by Alan Furst
“Russian war correspondent?” The man was amazed. “So soon?” He stared at Szara without comprehension. “Will they print a dispatch from this war?” the man finally asked, disbelief in his voice. “Fifty German divisions attack Poland? My, my, no. Perhaps ‘Some German units bravely defend their borders thirty miles inside Poland.’ “
Vyborg laughed bitterly by way of agreement. “Who knows,” he said with resignation, “it may give old Kinto something to think about.” The word he used for Stalin meant a kind of singing bandit, a merry figure from Georgian folklore. Szara grinned at the remark. “You see?” Vyborg said triumphantly. “He’s on our side.”
*
Speeding southwest in an open military command car, Szara and Vyborg sat grimly in the back seat. Vyborg’s driver was a big sergeant with close-cropped hair, a lion tamer’s mustache, and a veinous, lumpy nose that was almost purple. He swore under his breath without pause, swinging the big car around obstacles, bouncing through the fields when necessary, hewing a path through the wheat stalks. The road was a nightmare. Refugees walked north, their possessions on their backs or in little carts. Some drove their farm animals before them or led them on a rope halter. Four people carried a sick man in a bed. Meanwhile, Polish military units- marching infantry, horse-drawn artillery and ammunition wagons- attempted to move south. The car passed a burnt-out wagon with two horses dead in the traces. “Stukas,” Vyborg said coldly. “A terror weapon.”
“I know,” Szara said.
They were climbing steadily on the rutted dirt road that worked its way through the hills that led to the Polish side of the Carpathian mountains. The air was cooler, the rolling countryside softening as the daylight began to fade. Szara’s head ached horribly; the bouncing of the hard-sprung car was torture. He’d not survived the bomb attack as well as he’d thought. His mouth tasted like brass, and he felt as though a path of tiny pins had been pushed into the skin along one side of his face. The car turned west, into a sunset colored blood red by smoke and haze, the sort of sky seen in late summer when the forests burn. Their road followed the path of a river, the Dunajec, according to Colonel Vyborg.
“We still hold the west bank,” he said. “Or we did when we left Nowy Sacz.” He produced a large pocket watch and gazed at it. “Perhaps no longer,” he mused. “We haven’t much hope militarily. Perhaps diplomatically something can be done, even now. We face a million and a half Germans, and tanks and planes, with perhaps two thirds that number-and we haven’t any air force to speak of. Brave pilots, yes, but the planes …”
“Can you hold?”
“We must. The French and the British may come to help- they’ve at least declared war. Time is what we need. And, whatever else happens, the story must be told. When people are ground into the dirt that is always what they say, isn’t it, that ‘the story must be told.’ “
“I’ll do what I can,” Szara said softly. In the people on the road he saw sometimes sorrow, or fear, or anger, but mainly they seemed to him numb, lost, and in their eyes he could find only perplexity and exhaustion beyond feeling. He had no immunity to these refugees. His eyes held each one as the car wove among them, then went on to the next, and then the next.
“An effort,” Vyborg said. “It’s all I ask of you.” He was silent while they passed a priest giving last rites by the side of the road. “More likely, though, it will wind up with my getting us both killed. And for what. Russia will not be sorry to see the last of Poland.”
“Was a treaty possible?”
“Not really. As one of our leaders put it, ‘With the Germans we risk losing our freedom, with the Russians we shall lose our soul.’ Still, it may be in the Politburo’s interest for attention to be called to what the Germans are doing. It’s not impossible.”
When Szara heard the drone of the airplane he clenched his fists. Vyborg’s eyes searched the sky and he leaned forward and put a hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Slow down, Sergeant,” he said. “If he sees a staff car he’ll attack.”
The Stuka came out of a sun-broken cloud, and Szara’s heart began to beat hard as he heard the accelerating whine of the engine. “Stop,” Vyborg said. The driver jammed on the brakes. They leaped out of the car and ran for the ditch by the side of the road. Szara pressed himself into the earth as the plane closed. God save me, he thought. The noise of the dive swelled to a scream, he heard horses neighing with terror, shouts, screams, chattering machine guns, a whipcrack above his head, then the ground rocked as the bomb went off. When the sound of the engine had disappeared into the distance he sat up. There were red ridges across his palms where his fingernails had pressed into his hands. Vyborg swore. He was picking broken cigars out of his breast pocket. On the road a woman had gone mad; people were running after her into a field, yelling for her to stop.
