My name is million, the experiences of an Englishwoman in Poland

MY NAME IS MILLION

HVUs

MY NAME IS MILLION

The Experiences
of an Englishwoman in Poland

My name is million, because I love millions
and for millions suffer torment.

ADAM MICKIEWICZ

FABER AND FABER LIMITED

24 Russell Square
London

First published in Mcmxl

by Faber and Faber Limited

24 Russell Square London W.C.\

Printed in Great Britain by

Latimer Trend & Co Ltd Plymouth

All Rights Reserved

To cos mi rozkazaf zrobic, zrobifam

CONTENTS

Part One

I.

Summer in Poland

'page 1 1

2.

Mechanized War

23

3-

Poland Fights Alone

38

4-

England Declares War

52

5-

September 3rd

61

6.

Siege of Warsaw

7i

7-

'The Heart is no Traveller'

81

8.

Rendezvous with X.

90

9-

The Lublin Road

100

10.

First Aid Post

109

1 1.

Refugee Train

119

12.

Murder at Chelm

130

13-

Brzecz-nad-Bugiem

138

14.

People during Air Raids

149

J5-

P.K.P.

Part Two

160

16.

Polesie

171

i7-

The Fifth Partition has Begun

184

18.

Last Polish Soldier

202

19-

The Peasants come Closer

213

20.

The Commissars Arrive

227

21.

The Great House changes Hands

241

22.

Wilno

253

23-

Frontier Post

266

24.

Postscript

7

283

PART ONE

Polish names have been written

in English letters and without

diacritical signs

Chapter I
SUMMER IN POLAND

In the summer of 1938 we left Warsaw for five
months. It was too far to go to the house in the
Carpathians for trout-fishing in the Little Danube,
but Szaniawski let us a small wooden house with four
rooms, a huge attic and two verandas on the left bank
of the River Narew. The Narew was then even dearer
to us than the Little Danube and the winding, lovely
Vistula, because very often it reminded us with its
shifting bed, its backwaters, and its hundreds of little
islands overgrown with scented grass and the bushes
that the peasants quite incorrectly call oleanders, of our
best river of all, the Loire. Not, I think, that Szaniawski
ever realized himself that he had let us the house. His
bailiff, a huge Ukrainian, once a landowner like his
master, whose estates had stayed on the Bolshevik side
after the last war, managed all that. He even did some
whitewashing for us, and remembered that I was a
writer too, though not so good a one as Szaniawski,
when we fished the same part of the river and nodded
from one boat to the other. His red Irish setter, hope-
lessly badly bred, like most gun dogs in Poland, knew
me too, and would lift his ugly square head from the
bottom of the boat and stare fixedly at me and my

11

Summer in Poland

Irish terrier bitch as if we were almost as interesting
as fish. The bitch could not endure the sight of him,
probably because he was Irish too; just as she could
not endure the sight of certain of my friends or ser-
vants, my dressmaker, the telephone, or anything else
that either touched me or seemed to her particular
way of measuring things to come nearer to me than
others.

No matter. They are all gone now. Irish setter, little
red bitch, bailiff, Szaniawski (for all I know), wooden
house and manor house, and, higher up on the same
bank, the palace of Konstanty Radziwill, whose gar-
dener used to sell me the best melons and the youngest
peas I ever ate anywhere. For the fort of Zegrze was
only a few kilometres away in the Warsaw direction,
and the fort of Modlin was behind, and the Germans
went through there months ago — and only Narew still
flows as before, and in the spring, when the frost
loosens, the grass will come pushing up between the
levelled stones.

That was in 1938.

For five months I did not see Warsaw again. Now I
shall never see it again, never again as I remembered it
during those five slow, perfect months when the sun
was so hot that I hardly ever left the shelter of the
verandas or the little wood behind the house until four
o'clock in the afternoon, the hour when the rays of the
sun began to fall slantingly on the Mazovian plain. In
the wood it was dark and pleasant; you could put your
rug down on a thick bed of perfumed pine needles and
all day long a pair of big golden birds with wings as
brightly blue as a kingfisher's, flashed in and out among
the pine-trees, black against the brilliant sunshine, call-

12

Summer in Poland

ing to each other, so often that you felt they were doing
it on purpose and were grateful to them, with a note
that you could never hear without thinking of a silver
bell ringing somewhere under water. As a matter of
fact, the peasants' name for them is dzwoniec, which
means a bell. I never learned the name ornithologists
call them by. It can hardly be more suitable.

Idling there, I liked to think of Warsaw. Strange
town, last capital of the West, with many cobbled
streets and more horse-drawn dorozki than taxis, which
you amazedly exclaim to be a village, or, at most, a
country town, when you come to it from Paris, as I first
did, or from London or Vienna; and which opens its
horizons to you only as you stay in it, showing you
something more of itself every day, fixing your heart
so gradually that you are enslaved before you know it;
teaching you, if you are teachable at all, that it is the
most European of the European capitals, because it is
the last and because, just beyond it and always turning
their eyes to it, always dreaming of Vistula and the black
grainfields of Sandomierz and the spires of Krakow
and the coal-mines of Silesia, the barbarians are waiting,
like wolves that are waiting for a fire to die down;
wolves ringed around the same fire for how many
centuries now?

But I should have written all that in another tense.
To-day things are changed in Warsaw. The fire has
gone down, though the ashes are still glowing ; the bar-
barians have got through to Vistula; the wolf-pack has
closed the ring.

Then, when I thought of Warsaw, I cannot explain
why, it was always as the Warsaw of its late eastern
spring. I forgot the icy wind in the squares in winter, the

l3

K

Summer in Poland

slush of the thaws, the dusty heat of the summer, the
golden Polish autumn when the painted bronze leaves
of the tree in the Chopin monument were indistinguish-
able from the falling bronze leaves of the giant horn-
beams and limes surrounding it. In my memory the city
was always foaming with white and purple lilac. When
you sat in a tramcar with the window down and it was
still morning, your whole coat-sleeve or your face might
be brushed by a great scented branch of it still soaked
in dew. In the Aleja and the Royal Park trees of mag-
nolia burst into blossom overnight; the huge carp in
the fish-ponds barely moved, and white and rose-
coloured drifts of fallen petals lay on the water. As the
carp sluggishly stirred they broke up the reflection of
the ivory-coloured palace of the last King of Poland,
that formed again behind them.

The eighteenth century produced nothing lovelier
than that palace or its park. The windows of my flat
looked on to it. I knew every squirrel in the trees, every
swan on the island with its eighteenth-century ruins of
a Greek theatre, every plant and tree in the orangery,
some of them four hundred years old. I knew the Her-
mitage, the White House, the Hunting Lodge, all
royal lodges within the park enclosure. I knew all the
pictures in its twenty times soiled and plundered gal-
leries; something like two hundred or less of them
given back to Poland after the Treaty of Riga. In the
King's inventory, many of them entered in his own
beautiful handwriting, there were more than twenty-
four hundred. I knew the famous chandeliers, like
frozen cascades of purest water, in the ballroom; the
sixteenth-century bathhouse, with its thousands of tiny
encaustic tiles, of which no two designs are the same,

Summer in Poland

around which the palace itself came into existence. A
book of my own, whose corrected proofs were sent off
to England on the day when the posters went up for
mobilization and which was published when my family
believed me to have been killed in the siege of the city,
was written in the Chinese cabinet, where the King
himself used to write up his catalogues and dream the
day away with his poets and landscape gardeners.
Twenty-five years of loving, patient labour had gone
to the scraping off of the filth left in its rooms by the
Russian occupation; to obliterating the senseless de-
corations of the Romanovs, the grease and dung of Ivan
Ivanovitch, most miserable of soldiers, and the soot and
stains of his samovar and his wretched stove. Now it is
the turn of the Storm Troopers and Gestapo, if the
palace is still standing, as I sometimes hope it is not.
Perhaps it is only a heap of ashes, with some stinking
flesh buried beneath it, like so much of Warsaw. Some-
times rumour says one thing, sometimes another; our
palaces, our cottages, our families and our friends, our
lovers and our acquaintances, only rumour brings us
news of them. There is no news. Only the certainty
of daily torture, murder, starvation, and disease. The
fire has gone down. The wolves have crossed the
barrier.

Of Warsaw to-day, sitting here in London, it would
be better not to think. But I think of it all the time. If
only, for one hour, I could stop memory and quite for-
get. But I never think of it now as I did two summers
ago, among the pines and in the company of a pair of
golden, blue-winged birds. That image of Warsaw has
had another for ever imposed on it. A man who had
been all through the siege and who had seen the Ger-

15

Summer In Poland

man Army march in and Adolf Hitler come there from
Danzig to look for himself on the work he had done,
said to me: The tram-lines are full of clotted blood.
That is the image I have now of a city I have loved
more even than I loved Paris. No memory of wet
lilac brushing my face will ever take its place again, I
think.

In 1939 I said to my husband:
'Somebody had better go and get the cottage ready.'
Then I said, slowly, 'But will you be able to go?'
We decided that he might go for long week-ends.
After all, it was only half-an-hour from Warsaw. Be-
sides, one could take work and do it there. A man on
a motor-bicycle could bring the courier from Warsaw.
After all, what and who could keep us in the capital?
A. was only manufacturing tiny special gadgets for
aerodromes because nobody else did it as well, and
because it made money for us. We were free. We could
do without the money. Warsaw would be too hot, even
in our flat. Bronka, the servant we would be taking,
wanted to see her family. The boat had been laid up
too long. The dogs had to get into the country. There
was my cure to begin again. It seemed very odd to be
discussing week-ends. We had never been tied before.
The river would be high after the spring thaws, though
not so high as we wanted. It had been a queer winter
with very little snow. The cherry-trees would be full of
singing birds, the asparagus nearly over, and the chil-
dren would be bringing great cabbage leaves full of the
wild Polish strawberries whose perfume makes every
other wild strawberry in the world seem like a little bit
of painted wood.

Well, we were free, weren't we? We could go.

16

Summer in Poland

'They took Grotek last night,' said A. 'He's a
specialist, of course. I may be able to get him back.
Nobody else can cut those rotary files like he can.'

That was the secret mobilization. It had been going
on ever since the spring. Everybody said there had been
a German ultimatum. I don't know. I know very little,
really. Only more than you should know and remem-
ber, if you have to come out into the living world again.
But every night men we knew were being called up.
Quietly. Just a ring at the door and a paper telling you
where to go. It was getting to be very hard on employers
of skilled labour. Gardeners and people didn't matter so
much, though one missed them. In the Royal Park,
where I knew everybody, and had friends on all the
gates and in all the lodges, I looked in vain for familiar
faces nearly every day.

'All right,' I said. 'We'll try to get some week-ends.
Only I don't like nobody living there. Shall we let half
of it?'

So we did that. Somebody else wakened up there in
the morning and left out bread and milk for our jack-
daw and brought home faggots of dried wood from the
islands and bathed from the boat. The idea that we had
been free, that we could do what we liked, began to
seem rather a comic one. When an official-looking
paper came (and they come nearly every day in repub-
lics and look very official) I read them now instead of
leaving them about under paper-weights. Forty-two,
Officer of Reserve, twice wounded in 1920, thirteen
years in France, no manoeuvres since . . . not very likely,
but you never knew. When we went out we left ad-
dresses and telephone numbers.

'Now, Bronka, my dear, you're quite sure you under-

b 17

Summer in Poland

stand? If the master's mobilization card comes, tell
them . . . ring up. . . .'

Warsaw was very hot. I had a book to write. That
took about nine hours a day. Then there was work to
do because the war was coming. That took about five.
It was so often not worth doing anything except take
shower after shower and then sit down to work again
that three weeks passed before I noticed that I had not
once dressed or gone out in that time. On the balconies
in the evening it was cool and the flower-woman brought
me all the mignonette she could find to keep the flies
out of the flat. The flower-baskets and the window-
boxes smelt of wet earth. The little bitch complained
sometimes. Can't I go out with you? I hate going out
with servants, I'm naughty with them and have to be
kept on the leash.

At night it was not easy to sleep. Our machines flew
over the city nearly every night, manoeuvring. Search-
lights, conducting our own bombers to the aerodromes,
lit up the sky with pale wands following a falling arc.

Falling, fallen arc. But it is not all over yet. Every
light has not yet been quenched, never will be, in that
Polish sky.

A. said : 'You must go to the country, at least for ten
days. It can be done. Write and tell them to get ready.'

The day before we were to go, I said: 'I'm going
down to the cafe on the ground floor. We've always
taken their taxi. It's too small really, but I don't want
to hurt their feelings. We can squeeze things in.'

'I haven't any money,' said my husband. 'It'll have
to be the bus this time. I subscribed again to FON this
week. I literally have no money at all.'

Subscribing to FON was all right. That was one of

18

Summer in Poland

the national loans. Everybody subscribed; more, far
more than they had. Workers mortgaged their earnings
months ahead, and their employers advanced the money
for them, as well as what they gave themselves. So we
went in the bus. It only took about twenty minutes
longer, anyhow, and the dogs didn't even wear their
muzzles, although Poland used to be very strict about
that.

Between one or two little railway stations on unim-
portant one-track lines, long armoured trains were
standing. Anti-aircraft gun emplacements in the fields
had been masked by the usual unconvincing-looking
green branches and so forth. I suppose that from the
air they really did look more as if they had grown there.
The harvest was being got in early. Everybody in
Poland knows what that means. In her great days, when
wars were still carried on between gentlemen, the
Polish landowners, each of whom was rich enough to
raise and support an army of his own, and often did,
simply went home at harvest time and only started
fighting again when all the barns and granaries were
full. To the Polish grandee that was a very simple mat-
ter, obvious to anyone; and a duty really far more
pressing and important than wars, which, after all, were
only the sort of thing that other, rather low, people
began, and which, being a gentleman and having been
born to the bearing of arms, you were also obliged to
accept as your responsibility. But that fighting is fun,
and the land and the proper storing of harvests is
serious, was very much what he felt.

I think it is Lord D'Abernon, in his fine book The
iSth Decisive Battle of the World who speaks, of course
not at all understanding why, of coming up against

19

Summer in Poland

practically this same instinctive attitude among his
Polish acquaintances and even among the Polish High
Command in 1920, when the colossal Red wave of the
Bolshevik Army had rolled up almost to the very gates
of Warsaw. The same Army that Pilsudski was to break
and push back like scattered sheep across their own
frontiers and with whom he afterwards made a typically
mild and unaggressive Polish peace.

My library, like everything else I once possessed, is
in Poland, in the hands of the Germans, so I cannot
quite certainly say that it was Lord D'Abernon who
mentions this. Anyhow, what is interesting is that even
in 1920, with the Bolsheviks where they were and the
Polish Army, desperately short of supplies, ammunition
and officers, made up for the most part of students and
trained men who had neither uniform nor boots, a
friendly foreign military mission in Warsaw, without
any clue to where such a feeling should come from or
any comprehension of what it could mean, should again
and again be keenly conscious of this feeling, the roots
of which went straight down to Poland's glorious and
richly coloured past. A past particularly misleading to
the foreigner, who reads and hears of the most extrava-
gant gestures — of two or three villages of serfs being
given in exchange for one greyhound, of a Polish envoy
to the King of France causing whole kilometres of the
road into Paris to be buried under the finest salt so that
he might make his entry in his own sleigh, tossing to
the crowd the nails from the hooves of his gold-shod
horses ; and who never seems to have read or been told
of all the simple, much more truly Polish things which
have made that unhappiest of countries the most pas-
sionately loved in the world.

