‘Airdrop? Are the British still doing that in Poland?’
‘Well, not officially. Not any more. If Tadek was a Brit, one of their precious officers in Special Ops, maybe they would.’
She frowned, then stood up from the bed.
‘Tadek’s chances are pretty awful, really. No use pretending.’
‘I see that,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out and find a drink somewhere.’
‘Mike, I really really didn’t say anything to you today. All we talked about was Scotland or dancing with Tibbie Fowler or the weather or something. All right? You do have to promise.’
I promised. I pulled on my boots and we went out into a darkening street. A search for alcohol seemed to threaten a long, limping trudge through the blackout. But Margaret took me to a club belonging to the Brigade of Guards, where several tall officers shouted ‘Good God! It’s Meg Beaton-Campbell!’ and kissed her. There was gin in abundance, and dinner was roast pheasant shot on somebody’s estate.
‘Meg, come over and sit with us, and bring your Polish pal.’
‘Lovely, in just a minute. Mike, can I ask you something?’
‘What?’
‘Is there something wrong with me?’
‘No, but why do women always ask me that?’
‘I’ve lost the two men I loved most, one after another. Of course it’s not my fault, it’s the war, I know that. Obviously. And yet I can’t stop feeling there must have been something about me that I did or I said and now nobody will ever tell me what it was. Can you understand that?’
‘No. No, I don’t. How could you say such daft things?’ I thought: Margaret should meet Jackie Melville, who believed that a ship had blown up because she ran home in school time and turned a key.
‘Poor darling Mike, I shouldn’t have made you listen to that. I suppose I must just pull myself together.’ Margaret picked up our two glasses of pink gin and led me across to the other table.
*
The day before my leave ended, I reported to our army headquarters. There was a return travel warrant to collect, and messages might have been left there for me or for friends in the Division. High Command was in a small hotel on Knightsbridge, once probably luxurious but now shabby and dark. A double breastwork of sandbags and a yawning Polish sentry blocked the front door.
There was one letter for me, with French postage stamps. It had evidently been waiting a long time.
Paris had been liberated six months before. This letter came from an office in the Ministry of War and informed me that the naval enquiry into the loss of Fronsac was resuming in Paris. My failure to attend the previous session in London four years before had been noted as a refusal to comply with an order. If I again failed to appear at the reconvened enquiry, a request would be issued to the Polish military authorities for my immediate arrest and delivery to French custody. My status had changed from that of a simple witness to that of a hostile source of evidence, against whom criminal proceedings might eventually be taken.
The letter ended by summoning me to appear in Paris before a closed hearing in the Hotel Wagram, on a date in November 1944. I was reading it in January 1945. I looked at the two signatures. One was illegible: some admiral who was president of the board of enquiry. The other read: ‘Guennec, Jean-Marie, Capitaine de Frégate’.
My first thought was in my own language, and would not translate nicely. ‘Who do these little fuckers think they are?’ is a sort of equivalent. I was too angry to make sense, so I sat down in one of the scarred leather armchairs in the foyer and read the letter again. Splendid letterhead; wretched wartime paper flecked with what looked like particles of oatmeal.
My second, more coherent thought was: how can I find le Gallois? He could explain what’s going on. After all, it was the Commandant who had told me four years ago that Guennec had bolted back to France to join the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. If I had thought about him at all since the Liberation, I had assumed he would be in jail as a collaborator. Or even shot at dawn.
On the other hand, it was two months since the order for my arrest should have gone out and I was still free. Perhaps it never went out at all. Perhaps the French had decided not to bother with me. Or perhaps our High Command had shrugged and thrown the request into the waste-paper basket. With a Soviet-sponsored ‘Committee of National Liberation’ now established in Lublin, asserting that it was the legitimate government of Poland, our leaders had bigger things to worry about.
