by Wes Davis
When he finished his last year at Charterhouse, the following August, he traveled with his mother, aunt, and uncle to Gottenberg and from there on to Riga, finally settling in a picturesque village near the Latvian coast outside the capital. It was there, while swimming and taking walks among the pines that grew by the sea, that Moss listened to the increasingly distressing news of German troop movements along the Polish border. On August 20 he spent the day swimming and reading in the sun and noted in his diary that it was a relief to tune out politics for a while.
The book he had with him—a fantasy novel called Kai Lung’s Golden Hours—provided a welcome escape, but the respite did not last long. Throughout the following week, Moss heard reports of skirmishes along the Polish border. He was scheduled to begin a job in England on September 4, and it was beginning to look unlikely that he would be there on time.
By the end of August he was in Stockholm. On September 1 he went to see The Four Feathers, a popular recent movie about a British officer caught up in the Sudanese war at the end of the nineteenth century. The next day Moss heard that fierce fighting had broken out in Poland, as Germany launched the invasion that would plunge Europe into war. Reaching home would be even more challenging than he had thought. He and his family traveled to Gottenberg, where they boarded the Swedish Lloyd liner Suecia. They were about to sit down to dinner when it was announced that the ship would not sail. “We are in the soup now,” Moss recorded in his diary.
In the following week he made his way by train to Bergen, Norway, where he was able to book passage to Newcastle on a yacht that had once belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm and had been taken by Norway in what was now coming to look like the first World War. The ship sailed on the twelfth with some two hundred passengers on board.
By the fourteenth Moss had reached England, and soon after the new year he joined the Coldstream Guards. Like Leigh Fermor, he found the routine at the Guards’ Depot in Caterham, where both of their units conducted training, vaguely ludicrous. But military discipline was less inimical to Moss than it was to Paddy, and he waded through the flurry of regimental charades in reasonably good humor. After training he had even put in a stint in the King’s Guard at St James’s Palace. And for a while he was assigned to the guard at Chequers, the prime minister’s house in Buckinghamshire. “It had been wonderful staying at Chequers at a time when every word spoken by Churchill was gospel, and thrilling to see him ‘off duty’ and to speak with him and eat and drink with him and to understand him and his ways,” he recalled. On the whole, though, he thought the life of a regular army officer was not what he was looking for.
When he eventually joined his regiment for active duty, Moss found that brawling with Rommel’s forces in North Africa came still more naturally to him. During the two or three months he spent on campaign in the desert, he relished the “lovely feeling of advancing and beating the Germans.” Not that he liked everything that came with war. He would never forget the loneliness that washed over him while burying a sniper who had been killed on a rainy, mosquito-infested night in Tunisia. Nor how useless he had felt as he listened to one of his fellow guardsmen crying out for help as the man lay dying in the middle of a minefield after a blast had torn off both of his legs.
Moss had a theory about the way everyone around him managed to get through the war. He believed none of them really felt the impact of dreadful events as they whizzed past. You watch a man die on the battlefield, as he had, or a woman giving birth in the middle of an air raid, and your mind cannot absorb what you have seen. The same was true of any kind of bad news. “The floods of tears may be instantaneous, so too the feeling that the end of your world has come,” he believed, “but, in fact, the real horror, the ultimate implication of what you have learned, is reserved for later—and by then you find yourself strangely the better equipped to accept it.” It was only in retrospect, he thought, that anyone could see things clearly.
SOON AFTER HE arrived in Cairo to await reassignment to SOE, Moss began to hear horrifying news from the desert where the Coldstream Guards were still engaged in heavy fighting. One day an old acquaintance turned up with his left arm blown off and told him that three other comrades of theirs had been killed in action, including the closest friend Moss had ever had. A few days later he met another friend, whose right arm had been blown off, who reported still more casualties. It was utterly devastating news, and by his own theory it would be a long time before he could see it all clearly.