20

Summer in Poland

After Zegrze, where the barracks were and the fort
which was the last stronghold where the Poles might
hope to keep the Germans back from Warsaw, the fields
were the oddest sight. The sun was pitilessly hot. The
golden corn was falling under strong strokes of the
scythe ; the peasant women, half of whom we knew and
all of whom knew us at least by sight, with their bell-
shaped skirts swinging and the coloured kerchiefs tied
round their heads dark and stained with sweat, were
striding up and down the laid swathes gathering and
binding; behind them the children, the dogs, the geese
of the Commune and a few gypsies gleaning, drinking
tepid water from bottles, laughing, quarrelling and
dashing the sweat from their faces. The women's
bodices clung to their soaked bodies; nobody, except
the idle gleaners, bothered even to look up to watch
the bus pass. Among the workers, a whole regiment of
sappers, naked to the waist, white dust showing in
queer patches on their broiled red skin, were flinging
up barbed-wire entanglements. Every few yards or so
steel posts were being driven into the ground. As soon
as a post went in a dozen or so sappers ran along from
the last one with what seemed the obscenest looking
garlands of barbed wire and festooned it to at least the
height of a man's head. It was easy to imagine anything
at all, entrails, quiet corpses, even queer crimson tropi-
cal plants, flowering on that barbed wire. For as far as
the eye could see it stretched away into the peaceful
green country. The storks walked about as usual, taking
no notice. The harvesters worked in and out among the
lines, taking no notice. The bus coughed along as usual.
A little farther along more sappers were putting up
field telephones.

21

Summer in Poland

We said very little. There seemed to be nothing to
say. One man on a seat near us rolled a cigarette and
spat and said:

'Of course, this is Their direct road. From East
Prussia. This is the way They'll come this time.'

That was our summer of 1 939. We stayed there four
days.

22

Chapter 2
MECHANIZED WAR

We went back once more. At the end of
August. On the 30th we were ordered a
total black-out. There was to be no showing
so much as a torch.

We said: 'We'd better go to the cottage. There's
money owing for milk. ... It would be a good thing
to bring those rugs here. . . .'

I have almost forgotten how we got there. It is not
very important, anyhow. A bus still went part of the
way. Dust-clouds hid the horizon. Troops, endlessly
marching, field kitchens, horses being brought in from
the villages, tanks, cattle, a few refugees. The worst
thing when we got there was the women coming to see
us. A lot of the men were gone already.

'You come from Warsaw — give us news — have
They crossed the frontiers? — when will They be here?
Are we to burn everything? — what does your honour
order us to do?'

We had no orders to give. We were only people who
happened to lease a house there. A. was not even
mobilized. We knew as little as they. We paid our few
debts and filled our rucksacks. The most of the things
we gave away. A peasant is always comforted by a gift.

23

Mechanized War

Weeping, they nevertheless eagerly hid among the
folds of their skirts and in their shawls all sorts of things
they would never be able to use. Jam jars, wooden
spoons, bathing shoes, cucumbers and olive oil jealously
shared out into all the small bottles that we could find :
there were the usual rows about somebody getting
more than somebody else. Now and then I threw some-
thing into Narew, something I couldn't take and
wouldn't give away. The river had never looked more
beautiful. A faint swell made the boats rock. A boy or
two were fishing, whistling, hoping for a good catch.
The water was still going down. I could see the half
rotten piers of the bridge blown up by the Russians in
1920 sticking higher out of the water than I had ever
seen them. An uncannily dry summer. Even in the
famous marshlands, a long way away to the north-east.
Getting ready for Hitler's tanks. Even then, a normal
spell of rains could have saved us. No rain came.

In the park below the palace, where the half-tame
white deer used to play, a sort of centre for the requisi-
tioning of horses had been made. Dead-tired men were
leading hundreds and hundreds of horses in day and
night. Somebody said there were thousands of horses
already. I think that was probably very exaggerated.
Still, we could hear and smell them, though not see
them, in that strange, sensual way in which you are
always conscious of horseflesh in the mass, even when
you are a long way away.

One woman whom I knew better than the others
came and kissed my sleeve. A hard-bitten, sour-
mouthed woman, who had known both Russians and
Germans, and who knew what to expect.

'Tell me the truth,' she said. 'You'll not lie to me.

24

Mechanized War

What am I to do when They come? I'll have to save
the children. My man is paralysed — you know that.
I'll leave him."

'Cross the river,' said A. 'Stay in the forest. What-
ever you do don't show any smoke. They'll go straight
on to Warsaw. I don't think They'll cross yet.'

He was wrong. We were all of us wrong, about nearly
everything. Except about one thing. We knew what
was coming. We preferred it to dishonour. We have
paid, probably, the most fearful price in all history. But
we were right to do it. We would do it again. None of
us, not one of us, with all our faults, with all our quar-
rels, with all our regrets, if put to the same test, but
would do the same thing again.

She nodded. She trusted us. I wonder where she is
now. Before she went she washed the floors for me. It
was not like me, she said rather sharply, to go away and
leave the place in a mess. We left bedding, a frying-pan
and a kettle, logs and a heap of dry sticks.

'Perhaps', I said, 'one of our soldiers will get a chance
of spending a night in here. I'd like him to be comfort-
able.'

'Shall I leave my rods?' asked my husband. 'Would
you like him to get some fishing?'

In the end he did leave them. They had come from
England and cost far more than we could afford. But
they didn't seem to matter very much. Finally we took
our rucksacks and were rowed across the river. It was
hopeless to think of trying the main road. A peasant
waited on the other side for us with a cart. We drove
for hours across the fields and through partly cleared
forest. When the horse and cart fell into too big a hole
we all helped to pull them out again. I thought of my

25

Mechanized War

family in Cheshire and wondered just what they were
doing and what they would think of travelling like this.

The peasant who drove us was in tearing spirits. He
had, I think, a blue mobilization card. He expected to
be called up soon. Perhaps it was some other colour; I
forget now sometimes which cards were which. He had
four little sons, he said. He could get killed with a clear
conscience. And he had sold his young horse to the
Army for a good price. His blue eyes laughed. He was
quite ready to be killed for Poland, but he had bar-
gained well with the officer. That pleased him. The only
thing, they had not given him money; only an order
to pay. His wife would have to take it to the Town
Hall. In some places they had been paying cash. Well,
she was a sensible woman, she would know what to do.
When he had sold the young horse, he had bought this
old mare for her. She would look after the land.

'But a good wife and a young horse, there's no sense
in that! Now my mind is easy.'

When he left us he suddenly said passionately to
A.:

'Your honour is an officer? Take me with you ! Take
me now! We can leave the horse. She'll find her own
way home. Ah, the Szwaby, the Szwaby, why are we
waiting? Let us attack them!'

We left him looking after us. He was only about
twenty-seven and had been in the regiment that guarded
Poland's frontiers, the homely, quite undashing, in-
valuable KOP, so far removed from traditions about
gold-shod horses, so completely the expression of all
the hard, careful post-Versailles work that has been
temporarily smashed to atoms ; so dogged, patient and
enduring; so Polish; therefore so certain to live again.

26

Mechanized War

My husband did not want to tell me that he envied
the young man. Without being told, I knew. He would
get to the front all right. For my husband, probably a
staff job and military supervision of factories. As a
matter of fact there wasn't even to be that. There was
no time. But we still expected a regular front ; idiotically
enough, considering our perfectly indefensible fron-
tiers. My own job was already allotted to me — I was
to stay in Warsaw, or not, according to what the orders
would be — but my French and English and other
special knowledge I had were supposed to make me
very valuable. What really happened was that I never
got a chance to do anything. Until much later, when I
helped to forge passports and fake visas and smuggled
people across frontiers; but that is another and queerer
story which can only be told after the war. Unless I am
lucky enough to have forgotten it by then. I am afraid
I shall remember it for ever.

We got back to Warsaw. There was some talk of
gas-masks but everyone knew there were none really for
the civilians. The Army, we were told, had been sup-
plied. That seemed to be the essential. Already work
had been started digging up the public gardens and all
the squares and constructing trenches. People said:
'They'll be covered over, I expect, like in Barcelona,
and all that. They're supposed to be very good.' A few
people, like ourselves, more pessimistic, thought they
were not really meant to be shelters at all. Obviously it
was going to be quite impossible to bury all the civilians
any other way.

The Royal Park was closed. The lodge-keeper said I
couldn't come in, although he had always allowed me
in before. Sometimes, when it was very, very cold, they

27

Mechanized War

closed it for fear of people staying in by mistake after
the lodge-keeper went home and getting frozen to
death. But we were friends and he had always let me in.
I knew what they were doing, anyhow, for an officer
rang me up and said he had been put on duty on the
anti-aircraft gun practically outside my windows, and
he hoped I now felt safer. I said, what about the squir-
rels, and he said he didn't know. There was no Army
order about the squirrels, but he expected they'd get off
better than either he or I. In which, so far as I know, he
was perfectly right. Later I never could see that they
took any notice of bombardments. The rooks, on the
other hand, and the swarms of pigeons that haunted
every roof and window-sill in Warsaw simply loathed
the bombing and protested almost as regularly and as
usefully as President Roosevelt.

On the 31st, at noon, the posters went up for a
general mobilization. Transport became completely
militarized. There were no more civilian trains. Cars
were called up. Bicycles. Horses. At every street corner
quiet, dogged groups of people stood before the posters;
the men whose classes had not yet been called felt as if
they had been left with one foot in the air. Still, it gave
them time to make arrangements about their families.
Once called, you had only two hours. The telephone
rang all day in our flat. 'I'm going, look after Janka for
me . . . they've called up Oskar, he's over fifty and I'm
only forty, but he's a specialist; perhaps they'll call me
to-morrow. ... I'm going; if you've any flour or coffee,
think of Olesia; she's Air Warden for my block and
she's forgotten to get food for herself . . . good-bye,
good-bye, my father and mother are stuck in the coun-
try, no more trains. If they get back to Warsaw, tell

28

Mechanized War

them I had to go at 2.30. No time to leave a letter. . . .
Hello, haven't they called you either? I've been down
to volunteer but they won't have me yet. So have you?
Well, then it's no good. Have to wait, won't we? . . .
Hello, do you know anybody in the world who has a
can of petrol?

Then there was dialling and dialling on our own
telephone, one number after another, and hearing the
bell ring and ring in empty rooms.

We discussed what to do with the little bitch who
could not be sent to the country.

'I want to see her put out myself,' I said. 'Before you
go. You know what she is ; it's no use pretending. She
can't do without us. When you go, and I have to be out
of the flat, for all I know out of Warsaw, she'll break
her heart. Even if a servant can stay here and a bomb
doesn't drop on the house, and perhaps even that won't
be possible. Perhaps all the women will be wanted. Let
us agree on it. Have her put out.'

Wherever I sat, she always came and laid her head
against my foot. If I changed from one chair to another,
she changed too. She never made a mistake as to
whether we were talking about her or not. Not men-
tioning her name was no good. She knew anyhow. Now
she lifted her head and looked first at one, then at the
other of us ; behaving as she always did when any kind
of packing was going on. A mad fear of being left
behind. An unreasonable fear, for we had only left her
once and she had been with us for more than five years.
The one time we had left her, she had refused even
water until we came back.

'All right,' said my husband. 'How?'

'Revolver. Do it yourself. I loathe these lethal cham-

29

Mechanized War

bers. There's always some part of a minute, perhaps
more, when they know.'

Irena brought me warm beer to make sleep. Insomnia
has been my bogey for years. All this night I slept
heavily, completely exhausted. When I woke on the
i st of September, Hitler's War had begun.

From dawn we were attacked all along our frontiers.
Those terrible frontiers, thousands of kilometres long.
German fliers wearing our uniforms, their own colours
painted out on their machines by our amaranth and
silver, almost annihilated our aerodromes, and, flying
almost as low as the hangars, machine-gunned their
garrisons. At Bogumin, it seems, a mechanized unit
crossed into Poland before anyone knew a war had
started. The same thing almost happened with train-
loads of troops crossing Pomerania. There was no ulti-
matum and no declaration of war. The German plan
was worked out to its last perfect detail and was then
supremely well executed. One should never under-
estimate the Germans.

Warsaw was bombed pretty late. I remember dress-
ing and going down to the street, and the concierge,
whose husband had been called up the day before,
saying :

'Is it real this time, or is it just black-out practice
again?' She was embarrassed. She didn't like to disturb
people in the house if it was just more rehearsals, and
on the other hand she had instructions and was duty-
bound to disturb them if it was the real thing.

I remember another woman saying to me in English,
which I forgot to be surprised at:

'Of course it's real. But I don't see what we can do.
Personally, I'm going back to bed.'

3°

Mechanized War
Then, quite suddenly, we heard a radio somewhere :

'Uwaga! Uwaga! Uwaga!'

which meant, 'Look out! Look out! Look out!' Then
all sorts of ciphers and positions, probably meant for
the anti-aircraft people. . . . Such and such a number
has passed such and such a zone. . . . Then another
zone . . . then another. Then: Warszawa! Warszawa!
And then there was a battle in the sky, and, important
to me, A. coming in and saying:

'Some of these lunatics are still asking whether it's
not manoeuvres. I came back because I was going down
the Aleja Ujazdowska and the whole yard of the Ameri-
can Embassy is full of cars and luggage. They're leav-
ing already. I thought I'd better see you. I must go to

see X , but I expect you'd like to come with me.

Have you had your coffee?'

Irena brought us coffee. She said:

'I wanted to wash the windows to-day. They say I
can't. Why can't I?'

'Don't be a fool,' I said. 'Keep away from the win-
dows. Just as far away as you can. And don't let them
persuade you to go sticking those silly white paper
crosses on them, either. They're no good, and I don't
want you with glass splinters in you.'

