Winds of War (33 page)

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.”

“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 ceasefire.

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 begin 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 the 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?”

“I was sightseeing.”

“Well, you saw some unusual sights.”

“That I did.”

The officer laughed, and offered his hand to Byron. “Ernst Bayer,” he said, putting his heels together.

“Byron Henry. Hi.”

“Ah, yes. Henry. I remember the name. Well, you are comfortable? Can I offer you a ride in a staff car?”

“I’m fine. Where are we going?”

“Klovno. It’s the nearest working railroad junction, and there you will all transfer to a special train for Königsberg. It’s more than a three-hour trip. You might enjoy it more in an automobile.”

“Well, I’ve been travelling with these folks, you know. I’ll stay with them. Thanks a lot.” Byron spoke cordially, though this polite chitchat with a German felt exceedingly strange after all his anger at them.

Slote said to Natalie, “We can still make room for you in the Chevy. That wooden slat’s going to get kind of hard.”

She shook her head, looking darkly at the German.

“Give my best to your mother,” said the officer, with a casual glance at the girl and back at Byron. “She was really charming to me.”

“I sure will.”

Several guns fired in succession nearby, drowning out something the officer said. He grimaced. and smiled. “How are things in Warschau now? Very distressing?”

“Well, they seem to be hanging on pretty well.”

Half-addressing Natalie as well as Byron, Bayer said, “A bad business! The Polish government was completely irresponsible, running off into Rumania and leaving the country without leadership. Warschau should have been declared an open city two weeks ago. This destruction is pointless. It will cost a lot to repair. The mayor is very brave, and there is a lot of admiration here for him, but” - he shrugged - “what is there to do but finish it off? This will be over in a day or two.”

“It may take longer than that,” Byron said.

“You think so?” Bayer’s pleasant smile faded. He bowed slightly and walked off, toying with the glasses. Slote shook his head at Byron and followed the officer.

“Why the hell did you get him mad?” Hartley whispered.

“Oh, Christ. Blaming the
Polish
government for the siege!”

“He meant it,” Natalie said, in a wondering tone. “The man was absolutely sincere.”

With some shouting in German, snorting of motors, honking of horns, waving by the soldiers, the convoy departed from Kantorovicz, a hamlet of half a dozen wooden houses around the church, intact but abandoned. Since leaving the schoolhouse, the refugees had not seen a living Pole, nor a dead one. The trucks wound along one-lane dirt roads, passing burned-out barns, blown-apart houses, overturned windmills, broken churches, schoolhouses without windows or roofs, and much torn-up, shell-plowed ground and charred tree stumps. Still the scene was not at all like battlegrounds in movies and books of the last war: gray wastes of barren dead muck, tangles of barbed wire, dark zigzagging trenches. These fields and woods were green. Crops were still standing. Only the inhabitants were eerily absent. It was almost as though H. G. Wells’s invaders from Mars had passed through in their perambulating metal tripods, atomizing or eating the people and leaving only slight trails of their transit. The first Poles who came in sight, far behind the German lines, were an old man and his wife working in a field in late sunshine; they leaned on their implements and solemnly watched the trucks go by. As the trucks travelled farther from Warsaw, more peasants began to appear, going about their fieldwork or repairing damaged houses, either ignoring the trucks or watching their passage with blank faces. Nearly all were old people or children. In this back country, Byron saw no young men, and only two or three kerchiefed, skirted figures that from their slimness and supple movements might have been girls. Yet more striking, he saw not one horse. The horse, and the vehicles it pulled, were the trademark, the very life, of rural Poland. On the way from Cracow to Warsaw, there had been thousands of horses, clogging the roads, working in the fields, carrying soldiers, dragging heavy loads in the cities. Behind the German lines this animal seemed extinct.