in those last vehicles, it sat low enough to suggest it was not light.
“Reinforcements,” Blackwood said. “They’re building toward something. Not just holding the valley — preparing an advance.”
The column passed below us and the road emptied again, returning to its usual silence, though the silence now had a different quality. I kept my eyes on the tree line to the northeast, where the road curved out of sight, and tried to calculate what forty-plus fresh troops meant for the defensive positions I knew.
Cooper was beside me, watching the empty road. He had his rifle ready in a way that suggested he was thinking about what would happen if a vehicle stopped and someone got out and looked up.
Nothing stopped. The column completed its transit and the engine sounds faded east.
“How long since you’ve seen a supply convoy that size through this route?” Blackwood asked me.
“Never. We’ve had small vehicles, motorcycles. Nothing like this.”
He nodded slowly, still looking at the road. “They’re not resupplying what they have. They’re staging for something larger.” He lowered the binoculars. “How far to the head of that valley from the German forward position?”
“Twenty kilometres, perhaps twenty-five by road. Less if they come through the gap north of the ridge.”
“Could they?”
“If they know about it. It’s not on most maps.” I paused. “But they have Norwegian maps. Pre-war survey maps. The gap is on those.”
Blackwood looked at me. “Are they likely to know what the gap is worth?”
“If they have a decent intelligence officer, yes. If they’ve talked to any local who wanted to cooperate with them, also yes.” I kept my voice flat. “We should assume they know.”
He was quiet for a moment. The wind moved across the ridge and Cooper shifted his weight behind me.
“Your people have been fighting against impossible odds for a month,” Blackwood said. His tone had changed — still controlled, but with a different quality under it. The question of a man genuinely trying to understand something. “Why haven’t you given up?”
I thought of my father at the end of the street, his hand raised. My mother holding my face in hers. The kitchen that had smelled of bread on the morning the world ended.
“This is our home,” I said. “Where else would we go?”
Something settled in his expression. Not surprise — more the look of a man whose understanding of something has caught up with something he already believed. He nodded once, then turned back to the valley.
“We need to report this immediately. The timeline has moved.”
Going down was faster than coming up, the urgency in Blackwood’s movements transmitting itself through the pace he set without a word being said about it. Mills navigated the descent the way experienced soldiers navigate most things — efficiently, without wasted motion. Cooper stayed close to my heels in a way that suggested he was focusing on the path and letting the implications of what we had seen settle later, which was probably the correct approach.
Near the bottom, where the path widened enough to walk two abreast, Blackwood fell into step beside me.
“The gap you mentioned,” he said. “The one not on most maps. Can you show me on mine?”
I looked at his map, found our position, traced the route. “Here. The path is very faint now — it was a droving route, decades out of use. But the ground is passable.”
“And if the Germans come through it?”
“They’d bypass our current defensive positions. Come in behind the ridge, not against it.” I folded his map back along its existing creases. “We’d be outflanked before we knew they were moving.”
He took the map back without looking at it. He was looking at me.
“If you were commanding our combined forces,” he said carefully, “what would you do?”
It was not a question I had expected, and the carefulness of it told me that he was asking it seriously, not as a courtesy.
“I’d put someone on the gap,” I said. “A small team, observation only. Radio contact. The moment the Germans start moving through it, everyone else needs to know.” I paused. “And I’d start thinking about fallback positions, because if they’re bringing that many men, the current line isn’t going to hold regardless.”
Blackwood looked at the map again. “The fallback positions — Haugen has them planned?”
“He has plans. Whether there’s been time to prepare them properly, I don’t know.”
“Find out,” Blackwood said. “Discreetly.” He glanced at me sideways. “I’ll be having a conversation with Haugen this afternoon. It would be useful to know how that conversation is likely to go before I have it.”
I understood what he was asking. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Good man.”
We came back into camp to the smell of cookfires and the sounds of men on stand-to, and I went to find Haugen before Blackwood could reach him first.
He was at his command position reviewing radio traffic with the focused attention of a man who already suspected he was not going to like what it contained.
“The convoy,” I said, and told him what we had seen.
He listened without interrupting, which was how Haugen processed things — completely first, questions later. When I finished he was quiet for a moment.
“Troop transports,” he said.
“Four that I counted. Heavy equipment behind those.”
“And Blackwood saw all of this.”
“He did.” I paused. “He wants to discuss fallback positions this afternoon. Before he speaks to you, I think you should know he’s already decided they’re necessary. He’s not coming to ask whether — he’s coming to discuss how.”
Haugen looked at me steadily. “And you’re telling me this because.”
“Because you asked me to.”
A brief pause. Then the closest thing to approval Haugen typically expressed: a single nod.
“The eastern fallback,” he said. “I have positions prepared. He doesn’t need to know they’ve been prepared. Let him think it’s a joint decision.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at me for another moment. “You understand what I’m doing.”
“You’re giving him ownership of a decision that’s already made, so he feels he’s leading rather than following.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because we need him cooperative for longer than this week.”
Another nod. “Go. Tell me what he says.”
The afternoon conversation between Haugen and Blackwood, which I translated, was one of the more instructive things I witnessed in those early weeks. Both men were intelligent and professional, and both were engaged in the specific diplomatic maneuvering that happens between allies who need each other and are not entirely sure they trust each other. I translated accurately, as I had promised Haugen I would, and in doing so could observe both sides of something that neither man could see whole.