After that we went out and walked a bit towards the
town. There we found the trams running all right, but
two air-raid alarms got us off our tram twice. The first
time we were marshalled into a Garden Cafe, which
seemed inappropriate. There were no shelters, so we
stood about, talking to people in the way one does in
trains. Then the usual woman complained of being
tired of standing, and A. got a chair for her from some-

31

Mechanized War

where, which let him in for getting chairs for all the
women, of whom there were quite a lot. I don't know
where he got them from, and I know I stood the whole
time, feeling I had no right to my own husband's
chivalry; and it was hard to realize that this was the
war for which I had waited eight years. Later I was to
find out that the worst part of war is the endless waiting
for something; the dirt, the lack of any kind of coher-
ence, the feeling that there is no reason why this should
ever have begun and no reason why it should ever stop.
You want to catch a train at five in the morning, so you
go to the station at six the evening before to wait for it,
because you are not allowed to go there at any other
time, for some reason that nobody ever explains to you.
Perhaps nobody knows. Your mind, unable any longer
to feel pity, terror, grief, or any other sharp emotion,
attaches itself to what is nearest and least tremendous.
You scheme about how to wash out the rag that is your
handkerchief, because you have nothing else, and water
is being given out in drops. You concentrate all your
mind on pulling your boots off at the right moment,
because you have had high riding boots on for a week,
night and day, and if you pull them off you may just do
it the moment the bomb is going to fall, the drunk
peasant with the torch in his hand set fire to the tapes-
tries or the machine-gunning of the open trucks of your
refugee train begin again — then you will be caught
without your boots; once they come off, getting them
on again takes hours. This comes to seem infinitely
more important than the bomb, the machine-gun, or
the torch. After I had lost everything, when not a stone,
not a piece of paper, not a stitch of clothing remained
of what a few weeks before had been our homes and the

32

Mechanized War

accumulation of two people's whole lives ; when I never
knew whether I should eat again, sleep or wake, live or
die, from one second to another; when I had seen every-
thing I had cared for collapse like a house of cards, a
nation stretched on the cross, a fair country burning
behind me like a box of matches and hell itself opening
in front of me, there were whole days when I never
suffered anything. I was incapable of passion, even of
tears ; even of the desire for revenge. AH that was left
was the human instinct for some roof of my own, some
place to crawl into. I had none, so I made my roof, I am
conscious of it now, out of a big leather handbag I
carried. Everything necessary to my appalling existence
came within that handbag. I slept, when there was
sleep, with it tied to my arm. I never forgot it, never
laid it down ; saved it once from a heap of wreckage
from among the plunging hoofs of a dying horse ; when
my eyes were too full of blood to find it by sight I found
it by instinct. Even now, in London, I cannot give it
up. I sleep with it within reach of my hand. Everything
I have that I still care for but never dare to look at — a
pen, a button, a little tuppeny-ha'penny machine for
making cigarettes, one or two snapshots and a piece of
paper on which a lost hand once wrote a direction (for
I have no letters and nothing else at all) are still kept in
it. So is my passport, with which I came back to Eng-
land. When I go out, instead of looking for the things
other women look for, I instinctively look for my pass-
port and make sure it is safe. Without it I know that I
am lost. Without a passport you are nothing more than
a number in a concentration camp. It is the first thing
they take away from you. Once that is gone, they have
the right to take everything else.

c 33

Mechanized War

The second raid came very quickly after the first.
When it was over we went a long way, to an atelier
where my husband's most skilled artisans were working.
There, almost unexpectedly, the whole yard had been
torn up by bombs, and someone had lost an arm and a
house had lost a chimney. Children, of course, were
already playing in the pits made by the bombs: water
was oozing up, and the children's mothers were scream-
ing at them for making their frocks dirty. I remember
another battle about then, and A. counting little boxes
full of files for aluminium, and an apprentice who could
not keep his mind on counting them too; and then a
taxi and meeting my brother-in-law who said he had
been called up; and then more coffee in a cafe in the
Street of the New World, then the most fashionable
street in Warsaw, now a heap of ashes, and watching
German bombers rather a long way away and our
fighters going up to meet them. And after that the visit

to X , who unfortunately must also wait until after

the war to be written about, and the overwhelming dis-
appointment for both of us of being told to wait — there
would be plenty of work, but later — later — it was
necessary to organize. X. was the man on whom the
usefulness of both of us depended. Also, a good deal of
his own usefulness depended on us.

The streets were already blazing with posted bills.
The one I see most clearly now is of a loathsome, strang-
ling hand, branded with the swastika and, transfixing
and pinning it down, a dagger and the word WARA
all across it in great red letters. It is impossible to trans-
late the word. It is what you might shout to a man-
killing brute of a dog as he tried to fasten his teeth in
your throat. . . .

34

Mechanized War

Already the newspapers had disappeared. Special
editions of half a page had taken their place. There was
an official Staff communique, and the President's pro-
clamation, in which he attested before God and man
that there had been a treacherous and brutal aggression,
that the enemy had crossed our frontiers and that
Poland had never sought a war. Later in the afternoon
other sheets appeared, with the same news and the pic-
ture of the Queen of Poland, who is also the Mother
of God, and to whose titles the Poles have added the
crown of Poland.

We ate in a restaurant in the open air, to the sound
of marching feet, armoured cars rolling over the cobbles
and the creaking wheels of string after string of pea-
sants' carts coming in from the country with provisions
requisitioned for the Army. The peasants, for the most
part, drove with their air of stolid indifference. The
Szwaby had come again. There was to be another war.
Very well. Each would be called up when his time came.
In the meantime, he thought more about his horse, the
most valuable thing, almost certainly, that he had in the
world.

On every eighth cart or so, a soldier with a rifle
was perched. Frequently he looked dead tired; almost
always stolid and indifferent like the peasants he was
convoying. Most of them were peasants themselves.
There has been too much talk always of the famous
legerete, like the equally famous charme Slave. These
men have neither legerete nor charme, but they are
dogged and terrible fighters, with an endurance and a
power of recovery unlike that of any soldiers in the
world. No army of occupation will ever break that
spirit. No enemy patrol in Poland will ever dare to walk

35

Mechanized War

about in bands of less than five or six — and even then
they are afraid.

When we went home, Irena was still rather sulky.
She said it was a great deal of trouble turning off the
gas every time the sirens went. Must she really do it?

She must, I said. She must also see to the windows,
leaving the outside pair slightly open and the inside
pair must be shut and hasped. She must also not run off
water needlessly, as it would be needed everywhere for
putting out fires, and she must keep a torch, her identity
papers, bandages, and some food within reach at every
hour of the day and night. I had no idea, I said, of
allowing her to be a nuisance, and she might as well
stop now. This did her a lot of good.

I then, very seriously I remember, began a diary.
Just a factual one. Nothing about emotions or hopes or
fears. I wrote that I would keep it so long as I survived
the war, because there would be plenty of war corres-
pondents and plenty of historians but probably few
records kept by the ordinary civilian exposed to at least
as much danger as the Army, unarmed, and fed only
on rumour. Our news service was already ceasing to
exist.

That solemn diary I actually kept, until first five
wounds in the head physically prevented me from
writing it. Later I wrote it up again, only to abandon
it finally when I became a prisoner of the Bolsheviks.
I not only felt sure that it would be taken from me,
but I also knew that to the ignorant and prejudiced
nothing is more suspicious than any appearance of
belonging to the pen and ink classes. Most of the Soviet
officers could barely read and write their own language.
Probably the diary still exists, hidden among other

36

Mechanized War

papers in the Great House in Polesie where I left it.
That is, if the Russians have ended by making a collec-
tive farm of the place. If they have not done that, then
very likely the White Russian peasants have burnt it. A
big blaze is their idea of putting everything right. That
will be the fourth time it has been a bonfire in the life-
time of one of my kindest and dearest of friends, its
mistress; who is now well over eighty, whose earliest
memories are of exile in Siberia, and who literally, with
her own hands, in whose veins runs some of the noblest
blood in Poland, built it up inch by inch after the last
war, when she was more than sixty years old.

37

Chapter 3
POLAND FIGHTS ALONE

Here, in London, away from all that agony and
horror, in a clean bed beside a bright fire, I
cannot sleep; even morphia will not put me off.
For almost two years, when I lived among the musi-
cal pines and gentle flower-starred slopes of the lesser
Carpathians, soothed by the sound beneath my windows
of a mountain river tumbling over stones, in my own
home, with what was dearest to me in the world always
beside me, with my own dogs and flowers and books,
secure and beloved, sleep played me the same trick.
Insomnia, like nostalgia, is an enemy who never fights
fair. A pair of diseases that are past any kind of doctor-
ing, they take no account of probabilities ; and they are
always certain of victory, and too much success has
made them wanton, capricious and slightly insane.
They will leave you alone when you are most confi-
dently expecting them and fall on you when, for the
briefest reprieve, you think you have shaken them off.
And there is no doing anything at all with them; no
possibility, for instance, of getting fairly used to them.
Each thought of a lost country is as sharp as the million
that went before it; one sleepless night is exactly as
unbearable as all the others you have had before and all

38

Poland Fights Alone

the others that are waiting for you to get to them. At
the end of your desired tunnel there is always the same
excruciating daylight, glaring and white. Of this pair a
human being really need be afraid, because so far as I
know they are the only malignant diseases of which you
cannot die.

From the first day of the war in Poland until the day
when I first slept in an hotel in a neutral country, tem-
porarily, at any rate, secure, I was not only able to sleep ;
I could not keep awake. I have lain on the bare ground
among troops, horses, refugees, railwaymen, wounded
and dying and dead, in bitter cold with no food and no
water, badly wounded myself, desiring keenly to keep
awake ; and sleep has knocked me out as though it were
hitting me on the head. For nine and ten hours it has
been impossible to waken me. Once in Brzesc-nad-
Bugiem when there were no more sirens and no more
radio and no more anti-aircraft defence, it was neces-
sary for the people in the town to listen for the raiders
themselves. In the house where I was passing the night,
we divided the time into watches of two hours. When
your watch came on you went outside, walked up and
down or sat on the steps if you could stand the cold and
had any clothes to keep it out with, and listened for the
sound of the engines coming over. You could always
hear them; I don't know what mixture of petrol or
substitutes for it the Germans used over Poland, but it
made their engines as noisy as wooden rattles. My
watch was never kept. At two o'clock when the man
coming off was to waken me I was so dead asleep that
he went downstairs again and carried on till four. After
all, he had had some sleep about three days earlier, he
said next day: he was by no means in a bad way. In

39

Poland Fights Alone

Polesie, after the Russians came, when the local Soviet
was keeping us prisoners, the men from the estate and
the village, hundreds of them, in stinking sheepskins
and feet wrapped in rags, would come and make us turn
on the radio for them until we could hear Moscow
speaking. It was not so easy as it sounds. The valves and
batteries were at their last gasp, and there was no possi-
bility of renewing them. Then, too, in exactly the same
way, sleep used to fell me to the ground. When the
Komitet guards were absorbed in listening, propping
their chins on the butts of their rifles and smiling their
childlike, astonished smiles, I would stealthily leave the
room behind the backs of some of the house-servants,
who half wanted to betray me and half couldn't help
clinging in spite of themselves to the ways in which they
and all their forerunners had been born — one of our
guards could never remember not to kiss his mistress's
hands and mine as we sat down to whatever breakfast
they gave us — and lie down on the floor or on a chair
in the next room and sleep, perhaps for five minutes. I
could not have done otherwise to save, not my own life,
but lives that were far dearer to me. If only I could
sleep like that now! But from my first day across a
neutral frontier, my old enemy has turned up again,
grinning. He is here now, watching me write this, at
3.25 a.m. He will be here to-morrow.

On the afternoon and evening of the first day of the
war, I slept. At ten o'clock I woke, drank beer again, ar-
ranged two rucksacks, a dog-lead and furs beside the bed,
fought against the obsession of the telephone, and turned
over to sleep again. A man rang at the door and said:

'If they come over again, do you want to be wak-
ened?'

40

Poland Fights Alone

'What for?'

'Well, you could go out to the trenches. . . . Some
people are going to. I have to ask you. Do as you like.'

We smiled. So did he. The Roman augurs, they say,
used to exchange smiles, without speaking, when they
passed each other in the temples.

'Do you live in this house?'

'Yes. Above you, as it happens. You once came up
and made a hell of a row because our wireless was on
after ten.'

'I remember. Well, you were pretty rude, too. And
besides, I could have told the police about you. Is that
St. Bernard yours, then?'

'Yes. That bitch of yours gets on quite passably with
him. Your servant and ours take them out together last
thing at night.'

'She always gets on passably with big dogs. What
she won't tolerate is her own sex, or any animal that's
white, I don't know why. Well, I suppose this is the
last thing at night now. What are you doing about your
St. Bernard?'

'I don't know. What are you doing?'

'Well, we meant to do something. But we haven't
yet. Why are you running this? You're not the Air
Warden.'

'No. He's gone. Went after dinner.'

Silence. Then my husband saying:

'He was a doctor. They seem to want all the doctors.
Are you on all night? Want any help?'

'No, my wife is sitting up with me. Won't go to bed.
I'm letting her have her own way. She's got three
brothers fighting already. The youngest of all's in Wes-
terplatte. Her father's in Poznan. On the frontier. Well,

4i

Poland Fights Alone

good night. Sure you don't want to be wakened?'
'Sure. Good night.'

Westerplatte. Tiny fort in Danzig. Verdun of
Poland. You couldn't make much comment on that.
Everybody knew, the garrison first of all, that nobody
would get out of Westerplatte. Every few hours the
garrison was receiving greetings and messages from the
Commander-in-Chief of the Army. For a few days they
were still able to answer. After that nothing, but the
knowledge that they were still fighting. No help, no
supplies, no messages, even, could be got to them.
They were cut off from the rest of Poland and from
land ; bombed and shelled from the earth, the sea, and
the sky. Finally there was a day when a Polish voice
said on the radio (the mysteries of Warszawa One and
Two and how they managed to speak at all cannot be
cleared up now, and may never be ; too many of those
who could have told us will be dead): The prayers of
all Poland are desired for the souls of the garrison of
Westerplatte. Poland understood. It was over. There
was not one of them left alive.

While I slept I was still asking myself the question
I had been asking myself all day: What were England
and France going to do? I woke up on the 2nd asking
it. I went about keeping myself from voicing it. People
telephoned and, intending to ask it, although I had no
possible means of knowing more than they did, were
too uneasy or too kind to make me hear that too, and
rang off, leaving it unsaid.

I went about all day, already accustomed to constant
and heavy bombardments, to the sky being filled with
battles, to the house trembling and the windows rattling,
to the first shortage of water, an almost total cessation

42

Pol a fid Fights Alone

of taxis and buses, to the lack of newspapers, to no news
on the wireless, to official communiques that said noth-
ing whatever : almost used to it when a little fair girl of
about seven was killed in the street outside our park by
a piece of shrapnel from the blue and radiant sky. I
remember saying: 'Yes, yes,' as if I had been saying it
for ever and had expected nothing different when more
and more news, unofficial, disastrous and certain, kept
coming in from the different Fronts, when a man casu-
ally talked with in a cafe told me of a church blown sky
high at, I think, Legionow, just beyond Warsaw; of
civilians who had been sheltering there undistinguish-
able from the rest of the charred rubbish, of great
Government factories burning at Biala Podlaska; of the
men and their families buried beneath the ruins of the
Wola quarter ; I felt as if that too were something with
which I was infinitely familiar and had accepted and
knew how to bear. The question in my mind was
unbearable. To ease it, I went out into the town. I
remember buying a duck for the next day's dinner, and
a whole basketful of chrysanthemums and pears in a
covered market-place. A radio was roaring on a butcher's
stall. From the church of Ostra Brama, at Wilno, built
above the street in the great wall of the city, an ancient
Polish hymn came over the air. After the shrine of
Czestochowa, Ostra Brama is the most sacred earth in
Poland. Later, I saw the Bolshevik Army there, with
their machine-guns, their tanks, their little red stars,
and their red flags. Later still, I saw them march out
and yet another army, the third to carve up Poland,
marching in. As remorselessly as if I had foreseen all
that — and indeed, although I still had some kind of
hope, I did foresee it only too well — the question in my

43

Poland Fights Alone

mind kept on torturing me. As the afternoon ended I
went home, walking slowly along the Street of the New
World and past the plain-fronted British Embassy al-
most on the corner, where policemen were speechlessly
grouped about the gates. In the courtyard cars and
luggage and a few silent people; one of them a British
officer. I do not know, nor want to know, who he was ;
he was not very young; I never noticed his rank.

