102 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
Lux lay by my head, the bulk of his body pressed close against one side of my face.
He wasn’t clean, he smelled to high heaven, and he was full of lice. Besides, he
blocked my view. I had to lift my head to see what was going on. We were in a bad
spot; many of the drugovi [comrades] near me were killed or wounded that day. I
kept pushing Lux away. But it was no use; he settled himself almost on top of my
head and wouldn’t budge. He lay very still, unless I shoved him; and when I
shoved him, his body simply fell back against my face, like a sack of grain, not
quite full. I became impatient and angry, but there was no moving him; so I let
him be. All at once, in the midst of the din, I felt a tremor ripple through Lux;
then he was absolutely still. He stopped a piece of shrapnel that otherwise would
have gone through my head.^280The explosion was fatal not only to the dog, but also to Captain Stuart and to
Tito’s bodyguard, a Spanish veteran, while Bill Deakin was wounded. “I was
badly hurt,” Tito remembered later. “This is the end, I thought.” When he
came to his senses, in the middle of the devastation his eye fell on a ravaged
tree, on which a small bird was twittering in lament. “The explosion broke his
little leg and wounded his wing... this tiny creature stood on only one leg,
flapping its wing. I remember it vividly.”^281 Two days later, some grenade frag-
ments were removed from his arm, which had started to grow black and rigid.
Two other fragments were not removed until 1947, when he had a hernia oper-
ation. He was the only commander in chief to be wounded in battle during the
Second World War.^282
During the Fifth Offensive, Tito had another one of most horrifying experi-
ences of his life. “I was marching with my bodyguard, tired, keeping an eye on
every move of the enemy. It was raining. I was holding a stick on which I was
leaning. At a certain point, I stumbled in the dark and fell. My hands sank into
something hard and flabby. There was a bad smell. I had fallen onto a decom-
posing corpse. I tried to clean my fingers in the rain and wet grass, but to no
avail. The stench of death did not go away. Wherever I went, this terrible stench
accompanied me.”^283 And yet the hardships were not without funny moments,
as Tito relates: “This happened when my arm was wounded. It was in ban-
dages, whereas in the other one I had a stick, since I could not carry a machine
gun. During the walk, we met an old woman. I said to her: ‘Step aside, granny,
and let the army pass.’ She stopped and looked at me: ‘What kind of a soldier
are you, if you don’t even have a gun.’”^284
Those who happened to survive were saved from the encirclement on the
night of 8–9 June 1943 by a sortie of the First Proletarian Division near Tjentište
on the river Sutjeska. Koča Popović, without informing or asking for the approval
of the Supreme Staff, created a gap in the ranks of the enemy—an action Tito