At dusk the column of refugees thinned, then stopped altogether. The land was deserted. They sped through a village. Some of the houses had been burned; others stood with doors wide open. A dog barked at them frantically as they drove by. Szara opened the valise, took out a small notebook, and began to write things down. The driver swung around a bomb crater and cursed it loudly. “Quiet!” Vyborg commanded. Szara appreciated the gesture, but it didn’t really matter. Germans bomb civilians, he wrote. No, they would not publish that. Poles suffer after government refuses compromise. He scribbled over the words quickly, afraid Vyborg could see what he was writing. A new kind of war in Poland as Luftwaffe attacks nonmilitary targets.
No.
It was hopeless. The futility of the journey made him sad. Typical, somehow. Killed on Polish soil while making a useless gesture- an obituary that told the truth. Suddenly he knew exactly who Vyborg was: a Polish character from the pages of Balzac. Szara stole a glance at him. He’d lit the broken stump of a cigar and was pretending to be lost in thought as his writer wrote and they traveled to the lines. Yes, the defiant romantic. Pure courage, cold to the dangers of whatever passion took the present moment for its own. Such men-and the women were worse-had destroyed Poland often enough. And saved it. Either could be true, depending on the year you chose. And the great secret, Szara thought, and Balzac had never tumbled to it, was that the Polish Jews were just as bad-in their faith they were unmovable, no matter what form faith took: Hasidism, Zionism, communism. They were all on fire, and that they shared with the Poles, that they had in common.
And you?
Not me, Szara answered himself.
The driver braked suddenly and squeezed to the right on the narrow road. A convoy of three horse-drawn ambulances was making slow progress in the other direction. “Getting close to it now,” Vyborg said.
The car made its way up a wooded mountainside. Szara could smell the sap, the aroma sharp and sweet after the long heat of the day. The night air was cooling quickly, a wall of dark pines rose on either side of the road. They had very little light to drive by, the headlamps of the car had been taped down to slits. The sergeant squinted into the darkness and braked hard when, with a sudden twist or turn, the road simply disappeared. Nonetheless, their progress was observed. On two occasions a Wehrmacht artillery observer spotted the light moving on a mountain road and tried his luck: a low, sighing buzz, a flash in the forest, a muted crump sound, then the muffled boom of the German gun bouncing among the hills. “Missed,” Vyborg said tartly as the echo faded away.
Once again, he was awake at dawn.
Wrapped in a blanket on the dirt floor of a ruined shepherd’s hut, kerosene splashed on his neck, wrists, and ankles against the lice. From the hut, an artillery observer’s position in support of the battalion holding the west bank of the Dunajec, they could see a narrow valley between the water and the wooded hillside, a village broken and burned by German shelling, a section of the river, the wooden pilings that had served as stanchions for a blown bridge, and two concrete pillboxes built to defend the crossing. The observer was no more than eighteen, a junior lieutenant who’d been mobilized only three days earlier and still wor
e the suit he’d had on in an insurance office in Cracow. He’d managed to scrounge an officer’s cap and wore officer’s insignia on the shoulders of a very dirty white shirt-his jacket neatly folded in a corner of the little room.
The lieutenant was called Mierczek. Tall and fair and serious, he was somebody’s good son, an altar boy no doubt, and now a soldier. A little overawed at first by the presence of a colonel and a war correspondent, he’d made them as comfortable as he could. A harassed infantry major had greeted them the night before and brought them up to the post. Szara had described him in his notebook as 1914 war vintage or earlier; ferocious, bright red face; complaining he hasn’t sufficient ammunition, field guns, etc. He gave us bread and lard and tea and a piece of a dense kind of currant cake his wife had baked for him before he left for the front. He wears a complicated-Masonic? noble? — ring. Not happy to see us.
“There’s no knowing what will happen. You will have to take your chances as best you can.” They are facing elements of the XVIII Corps of the Wehrmacht Fourteenth Army under Generaloberst List. Advances from northern Slovakia have already been made through the Jablunkov and Dukla passes. Some German units advanced more than fifteen miles the first day. We may, no matter what happens here, be cut off. A delightful prospect. Polish air force bombed on the ground in the first hours of the war, according to Colonel V.