The policemen let me pass in. It was all too simple
to be dramatic. I don't think he was even surprised.

I said:

'Listen — your uniform — I can't help doing this. I'm
sorry. We're both English. Is England coming in?'

This is the story of a civilian. It is, in fact, in another
form, the diary I began to write on the first day of the
war. Chance brought it about that I saw and took part
in far more than I could ever have expected, but that
first entry needs no changing — to the end I remain the
civilian, caught in a machine of whose working I had
no real knowledge, battered about by the horrible ebb
and flow of rumour, with all landmarks and seeming
certainties underwater, suffering in war, I still think,
infinitely more than the combatant.

On the events, each one fatally precipitating the next,
we have lived through since 1918, and the decisions of
1939, history will some day pronounce its verdict. I am
not an historian and I have no verdict to give. I am not
capable of giving one. There has been and will be noth-
ing written here that is not the strictest truth, as I know
it, but only that; and that means fragments and night-
mare glimpses and words removed from almost the
whole of their context and a view darkened by personal
anguish. A shaken kaleidoscope, true in every one of its

44

Poland Fights Alone

details but not the whole picture. Unlike the historian,
the civilian and even the soldier in wartime has no per-
spective and no known result, against which to take any
kind of measurement. Every word, every act, every
involuntary ejaculation recorded here, is fact. But the
meaning of these facts, more often than not, is hidden.
A day may come when the very things that were hardest
to bear will be seen as the things that were the best
designed to bring order out of the kaleidoscope. The
first and hardest of these things is what seemed at the
time to us, waiting in a night of appalling darkness, the
inconceivable and fatal delay of the Allies in coming to
Poland's aid. There was the visit of Poland's Foreign
Minister to Berchtesgaden. There was the visit of von
Ribbentrop to Warsaw. After these, the die was cast in
Europe. Hitler and his advisers faced the fact that
Poland, in spite of the geographical position and all the
other causes which had forced her into a seeming,
though cold, rapprochement with Nazi Germany,
would never accept their terms. An acquiescent Poland,
charmed by the siren song of German racialism, willing
to forgo her ancient Latin and liberal culture in favour
of Teutonic penetration and a Nazi protectorate, cynic-
ally abandoning her inherited role in the East and her
centuries-old tie with France in the West, could and
would have been allowed to live and even prosper in the
shadow of the Third Reich. An independent, honour-
able Poland should and would be swept from the map.
From February onwards an attentive ear could al-
ready distinguish the sounds of what was to come. The
wings of Hitler's bombers were already vibrating for
flight. In March the fall of the Slovakian frontier set a
sign and seal on what was already certain. In April a

45

Poland Fights Alone

typical Hitlerian ultimatum demanded Danzig and a
corridor within the 'corridor' ; in other words, complete
domination of the Vistula and the military subjugation
of Poland without a shot being fired. After the inevi-
table Polish refusal, a British guarantee was spontane-
ously offered to Poland and soberly and after delibera-
tion accepted. All through that last, brilliant summer,
the wheel once set spinning, gathered staggering pace.
A treaty of mutual aid was signed between the new
Allies. Poland, always Anglophile, was exalted. I shall
not easily forget the noble enthusiasm with which the
new friendship became an article of Polish faith. The
terms of the treaty were published. Rightly or wrongly
the average citizen in Poland believed that what we
were promised was immediate military intervention in
the event of unprovoked aggression.

The patience of the country, stretched to breaking-
point, refused nevertheless to break. An interminable
series of insults, public and official; abduction and
murder of Poles on the German-Polish frontiers, the
outrage of all that took place in Danzig, were all en-
dured with a moderation that amazed Europe. Accord-
ing to no less an authority than M. D'Ormesson of
the Figaro^ this attitude of the Polish Government had
its origin in the guarantees given by Great Britain.
There was plenty of feeling among Poles that what had
already been done constituted an aggression and that
we should at once begin to reply to violence by armed
defence. The Government, in constant communication
with London and Paris, held the people back and called
for more and more patience. In the meantime, the
German staff had fixed on the i st of September. The
hour struck, the blow was dealt. Poland, bloody and

46

Poland Fights Alone

already reeling, turned her eyes to the West, and, ask-
ing for bread, received, or seemed to receive, a stone.
For three days, with our terrible exposed frontiers and
in a sunshine so glaring that a fly could not crawl unseen
from above on the surface of the earth, we were com-
pletely alone. On the third day there was no longer any
doubt of what the end must be. Poland, once again,
had been assassinated. On the third day our Allies
declared war.

For the ordinary British visitor or official in Poland
during those days of waiting, I believe that the waiting
was torture. To an individual like myself, married into
a Polish family, familiar with the country and its lan-
guage, literature and history, a Polish subject, Catholic,
intensely Polish in sentiment, it was even more than
this. It was the discovery that, in spite of the long pass-
age of years, in spite of the ties of custom, religion,
language, great love, friendships, and what is known as
a stake in the country, I was ineradicably British, after
all. If Poland could so gallantly commit an acknow-
ledged act of suicide, how was it to be endured if Eng-
land conceivably fell short? It was inconceivable; but
night and day one lived with the possibility of it already
advanced by so many more minutes, so many more
hours. I do not think that the Polish people themselves
ever doubted that England would keep to her word.
They were bewildered, they groped about for explana-
tions, but their imagination could not take so monstrous
a leap as that. I confess that mine did. That would not
have been possible if England's honour had not been
dearer to me than it was to the Poles.

The Poles, relieved of that frightful double burden,
nevertheless stood aghast. Immediate military interven-

47

Poland Fights Alone

tion as we saw it meant war in the West from the first
hour in which the enemy attacked our frontiers; the
bombing of our open towns and villages, the use of
mustard-gas and other Rightfulness, the machine-gun-
ning from the air of isolated field workers, trains loaded
with refugees, and even herds of cattle standing in the
fields, must entail, we thought, the immediate bom-
bardment of, at least, military and strategic positions
in Germany. War in the West must have immediately
relieved our fronts against which the German staff had
thrown five armies. The bombing of Germany would
have carried an international war on to purely German
territory, the one test of endurance that the people of
Germany are not morally prepared to pass ; and it would
have relieved our aerodromes, our centres of mobiliza-
tion, the network of our railway system, our General
Headquarters, and our defenceless towns and villages
from the mass pressure of the three thousand and more
bombers which Hitler was sending over three times a
day. Yet in the West only the politicians were speaking;
the guns were still silent. In that flawless September
sky, only the wings of Hitler's raiders, so long stretched
for flight, ceaselessly drummed. If the Germans ad-
vanced rapidly, it was increasingly evident that the
Russians would advance, too. There would be nothing
left of Poland. There was no official confirmation, but
how fast the Germans were advancing admitted of no
doubt. In a few days they would be within striding dis-
tance of Warsaw. Catastrophe, irrevocable catastrophe,
was imminent. In the meantime our Allies were not
moving. From the West, no help. At home, the end of
a world.

For what it is worth, this is a record. It is nothing

48

Poland Fights Alone

else. If this book has any value, then it is as a document.
As a summing-up, an appraisal, as anything but a plain
tale of the days as they came, and the experiences that
came with them, it has no pretensions at all. Insepar-
able from those experiences is the memory of waiting
for England. Once again, if anybody in this narrative
seems to have judged England hardly for that waiting,
it was I. It was not the Poles. Their belief in England's
ultimate aid was never shaken.

The British officer in the Embassy courtyard peered
at me in the twilight. Although we could scarcely see
each other, of all the faces I have seen since, out of all
the grimaces of pain, of grief and madness, of ravenous
hunger, of heroism, cruelty, of every kind of torture, I
still remember his. After a very long time, a time
measured by the creak of the refugees' carts and the
straining harness of horses that had been on the march
since morning, endlessly following each other up the
Avenue of the Third of May, he said, heavily and as if
he were being put to death:

'I don't know . . . there is no news . . . what do you
expect me to tell you? . . . nobody has told me.1

Then, again:

'They say the wireless is jammed. You can't get any-
thing. Yes, the wireless. ... I expect we shall know
to-morrow.'

To-morrow seemed a long way off. Even longer, I
have thought, to him than it did to me.

I began to go away. How glad he must have been.
Before I went I said one more thing. I never meant to
say it.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'perhaps . . . England is going to
let us down? Do you think she is?'

d 49

Poland Fights Alone

'Oh, no,' he said. You could see he had been repeat-
ing that to himself all day, and he was wearing the
British uniform. 'Oh, no,' he said, smiling, and his look
then was worse than when he had not smiled. 'Oh, no.
That couldn't happen. To-morrow the wireless is sure
to be working. We'll have all the news to-morrow. It's
the wireless really — we can't get through to anybody.
Did I tell you? They say it's jammed.'

That night, the 2nd of September, the first train-
loads of wounded came into Warsaw. Soldiers have told
me since that the Germans came into Poland in a
column of fire and iron fifteen kilometres wide; nothing
but fire and iron, armoured and plated and rolling like
the cars of Juggernaut over those terrible dry roads
where they would have been bogged for weeks if the
heavens had only sent us a little rain. Not a man on
foot. Nothing for cavalry to do. No chance of the
bayonet fighting against which the Germans have never
stood and never will. And we were alone.

The wounded men, looking very long and flat, lay
on stretchers roughly covered with blankets. Horribly
wounded. The first fruits of the Great Mechanized
War. Their teeth were shut, but they opened their eyes
and looked up into the faces of those who were waiting
to help them — all that night the women of Warsaw
stood on the stations, hoping to give them at least a
cigarette to smoke, something hot to drink.

They did not even hear the questions. . . . Coffee?
Tea? What would you like? Shall I light you a cigar-
ette? . . .

Their teeth shut and their eyes wide open, they
searched the friendly faces; their voices became quite
strong, even authoritative.

5°

Poland Fights Alone

'News . . .' they demanded. 'News. . . . How are they
fighting in the West? . . . Are they bombing Germany?
. . . Is England in?

S1

Chapter 4

ENGLAND DECLARES WAR

1 etween the house we lived in and the next house,
also on a corner, used to run one of the quietest
streets I have ever known. A few houses, set very
far back in gardens with bright lawns and, in their
flowering time, whole groves of cherry, lilac, and acacia
trees all foaming white, looked out on to it. No traffic
went through it. The only noise you ever heard there at
night or in the early morning was the furious barking
of the watch-dogs behind the locked gates, and the
singing of a woman whose name I never knew, who
used to sing for herself alone, without accompaniment,
in an unlighted room at the top of a house with a
green door and dark blue shutters. Very often she sang
scales. Whatever she sang, you could always tell that
she cared for what she was doing. Whoever she was, and
I think she was a great artist, it was in work that she
believed. Very often, during that last summer, very late
at night when my own work was finished, or in the very
early morning before it began, I would put a long coat
over some pyjamas and my bare feet into slippers and
walk up and down that street, with my husband and our
little Irish terrier. After or before the heat of the day the
street used to be heavenly cool; usually the concierges

52

England Declares War

with long hose-pipes had just finished watering the
whole length of it. Along each side of the street there
was a row of flowering chestnuts and double rows of
aromatic box almost as high as my head. It was between
these double rows that we liked to walk. Sometimes, I
remember, after all, another sound would faintly chime
in with the singing; never disturb it. A clink of iron on
cobblestones. That would be, just beyond the chest-
nuts, the mounted police riding out towards the city or
riding in from it to their barracks in the Street of the
Cadets.

On the 2nd of September, at about seven o'clock in
the morning, an enemy plane flew so low over our house
as almost to tear its wings, turned away from the park
and the anti-aircraft guns hidden there, and, I was told
later, was shot down almost over Vistula, out of sight.
This time I was fully dressed. No more strolling in a
long coat over pyjamas. Our quiet street was no longer
very quiet. From a few kilometres away came the almost
ceaseless sound of artillery. No music came from the
top room of the house with the blue shutters. Fire
engines dashed wildly towards some quarter where
incendiary bombs were falling. A moment later another
fire engine at the top of its speed actually cut through
our street itself; the first traffic I had ever seen there.
The firemen were not smiling, buckling their belts and
settling their helmets, as one had always seen them.
They were silent and grimy and fully equipped; they
had probably been out for hours. Already the city was
full of fires. Very soon it would not be possible to put
them out. In the direction of Wilanow, where visitors
to Poland used to go to walk under the giant trees to
hear tales of the great King Sovieski and his love for his

53

ILngland Declares War

French wife, whose palace of Wilanow he filled with
Turkish splendours and, they say, the finest collection
of Ming porcelain in the world, the sky was full of
explosions and white curling shrapnel puffs, and the
dull report of fairly heavy guns. As a matter of fact, we
should have been indoors anyhow. Once the sirens
went, everybody was supposed to take shelter.

We left the street of our morning and evening
memories and went in and stood on a balcony, watching
the battle over Wilanow. In the Street of the Cadets,
about a hundred workmen had been busy, all the last
half of August, laying down drains. Now a score or so,
not yet called up, were still at it. The foreman became
crimson with anger every time the sirens blew and his
men came popping up out of cover to count the raiders
and watch the direction they took. So long as there was
no raid they stayed down in what was in fact a perfect
air-raid shelter, several metres below the road level,
getting on with laying the pipes. A good many of the
pipes had already been cracked by distant explosions,
but I daresay they laid those too. What could it
matter? As soon as there was danger, up they came;
stood on wheelbarrows and climbed railings and raised
their arms, pointing angrily and mockingly at the
Szwaby and their machines. I said to them from my
balcony:

'You are a lot of lunatics, gentlemen. Why don't you
listen to your foreman? What's the good of behaving
like that?'

They laughed again at my queer accent.

'Where does the lady come from? Is the lady an
American?'

'I'm Polish,' I said.

54

England Declares War

We went on talking. The concierge and a woman
from a dry-cleaning shop who knew me joined in.

'She's English,' they said, 'but her husband is
Polish. She loves Poland.'

A score of faces eagerly looked up into my wretched
one. Blue Polish eyes smiled up at me ardently and
affectionately.

'England is a great country,' they said. 'The English
are all gentlemen, like us poor Poles. But the English
are Poland's friends.'

Only the foreman looked at me doubtfully. He had
a wireless, he said. Had I one? No, I had always hated
them, but I was sorry now. Now it was too late ; there
were no more to be bought. Then I had no news?
Before we had left home, very early, he had had his on.
There was nothing about England. What was she wait-
ing for? Was Germany not to be attacked? It would
become clear to us in the end, of course. The English,
yes, the English were a nation of gentlemen. But what
frontiers we had! How little money! Did the English
understand about that?

I said, yes, I thought that they did. That I knew no
more than he did. That, of course, it would be all right.
Then I went in and ate, I had the impression, some
sawdust for breakfast, and the day passed, and it was
that evening that the first of the wounded came. On the
morning of the 3rd, at about the same time, I went
with my husband and Irena to the house on the opposite
corner, across the street that had been quiet once, and
walked through a garden full of birds and into a little
chapel to pray. The house was the House of St. Ladislas
and a hostel and refuge for the paralysed poor. All that
summer, three times a day, Bronka or Irena had run

55

England Declares War

across with the newspapers as we finished reading them
and, when we made jam, with a pot of whatever had
turned out best, or with tobacco, cheap and black like
Maryland, and fresh fish when it came up from the
cottage on Narew, and sometimes just some soup.