There was still time to telephone the French military attaché in their Embassy. I pretended that I was an officer on our naval staff, and, after enduring some haughty cross-questioning, established that le Gallois was still in Scotland, although his warships had returned to Toulon or Brest. Then I bought a bottle of black-market whisky from a friend of one of Margaret’s friends and set out for Dover.
*
The war was ending as our tanks crossed the Rhine and drove into Germany. From every direction, desperate people came towards us for rescue, food and a return to humanity. Wehrmacht deserters were followed by thousands of Polish men and women, some from the concentration camps, some escaping from slave labour in Nazi industry and on north German farms, some who had survived the Warsaw Rising or the 1939 campaign as prisoners of war. A group of Polish Jews reached us with their last strength from the camp at Bergen-Belsen, after they had been liberated by the British. But many of them soon died in our field hospitals.
My best memory comes from the day we drove to a prison camp for Polish women. The guards had fled, and the women had somehow heard that we were coming; they had tried to make themselves ‘look nice’ in spite of their shaven heads and stick-thin legs.
They were crowded up to the wire, shouting to us in Polish as we jumped out of the vehicles, and they were laughing and smiling. Yes, they acted as if we were boys late in coming to take them to the movies, rather than soldiers rescuing them from death by typhus or starvation. Only a few of the older ones were weeping. I can see those women’s faces now. I still think that everything was worth it for that moment.
The numbers grew, and soon there were more ‘displaced persons’ than soldiers; the Division looked more like a nomad encampment than an alert fighting unit. In the end, we simply took over a small German town and threw out all its inhabitants. Our horde of camp followers moved in and we declared it ‘a Polish town’, renamed ‘Maczków’ in honour of our General. I remembered how Commandant le Gallois had annexed part of Gourock as a French town. Home can be just a proclamation.
Hitler died: the Third Reich surrendered. The British held an Allied victory parade in London, but they did not invite the Poles. This was because Churchill was preparing to recognise the Communist-dominated ‘Provisional Government’ as the legitimate rulers of Poland. Accordingly, Britain would withdraw recognition from our exile government in London.
British friends said privately that they felt rather sad about this, but reality was reality. The ‘Provisional Government’ was in command of Poland now, with Stalin behind it, and one had to accept that. Again, I remembered le Gallois and what he had said about les Anglais: ‘so nice, so noble – then one day you wake up to find a noose around your neck’.
What about us, the soldiers? If many of the men in our original First Corps came from the lost eastern regions of Poland, the same was true – even more so – of the Second Corps which had ended up in Italy. They no longer had homes to go back to, and the survivors of the Polish population in those provinces were being expelled.
Some of the ordinary soldiers hoped that, as humble ‘workers and peasants’, the new regime would value them. A fifth of Poland’s population had been killed; its cities and factories had been shattered or deliberately razed to the ground. So sheer patriotism could urge men and women to return and rebuild their country, whatever they thought about Communists in the government.
But for most officers, return to a ‘People’s Republic’ under Russian hegemony was unthinkable. In the forests there was civil war,
as boys and girls of the Home Army resistance movement were hunted down by the ‘internal security forces’ of the new regime. I heard several comrades on the Divisional staff say that this new Poland was not the country they had fought for. They would only return to that soil, alive or even in an urn of ashes, when Poland was free again and when ‘atheist Bolshevism’ had been driven from the land.
There was no mystery about what the British wanted. They wanted to get rid of us. They urged us to lay down our arms, demobilise and go back to Poland as soon as possible. I thought this disgraceful, and yet my own feelings were mixed.
I had no illusions about the brutality of Soviet power. I had no problem in believing that Russia would always be, as it had always been, the enemy of a truly independent Poland. But I was also convinced that the pre-war regime in Poland – super-patriotic, super-conservative, blind – had been responsible for our national tragedy. Was there a slim chance to build a new nation which would be both democratic and strong? Would the Polish Communists and their Soviet masters agree to share power in the long term? In our officers’ mess nobody believed that. I wanted to believe it, but the evidence was against me. So I held my tongue.