The tiny river valley in the Carpathians was exquisite at dawn. Streaky red sky, mist banks drifting against the mountainside, soft light on the slate gray river. But no birds. The birds had gone. Instead, a deep silence and the low, steady rumble of distant gunnery. Mierczek stared for a long time through a missing section of roof at the back of the hut, searching the sky for clouds, praying silently for rain. But Hitler’s timing had been perfect: the German harvest was in-the population would not suffer deprivation because farmhands were suddenly called to serve in the army. The infamous Polish roads, which would turn to mud of a diabolical consistency once the autumn rains began, were dry; and the rivers, the nation’s only natural defense positions, were low and sluggish.
The German attack started at 05:00. Szara and Vyborg both looked at their watches as the first shells landed in the village. Mierczek cranked his field telephone and made contact with the Polish counterbattery at the edge of the forest above the town. Gazing through binoculars, he located the muzzle flashes at a point in the wood on the other side of the river, then consulted a hand-drawn map with coordinates penciled on it. “Good morning, Captain, sir,” Mierczek said stiffly into the telephone. Szara heard the earpiece crackle with static as a voice shouted into it. “They’re in L for Lodz twenty-four, sir,” Mierczek responded. He continued to stare through the binoculars, then consulted his map again. “To the southeast of the grid, I think. Sir.” Vyborg passed his binoculars to Szara. Now he could see the village in sharp focus. A fountain of dirt rose into the air. Then a housefront fell into the little street, a cloud of dust and smoke rolling out behind it. A few small flames danced along a broken beam. He swung the binoculars to the river, then to the German side. But he could see very little happening there.
The Polish field guns began to fire, the explosions leaving dirty brown smoke drifting through the treetops. Now Szara saw an orange tongue of flame in the German-occupied woods. “Two points left,” Mierczek said into the phone. They waited but nothing happened. Mierczek repeated his instructions. Szara could hear an angry voice amid the static. Mierczek held the phone against his chest for a moment and said confidentially, “Some of our shells do not explode.” As the Polish guns resumed firing, Szara saw the orange flash again, but this time in a different place. Mierczek reported this. Two men in dark shirts with their sleeves rolled up went running from house to house in the village. They disappeared for a time, then emerged from a back door with a gray shape on a stretcher.
It was getting harder and harder for Szara to see anything; the pall of smoke thickened until solid objects faded into shapes and shadows. The flashes from the German artillery seemed to change position-there simply, he decided, couldn’t be that many of them in the forest. Then a Polish machine gun opened up from one of the pillboxes. Szara moved the binoculars toward the far bank of the river and saw hundreds of gray shapes, men running low, come out of the woods and dive flat on the ground. Polish rifle fire began to rattle from the houses in the village. A Polish ammunition dump was hit by a shell; the sound of the blast was ragged, a huge billowing cloud swirled upward, brilliant white stars trailing smoke arched over the river. Mierczek never stopped reporting, but the Polish counterfire seemed ineffective. Finally Colonel Vyborg spoke up. “I believe, Lieutenant, you’re trying to pinpoint a tank battery. It seems they’ve cut passages into the woods for the tanks to move around.”
“I think you’re right, sir,” Mierczek said. In the midst of communicating this information his face tensed, but he carried his report through to the end. Then he unconsciously held his lower lip between his teeth and closed his eyes for an instant. “The battery’s been hit,” he said. Szara traversed the Polish woods but could see little through the smoke. Vyborg was staring out the low, uneven rectangle cut into the logs that served as a window. “Give me the binoculars,” he said to Szara. He watched for a few seconds, then said, “Pioneers,” and handed the binoculars back to Szara. German troops were in the river, shielded by the wooden stanchions where the bridge had stood, firing machine pistols at the portals of the pillboxes. The German Pioneer closest to the Polish side was shirtless, his body pink against the gray water. He swam suddenly from behind a stanchion with a rope held in his teeth. He took long, powerful strokes, then he let go of the rope, which floated away from him when he turned on his back and moved downstream with the current. Behind him, soldiers hauled themselves along the rope as far as the stanchion he’d just left. Some of them floated away also but were replaced by others.