At the sound of the sirens there was no need for any
Air Warden to ask here : 'Do you want to go out to the
trenches?' If they had wanted to, these paralysed old
men and women could not have stirred. I have never
heard what did finally happen in this place. Probably,
like the Children's Hospital at Otwock, bombed with-
out respite on the second day of the war until hardly a
smear remained on the surface of the earth to witness
that here had been either children or bricks and mortar,
and like every other hospital and refuge in Warsaw, it
was a picked and early target for the fury of the German
raiders. If so, it is well with my helpless friends. As the
Russian peasant story-teller, smiling for joy, so often
ended his story: 'God has forgiven them their sins.
They are dead.'

Mass was said and prayers for Poland. Both chapel
and courtyard were crowded with kneeling and weeping
Poles. A Pole is not ashamed to shed tears before the
catastrophe of his native land. Hearts were breaking
with a sorrow that had little or nothing to do with per-
sonal loss. The soil of Poland, so often and so frightfully
violated, is regarded by the Poles with a sentiment
which has no counterpart here in the West. Patriotism
is passionate and articulate. The Englishman is never
articulate about England because he has not needed to
be. Exactly the opposite is true of the Poles. Quite
literally, I think there can hardly be a foot of Polish
earth which has not been drenched, over and over again,

56

England Declares War

in the best blood of a generation. The phrase is hack-
neyed enough and by repetition all phrases lose the
awfulness of their first utterance. But, in Poland, such
words are simply true, and truly awful. To understand
Poland, to understand what a decision she took in
determining to resist German aggression at whatever
cost to her people and to the soil, even to begin to
imagine what are her sufferings now, it is necessary to
remember this.

There is a hymn, as old as Poland's martyrdom,
which we sang on our knees in that chapel on the 3rd of
September, and which I have heard again here in the
poor church of the Polish Mission in Islington. As I
make this record, as I go about my business, as I lie
and long for sleep, wherever I am and whatever I am
doing, and whoever's voice I seem to be listening to,
the words of that hymn are never out of my ears. From
thirty-six million of murdered and dying there comes
to me one great cry:

Lord, what of Poland? So many years now, and
so long!

I remember very well when I first began to learn
about Poland. Her literature seemed to me something
entirely strange. Her extraordinary heritage of poetry
that is full of national vision was something altogether
out of my experience. The great line of Polish poets,
who were also her great line of patriots and seers, spoke
a language which had very little meaning for me. At
this time I was living in Paris in the Champs de Mars.
Every time I crossed the Place de L'Alma there was the
statue of Adam Mickiewicz, of whom, as their guest
and professor, Paris and the College of France are still

57

'England Declares War

proud; Polish poet, mystic and political exile, in whose
writings I first found that curious and profoundly-
Polish philosophy which has been given the name of
Messianism. I did not understand that philosophy at all.

Even when I had lived in Poland I was still far from
understanding it. It seemed to me extravagant, exalted,
and even a little arrogant. It seemed to me too terrific
a claim for any nation to make ; that it was not possible
in sober truth, that it was even in pretty bad taste to
make such a profession of faith. Long before 1939 I
had come nearer to it. In the months before the war, I
divined it. To-day, seeing what I have seen, knowing
what I know, much of which will not be written here,
for it can never be written anywhere, I affirm it. It is
Poland, in Europe, whose hands and feet once again
are pierced by nails. In Poland there is agony and
bloody sweat as in the Garden of Gethsemane. In their
own bodies, on the trees, -the Poles are bearing, among
the nations, what Jesus Christ bore for the world. In
their own bodies, too, they will see a day of Resurrec-
tion. It is not finished. It is only begun.

The chaplain addressed the people. What he said
was very short and very much to the point. This, he
said, was the third day of the war. We had suffered,
but we must be prepared for suffering infinitely more
great. That even the history we all knew so well could
provide no parallel for what was now before us. The
object of the German attack was the complete annihila-
tion of Poland. Materially it was all too likely that they
would seem to succeed. Every kind of frightfulness and
horror, surpassing even our knowledge or imagination,
would be employed. What an Army of Occupation,
under the orders now of Gestapo, could mean, nobody

58

TLngland Declares War

needed to be in doubt. The Polish soil that we loved
would be stamped into a bloody morass. Everywhere
the lamp of freedom would be extinguished ; men and
women and even children would be tortured, maimed
and executed for the crime of loving their country. The
altars of Poland would be thrown down and her Holy
of Holies desecrated by the foulest deeds. It was well,
it was right, to be prepared, to entertain no fond hopes,
to measure to the last bitter drop the depth of the cup,
which Poland, true to her history, had elected to drink.
In a few short days, very many of us might be home-
less ; some of us would have given our lives ; that would
be the easiest and the most enviable of sacrifices. In a
few short days, we might already know thirst and hun-
ger. Parting and bereavement was upon us already;
and, for those who were parents of young children, an
agony before which his own tongue halted, and which
they could take only to the Queen of Poland, the Mother
whose Son was also put to death before her eyes. But
whatever the path before us, whatever remained still
unknown, the lamp that seemed to be extinguished
must go on burning for ever. Poland, wiped from the
map, must go on existing, where she had ever existed,
in Polish hearts. The iron crown of martyrdom, which
had ever been fitted to the bleeding brow of the nation,
was being held out to us again. This was the tra-
ditional crown of Poland which, it had briefly seemed,
a new generation was to be spared the wearing, and
which our generation, and our fathers', had already
worn.

He paused. Of all the congregation he was the only
one whose eyes were dry. He was past the relief of tears.
Then he said again, gently and sadly:

59

ILngland Declares War

'It is part of our heritage. God has willed it so. God
has called us once again to martyrdom. That is why the
enemy has passed our frontiers, wasted our cities, and
is rapidly approaching our capital. That is why, on the
third day of the war, we have no sign from our Allies.
That is why such a country even as England is still
waiting to fulfil her pledges. On the third day of the
war, crushingly exposed and outnumbered, we are still
alone.'

Nobody looked at me. Nobody thought of me. There
was not the shadow of a reproach in the voice of the
chaplain. He was speaking from the altar. His whole
soul was with his people. Politics meant nothing to him.
No kind of consideration of what, after all, was a ques-
tion of statesmanship, was implied. But the fiery trial of
that moment is one of the many things I shall never
cease to remember. My intention had been to go up to
the altar. I remember turning away. I was British, after
all, before I was Polish. Until Britain came in, I would
be her scapegoat. I would not approach the altar where
hundreds of Poles were kneeling in tears to receive, as
likely as not, their Last Sacrament.

It was foolish. It was most unnecessary. It was self-
dramatization, anything you like. But it was also the
war in Poland, of which this is my most imperfect
record.

A little after noon, a friend telephoned. My husband
lifted the receiver.

'Is your wife there?' said a voice neither of us will
ever hear again. 'Tell her it's all right. England is in.'

60

Chapter 5
SEPTEMBER 3rd

For hours I was part of a crowd.
The whole population of Warsaw cheered and
wept in the streets. With the crowd I surged for-
ward against the railings outside the British Embassy.
I fell back before the commands and entreaties of the
police cordon. I climbed on to the running-boards of
cars as they crawled in and out of the courtyard. I
surged forward again to the same railings, fell back
again before the same cordon, and shouted the same
things over and over again until I was nearly voiceless
and senseless. And all the time I was not even in exist-
ence. A thing called the crowd had taken my place. The
wheel of an outgoing car did not crush my foot ; only a
foot belonging to the crowd. It was not I who had my
ribs nearly driven in by the pressure on both sides and
was most uselessly exposing myself to massacre from
the air if the raiders took their opportunity. Only the
crowd felt, willed, changed, or kept a direction. In this
life I am living now, here in England, chained to myself
and my memories like any one of those I have loved
chained to another prisoner in a concentration camp,
I think of that Sunday morning as a bright dream I
can never recapture. Talking with people confuses me,

61

September 3rd

They tell me I have 'escaped' from Poland! Extra-
ordinary irony of words ! The only escape I have known,
or shall know, was into that crowd, for a few hours, six
months ago, to a day, as I write this down.

After his brief speech, the British Ambassador had
left the balcony. The bank of flowers on it grew higher.
The crowd passed them to the struggling policemen,
and to anybody who succeeded for a second in estab-
lishing a foothold between the railings.

The occupants of the crawling cars were preoccupied
and stern. On the other side of glass, one saw their faces
in profile ; set, and, for the most part, speechless. There
were suddenly more British and French uniforms in
Warsaw than one had supposed possible. The khaki, a
little different from our own, and the familiar French
blue, wavered a little before our wet eyes. British,
French, and Polish together! We were all right now.
Out of the Avenue a little company of very young
soldiers from a frontier regiment, laughing all over their
faces, swung to the right. The crowd somehow oozed
back and they came into sight and passed out of it,
catching the cigarettes that were flung to them, their
splendid teeth shining as they shouted: 'Long Live
England and Poland! Long Live King George! We'll
soon be in Berlin now!' Each one wore in his cap the
Highlander's eagle feather.

The cars continued to roll in and out at a foot's pace.
Within them there was no laughter and no shouting.
Gravely and courteously saluting at each fresh burst of
acclamation, the Allied officers passed out of our sight,
too; the full gravity for themselves and for Europe of
the decision announced from that balcony rode in the
cars with them. A bank of flowers could not bury it.

62

September 3rd

For Poland it was a day of rejoicing; her last for who
knows how long? For her Allies, a day whose conse-
quences were and still are beyond human calculation.
In honouring their obligations, they did not disguise
from themselves for a moment what honour costs. The
crowd, with its strange sense of situation, a thing that
cannot be expressed in words and is inseparable from
crowds, understood and was humble. The tumultuous
shouts of 'Long Live England!' came straight from the
heart of a nation. The formal words were not a formula.
There was nobody who did not comprehend that for
England, too, it was life and death now in the balance,
and it was England who had plainly chosen this. She
had not, like us, an enemy over her frontiers. No mad
dog as yet had closed his fangs on her throat. 'Long
Live England!' echoed to the top of the roofs of War-
saw. 'Long Live England! Long Live King George!'

For King George there was some extra, an almost
wistful, note of recognition. Poland has never forgotten
her own Kings. Not all of them are worth remembering.
Too many of them brought her internal troubles and
laid her fatally open to attack from without. But the
great dynasties of Piast and Jagiello, the names of
Rurek, Batory, Sobieski, are among the most resound-
ing in history. An individual again for an instant, I
suddenly wondered what might have been the feelings
of the King of England, who has heard that same cry
so often from so many millions of throats in so many
places, if he could have heard it then?

Warsaw was already in the first throes of her mutila-
tion. In another twenty-four days, mangled and un-
recognizable, she was to fall into the hands of her
butchers. Surely, wherever and whenever that cry has

63

September 3rd

been raised, the note that was sounding in it in Warsaw
can never have been heard.

The crowd, by another spontaneous movement of its
will, without words, knew that it was now going to
Frascati where the French Embassy used to stand. It
does not stand there now, or so rumour, which is all
our news, reports. On that Sunday it still looked very
solid and reassuring. The green lawns looked as they
always had. Again consciousness stirred for a minute.
I remembered another Irish terrier, the superb son of
my little bitch whom she had tolerated in the country
where there were outdoor kennels for all the dogs except
herself, but would not live with for five minutes in the
closer quarters of a Warsaw flat, and who had had to go
and live with our friends.

An hour's free run in the green and open quarter of
Frascati had been his routine every morning. He needed
and took exercise like a horse. In fact, because he was
Irish and could take fences, he had been named Hunter
while he was still blind and sucking. The fence then
had been only the raised side of the box in my bedroom
where he was supposed to lie quiescent beside his
mother, and never would. But when he grew up the
name continued to suit him. I have seen him clear a
six-foot paling. The wild boars in the forest let them-
selves be rounded up by him. In an ecstasy of love he
would leap in the air and remain somehow suspended
in it, passionately kissing his master's forehead. For me,
he never did that. I was second fiddle.

Outside the French Embassy the sense of tremen-
dous things undertaken, of events pressing, of Time at
its back, spread more contagiously than ever through
the crowd. The faces of Frenchmen came and went, set

64

September 3rd

and even taciturn as we had seen them coming and
going in the British courtyard. The crowd fell into a
sort of taciturnity of its own. It is always difficult to
imagine what it is that the French and the Poles have
in common, except their Latin civilization. To any out-
ward examination, no two temperaments could be far-
ther apart. Yet it is one of the oldest friendships in
Europe, and it survives everything. Each of the friends,
in his turn, has loaded the other with reproaches, more
or less deserved. Their quarrels have been frequent and
often bitter. I know very well from my own experience,
and I have lived a great deal with both of them, that you
cannot have French and Polish people in the same room
for more than five minutes without a discussion, more
or less recriminatory, breaking out in several places at
once, like a heath fire. But once they stop talking, a Pole
and a Frenchman never fail to understand each other.
Once the discussion is over and the smoke cleared away,
they are always to be found together, fighting side by
side.

Outside the Embassy, as the Ambassador stepped
silently into a car and drove away, as staff officer after
staff officer hurried in or out, pausing on the steps only
long enough to acknowledge a cheer by the curtest of
salutes, and went on about his business, they under-
stood each other perfectly. The 'Marseillaise' in Polish
is every bit as moving as it is in French, and almost as
familiar. When the singing of it was over, the crowd
began to trickle and finally melt away from Frascati and
flow towards the heart of the city. By perhaps four
o'clock in the afternoon I was no longer a part of it, for
it no longer existed. A crowd is drawn back to its secret
places as mysteriously as it wells up somewhere away

e 65

September 3rd

from them. We found that we were standing in the
thoroughfare of Krakowskie Przedmiescie when this
happened. A very hot morning had turned into an
afternoon of cold wind and blowing dust. I shivered in
a thin frock. The sirens were screaming again. Had they
stopped since the morning, or was it just that the crowd
had not heard them? I was very hungry and more tired
than I had ever been in my life before. We hesitated
between two restaurants. In the Hotel Europejski there
would be Americans very likely, and any other for-
eigners still left in Warsaw. Reserve took hold of us
again. We decided on one that was smaller and very
Polish — Simon i Stecki. Every visitor in Warsaw who
understands good food and drink remembers those two
names. Its charm was that it was never overcrowded or
noisy, not even cosmopolitan. If it still exists, and I have
heard that some part of it does, then the people in
Europe who least understand the art of eating or drink-
ing will be swilling and guzzling there now. On the
third day of the war it was still a place for Poles. The
head waiter stopped smiling like a head waiter and said
something to the man who was serving us. In a minute
or two they came back to us together. We dined with a
little silk Union Jack in a silver stand standing up
beside my plate.

I remember choosing good food and the frightful
fatigue of trying to eat it when it came. There was
nothing to drink. The sale of wine or spirits had been
prohibited from the first day of mobilization. Excite-
ment had gone and would not come back again ; but I
remember feeling that this was happiness. England was
in. I remember saying to A.:

'For once, I am going to enjoy the moment. After

66

September 3rd

this, for long enough, we have only parting and sorrow
to expect. I am going to make this last for another half-
hour.'

