by Herman Wouk
“I’m afraid there isn’t time.” The ambassador deliberately scratched his eyebrow. “The cease-fire will probably come within the hour. As soon as we get back, I’ll have to start assembling my party.”
“So will I. But it’s up to the Poles and the Germans, after all, to ensure that the neutrals cross the lines safely.”
The ambassador glanced at his watch. “Colonel Rakowski asked that we come out and view the route ahead of time. I really do think we’d better go on.” Two heavy guns went off in the woods—RRUMPH! RRUMPH!—one to the left, one to the right. The chauffeur whirred the ignition.
“Just a moment!” The driver turned around and looked at Slote, who had gone dead pale, his mouth working. “Ambassador, I must insist that you at least take us back to the bridge first. Perhaps there we can hitch a ride on a truck or bus.”
“But my dear sir, you should see the route, too. Our parties may get separated later in the woods.”
A peculiar feeling knotted Byron’s stomach. The ambassador’s faultless manners did not obscure what was happening, and Slote represented the United States. He said, “Leslie, I think you’re dead right about Natalie. Why not take her into one of those log houses and wait? I can go on with the ambassador and get the information, if you like.”
The ambassador at once said cheerfully, “Excellent idea! We can go and return in ten or fifteen minutes, I’m sure.”
Slote opened the car door and got out. “Come on, Natalie. We’ll wait in the one with the green blinds, Ambassador. I saw a woman at the windows.”
Natalie stayed in her seat, looking from Slote to the ambassador, her mouth pulled down unpleasantly. The ambassador said to her in a stiff European tone, “My dear, please do as you are told.”
Jumping out, she slammed the door and ran toward the house. Slote hurried after her, shouting. The limousine shot forward in a rattle of pebbles. The haze ahead thinned as they drove into it. About half a mile further along they came upon the shrine, a luridly colored wooden Jesus on a gilt cross in a sheltering frame; and not far beyond that was the schoolhouse. Several soldiers, smoking and talking, lounged in front of it around a stone goose bordered with red flowers. Byron thought that if Leslie Slote could have held on only three or four more minutes, he would have been all right. That one bad moment in the limousine, when the dirt hit the roof, had been unlucky for him.
Colonel Rakowski hailed the Swedish ambassador with a shout and a hug. He seemed in unrealistically good spirits, Byron thought, and indeed all the staff officers looked too chipper, considering the bad news that shrieked from the military map of the front on the wall: a crude thick red crayon circle, completely ringing Warsaw. On the other walls of the schoolhouse, bright kindergarten pictures hung. Rakowski, an enormous man with pointed blond moustaches, and a big nose empurpled by good living, led the visitors out a back door, and along a leaf-carpeted path to a concrete gun emplacement, where grimy, whiskered men stripped to the waist were piling shells. Motioning the visitors to come on up the colonel climbed the shallow cement slope and mounted the sandbags. Byron followed the ambassador. A forested plain lay before them, dipping toward the east, with a scattering of houses and farms, and three widely separated church spires. Puffs of smoke out there, Byron realized, came from German artillery.
Panting from the little climb, the ambassador and the officer talked volubly, gesturing at the church spires. The ambassador scrawled notes and translated bits to Byron. On the terms of the cease-fire, he said, the neutral refugees would cross unescorted from the Polish to the German lines, heading for the farthest church, where Wehrmacht trucks would meet them. Colonel Rakowski feared that some refugees might wander on the poorly marked dirt roads, head for the wrong church, and find themselves between two fires when the truce—for which the Germans were granting only two hours—was ended. So he had asked the Swedish ambassador to come out and study the route beforehand.
“He says,” the ambassador observed to Byron, closing his notebook, “that the best view is from that observation tower. You can make out the different roads, all the way to the Kantorovicz church.”
Byron looked at the spindly wooden tower erected close by in the school’s play yard. A narrow ladder led to a square metal-shielded platform, where he could see the helmet of a soldier. “Well, I’ll go up, okay? Maybe I can make a sketch.”
“The colonel says the tower has been drawing quite a bit of fire.”
Byron managed a grin.
