The Demi-Monde: Winter (40 page)

The discussion was cut short by a strange whistling sound that cut through the air.

Trixie had read descriptions of artillery barrages in the books in her father’s library but she was still stunned – literally – by the reality of being at the receiving end of one of them. The explosions of the shells were deafeningly loud, so loud that she felt her one good ear go pop: it was as though she had been smashed about the head by two cymbals. But the noise was as nothing to the shock wave which tore out from the blast. Even shielded underground she was hurled against the wall, her head smashing against the brickwork. A shearing pain lanced through her damaged shoulder and for a moment she lay foetuslike on the ground, deaf, numb, and shocked by the ferocity of what she’d experienced. Dust and grime thrown up from the blast began to swirl around her: now every time she took in a breath it was flavoured with the taste of brick dust. She coughed, trying to spit the choking powder out of her mouth.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and turning her head she saw a concerned Wysochi looking down at her. He was covered in a patina of white dust, looking as though he had been dipped in flour ready to be baked in an oven. His uniform had also suffered in the blast; the right sleeve of his jacket was torn and the knees of his trousers were tattered and stiff with
mud. He spoke to Trixie, but she couldn’t hear a thing. She stabbed a finger into each ear and massaged them.

Wysochi nodded and raised his voice. ‘Are you hurt?’

Trixie staggered to her feet and took a quick inventory. She had a catalogue of bumps and bruises but nothing seemed to be broken. She mouthed an uncertain ‘I’m fine,’ and was pleased when she heard her own muffled voice.

‘Good, then come with me.’ Wysochi turned and climbed the basement stairs back up to the road level.

The scene that greeted Trixie was one of horror and carnage. About ten of the men and women who had been putting the finishing touches to the barricade had been caught in the open when the salvo of artillery shells had struck and now they lay bent and busted on the torn cobbles. Captain Gorski was lying amongst them: from the odd tilt of his head it was obvious that his neck was snapped.

Trixie looked around: there seemed to be no officers and no NCOs, just a muddle of winded, bemused and very frightened soldiers. Then, out of nowhere there was another explosion, and Trixie and Wysochi were pelted with debris. When Trixie stood up, she found the Sergeant lying still and unmoving at her feet, hit by a flying brick.

She gawped down at Wysochi. It seemed impossible that such a powerful man could be felled. He was a rock. He was indestructible. Panic washed over her. She looked around, frightened, uncertain what to do … alone.

‘Steamers … SS steamers …’ someone shouted, the quaver in his voice indicating that he was near to panic.

Trixie’s naturally combative spirit reasserted itself. ‘Corporal! Is there a corporal still alive here?’ she screamed at the top of her voice and almost immediately a boy emerged from behind a low wall that surrounded the front garden of what had once
been a very elegant house. It was elegant no longer, having taken a direct hit. ‘What’s your name, Corporal?’

‘Karol Michalski.’

‘Get ten men, Corporal Michalski, and as many firebombs as you can carry and station yourself at the top of that house there.’ She stabbed a finger towards a tall building standing a hundred yards or so in front of the barricade. ‘Wait until the steamers arrive, then burn them.’

The Corporal hesitated for a moment, then saluted and without another word did as he was ordered. Trixie looked around and saw a soldier staggering around brushing flames out from his trousers. ‘You, soldier, round up twenty men and station them on the upper floors of that building.’ She pointed with her revolver to the house that flanked the barricade.

The young soldier shook his head. ‘No. We’ve got to retreat out of artillery range …’

‘Pull yourself together, man. What’s your name?’

‘Josef Zawadzski.’

‘If we run, Zawadzski, the SS will kill us like rats in a barrel. There’s nowhere to retreat to. We must stand or we must die.’ Other men were slowly emerging from their hiding places and Trixie raised her voice so they could hear her. ‘Yesterday you swore an oath to defend your city to the last man. Today we will find out whether Poles are men of their word or men of straw.’ Flushed with embarrassment, Zawadzski saluted and then began rounding up his men.

A sergeant, still bemused and baffled by the barrage, stumbled out from a cellar and made an attempt to exert his authority. ‘No, stay where you are. I command here. You’re not a real officer. I say we retreat.’

It was a pivotal moment. The men who had been scurrying
off to do Trixie’s bidding hesitated. They looked uncertainly from Trixie to the sergeant and back again.

She tried to bluff. ‘I am Lieutenant Trixie Dashwood.’