The sirens were so loud now that they sounded al-
most in our ears ; the traffic had stopped outside. The
wireless kept up its 'UWAGA! UWAGA! UWAGA!
Zone such-and-such. . . . Zone another-and-another. . . .
Zone. . . . Zone. . . . WARSZAWA! UWAGA!
UWAGA! UWAGA! WARSZAWA! WARS-
ZAWA!' That meant the raiders had got past the last
observation post and were over the capital itself. I
remember better than the sirens or the wireless the
calm, half-contemptuous faces of the other people in
the room. Nobody talked either more or less than usual.
The waiters covered the windows and brought dishes
and took them away as if nothing were going on. The
anti-aircraft guns came into action. We were very near
to the Vistula and the bridges were being attacked. We
could feel all this old part of the town trembling very
slightly. The air outside the windows was shaken by
repeated explosions. The Germans, once again, had no
luck. The bridges remained untouched.

In fact, from the beginning to the end of the war, I
never could see that they had any certainty of hitting
from the air any objective at which they were taking
aim. Also, during the first few days, a lot of their ma-
terial failed to explode. Afterwards it exploded much
better. Why they were such bad shots I have no idea.
I should not think it is something about them on which
other nations ought to count. But that is how it was, so
the fact belongs here. I have known a squadron of
twenty-five to thirty raiders bombard a refugee train or
some huge stationary object like the petrol refinery at

67

September 3rd

Chelm until the whole sky was fouled and darkened
even for themselves, forcing them away; and yet not be
able to hit their mark once. I have often wondered, too,
how it could possibly be worth the money. Of course
they always hit something. That was inevitable. Of
course, scores of homes in Chelm, but not the building
they had been trying for and which was one of the few
in the town not to be made out of wood, blazed all
night and smoked and smouldered for a week. Of
course, when they swooped down with machine-guns
over a little open latrine on a wayside railway station it
was easy to murder the poor old man inside it, whom I
later stumbled over lying with his head in filth and a
grey face and grey exposed linen ; but how can it pos-
sibly have been worth while? I have forgotten now how
much I used to be told that a bomb weighing any given
number of hundreds of kilos cost. At any rate there was
no proportion between the sum, whatever it was, and
the value of an old, grey man.

In Warsaw, the real destruction of buildings was
done by the artillery. Artillery is sure. The bombing
very often was effective only by accident; by accident,
that is, against solid bricks and mortar, fireproof re-
inforced concrete and the terrific walls of Zamek and
the Old Town, over whose great stays and buttresses
even Time had no power; only the artillery of Hitler.
Against queues miles long, waiting for a little water;
against hordes of bewildered peasants seeking a refuge
in the capital and herding in the streets or the Opera
House, or where and how they could, like cattle in
some shambles whose overseer was monstrously over-
worked ; against families trying to drag their wounded
to some mockery of shelter, it was very effective indeed.

68

September 3rd

In the towns and villages, where so much was con-
structed in wood, and for cutting our communications,
it was the perfect weapon. But for all that, they have no
eye, those German sportsmen. For once that they hit
the wicket they used to send up about ten completely
wide.

Out in the street again, it was still draughty and
dusty. We went home gladly on a tram that would take
us at least part of the way. Standing on the platform, we
got into talk with a young airman. He may have been
twenty years old. Our guns, he said, had brought down
a Messerschmidt just beyond the viaduct. He had seen
it himself. His eyes, bluer than his uniform, were
beaming with happiness. This time Poland had friends.
The greatest in the world. This time we would not be
allowed to go down. . . . The British and the French
Air Forces were with us — what were the Germans
going to do about that? . . . Perhaps even now, Berlin.
... It was fine now that the English had got going. . . .
The English were a great people. Long Live England!
Long Live King George!

When we got home, the little red bitch welcomed us
hysterically. The St. Bernard could still be heard walk-
ing about, in his serious way, in the flat over our heads.
He made almost no noise when he did this; just an
impression of velvet bolsters being displaced. We said:

'To-morrow we will really do it.'

Very likely the people in the flat above were saying
the same thing.

A handsome young married woman, with a beautiful
baby, who lived in two rooms in the basement and
sewed curtains and aprons for Irena, and occasionally
let out seams or took them in, and things like that when

69

September jrd

we needed a sewing-woman, came up to see me. She
was shining and cheerful, like her rooms, and she had
made me a Union Jack to fly on my balcony. She said
Irena had found her a white shirt and a red linen frock
to cut up, and they had taken Chambers' Encyclopaedia
from my shelves and found a coloured plate in it called
Flags of the Nations or something of that kind. The
blue they had had to buy, she said. There had seemed
to be nothing blue in any of my drawers or cupboards.
The shade they had chosen, she was afraid, was a great
deal too pale, much paler than the picture. But it was
Sunday and they had only been able to get it at all by
knocking up a friend who kept a shop.

I remember every minute of the night that followed.
I remember waiting endlessly for that feeling of change,
that first roll of the earth towards morning that always
seems release of some kind after a long night of pain.
I could not understand how I had forgotten to expect
this pain. To provide in some way against it. It was
very sharp.

'To-night,' I thought with every tick of the watch
on my table, 'to-night They are over England. London
is being bombed.'

70

Chapter 6
SIEGE OF WARSAW

Monday was the fourth day. If anybody had
told me it was the fourth year I could have
believed them. In fact, it would have seemed
more probable. It was already impossible to think back
to anything so remote as Before the War. Bad news was
a commonplace. Half-cooked dinner, because the gas
had had to be cut off twice during its preparation, was
another. We forgot that we had not always made coffee
on my Italian tea-table over a stinking little spirit lamp
that had been brought from the cottage. Battles in the
air no longer deafened us. Windows had never been
meant to be looked out of, only to be kept away from.
Glass smashing inwards and lying on a carpet in ground
powder or long jagged saws hardly looked unnatural.
Time always seemed to have been measured by sirens
and it was hardly worth while to wind up a clock. There
were no newspapers. Only an occasional sheet with a
so-called communique which nobody at all believed.
Not that what the communique said was untrue. They
simply did not say anything. Just some words : . . . cour-
age . . . tradition . . . the Polish people . . . our Allies.
No facts as to where the fronts had broken. No figures
about the pace at which the motorized German columns

71

Siege of Warsaw

were advancing over the body of Poland. Cavalry-
charges, of course. There was never a battle with Poles
in it yet when the cavalry did not charge. To fight from
the back of a horse, or, dismounted, cut your way in
hand-to-hand fighting through mounted Uhlans and
steel-plated Cuirassiers — that has been the Polish way
for a millenium. But the car of Juggernaut simply
rolled on this time, with men and horses plastered and
clotted on its carapace and crunched between its cater-
pillar wheels. Not even the Polish cavalry could hold
up the columns Hitler sent. What is fantastic, what is
almost incredible, is the number of tanks and armoured
cars they lost, for all that. I have seen men who went
against them with their bare hands. Women with baskets
full of hand grenades. The shopkeepers of Warsaw,
children, servant girls, anybody who could lift an arm
and throw a bottle, with bottles of benzine. Benzine and
smouldering rag took more tanks than anything the
War Office in any country had ever heard of. No matter
that the thrower flared up too, like a piece of tow. No,
the communiques said nothing. They did not need to.
We knew without being told. In my memory the whole
of that Monday towers up like a great wall of sea-water,
higher than you ever thought any wall of water could
be. A green wall of water racing inland; in just that
fraction of a second before it topples over and breaks
and drowns the land.

Communiques. Telephone. Rumours. A feverish
desire for news. News leaking in. Certainty growing
not to be shaken off. In our flat, no summons for either
of us. Nothing to do. More promises. Yes, wait, wait,
we are going to use you . . . you must give us time. . . .
it is necessary to organize. . . . Time — but it was not

72

Siege of Warsaw

we who had Time in our hands. It was the Germans.
In the streets, new posters going up. More classes
called. Will he be among these? More groups eagerly
and fatalistically scanning them. No, these are still
classes who have mobilization cards, you know you have
none. Come away. To-morrow they will give us some-
thing to do. Come away. There is no use in standing here.
In the afternoon a battle so near and so terrific that
for the first time we decided to get nearer shelter and
go down to the ground floor among the crowd that
comes in from the street. Here the arches of the build-
ing are strong and reinforced by sandbags. Irena flatly
refuses. She has ironing to do, she says. If she stopped
work every time there was an air raid she would never
be finished, would she? Very well, I say. She is older
than I am, and should know her own mind. I cannot
do more than give her orders. If she won't, she won't.
Among the crowd are the few men who are all that are
left now of the gang outside. They are still laying those
drain-pipes. My husband and I, from long habit, talk
to each other in French. One of the navvies, a man of
about sixty, listens, and tells us that he, too, once lived
in France. Somewhere in the north, working the mines.
We talked about cheese and wine and crusty French
bread well rubbed with garlic. It was good living in
France, he says, but a man comes back to his own
country. If only he could live in it, though. He laughs
and says, 'Szwaby! They would not let any man have
his own if they could help it.' The house, instead of
rocking, lurches suddenly; for a moment we all think
we are for it. A servant girl laughs too, and spits be-
tween her feet. It is a short laugh. 'Szwaby!' she says.
'Szwaby! Kill me if you can, you!' The house

73

Siege of Warsaw

settles again. The All Clear comes quite quickly. The
crowd is in a hurry to get into the street again, and
leaves us alone. The concierge's little son, who was
eleven, or was it ten, last month, comes in from the
courtyard. His mother had sent him out to see that all
the tenants had their windows shut properly. He says :
'Mother, it's so hot, look, my shirt is soaking. Give me
the money to buy an ice.' Irena is still ironing when we
go upstairs again. She admits that once or twice she
wished to come down, too.

'But my heaters were red-hot. It seemed a pity to let
them go cold. After all, we haven't got very much coal
in. Perhaps they won't have any more in the shop.'

Certainly they won't, I thought. Nor in the mines
either. Not for us. The Germans are in Katowice,
although no communique has told us so.

Irena has not the slightest idea of what is really
happening. This war, she thinks, will be the same as
any other war. In the last one, she was a child. She
remembers leaving the farm with her family and staying
all day in the forest until the Germans had gone from
the village, and coming back at night. The soldiers had
taken all the food and burst a few doors open, but when
the family returned, the old uncle, who had stayed on,
and the dogs were still alive. The Germans had been
pressing forward to attack the Russians. That was in
the spring, just after the sowing. In the autumn it was
the Russians who were following up the retreating
Germans and the Russian soldiers who had taken food
in the villages and thrust their bayonets into cupboards.
But neither army had burnt the farm buildings nor
driven off the last of the beasts that time, and the
peasants were used to hunger and to three foreign

74

Siege of Warsaw

armies on their soil. From 1 9 1 4 to 1 9 1 8 there had been
more hunger and more movement of the foreigners'
armies and more misery for Poles. That was all. What
did it matter what they conscripted you for? There was
a war and, as often as not, you found yourself fighting
against your own brother ; or there was peace and they
sent you to Siberia or into Prussia, perhaps, for twenty-
five years. One way or the other, you had to leave the
farm. All wars were alike to Irena. They were never
wanted by Poland, and they were always fought on
Polish soil. Beyond that her imagination did not take
her. The whole of the siege of Warsaw was before her
and she had no idea of it. I know that she has survived
the siege and that six weeks ago she was still alive. But
she has no coal to heat her irons with, that is certain. I
cannot imagine how she gets any kind of food. I should
like to be able to forget her. She was very pretty, with
charmingly arranged fair hair, and she was vain of her
small feet and the good taste with which she wore her
clothes. From her afternoons and evenings out she
always came back with long tales of writers she had
been having tea with in the Cafe Club, and of Japanese
attaches who had discreetly inquired from the door-
keeper who she could be. She was disappointed because
I could not inform her about the movements of the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor and made mysteries
about her name, which she asked me never to reveal to
anybody in the shops where she bought our food as she
did not want to compromise those members of her
family who had not sunk in the world like herself. In
a word, she was a perfect fool, but she was pretty and
nice and I liked her. That afternoon we looked in the
store-cupboard together.

IS

Siege of Warsaw

'Do you remember what I said when we picked over
all this fruit, Irena? I told you then we were getting it
all ready for the Germans!'

Since then I have lost a good deal more than the
contents of a store-cupboard. But that jam and those
jars of preserves still stick in my memory. It was such
a hot bright day when we bought the fruit in the
market. The raspberries were so perfect. The white
currant jelly took so many hours to strain. The mixed
fruit salads for the winter were so attractive. The very
young, very green peas from the palace garden had
bottled so well. The work had been so exhausting. I
remember a friend coming while I was still topping-
and-tailing gooseberries, and that I lay down on a
couch in my study and finished the gooseberries there
while we talked. I cannot forgive the Germans for that
cupboard of mine and for those shining coloured rows
of jars and bottles. Neither do I know how to bear it
here when occasionally somebody offers me jam with
my tea.

Later we sat on a balcony with a man from one of the
Ministeries, drinking one glass of tea after another.
Four great thoroughfares crossed just below us here,
and there was always a great rumbling and stir of
traffic. The Vistula is just behind, spanned by the Via-
duct and the Poniatowski Bridge. Now the normal
traffic had stopped entirely and the noise was no longer
a rumbling; it was more like an avalanche just loosened
and starting to roll down and growling as it came.
Convoy after convoy of food went by for the army.
Ambulances and fire engines tore along the middle of
the street. Companies, white with dust, went by in full
field equipment, asleep on their feet. One traffic stream

76

Siege of Warsaw

brought in the refugees from the country, from the far
side of Zegrze and Modlin, the two forts. Their carts
were piled with furniture and farm implements and
bedding. The family for the most part walked beside
the carts. The dog walked too, under the shadow of the
axle, avoiding the sun. We remembered our summer
journey and the man in the bus saying: this is the way
They will come. This is Their road from East Prussia.
There were not as yet very many refugees. A peasant
will hardly ever make up his mind to leave his home,
even for the Germans. It is not that he will not see
reason. It is that he has a different reason and he cannot
help himself. It is the same reason that tells him, with-
out a calendar, when to put in the plough and when to
begin the harvest and what to do for a sick beast and
which tree in the forest to fell. It is impossible for him
to guide his actions by any voice from outside. These
homeless people were mostly small traders and imper-
manent individuals of that kind: Jews, groups of people
renting the produce of some vast mortgaged orchard on
a contract of two or three years, summer cottage people,
old parents seeking their children who were working
in the town. All of them remembered 191 9 and the
great drive coming from Warsaw and flinging the
enemy back. Once more, I suppose they argued, help
would come out of Warsaw. Weary, thirsty, carefully
steadying the bits of furniture slipping about under
hastily tied cords, they walked of their own free will
into the most appalling trap that has ever been heard
of, and immediately began making acquaintances, buy-
ing cucumbers, setting up a few pots and a kitchen
chair anywhere and feeling that they were safe.

We talked, as people always do in war, of trifles. F.

77

Siege of Warsaw

had had no job given him either. Like my husband, he
was over forty and had no mobilization card. Still . . .
to-morrow . . . naturally it all took time. ... X. had
said that he had seen us, that in a day or two, at the
most, there would be work for us both ... for F. too,
perhaps . . . unless X. was getting ready to pack up . . .
after all, they were a set of .