*
We sat around for sterile months. Exile or return? The British soon had to accept that most of the troops would choose exile. As a sort of apology to these men and women who had stood by them from the first day of the war to the last, they set up an elaborate system of transit camps in England and Scotland, with a Resettlement Corps to teach English and ease the way into civilian jobs.
I was among those from eastern Poland who could be called homeless. Why not wait out the future in Scotland, where I at least had friends and connections? So, through the Division, I reluctantly put my name in for resettlement, and almost at once received a message from the army’s legal department. I was to report to an address in Hamburg. There was, it seemed, a problem connected with my request.
Most of Hamburg had been obliterated by the RAF. But the jeep driver jolted his way to a handsome white villa at Blankenese, on the Elbe shore. In the hall, somebody had pinned a Polish flag on one of the doors. I knocked and found myself facing somebody I knew very well.
24
My old Colonel, the same severe gentleman who had been my commander at Pitnechtan, was sitting behind a trestle table stacked with buff-coloured folders. A single folder, a blue one, lay open in front of him. I could see the ‘Ministère de la Guerre’ heading on the top letter inside it.
I reminded myself that the Colonel had been a public prosecutor in civilian life. Today he was in uniform, but had acquired an unmilitary pair of gold spectacles. They gleamed austerely in the pale light reflected from the Elbe.
I saluted. ‘At ease! You may sit down, Szczucki.’ Behind his head, a white rectangle on the wall showed where some departing Nazi had removed the inevitable portrait. He came round from behind the table, and we settled opposite one another in two uncomfortable Teutonic chairs, carved out of black oak with protruding heads of wolves and eagles.
‘Well, Major, you have come through the war pretty well. I heard about the leg. But you are alive. Not all the men we both knew in Scotland are alive. And your Division seems to be satisfied with your performance. By the way, what happened to your career as a silent-shadowy parachutist?’
I explained that I had broken my ankle, during a weekend’s leave. He raised his eyebrows, then heaved himself off the chair to fetch the open folder.
‘Major, I thought you were a reasonable man. A bit lazy, a bit too inclined to dreaming and drinking. But reasonable. That affair over the absurd leaflet on the orders board – remember? You made a sound impression on me then.’
‘Sir.’
‘So what the hell is this? Read it. I await your explanation.’
The letter repeated much of the letter I had opened in London. But it ended by stating that the naval enquiry, meeting in November last year, had indeed issued a request for my detention, pending transfer to the custody of the judicial branch of the French navy. The same signatures. The Admiral, again illegible, and Guennec, Jean-Marie.
‘Colonel, I have done nothing to be ashamed of. There is a misunderstanding, but somebody seems to be trying to invent...’
‘I don’t want your opinions, Szczucki. Facts! What is all this about?’
I told him about the sinking of the Fronsac. I told him that the French – as opposed to the British – stuck to the view that it was a case of sabotage. I said that it was a fact, but also a coincidence, that I had lodged in the house of the British officer whom the French suspected of causing the explosion, or at least of complicity. He had died when the torpedo detonated.
‘How do you know he is dead?’
‘Did I say dead? Excuse me, Colonel, I should have said missing, but of course presumed dead.’
The old procurator looked at me evenly. ‘How well did you know him?’
‘We hardly spoke. He didn’t like having me in his house.’
‘Was he married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she young? Where is she now?’
‘I think she may be in Canada. She had a daughter.’
‘You think. Why don’t you know?’
I didn’t like the way this was going. What was he after? I told him about Captain Guennec and his defection from Free France to join the Vichy government. ‘For some reason I don’t understand, he is trying to frame me.’
The Colonel nodded and stood up. I remembered his taste for delivering rapid verdicts.
‘Two things are clear to me, Major. One: you are not telling me all that you know. Two: whatever the truth of your story, the French are up to dirty tricks. You are probably just a banana skin, which one crew of Paris scoundrels is using to trip another crew.’