With a paternal smile, the ambassador handed him the notebook and pen. Byron trotted to the ladder and went up, shaking the frail tower as he climbed. Here was a perfect view of the terrain. He could see all the roads, all the turnoffs of the brown zigzags across no-man’s-land, to the far church. The soldier on watch glanced away from his binoculars to gawk, as the young American in an open shirt and loose gray sweater sketched the roads in the ambassador’s notebook, struggling with the pages as they flapped in the wind, marking all the wrong turns with X’s, and crudely picturing the three churches in relation to the route. The soldier nodded when Byron showed him the sketch, and slapped his shoulder. “Ho kay,” he said, with a grin of pride at his mastery of Americanese.
Natalie leaned in the open doorway of the cottage, arms folded, as the limousine drew up. She hurried to the car, followed in a moment by Slote, who first said good-bye at the door to a kerchiefed old woman in heavy boots. As the car drove back toward Warsaw, the ambassador recounted their visit to the front, including Byron’s venture up the tower. Meantime Byron worked on the notebook in his lap.
“Think four copies is enough?” he said to the ambassador.
“Plenty, I should think. Thank you.” The ambassador took the notebook. “We may have time to run off some mimeograph copies. Very well done.”
Natalie clasped Byron’s hand and pulled it to her lap. She was sitting between him and Slote. She pressed his fingers, looking seriously at him, her dark eyes half-closed. Through her light green dress, he felt the flesh of her thigh on the back of his hand, and the ridge of a garter. Slote repeatedly glanced at the two hands clasped in the girl’s lap as he calmly smoked, looked out of the window, and chatted with the ambassador about assembling and transporting the refugees. A muscle in Slote’s jaw kept moving under the skin of his white face.
In the embassy all was scurry and noise. The mayor’s office had just sent word that the cease-fire was definite now for one o’clock. Polish army trucks would take the Americans to the departure point, and each person could bring one suitcase. The rush was on. The Americans still living outside the embassy were being summoned by telephone. A smell of burning paper filled the building, and fragments of black ash floated in the corridors.
Mark Hartley occupied the cot next to Byron’s in the cellar, and Byron found him sitting hunched beside a strapped-up suitcase, head in hands, a dead cigar protruding from his fingers. “Ready to go, Mark?”
Hartley uncovered a drawn face, the eyes frightened and bulging. “Horowitz is the name, Byron. Marvin Horowitz.”
“Nonsense, how will they know that?” Byron pulled from under the cot his old torn bag with the sprung hardware.
Hartley shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I must be crazy. I never once pictured that anything like this would happen. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that Roosevelt would fly us out in Army planes. Something like that. I’ve never been so goddamned scared in my life. We’re going to the Germans. The Germans.”
“Put that in your bag,” Byron said, tossing a worn black book to him as he packed. “And cheer up. You’re an American. That’s all. An American named Hartley.”
“With a Horowitz face and a Horowitz nose. What’s this? The New Testament? What’s this for?”
Byron took the book, which had a gold cross stamped on the binding, and carefully tore out the flyleaf with his own name written on it. “Make a good Christian of you. Here, put it away. Don’t sit around and worry. Go help Rowlandson burn papers.”
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“I wish I had my own Bible or prayer book,” Hartley said dully, unstrapping his bag. “I haven’t been inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah. An old smelly Hebrew teacher made me memorize a lot of gibberish. I did it to please my mother, but that was the end. I never went back once. Now I wish I remembered the prayers. Any prayers.” He glanced around at the bustling cellar. “So help me, this hole looks to me now like home sweet home. I’d give anything if I could just stay here. Do you think we’ll ever play bridge again one day, the four of us? In New York, maybe?”
“Sooner than you think.”
“From your mouth in God’s ears. That’s what my mother used to say.”
The army trucks came snorting and rattling up to the embassy at half past eleven; loose wobbly old machines so caked with mud and rust that their gray paint was scarcely discernible. At their arrival, more than a hundred Americans milling inside the fence on the lawn, set up a cheer and began singing “California Here I Come” and such ditties. The Poles of the staff, mostly girl secretaries, were sadly passing out coffee and cake.