Another, and much louder explosion. Somebody said
the Radio Station had been hit. This was obviously
untrue as soon as it had been said. Still we had better
go indoors. There was no sense in sitting out here. After
all, if we were to be hit, we could be hit just as well
inside and it was only fair to the waiters to keep to the
regulations. Three more glasses of tea, please, and the
telephone directory. When the tea came we forgot what
the idea had been about telephoning. To whom?

'Do you remember?' asked F.

'No. It was your suggestion.'

The idea was allowed to slide away. The tables tilted oc-
casionally. Almost anything could slide off on to the floor.

'The difficult thing is to keep your temper,' said F.
suddenly. 'These Huns!'

'Czestochowa !' said my husband, apropos of nothing.

'Yes, I know. I saw a man to-day who came in from
Poznan!' The most courteous of men, he turned on me
in a kind of fury. It was like reaching out to somebody
else, no matter whom, with a red-hot iron that has burnt
your own flesh. A sure instinct made him choose me.
The iron burnt me all right.

'The jackals follow the army,' he said. 'They have
set up Gestapo there already. You know their methods,
don't you? You know what they do? They have lists.
They go from house to house.'

78

Siege of Warsaw

When I did not answer, he said it again.

'You know what they do '

'Yes,' I said. 'I know.' The All Clear sounded.

'We must go to the post office,' my husband said.
We left F. in the street. When I gave him my hand I
found that his cheeks were wet. The post office was
hard to find in the total black-out. A soldier with a
bandaged head bumped into a cart and said: 'Believe
me, brothers, the front is better than this!' In the post
office no news at all. No chance of mail from anywhere.
'They have cut us off from Europe,' stated a girl behind
a counter. She said it as, a week earlier, she might have
given the information: 'Stamps at that counter, on the
right.' She had no idea that she was a Mouthpiece of
History. The last distribution from even the city pillar-
boxes had been made. A clerk suggested that, being
British-born, I might get somebody at the British Con-
sulate or at the Embassy to put a letter into the bag for
my family in England. Presumably there would be an
aeroplane keeping up some sort of liaison. Out in the
street again a great haggard lad was selling news sheets
so fast that he could hardly hand them out. Of course
there was no news in them. Still, buying them had
become automatic. A hand-printed poster had some
wild stop-press announcement about British advances:
British Army in France: Britain Sends Aid to Poland.

'Is it true?' asked somebody.

'As God is my witness,' said the lad, 'I would give
these two arms, yes, and these two feet, that it might be !
Why should it not be true? The English can do anything.'

I remember that we embraced each other. I forget
how it happened. I know I kissed his cheek and that he
then squeezed me in his arms.

79

Siege of Warsaw

'Poor Poland,' he said. 'Poor Poland! Biedna Polska!
But it is all right now that the English are with us. The
English can do anything, pant Angielka. There is no
need to cry.'

When we went home there was another thing to do.
F. had put it into words sitting on that balcony. He had
said that I must take down the dressmaker's Union
Jack at once.

'Are you mad? Don't you know the whole place is
crawling with spies? Don't you know what is going to
happen here? If you don't care for yourself, remember
there are other people in the house.'

I went out and cut the light cord it floated on. For
a flagstaff the women had taken a length of fine bamboo
from an old rod of A's. I did not know what to do with
the flag when it came down. Finally I put it in the ruck-
sack that was always waiting at the foot of our bed. No
harm would come to it there and it would harm nobody.
I could not quite decide to destroy it at once. No
dramatic ideas of defending it occurred to me; but I
would have it where I could destroy it if the worst came
to the worst. The Germans should not have it. My
ideas of the worst were still limited to a situation in
which I would have a rucksack. As a matter of fact I
did destroy it just seven days later, a long way from
Warsaw, when I was afraid of the confusion in my own
head, the result of wounds and loss of blood and want
of food, and dared not put it off any longer. But as to
what the worst was, even in that moment, I was very
far from knowing. Knowledge came later, and is grow-
ing, every day.

80

Chapter 7
'THE HEART IS NO TRAVELLER'

\ \ 1 e left Warsaw.
\/\/ Somebody wrote somewhere (I now have
V T no idea where and hope I am doing nothing
out of order in quoting it here without permission and
perhaps misquoting a bit):

When and where makes no difference.

There is no sense in choosing times for partings.

No matter when a wound comes,

It is still a wound.

Nor is travel a cure as is said.

The heart is no traveller,

It lives obstinately in its obscure trivial haunts

The heart can make its home anywhere

But it will not change or move.

. . . it cannot always avoid the tune or the words,

For the wireless may play these, or

Some thoughtless hand fit a disk to the gramophone,

And the helpless heart is made aware again,

Of its home, and of the present emptiness there,

No other remaining, only itself, entirely alone.

Having written the three words 'We left Warsaw',
try as I will, no other words but these will get them-
f 81

''The Heart is no Traveller

selves written down after them. When and where makes
no difference. There is no sense in choosing times for
partings. We left Warsaw, and did not even know we
were going.

All the day before terrible news had been coming in.
In any normal year the rains would have started. The
Polish plans had been based on the conviction that tanks
in autumn would be bogged and useless and that cavalry
on its own terrain would have every advantage. This
year the rains came too late. On hard ground the fight-
ing below Czestochowa had been calamitous. Cavalry
charge after cavalry charge against that unbreakable
column of fire and iron. Mad, heart-breaking Polish
tradition. Strange folly, if you like, that could under-
take such a hopelessly lost cause. Tanks, blind, hideous,
imperturbable, without will or blood-lust, even, of their
own, rolling mechanically forward over the mangled
beauty and ardour of men and horses. Caterpillar wheels
going round and round with torn flesh and guts and
scalps and bloody khaki cloth slowly revolving with
them; and the caterpillar not even knowing what he
had done.

The Polish cavalry! Outworn arm; prejuge polonais,
as visiting military attaches used to call it. How often
one heard that said, and how true it was. It was difficult
for a Pole to believe. Right up to September we were
giving the same answer: every war fought on Polish
territory has been decided by the cavalry. The West has
its ways, we have ours. Our country is altogether differ-
ent. For us, a mobile army is essential. Our soldiers
have unrivalled powers of recovery. Rout them on one
front and the remnant will take you by surprise on
another before you have got back your own breath.

82

6 The Heart is no Traveller

Among our dense and spreading forests, in the rich
clayfields of the Vistula and the central plain, once the
rains come, in Polesie and the Pripet Marshes, a hand-
ful of Polish cavalry can harry and destroy a whole
mechanized Army Corps sinking deeper and deeper
above its axles. The whole Polish Army, if hard pressed
enough, can always fall back and indefinitely sustain a
guerilla warfare in the east. Polish cavalry, Polish light
horse! Spellbinding words, immortal glory, immortal
garland of Polish history until 1939! In 1939 fit only
for the wheels of Juggernaut ; bloody pulp to be fed to
the blind and insensate Caterpillar.

I left Warsaw. In the end I left Poland. It is in the
walls of this room that I do not believe. It is not the
muted traffic noises of the London black-out that rises
to this furnished flat. The walls roll back and the win-
dows open on to the mechanized slaughter of the plain
below Czestochowa. The heart is no traveller ... it will
not change or move.

At midday A. and I had a rendezvous. Our last in
Warsaw, although we had no idea of that then. I waited
inside a church. Spasmodic bursts of fire drowned the
voice of the celebrant at the altar. Above me was a
stained-glass window, with a coat of arms, two figures
with crossed hands and feet, and verses of stately Latin,
commemorating the conjugal virtues of a husband and
wife buried below. No separation threatened them. The
sun was more brilliant than ever when I went out again
to look across the Place. It was so hot that even the
pigeons did not stir. I walked down the steps amongst
them, they did not even take their heads from under
their wings.

A. said:

83

The Heart is no Traveller-"'

'I couldn't come sooner. X. is not in the Bureau. Do
you know that general evacuation has started? The
French have told me we are not going to defend War-
saw?'

'I know. I have been to the British. They are all
going within an hour.'

In the Street of the New World a woman sprang out
of a car and seized my hand.

'We are being evacuated. I can't tell you where. We
are going at once.' She was as white as a cloth.

'Of course we shall come back. We shall come back
within a few days.' She was a Polish journalist, in the
British service, and her department had orders to leave.
A few weeks ago we met again in Regent Street. If I
had not spoken she says that she would not have recog-
nized me. That morning in Warsaw I hardly recog-
nized her. When she was a very young girl she went all
through the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik
Terror that came after it. The things that are considered
unspeakable were to her perfectly familiar: firing
squads; that queer indescribable look on men's faces
when they have just killed other men, anonymously
and under orders, in that particular way; the soft, un-
mistakable plop of bodies slipping from a wall to the
pavement; walking along a street and finding your
shoes dark with anonymous blood. Even in 191 9, with
the Red Army advancing, she had never thought of
leaving Warsaw. Now she repeated, in the voice of a
sleep-walker :

'We are leaving. I have a suit-case here. I have had to
have it ready all the week, but we shall be coming back.
It cannot all be over. It is impossible that this is the end.'

Somebody else came out of a shop. Somebody else

84

* The Heart is no Traveller

being evacuated. The engine of the car was running.
1 Good-bye, ' she said, 'we're coming back, you know.
What about your husband? When he's called, what are
you going to do?'

I remember laughing. Not a very nice laugh, prob-
ably. Rather like the laugh of the servant girl the day
before when the house had given a great forward lurch.
When she had said, 'Szwaby!' and spat. 'Staying 1' I
said. 'Good-bye. I hope it keeps fine for you. Staying!
Somebody must be here when the Germans come.' We
kissed. I was brutal and I made it worse for her. I knew
she was distracted at having to go, but I would not help
her an inch. She has forgiven me since. And I was a
liar, too. I left almost as soon as she did. Anything, I
have found, can happen to anybody. In the meantime,
we walked on. Almost every door was open and every
block and shop had at least one wireless set perpetually
going. This was an order. It was difficult to speak to
one another above the noise.

By one o'clock it was quite openly said: evacuate all
children, invalids, and old people. The only thing was,
nobody told them where. The Lublin Road is the great
highway out of Warsaw, but after that, where? Towards
the East? But the rains had not come. The marshes
were like billiard tables. Well, at least to Lublin. After
that, Lwow, the Roumanian frontier? And if the Uk-
rainians stop you? If you cannot get any petrol? For
that matter, have you any now? Where are you going
to get it from? How are you going to get a train? Are
there any? Don't forget that the raiders are bombing
every viaduct, every junction, every level-crossing,
every train carrying refugees. Don't forget that the
Lublin road is choked with army transport and that the

85

'T/ie Heart is no Traveller

raiders will bomb you there, too, every inch of the way.
Evacuate, by all means, the children, the invalids, and
the aged. Only — where do you intend to take them?
How are they going to get food and water? Where are
they to lie down to sleep? Even the peasants dare not
boil potatoes or light a fire on their hearths for fear of
showing smoke. For fear of the machine-guns. What
kind of money have you got? In a day or two, nobody
will take coin from you any longer. Have you got salt
to pay with? Do you remember the black bread of the
last occupation, the bread that was the typhus carrier?
Is it any use running out of Warsaw to die, like a
nameless dog, in a farther ditch? Nobody asked those
questions. If they had, nobody could have answered
them. Of course, when we had all gone, Warsaw seemed
as full as it had ever been and not at all different. The
going away of everybody never does make the slightest
difference to a city. The citizens of Warsaw, unaware of
any gap in their numbers, continued to undergo the
siege. Stefan Starzynski did not feel himself any less the
city's Lord Mayor. The concentration camp of Dachau
awaited him just as certainly. Prodigies of anonymous
heroism continued to keep the wireless stations going.
The newspaper boys in the street, whose extraordinary
daily courage and doggedness the whole European Press
was to exult in and then forget, noticed no falling off in
their customers. Warsaw remained Warsaw without us.
We have lost that chance of immortality. The defenders
of Warsaw, rotting now in the thaw beneath the ruins,
heaped one upon the other in pits in the squares and
gardens, crucified on bayonets, set alight by benzine,
machine-gunned as they waited for water, dropping
down in the streets all this winter from frost-bite and

86

'The Heart is no Traveller

starvation, kicked to death in prisons, 'executed' by
German law, are alive for ever. The rest of us, who
survived, what are we? Only the Polish emigres. Our
travels in Europe are well known. They began in the
eighteenth century. We do what we can.

Within a couple of hours, because of an urgent
message from X., we ourselves had to leave. We meant
to return by evening. At the latest, by the next day.
X. gave us a rendezvous in his village in a pine forest.
We were to cross the Vistula.

To Irena, before leaving, I said:

'Remember, if we don't come back, you have a roof
here, unless the house is hit, of course. There's enough
food for one for weeks. Keep it or share it. I can't tell
you what is going to happen. Each day you must decide
for yourself. If you need to, you can sell the silver and
the furniture. There will always be somebody who will
pay for such things. If you can, go and work with the
Red Cross.'

For the first time, she burst into tears.

'Why do you say all this? Shall I not see you again?'

I told her all I knew. We were going to the country
for a few hours. We believed we were coming back. It
might also happen that we would be sent elsewhere.
Nobody could tell such things. A bomb might smash
us to jelly as we went out of our front door. Not to be
silly. Not to cry. To go out and try to find us a horse.
To find me some clean handkerchiefs to put in the
rucksacks. Was she never going to finish that ironing?
She really must not attach so much importance to bed-
covers at present. What I needed was a horse, not all
that Valenciennes lace and hand embroidery and tucks
for a bed in which I was unlikely to sleep. Very well,

87

^The Heart is no Traveller

she said. A horse first. Then she would go out and look
for that. But the linen was far too dry already. She had
sprinkled it twice. If she sprinkled it again it would be
spoiled no matter how hot her irons were. . . .

'Irena, go at once.'

She went. We prepared our rucksacks. Nothing
more. I never even looked at my jewellery. My furs
were in storage, and could not have been got at, any-
way.

'Boots?' said A. 'We may have to walk.'

The heat was frightful. I could not imagine walking
in boots. How often I thought of them afterwards.
What would I not have given for a pair of boots?

'We can get them out to-morrow. They're with your
ski-ing things. Irena knows where. If I ask her she'll
take hours. I can walk better as I am.'

To-morrow still seemed a thing one could count on.
When I look back on it, I can hardly believe in such a
conversation. Why did we think we could do anything
to-morrow? In what miracle did we still believe?

We went through the rooms together.

'What one thing shall I take? This may be going for
ever.'

I answered myself.

'I want everything. I might as well take nothing.'

That seemed to sum it up. I wish now that I had
taken at least photographs ; two packets of letters ; but
in war these are not the things one does. Almost every
action is irrelevant. Just as one is always talking about
trifles. Irena came back with the news that she had
found a dorozka. A. asked her for a bottle. When it
came he filled it carefully from another larger one of
very old Jamaica rum. Above our bed was a small oval

88

''The Heart is no Traveller

reproduction of Our Lady of Czestochowa that might
have gone easily into a pocket.

'Shall we take Her?'

'No.'

In the cottage we had made the same decision. The
Queen of Poland, from her place of honour, still bent
downwards her grave and gentle gaze. It is a quiet face.
In the right cheek are sabre wounds, inflicted in another
Polish war. Irena wept again. She came with us to the
dorozka. Horse and driver were sheltering under a high
wall.