He took a cigarette from a box on his desk, snapped a lighter and began to smoke it in that ‘Russian’ way I remembered.
‘Dismiss, Major. Come back here at four. I take it you have transport.’
I made the jeep drive me around for a few hours. I had hardly looked at the ruins. Now I saw that everywhere, less than a year after the war had ended, the Germans were making broken houses habitable: walls were rising, and piles of salvaged bricks and roof timbers were neatly arrayed on cleared pavements. I could hear hammers and saws. While I wasted my life in army camps, this must also be happening in what was left of Warsaw.
Back at the villa in Blankenese, the Colonel kept me standing before his table.
‘In making my decision I have regard to the following considerations. The first and second, I have already made clear. One, you are not telling me the full truth for some reason; two, the French request is dishonest, unconvincing. But, third, I cannot refuse indefinitely to comply with it. Fourth? Well, you are a Polish officer who has served decently through this war. And you have been one of my own officers.’
He took up another sheet of paper. ‘You have applied for resettlement in Great Britain. That is your choice. But I should point out that you will not be safe there, if the British security people cooperate with the French. You are in very serious trouble, and ultimately I cannot help you.
‘Major Szczucki, my decision is this. I do not intend to arrest you immediately, here and now. So I will find reasons to wait for a month, but after that I must order your detention. I suggest that you use that time to think again about your future. That young lady in Canada? A big country which is not very inquisitive. Dismiss.’
He smiled for the first time. I went back to the Division and asked for leave. It turned out that a Polish frigate was leaving Kiel for Rosyth, and I was taken comfortably back to Scotland in time for a hard-drinking Hogmanay evening with several Polish seamen in the Edinburgh pubs. Later, when the sailors had left me and headed off to visit a famous madame in Danube Street, I found a telephone box in working order.
The bell rang and rang vainly in distant Fort Matilda. But just when I was about to press Button B and regain my heavy, clattering British p
ennies, a cross janitor voice answered.
‘D’ye not know whit day it is? Ach, for God’s sake! No, nae Frenchmen here any more.’
How didn’t I know the base had closed? ‘I’ve no got the right to disclose this. But seeing it’s Hogmanay, I’ll release information tae ye: the Commandant is in the Central Hotel, Glasgow, waiting to be away to France. Have a good New Year yourself.’
Built over Central Station, the hotel’s dim, enormous lounges were swarming. Many of the men and women were still in uniform, keeping their greatcoats on against the chill of unheated saloons. It was noisy in the hungover aftermath of Hogmanay, and dwarfish pageboys in pill-box hats sauntered through the crowds, shouting: ‘Mister MacDonald... Please! Telephone for Mister MacDonald... Please!’
The lift was out of order, in this disjointed transition between war and peace. As I started up the staircase, two English officers came trotting down past me. One was saying to the other: ‘No, Timothy’s having a jammy life since demob. Saw him last week with an opulent-looking popsy in Quaglino’s...’
Le Gallois had a suite to himself. The main room held a huge unmade double bed and many tiny tables with ashtrays; there was a smell of railway smoke and brown sauce. The heavy curtains were drawn, but I could hear wind and rain shaking the panes as the Commandant jumped up to embrace me with a bristly kiss. He hadn’t shaved, and was wearing a blue silk dressing gown with white polka dots. I had never seen him out of uniform before.
The bathroom door opened and a young woman came out, tugging sharply at the corners of a creased jacket. She gave me a disagreeable glance as she retrieved a pair of shoes from under the bed.
‘Martine, I present my Polish friend Major Shoosky. Now you must leave us alone to talk. Yes, off you go. Listen, come back at seven and I’ll take you to the Malmaison downstairs and feed you properly.’
Martine took two threatening steps towards him. She shouted: ‘J’en ai assez, tu entends! Assez, assez, assez!’ The door slammed behind her.
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 22