At the time, Moss was engaged to a young woman named Patsy, who was supposed to come out to meet him. He took a room above the cinema at Shepheard’s Hotel, bought a ring he could not afford, and waited, but she never arrived. His assignment to SOE came through on September 24, and there was still no sign of Patsy. Soon, however, a letter arrived from her breaking off the engagement. Moss sold the ring and used the money to finance two more weeks at Shepheard’s, before moving to his SOE quarters. But it was not long before he began plotting to move out of Hangover Hall. By chance he found an airy villa in a leafy neighborhood north of the Gezira Sporting Club, which was practically a second home to the British officers stationed in Cairo.
At first he moved in alone, then began recruiting a handful of SOE officers to join him and pitch in on the rent. Paddy Leigh Fermor signed on right away. But he and Moss worried that the house would fall into shambles when they were sent into the field. If they could convince a few women to share the place, they reasoned, it would remain occupied as the men came and went on various missions. They had asked two of the young English women who worked with SOE, but they were still making up their minds when Moss decided to ask a young Polish countess, in Cairo working with the Red Cross, whom he had met earlier that summer.
Sophie Tarnowska was a striking, slender woman with shoulder-length fair hair swept back from her face. She had remarkable green eyes and a smooth high forehead. Even her hands were beautiful. She spoke English with a charming accent. Her manner was graceful and self-assured but also lighthearted. Moss had to admit that she was as captivating a woman as he had ever met, but she also managed to seem like one of the boys.
Moss and Leigh Fermor were happy when Sophie accepted the invitation to join the new household that was forming in Gezira. But then, when the time came to move in, the other two women backed out, and it looked as if the plan would fall through. Sophie worried about the impression that might arise if she was the only woman living in a villa full of men. “No, I can’t possibly come,” she told Moss. He and Leigh Fermor tried everything to convince her. They took her to see the splendid house; they pointed to the benefits of pooling their money; they unashamedly begged. But she still wavered. Finally they came up with a scheme that would keep up appearances.
When Sophie moved out of the National Hotel, where she had been staying, she took up residence at the Gezira villa with Moss, Leigh Fermor, the other SOE officers, and one Mrs. Khayatt—a respectable, somewhat sickly, and, though no one was to know this, entirely fictional chaperone. Whenever a guest dropped by, the residents of the house made elaborate apologies for her. “Mrs. Khayatt is so sorry that she can’t join us,” someone would announce, “but she has a terrible headache.”
The ruse proved so amusing that before long everyone in the house had taken on a fictitious identity. Sophie became “Princess Dnieper-Petrovsk,” Moss was “Mr. Jack Jargon”—after the gigantic guardsman in Byron’s Don Juan—and Paddy was “Lord Rakehell.” The others assumed equally colorful personas. Soon a brass plaque appeared at the entryway bearing the outlandish names of the new tenants.
AS AUTUMN FADED into winter, Leigh Fermor, Moss, and the others came to know Sophie better, and it was fair to say that all the men became a little infatuated with her. Everything about the countess bore a tint of adventure. Sophie had grown up on her father’s estate along the River San in southern Poland, in an atmosphere of country aristocracy that might have come from a Tolstoy novel. Indeed, the resemblance was more than coincidental. Sophie’s fathe
r admired Tolstoy and had modeled his management of the estate, called Rudnik, on the Russian novelist’s benevolent principles, providing housing, schools, and medical care for the peasants who lived and worked there. Rudnik was a vast realm in which Sophie and her younger brother enjoyed the run of some ten thousand acres. Its well-managed forests—forestry was one of her father’s passions—extended for miles in every direction, and the grounds held greenhouses and orchards, vegetable gardens, beehives, and a vodka distillery. There was even a hydroelectric power plant.
Sophie’s grandparents had been fixtures in Kraków society. Her grandfather, Count Tarnowski, was a respected academic whose ancestors, five hundred years before his time, signed their names to the charter of the nation’s oldest university. Sophie took great pride in all he had achieved, though he died the year she was born. Her grandmother was a countess from a still wealthier family, whose forebears had been favorites in the court of Catherine II.