“They make me feel ashamed,” Natalie said to Byron. Two of the Polish girls bearing trays had just gone by with fixed forced smiles and glistening eyes.
“What’s the alternative?” Byron, famished, bit into the coarse gray cake and made a face. It tasted of raw dough and paper ashes.
“There’s no alternative.”
Byron said, “Mark Hartley is scared stiff of the Germans. How about you?”
Natalie’s eyes flashed. “What can they do to me? I have an American passport. They don’t know I’m a Jew.”
“Well, don’t tell them. I mean don’t become all brave or defiant or anything, okay? The idea is just to get the hell out.”
“I’m not an imbecile, Byron.”
A Polish officer shouted, the gate opened, and the Americans began piling into the trucks. Some people were too old to climb up, some were trying to take extra luggage, the Polish drivers and officers were urgent and short-tempered, and nobody was in charge. Yelling, complaining, weeping, and fist-waving went on, but most of the people, hungry and uncomfortable though they were, felt so happy at starting out that they continued to sing and laugh. The trucks clanked off in single file. A black Chevrolet with American flags on its fenders brought up the rear, carrying Slote, his three highest-ranking assistants, and the wives of two of them. Outside the gate the Polish secretaries stood and waved, tears running down their faces. Byron and Natalie jolted along in a truck, clasping each other’s waists. Slote had offered her a place in the Chevrolet. She had shaken her head without a word.
The bombardment was going on as heavily as ever: the distant HRUMP! HRUMP! HRUMP! of the artillery, the blasting explosions of bombs from three small V’s of German planes passing slowly in the hazy midday sky, and the popping and stuttering of the Polish antiaircraft guns. The convoy crawled, stopped, and crawled through the shattered streets, the canyons of yellow-patched structures, careening up on sidewalks to avoid holes and tank traps, once backing out of a boulevard blocked by a newly fallen building.
At the bridge across the Vistula truck convoys flying various embassy flags were converging. The bridge was jammed to a standstill with refugee trucks. There were more than two thousand neutral nationals in Warsaw, and every one of them evidently meant to get out. Byron kept glancing at his watch. The traffic started to move again, but so slowly that he feared they might not reach the departure point by one o’clock. German shells kept whistling by, and splashes like geysers boiled up in the river, sometimes showering the bridge and the trucks. The Germans clearly thought it all in the game if they killed nine-tenths of the neutrals on the bridge, fifteen minutes before the cease-fire.
The convoys ended in a stupendous pileup at the schoolhouse with the stone goose. Colonel Rakowski and the Swedish ambassador stood together in the road, shouting instructions to each truckload of descending passengers and handing out mimeographed instruction sheets. With some pride of authorship, Byron noticed that whoever had traced his sketch on the stencil had faithfully copied it, even to his crude pictures of the three churches.
Guns in the woods all around the school were thundering away, but at five minutes to one the bombardment began to fade down. At one o’clock the guns fell silent. The loudest noise was the chattering of refugees in many languages along both sides of the road. Byron could hear birds, too, and the strumming of grasshoppers. It struck him that the noise of grasshoppers was the most peaceful sound on earth. A loudspeaker bawled final instructions in one language after another. Groups of neutrals, picking up their suitcases, began to walk down the sloping road. Finally came the English in a heavy Polish accent, “Please keep together. Do not make wrong turns. The German command has stated it will accept no responsibility for anybody who is not at the Kantorovicz church by three o’clock. Therefore the Polish command can accept no such responsibility. It is an easy hour’s walk even for an old person. The enemy will undoubtedly recommence hostilities at three. We will return the heaviest possible fire at the first shot. Please, therefore, hurry. Good luck to you all. Long live America. Long live Poland.”
At this, the Americans took up their luggage and walked into no-man’s-land.