‘We ain’t got no women officers in the WFA. I’m in charge here and I say …’

They never got to hear what the sergeant was intent on saying. The pistol in Trixie’s hand barked and the sergeant dropped to the ground with a bullet hole in his chest. For a second Trixie stood paralysed by her own ruthlessness. But then she threw off any doubts; she would ponder the morality of her action later … if she lived. ‘He was an Enemy of the Revolution. I command here,’ she snarled. ‘I am Lieutenant Trixie Dashwood, and my orders are to hold this barricade and hold it I shall. You – Corporal Zawadzski – get those twenty men into that building and when the Anglos come, fire down on them. Understand?’

A nod from Zawadzski.

‘The rest of you, get your rifles and your ammunition and man the barricade.’

‘What about us?’ said a voice to Trixie’s left.

Trixie turned to find herself looking at a group of young girls, the eldest of whom couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Surely they were too young to be away from their parents? Trixie nearly laughed, she was only three years older than them and she’d just shot a man for disobeying her. ‘Carry the wounded to the basement. Look after them as best you can. The rest of you grab rifles and help defend the barricade.’

‘Women can’t fight,’ protested one of the soldiers.

The look on Trixie’s face silenced him. ‘It doesn’t matter if a rifle is fired by a man or a woman, to the SS trooper it kills the result is just the same. If the SS win, women will be executed
alongside the men, therefore they have the right to fight and die just as surely as men.’

It was one of those strange moments when silence descends, when all noise and all talking suddenly ceases. It was as though the world was taking a breath. It was as though the world had been suddenly made mute by the horror it was about to witness. Trixie looked around at the men and women manning the barricade, and wondered what they were listening for. She strained her one good ear.

There …

Far off she could hear the scrunch of steel on stone, could hear the faint thud-thud-thud of a steamer’s pistons, could hear shouted commands drifting towards her through the sharp, crystalline cold of the afternoon.

A boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, darted around a corner of a building and shouted a message. ‘The Anglos are advancing through Southgate. Ten minutes.’

‘Soldiers of Warsaw, prepare yourselves,’ Trixie shouted.

Now all they could do was wait and she suddenly came to understand how lonely it was to command. Every one of the men and women lining the barricade was waiting for her to say something. She began to pace up and down, shouting at the pale-faced WFA soldiers as she went. ‘Hold your fire until the Anglos are within fifty yards. Don’t waste your shots. When a man falls, one of you without a rifle will take his place. I will shoot anyone stepping back from the barricade. There will be no retreat, there will be no surrender. This is your time, people of Warsaw. This is your time to kill.’

The first steamer lumbered around the corner five minutes later. The SS had taken the rubber tyres off the wheels and screwed in
large spikes; now the wheels smashed and crushed the street cobbles as the machine passed. Swathed in steel and steam, the huge steamer huffed and puffed its way, slowly, inexorably, towards the barricade. Once it faced them head-on, it stood poised for a moment crouching like some great fire-breathing dragon that had escaped from the depths of Terror Incognita. Then it began to lurch forward, gradually picking up speed, obviously intent on ramming the barricade. Behind the machine swarmed a mass of black-uniformed SS troopers. There was a rat-tat-tat as two Gatling guns housed in nacelles on the top of the steamer opened fire and instinctively Trixie threw herself to the ground. Bullets smacked into the house to her left. Windows smashed, showering glass down onto the road. Somewhere to her right she heard a scream. The steamer picked up speed. It seemed unstoppable, a huge lumbering force of Nature.

‘Steady, you useless bastards,’ shouted Trixie. She blushed. She couldn’t believe someone of her rank and her breeding could use such profanities. Sergeant Wysochi had a lot to answer for. But when she saw the effect her words had on her troops – they were actually laughing – she was encouraged to go further. ‘Look at them … there are so many of the fuckers even you useless bastards can’t miss.’

There was a round of louder laughter.

The SS lumbered forward. Eighty yards … seventy yards … sixty yards … fifty yards.

‘Fire!’

The soldiers of the WFA began to fire, working their Martini-Henry rifles for all they were worth, pouring fire into the advancing SS. In an instant the bright Winter’s sunshine was shrouded with a cloying, choking cloud of cordite.

‘Hold hard,’ Trixie screamed as the steamer hit the barricade. For a moment she thought the barricade would buckle but the
tons of earth and timber that they had laboured to pour into its construction withstood the charge. Now Corporal Zawadzski’s men began to fire down into the ranks of the SS swarming around the beached steamer. A man fell back from the barricade, his face mashed by a bullet. Instinctively Trixie brought her brute of a pistol up, took aim at the SS advancing towards the barricade and pulled the trigger. The Mauser bucked back in her hand, raking her injured shoulder with pain as she worked the trigger and fired again and again and again. Frantically she fired shot after desperate shot into the black mob of the SS, firing until the hammer of her pistol clicked on an empty chamber.