Sophie’s parents were married in the anxious summer of 1914, little more than a week after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. By the time Sophie was born, in 1917, the family estate had been devastated by the war. More than three thousand bodies were hastily buried on the grounds after one particularly fierce battle. And there was more turmoil to come. Sophie’s earliest memory recalled her parents’ defiance and resolve as the Red Army advanced toward the estate, when she was three years old.
As a young girl, Sophie seemed to put on a mantle of precocious ruggedness. She flung herself into outdoor pursuits, soon becoming the “Lion” to her younger brother’s “Hare.” The two spent their time shooting and hunting, eagerly flirting with whatever dangers they could find in country life.
But their rugged childhood idyll came to an end in 1930, when their parents separated and Sophie was sent to a convent school some eighty miles from home, where she was often in trouble with the nuns. On one occasion she was discovered taking a bath naked, something the administration frowned upon. (Convent rules required the employment of a “modesty garment.”) To make matters worse, the nuns later intercepted a letter to her parents in which Sophie had made “rude comments about the Mother Superior’s body odor.” (She called it the “odeur de sainteté,” the odor of sanctity.) Finally, early in 1931, when she was thirteen, she scrawled “Goodbye—Sophie” on a blackboard and caught the train for Kraków to rejoin her family.
Four years later she had fallen in love with Andrew Tarnowski, a tall, gregarious young man from the main line of the Tarnowski family. By 1937 Sophie and Andrew were married. The couple’s first son, born that fall, died just two years later, on the very day their second child was born. It was while bringing the new baby home from Kraków in the summer of 1939 that Sophie, already sick with grief, had a vision of the terrible future that would eventually tear her family apart, along with the fabric of Europe itself. She and Andrew were waiting at the railway station when the train they were to take pulled into view. As it came even with the platform, they were horrified to see blood streaming down the sides of one carriage. It turned out that a number of army conscripts who were riding on the roof of the car had been killed as the train passed under a low bridge. For Sophie it was not just a horrific sight but also an omen. She felt that some powerful force was about to destroy everything she had ever known.
That August the couple, in the company of Sophie’s brother Stas and his new fiancée, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl from Warsaw, basked in the pleasures of an aristocratic way of life that was about to be shattered forever. They spent their days riding through the forests of a remote estate that Sophie’s family owned in the Carpathian Mountains, hunting deer in the evenings, and coming together for meals served outside under the willows.
Then, on the morning of September 1, Sophie was awakened by the sound of airplanes roaring over their house. “They were going so low,” she recalled, “that I saw the curtains moving and dust lifting off the road. I looked out the window and I saw quite a lot of farm hands waving at the planes.” At first she imagined, as the farmers did, that these were British aircraft, part of a force moving in to help repel any German advance. But the news reports coming over the radio soon dispelled that hope. “And this,” she recalled, “is how we learned that the war had started.” While Sophie was upset by the news, Stas was electrified. “Hurrah,” he called out, “we’ll show the buggers. We’ll be in Berlin in a couple of months.”
Over the following days, radio news reports tracked German tanks and troops as they rolled across Poland. Meanwhile, Sophie and Andrew heard rumors of a coming British counterattack. But all around them the signs were ominous. German planes were often visible overhead, apparently circling the house in regularly timed patrols.
Sophie had her hands full caring for the refugees who began to converge on the estate from the surrounding countryside. When one young woman lay dying of typhus, Sophie stayed in the house to tend to her, even as the others took shelter from the German bombers in a nearby icehouse. Stas and Andrew drove to a nearby village to buy medical supplies, but they found the stores and pharmacies shuttered. As they pressed on toward a larger neighboring town, a German plane forced them to turn back to the estate.