For two or three hundred yards it was no different than the rest of Praha, but then the asphalt road narrowed and trailed off into a dusty, rutted, one-lane cart track. They passed ruined houses. The barnyards had no animals, except for an occasional abandoned chicken wandering and clucking, and some slinking jumpy cats. The road entered woods where sunlight slanted down in green-yellow bars through the leaves. The leader of the Americans, a tall gray Episcopalian minister in a black suit and turnaround collar, checked Byron’s sketch at each crossroad. This strange slow walk between two silent enemy armies took a full hour by Byron Henry’s watch. As he remembered it later, it was like a stroll in company in peacetime through a fragrant autumnal forest. Many fall flowers, blue and orange and white, dotted the dirt road and the woods; the birds chirped and twittered; and the wonderful song of the grasshoppers filled the air. He also remembered becoming very dry-mouthed and thirsty from tension, so thirsty that his legs felt weak. Two other memories stayed with him: the diplomats’ black cars going by, honking the walkers out of the road, with Slote laughing in the front seat and waving at him and Natalie; and then, near the end of the trek, at the bend of the road where the Kantorovicz church appeared, Mark Hartley coming up beside him, slipping his hand through his elbow, and saying, “My name is Mark Hartley, and oy, am I a good Christian!”—smiling at Byron, his face dust-caked and terror-stricken.
All at once, there were the German guns and the German gun crews in the woods. The howitzers were bigger than the Polish artillery pieces, with an appearance of better, newer engineering. Watching the walkers, the soldiers stood quietly at their weapons, in their neat field gray and formidable Wehrmacht helmets. Byron peered at the German soldiers with immense curiosity. The helmets gave them a beetling warrior look, but most of them were young and had the same German faces he had seen in Munich and Frankfurt. Many wore glasses. It was hard to believe that these were the villains who had been pouring flying steel and fire on Warsaw, setting pregnant women aflame, blowing children’s legs and hands off, and making a general shambles of a handsome metropolis. They were just young men in soldier suits and stern helmets, standing around in the shady woods amid the pleasant noises of birds and grasshoppers.
From the first, the Germans handled the refugees better than the Poles had. A mule-drawn water cart—a large olive-painted cylinder on wheels—stood by the road near the church, and soldiers waited with tin cups to herd the thirsty people into a queue. From the water tank, other soldiers guided them toward new clean gray trucks, with thick black deeply treaded tires, so different from the Poles’ dirty deteriorated machines. Wehrmacht officers in tailored long military coats and high peaked caps were talking amiably, though with marked condescension, to the arriving diplomats near a table by th
e roadside. As each national group came to the trucks, its ambassador or chargé gave a typed roster to a bespectacled soldier behind the desk. He called off names, and one by one the people entered the vehicles, which unlike the Polish trucks had wooden seats. The Poles had not troubled with rosters. There was no bunching up, no disorder. Soldiers stood by with little stools to help up the elderly and to hand the few children to their mothers with a laugh and a playful little swing. At a field ambulance marked with a red cross medical orderlies gave restoratives. Two soldiers with movie and still cameras roamed the scene, recording all this good treatment of the neutrals. The loading was not quite over when the guns near the church all at once shot off a salvo that made the ground shake. Byron’s watch read a minute past three o’clock.
“Poor Warsaw,” Natalie said.
“Don’t talk,” Mark Hartley said in a low hoarse voice. “Don’t say anything till we’re out of this.” They sat with Byron on the last bench of a truck, from which they could look out.
Natalie said, “Look at Slote, will you? Taking a cigarette from a German, for crying out loud, and laughing! It’s just unbelievable. All these German officers with their long coats and pushed-up caps. There they are, just like their pictures.”
“Are you afraid?” Byron said.
“Not any more, now that it’s actually happening. I don’t know why. It’s sort of dreamlike.”
“Some dream,” Hartley said. “It should only be a dream. Jesus Christ. That officer with Slote is coming here.” Hartley gripped a hand on Byron’s knee.
The officer, a blond young man with a good-natured smile, came straight to Byron, speaking with a pleasant accent, slowly and precisely. “Your chargé tells me that your father is American naval attaché in Berlin.”
“Yes, sir, he is.”
“I am a Berliner. My father is in the foreign ministry.” The officer fingered the binoculars around his neck. His manner seemed not very military and rather self-conscious. Byron thought he might be feeling compunction of a sort, and he liked the German better for that. “I believe I had the pleasure of meeting your parents in August at the Belgian embassy, and of dancing with your mother. What on earth have you been doing in Warschau?”