It looked hopeless: the SS were coming forward like a black wave, hosing the barricade with their automatic weapons. Then little Corporal Michalski and his band struck, hurling their fire-bombs down, turning the whole of Uyazhdov Boulevard into an inferno. In a moment the fashionable tree-lined avenue was turned into a living, burning Hel.

‘Now!’ she yelled and two boys – children really, neither was more than ten – leapt over the top of the barricade in a suicidal attempt to throw firebombs into the cabin of the steamer. One was cut down by machine-gun fire but the second managed to thrust his bomb through the driver’s observation port. There was a ‘wooomph’ as the bomb exploded and in that instant the sound of pounding steam pistons and scrabbling wheels was accompanied by the screams of the steamer’s crew as they were burnt to death.

Then, like the ebbing of a tide, the ferocity of the fighting seemed to suddenly falter and, as she watched, the SS began to retreat.

There was a shout from the barricades. ‘We’ve beaten them. They’re running for it.’

‘Keep firing,’ bellowed Trixie, ‘for fuck’s sake, keep firing. Kill as many of the fuckers as you can. Make them remember. Make them scared. Make them dead.’

And as she screamed out her orders, Trixie realised that she had never been happier in the whole of her life.

Comrade Major Hartley stood stock-still in front of Archie Clement’s desk as the Colonel idly played with his pencil, rolling it backwards and forwards between the fingers of his right hand. Finally Clement stopped his fidgeting and slowly raised his gaze.

‘So, waddya gotta say for yourself, Major?’

‘We encountered greater resistance than we had anticipated, Comrade Colonel. But I am confident …’

‘Con-fee-dent. Gracious me, Hartley, that’s a real two-guinea word, but ah gotta say iffn ah was standing in your boots ah wouldn’t be feeling con-fee-dent. No, Sirree. Iffn ah had seen two hundred of mah men blasted to buggery and the rest being forced to retreat by a pack of no-account Rebs, ah don’t think ah’d be using a word like con-fee-dent.’

Hartley swallowed hard. The perks and benefits that came with being a high-ranking member of the SS were one thing, but they were granted only after having taken an oath of death or glory. And as the performance of his men this afternoon could hardly be termed glorious …

‘The Poles have used tactics which are bestial and violate every code governing civilised conduct in war.’

Clement looked at Hartley as though he were mad. ‘You joshing me?’

‘No, Sir: the Poles have children hurling incendiaries from rooftops. They have booby-trapped buildings.’

‘Mah, mah, what ruffians we are fighting. Children … boobytraps
… whatever will them Rebs think of next? Cuss words? Obscene gestures? You better quit your bellyaching, Comrade Major, ‘cos ah ain’t used to having my SS boys having the shit kicked outta them by Rebel scum.’

‘They are fanatical, Comrade Colonel, and their commander is a madman …’ Hartley paused and then corrected himself. ‘… a madwoman.’

‘Them Rebs are commanded by a woman?’ asked Clement, suddenly evincing a little more interest.

‘Our Balloon Corps Observers report seeing a woman with long blonde hair organising the defenders and one captured Varsovian has confirmed this under interrogation.’

‘This woman’s gotta name?’

‘The prisoner didn’t know her name. All he was able to say before he died was that she was the same woman who led the attack on the barges. It is typical of these Polish scum that they would force women to fight like men.’

‘By mah reckoning, this woman is fighting better than a man, iffn the way she booted your ass this afternoon is any indicator.’ Clement took a long swig of his glass of Solution. ‘You better saddle up, Major Hartley, and get your boys ready to toe the line. You gonna attack again but this time ah’m gonna help you out by making sure that there’s a heavier artillery barrage before you let rip, a barrage so heavy that it’ll pound them Rebs to dog shit. And seeing as you caught me in a forgiving mood, Hartley, ah’m gonna allocate the six newly arrived armoured steamers to your assault. But listen real tight ‘cos ah don’t want there to be any misunderstanding: your objective is to take the barricades which block our advance to the Old Town before nightfall. This is your minimum objective and iffn them Rebs give you the turnabout again, Comrade Major …’ Clement gave Major Hartley an empty, cold smile. ‘Well, ah don’t think it’s
necessary to explain to an SS officer who uses big words like con-fee-dent how he should act if he goes and fucks up for a second time, now is it?’