By the end of the week, Andrew had decided to move the family to a hunting lodge that lay secluded in the forest not far from the main house. It was a practical measure, but to Sophie’s mind the move loomed like the first act of a tragedy in which she wanted no part. Whatever happened next, she refused to leave Poland and was willing to take extreme measures to ensure that she would stay. Before she left the house, she burned her passport.
That night, just hours after the family had settled in at the hunting lodge, word came that a German column was approaching. Sophie and Andrew piled into a hulking blue Ford with their baby, accompanied by Stas and his fiancée, and they drove north into the night, toward Sophie’s childhood home. Traveling on bomb-rutted roads with the headlights turned off, for fear of attracting German planes, they made slow progress, but they managed to reach Rudnik a little before dawn. What they found there was nothing like the pastoral paradise Sophie and Stas had known as children. The estate was already crowded with refugees from the nearby town, where the railway station and surrounding buildings had been targeted by German bombers. And the German front was still only a day’s drive away.
It was clear that they would have to keep moving. That evening, as Sophie said good-bye to her father for what would be the last time, he handed her one of the treasures of the estate, the royal standard of the Swedish king Charles X Gustav, which had been captured by the Polish cavalry at Rudnik nearly three hundred years earlier. With this relic of Poland’s earlier struggle packed among their belongings, Sophie and the others drove east toward the River San. Once across the river, they turned north, but they soon found themselves swept up in a tide of refugees moving southeast through rolling, forested terrain toward the Romanian border. On September 17, as German bombers pounded the Polish town behind them, they were forced across the River Dniester, which marked the border between the two countries, leaving their homeland behind.
In the coming months Sophie’s party was driven by advancing Axis forces from Poland to Bucharest to Belgrade and then to Tel Aviv. Her brother married his young fiancée, her remaining child died, and her husband fell in love with her new sister-in-law. By summer she was on the move again—this time boarding a train that carried her south toward Cairo through the stifling heat of the Sinai desert.
WHEN SHE REACHED Cairo, Sophie moved into a villa owned by a well-traveled nephew of King Farouk who had gotten to know Andrew at hunting parties in Poland. There was a cook who served up delightful meals, and the staff included a night watchman and a servant who impressed Sophie with his pristine manners. Her host filled the house with flowers, provided his guests with champagne and French perfume, and even made daily deliveries of wine and cigarettes. After months living a hand-to-mouth existence, this new life felt like stepping into a dream.
“Altogether it is a bit of a fairy tale,” Sophie felt.
But for all the excitement of life in Cairo, she never stopped worrying about her husband and brother—who were now fighting in the desert with the Carpathian Lancers—and the rest of her family, many of whom had remained in Poland. She soon went to work for the Red Cross and before long had founded a Polish branch of the organization. Unlike Red Cross volunteers elsewhere, who wore dark woolen uniforms, Sophie’s unit wore khaki, which was more suited to Egypt’s desert climate. She also specified that there would be no system of military rank in the new branch, a radical idea in a time of war. It may have been that the young woman who had kicked against the authority of the mother superior at school in Poland had a hard time, at the still-youthful age of twenty-five, imagining herself in command.
She set up an office outfitted with a typewriter and a sewing machine. The director of the British Red Cross supplied a heavy truck, which Sophie drove around the city and countryside, collecting clothing for Polish refugees.
But Sophie’s life in Cairo was far from all work. She was on friendly terms with the wife of the British ambassador and got along well with the commander of the British forces in Egypt and most of his officers. A flashier set also sought out her company. Not long after her arrival in Cairo, Sophie was befriended by Aly Khan, the Ismaili prince whose father was a former president of the League of Nations. The thirty-year-old prince was passionate about horse racing and thrill sports of all kinds. He loved skiing and motor racing and had set records for risky long-distance flights. He would later marry the actress Rita Hayworth and had already established a reputation as an international playboy. When the war broke out, he had joined the French Foreign Legion, but he was now attached to the British army. Sophie enjoyed his company, especially when he took her up for a joyride in his private plane.