“Hello? Captain? Hello?” Mierczek called into the phone. He cranked the handle and tried again. Szara could no longer hear the static. “I think the line has been severed,” Mierczek said. He took a pair of electrician’s pliers from a khaki bag, moved quickly to the low doorway, and disappeared. His job was, Szara knew, to follow the line until he found the break, repair it, and return. Szara saw a flash of the white shirt to his left, toward the battery, then it vanished into the dense smoke hanging amid the trees.
Szara swept his binoculars to the village. Most of the houses were now on fire. He saw a man run from one of them toward the woods, but the man fell on his knees and pitched forward after a few steps. Back on the river, the Pioneers had gained two more stanchions, and crowds of Germans were firing from the ones they held. The fire was returned. White chip marks appeared magically in the old, tarred wood and sometimes a German trooper fell backward, but he was immediately replaced by another man working his way along the line. A little way down the river there were flashes from the front rank of trees and, concentrating hard, Szara could see a long barrel silhouetted against the trunk of a shattered pine tree. He could just make out a curved bulk below the barrel. Yes, he thought, Vyborg had been right, it was a tank. A group of Polish infantrymen moved out of the forest below him, three of them carrying a machine gun and ammunition belts. They were trying to take up a position with a field of fire that would enfilade the stanchions. They ran bent over, rushing forward, one of them lost his helmet, but then all three made it to a depression in the sand between the edge of the water and a grove of alder trees. He could see the muzzle flash of the machine gun. Swept the binoculars to the stanchion and saw panic as several of the Germans fell away from the pilings. He felt a rush of elation, wanted to shout encouragement to the Polish machine gunners. But by the time he had again located their position, only one man was firing the gun and, as Szara watched, he let it go, covered his face with his hands, and slumped backward. Slowly, he got himself turned over and began to crawl for the edge of the woods.
The field telephone came suddenly to life, static popping from the earpiece. Vyborg g
rabbed it and said, “This is your observer position.” A voice could be heard yelling on the other end. Then Vyborg said, “I don’t know where he is. But he repaired the line and until he returns I will direct your fire. Is there an officer there? ” Szara heard the negative. “Very well, Corporal, you’re in charge then. There are tanks in the woods to your north, at the edge of the forest. Can you fire a single round, short? Even in the river will work.” There was a reply, then Vyborg stared at the map Mierczek had left behind. “Very well, Corporal,” he said. “My advice is quadrant M28.” Szara moved the binoculars to see the impact of the ranging fire Vyborg had directed but was distracted by a group of Germans who had reached the west bank of the river and were running into the woods. “They’re across,” he said to Vyborg. Vyborg said, “You’re too short, come up a couple of degrees.”
Szara glanced at the doorway, wondering where Mierczek was, then realized he was not going to return. Szara could now see muzzle flashes from positions in and above the village as Polish troopers fired at the Germans who had established a flank attack in the woods. Five Panzer tanks moved out of the woods onto the sandy shore of the river, rumbling forward to the edge of the water and forming an angle that allowed them to fire directly into the Polish forces in the village. Szara’s binoculars found the Polish machine gunner who’d tried to crawl away from the beach. He lay still in the sand. “Corporal?” Vyborg said into the phone.
By late afternoon, they were near the town of Laskowa, not far from the river Tososina-uncertain where to go next, possibly cut off by Wehrmacht encirclement, but, narrowly, alive.
They had escaped from the scene of the German bridgehead over the Dunajec-a matter of minutes. Colonel Vyborg had taken the precaution of leaving the staff car, with the sergeant to guard it, up the road from the village. Had it been in the village itself they would now be captured or, more likely, dead. As Polish resistance had worn down, the German infantry had negotiated the river on wooden rafts, isolated the remaining Poles in a few positions at the far end of the village, and demanded surrender. The Poles, from the look of it, had refused. Vyborg had watched the beginning of the final attack through his binoculars, then, unwilling to witness the end, had carefully restored them to their leather case and deliberately pressed both snaps shut. Working their way through the hillside brush they had come under fire several times, German rounds singing away through the branches, but the forest itself had protected them from the German marksmen.