Blackwood proposed the fallback positions as his idea. Haugen agreed with them with the air of a man being persuaded. Both left the tent satisfied, and the positions that had existed in Haugen’s planning for a week were formally adopted by their combined forces.
Dahl, who had not been present and to whom I described this afterwards, received the account with the expression he had when reality confirmed something he had already filed under obvious.
“Good,” he said. “As long as the positions get used, who thought of them doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No.” He poured the last of the evening’s coffee, which was cold and had been cold for an hour. “That’s a peacetime concern.”
The following days found us in the rhythm of a military alliance — not quite comfortable but functional, two systems learning to coordinate without either fully yielding to the other. British soldiers and Norwegian soldiers shared ground and occasionally shared food and cigarettes, and the harmonica player whose name turned out to be Private Davies played on most evenings, and Kristian complained about it less than he had at the start, which I took as a form of progress.
I moved between the two groups as my role required, translating not just language but register and intent — the things Blackwood meant but didn’t say, the things Haugen said more directly than Blackwood expected, the friction points that came from two different military cultures trying to operate in the same mountains. When it worked, it worked well. When it didn’t, I was generally the person who heard about it from both sides separately.
Cooper sought me out on the third evening. He had been given a task that required him to liaise with a Norwegian supply unit that had established a depot two kilometres east, and the liaise part was proving optimistic given that his Norwegian extended to approximately six words, none of them useful.
“I need someone who speaks Norwegian,” he said, with the specific desperation of a man who has tried several approaches and arrived at the direct one.
“I speak Norwegian,” I said.
“Right. Yes. Obviously.” He rubbed the back of his neck in a gesture I found unexpectedly familiar. “The thing is, I’m supposed to have already sorted this two days ago. My sergeant thinks I have sorted it. And I haven’t.”
I looked at him. He had the particular expression of a young man trying to calculate how much trouble he was in.
“Come on,” I said.
The supply depot was run by a Corporal Eide, a heavyset man from Bodø who had the deeply unhelpful quality of refusing to speak anything but his own regional dialect when he was irritated, which he currently was, because a British soldier had been appearing at his depot for two days and gesturing at things without any discernible system.
It took twenty minutes and a certain amount of patient interpretation on my part. Cooper was a quick study — he watched how I moved through the conversation, adjusted his own manner accordingly, and by the end had established what I suspected would be a workable arrangement with Eide. He had the instinct for knowing when to let someone else do the talking, which was rarer than it should have been and more valuable than he probably knew.
On the walk back, he was quiet for a while.
“I should have come to you two days ago,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t want to seem like I couldn’t handle it.”
“You couldn’t handle it. Not speaking the language.”
He absorbed this. “Fair point.” He looked at the mountains above the tree line, the last light on the peaks. “Do you think we’ll hold? Here, I mean. In Norway.”
The question deserved a straight answer. “I don’t know. We’re doing better than anyone expected. But better than expected isn’t necessarily good enough.”
He nodded, as though this were the answer he had been prepared for. “At home they told us it was going well. Before we shipped out.”
“At home they told you what they knew, probably. Or what they wanted to be true.” I pulled my collar up against the wind coming off the slope. “Those aren’t always the same thing.”
He was quiet for a moment. “My mother writes every week. I write back when I can.” A pause. “She sent chocolate.”
“The bar you brought over.”
“Yes. I thought —” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought. It seemed like the thing to do.”
I thought of what Kristian had said about small gestures meaning more than they looked like, though he had said it in the opposite spirit.
“It was the thing to do,” I said.
We came back into camp. Blackwood was standing outside the command tent talking to Mills, and he looked up briefly as we passed and gave the small nod of a man filing information for later use.
The following week brought the kind of fighting that settled into memory not as distinct events but as a continuous texture — the rhythm of positions held and lost and retaken, the arithmetic of ammunition and men, the particular exhaustion of waiting that came between engagements. We fought alongside the British in four separate actions along the ridge. In two of them, Blackwood’s artillery support was the deciding factor. In one of them, my knowledge of a secondary path down the eastern slope was.
In the fourth, we lost three men. Two Norwegian, one British — Davies, whose harmonica had marked the evenings since the alliance began. Kristian took the news without visible reaction, which told me more about how he was doing than visible reaction would have. He had learned, the way all of us were learning, to file grief in a place that could be accessed later and keep moving in the present.
That evening I found Cooper sitting outside his tent in the dark, not doing anything, just sitting.
“Davies,” I said.
“Yes.” A pause. “He was from my village. We joined up together.” He looked at his hands. “His mum and my mum are friends.”
I sat down beside him. The camp was settling into its night routine around us.
“I’m sorry,” I said, because it was true and because there was nothing more useful to add.
“He used to drive everyone mad with that bloody harmonica,” Cooper said. “Everyone complained about it.” He was quiet for a moment. “Nobody’s going to complain about the silence tonight.”
We sat there for a while, the two of us, while the camp went quiet around us and the mountains above held their shapes against the dark sky the way they always had, as though none of this made any particular difference to them.
It was, in its way, the most honest conversation I had with anyone that week.