'Come back,' suddenly cried Irena, 'I love you so
much!' She had no family. It must have been awful
going back to that flat alone. I remember that when I
had climbed up into the carriage she hugged my knees
in her arms and kissed my husband's sleeve. I was sur-
prised. She had come a long way from the peasant
upbringing and I thought she had forgotten those old
ways. Besides, she had been with us a very short time.
The sun lit up her pretty hair and showed off her dark
tailored suit.

'To-morrow,' I said.

She shook her head in despair and started to walk
away.

I have always known that she believed us to be
abandoning her. I wish I could once see her, just to
explain.

89

Chapter 8
RENDEZVOUS WITH X.

On the ground, what from the air must have
I seemed a group of doll figures. A toy set of
signal boxes and the shining double curve of a
child's railway line. A dog, too small, I think, to be
distinguished at all. Just a patch of something reddish
in the arms of one of the dolls.

In the air, bursts of shrapnel, white plumes and
flame. Outline of Heinkels; each a nightmare queen
bee swollen with monstrous eggs. Concussion of bombs
dropping, missing the bridge again. Beyond the viaduct
a brilliant, grown-up fireworks show. Heinkels coming
lower and nearer. A soft sound, quite unexpected, of a
factory collapsing inwards. Not violent at all. A sort of
gentle subsidence. The dolls still buying their tickets.
The toy train getting ready to start. The awful ear-
splitting roar of the bombers. The image of obscene
queen bees coming back as queer ovoid pouches begin
to fall from them. The dolls have never seen these
pouches before. They fall slowly, drifting when a puff
of wind gets behind them. A. saying:

'Mustard gas.'

The Germans have begun to use gas.

We are pleased that there is this train running. The

90

Rendezvous with X.

line is a single-track one. It will take us within a few
miles of where we want to go. The dorozka came right
out of the city with us. So far the journey is very easy.
The heat is terrible, but we have not had to walk at all
yet. More and more refugees are coming into Warsaw.
All the rest of the traffic is leaving the town and it is all
military. We are not in the stream of the great exodus.
We are on our old road to Zegrze, but we are leaving
it now, if the train gets away. If we get away. The terrier
is heavy to hold, and A. has two rucksacks. Surely I can
do that much. If I put her down I may get told to leave
her behind. After all, this is war. It is not the bombers
that make me sure of it. It is the boat-shaped convoys
of live hogs going with the army. Sitting up on the high
seat of the dorozka, I have looked down on hundreds
and hundreds of these poor beasts this afternoon.
Lashed together with ropes, blood welling up out of
their lard. Pale hulks, screaming with pain and terror,
their heads lolling, the sun burning them up, bloody
bubbles coming from their snouts. War. No time for
pity for a hog. Men will be worse treated than this. A
gentle girl, a few hours after giving birth to her child,
will be bombed out of a Warsaw clinic and, crawling
with it on hands and knees, cover a mile or two in
twenty-four hours. In the house that takes her in she is
to find her murdered husband ; to crawl over his body and
lie down on it, and after that to live. She is alive to-day.
War. Reality of a German invasion. The train moves.
There is even a seat, and the air is not too terrible.
Mustard gas, then. On the 5th of September. After-
wards they accused us of using it, and the British, I
think, of supplying it! The train has an engine not
much more powerful than a tea-kettle. A. calls it a

9i

Rendezvous with X.

samovar. There is still the problem of the terrier. X.
must lend us his revolver and finish that, anyhow. I
realize that I am nearly asleep. All the suburb through
which we have been passing has been damaged. Families
are standing about, pulling crumpled bits of iron, prob-
ably bedsteads this morning, and all sorts of unrecog-
nizable things out of heaps of rubble and dust. The
body of a man is sprawling face downwards, quite
alone. I wonder when somebody will find him. There
is broken window-glass all along the permanent way.

It is still quite early afternoon as we walk through
the pine forest. There is no road. I remember our com-
ing here before, in a Chevrolet belonging to X. The
chauffeur drove for miles between groves of pines and
straight across fields and over sprawling roots and
stumps of trees not altogether level with the ground. I
suppose he had some quite clear route of his own in his
head, but we are not able to find it. We meet one or
two people who give us quite wrong directions, and the
terrier enjoys the country smells and runs after hens.
There are quite a lot of summer villas in the forest, but
they are nearly all deserted. Some people of whom we
ask the way answer us unwillingly. As we go on, we
hear them begin a quarrel.

'When will you learn not to tell a stranger anything?'
says one of the women. 'How do you know where they
come from? What should they want with any captain's
house? You'd better remember another time what
you've been told about spies.'

She was perfectly right. The work done by German
spies in Poland was fantastically successful. It is not
that their existence was unknown. The trouble seems
to have been, as in all civilized countries, to know what

92

Rendezvous with X.

to do about them. It is a pity that spies themselves
apparently never have this difficulty. What they have
to do is quite clear to them, and they do it well. What
they did in Poland, they have done and are doing
everywhere else. It was nice being in the forest. I
thought I should not mind if we never found the house.

Of course before very long we did. X. was not there.
His mother came out and asked us to come in.

'But where are you going to sleep? In an hour or two
we are leaving this house. My son is sending a car. He
cannot come himself. He has ordered us away at once.
I understand nothing. I am inclined not to go.'

She was old and she remembered many wars. 1 9 1 6,
and X. one of the famous Legionaries; why, she
thought, that was such a short time ago. And now, all
to do again.

'We miss the Marshal,' she said, sadly shaking her
head. 'We miss Pilsudski.'

Her daughter-in-law was not missing Pilsudski. She
was feverishly smoking cigarettes, throwing things into
suitcases, and breaking off every few minutes to try the
telephone again. By a miracle, there was still a line to
Warsaw. The telephone was one of those incredibly
old dreary affairs fixed to a wall, and every time she
tried to get through she had to turn a sort of crank.
When she was not doing any of these things, she pol-
ished her already over-polished nails. With the telephone,
you never knew. Sometimes a reedy voice would answer
and a frantic conversation ensue, certain to be broken
off in a minute by the telephone going dead. At other
times nothing except that distant splutter and crackle
of all telephones to which nobody comes. Occasionally
it rang violently of its own accord. When it did that,

93

Rendezvous with X.

there was always a fraction of time in which everybody
was afraid to go to it, and another in which everybody
leapt at once to let out the reedy voice which might
have some kind of News. After ringing, what it usually
did was to splutter and crackle for a few minutes before
going dead again. Nothing more. The whole evening
and half the night was punctuated by that nerve-
shattering telephone. At about eleven o'clock it died
finally. The last liaison with Warsaw gone.

There were seven or eight people present. Perhaps
ten, with ourselves. I remember none of them clearly
except the old mother, the young second wife and a boy
of about sixteen, X.'s son. There were some women,
very calm, who insisted on us all having food. A
colonel's wife, with a little daughter, I think, waiting to
hear from her husband. After eleven o'clock she knew
that she would not.

From six until ten the car was waited for. The wire-
less and the telephone made it impossible to hear any-
thing. The boy kept going out into the road to listen.
A housekeeper and some servants came in and out, dis-
cussing what to take; what food would be wanted;
whether the cupboards should be locked and the keys
taken away, or left with somebody who lived some-
where else. The housekeeper did not intend to leave the
villa. The old lady kept shaking her head and saying:

'I don't like it. We never left our houses empty
before. What will the Germans think when they come?
There are all those sheets still unmarked, and the honey
not put away for the winter.'

The young daughter-in-law could not stand it. She
was frightened. She had not the stamina for that sort of
thing. I don't know where X. met and married her. I

94

Rendezvous with X.

do know that he was frantic about her safety. At about
ten o'clock his voice came through from Warsaw.

'Listen,' it said. 'I can't discuss anything. Tou are to
go. Tell the boy he is to go with you. Wait for me at

N . I am transferring the Bureau there. The car

will arrive somehow. It may be in the morning. But
you are to go with it. The boy and every one of the
women. I don't care how you fit in, or what you leave
behind. Only go.1

She asked him what about her clothes? The flat in
Warsaw? When they could come back? The boy, she
said, refused to go. He could not expect her to have any
control over him. Who was bringing the car? Why
could he not drive them himself? Why could they not
wait a few days? There could not be all this hurry. He
had no idea how difficult it was to pack — to think of all
they would need.

The telephone groaned and crackled.

'For the love of God,' said X., 'is there no man there
in the room with you? Get off the line. Send me a man
to talk to before this damned thing stops for ever.'

We could hear his voice in the room quite distinctly.
The telephone was now magnifying instead of dwind-
ling everything. A. took the receiver out of her hand.
X. now insisted that he and A. must meet in Lublin.
After a long time I heard A. say:

'What are you going to do about my wife? She can't
go back either. You know she can't. X., you got her
into this. You must make them take her at least as far
as Lublin. She can't speak Polish properly! I'll get to
her somehow there, or send somebody.'

The boy kept trying to get at the receiver. The
women in the other room kept fading the wireless news

95

Rendezvous with X.

in and out. X. was saying: 'No. No! It is quite impos-
sible.' The boy spoke over A.'s shoulder. 'Father, you
must listen to me. Why should I be sent with the
women? Father, you know I'm sixteen!'

The telephone gave a death rattle and broke down.
The boy flopped on a couch and stared at his step-
mother. He had to go. His stepmother said uneasily
to A.:

'We'll take your wife if we can. But there are so
many of us already and the car is very small and we are
sure to be short of petrol.' All the time she talked she
went on making cigarettes; hundreds of them. 'You
see,' she said, 'it's a small car and we have a lot of
luggage. We must have warm clothes. After all, this is
September. The bad weather will be here in a few
weeks.'

'You'll be throwing your luggage overboard very
soon,' said A.

The wireless came on again full blast. All men of
military age were to leave the towns upon which the
Germans were advancing. All men of military age were
to leave Warsaw. . . . Towards morning, the car came.
The man driving it had been driving for thirty-six
hours without sleep. He said that nothing on earth
would induce him to take the wheel into his hands again
unless he slept.

'You'd be done for quicker that way. In an hour you
can waken me. Now I'd simply drive you off the road.'

He had been to Lublin and back. The car was in
much the same state as himself. As he was saying this
he fell asleep.

During the night I had asked A. nothing. We had
lain down on two beds in an upstairs room for a few

96

Rendezvous with X.

hours. Every time I looked at him he was lying on his
back in the moonlight with his hands behind his head,
thinking what to do. When I looked he turned his eyes
towards me and said, 'Sleep.' Whatever he decided, he
knew that I would obey him. If he were to tell me to
leave him, I would even do that. After the car came he
went down to the kitchen and came back with a glass
of hot tea.

'Well, they won't take you,' he said.

'Is the man who has come an officer?'

'Why?'

'I want a revolver.'

The terrier stirred and woke.

'I wish we had had it done when we said. I can't do
it with a stone. Do you remember that frightful village
we were once in where stray dogs were clubbed in the
yard of the Town Hall?'

'Not at present,' said A. 'Neither need you. Be quiet.'

For days we had not ventured even to touch each
other's hands. We were mortally afraid of tenderness.
For him it was the worst thing that could have hap-
pened that they had not called him at once. That part-
ing would have been natural; in some ways almost easy.
Sooner or later we were bound to lose each other. We
had not even the right to wish to die in each other's
arms. I did wish it; but I knew that he did not. He
would have seen me killed and still have wished to live
so long as Poland needed a living man. I tell you, the
Poles are a great people. Even yet the yoke has not been
invented that can break their backs ! Not though I hear
to-day from Stockholm of thirty-six thousand Polish
families newly deported to Siberia. Of the Vistula river
folk driven inland a hundred kilometres from their

g 97

Rendezvous with X.

homesteads. Not though I read in the news from Paris
often to fourteen 'executions' in Warsaw every day. Of
Nazi guards bursting into houses and forcing the wo-
men present to choose which of the men is to be shot —
husband, father, or brother. Of the body of a Warsaw
butcher hanging before his own shop for a week. The
Vistula folk, driven to hard labour, sang the Polish
National Anthem. Two great and rich industrialists
known all over Europe, both born of families coming
originally from Germany, died for one reason only.
They refused to sign away their Polish citizenship.
They preferred the firing squad.

We decided to go to the nearest railway, hoping to
return to Warsaw before the meeting in Lublin.

We walked for hours through sandhills. It was very
exhausting. My white kid shoes were not much good
to me. I realized how mad I had been to walk out of
that flat without a pair of boots.

Yesterday already seemed a hundred years ago. We
had a thermos with some tea, and at about nine o'clock,
after three hours of walking, we halted and drank that.
Afterwards there was a long and very bad period in a
Town Hall and a worse one on a station, while the station-
master controlled the evacuation trains going through.
Twice the familiar hum and drumming of bombers
approaching sent us to shelter. The thud and concus-
sion of bombs falling began to be as exhausting as the
sandhills and the sun. One got so endlessly tired of it.
In and out of the Town Hall — in and out of the station-
master's room. Everywhere the same answer, the same
sun, the same bombers, the same trick every minute or
two of glancing round to heel for the terrier who would
not be there. Even in London I still do that.

98

Rendezvous with X.

By midday, we knew that return to Warsaw was
impossible. We were homeless. The only thing to be
done was to go on. The stationmaster passed another
refugee train. There was still some tea in the thermos.
It was astonishing how thirsty one got. . . .

From the air, a group of doll figures. A toy set of
signal boxes, the shining double curves of playbox rail-
way lines.

99

Chapter 9
THE LUBLIN ROAD

I thought this was going to be an easy bit to tell
about. It is extraordinary how difficult it is. It is
only about more travelling over these little single-
track railways, buying tickets, waiting for waggons to
come, suffering from the sun, hiring horses, arguing
with peasants, saying, 'Are you all right?' 'Yes. Are
you? Can you hold on a bit longer?' It is only about A.
looking at me and then turning away, and myself look-
ing at him. And remembering the terrier, and passing
that place at Otwock where the Children's Hospital
had been; and the queer idleness that had fallen on the
villages and the endless waiting and talking and waiting
again before you could get on another few kilometres.
It was awful its being so unlike what one had pictured
it. Some frightful apocalyptic convulsion would have
been easier to deal with. But this was only everyday life,
with the difference of a distorting and magnifying
mirror somewhere.

The peasants did not even see the mirror. They had
heard of it, but not looked into it yet. It made no
difference to them that somebody forty kilometres away
had. No peasant knows or cares anything about people
forty kilometres away. There are strangers in the vil-

100

The L,ubli?i Road

lage. They want to hire or buy horses. Strangers hiring
or buying horses in a hurry are meant to be cheated. So
the peasants cheat. Haggling is a village tradition, so
they haggle. Ninety German divisions could not make
them come to a decision a second sooner than they did;
or keep them from going back on it again as soon as it
was made and then changing their minds and saying it
was a bargain after all.

For the most part, the man who had a horse and
meant to go with you could not be seen at all. Those
who had none, and would not have gone with you if
they had, professed enthusiasm, and shame, and aston-
ishment that anyone could be so obstinate, so blind to
his own true interests and to what he owed the gentry,
as everybody else. A horse was occasionally led out of
some lean-to and his harness exuberantly thrown on to
him and a cart approached; and then the owner, or very
likely somebody speaking for the owner, would dis-
cover that the cart was not what we had been accus-
tomed to, and lead the horse back again, saying no, he
could not think of it. Besides, he could not possibly
leave his wife.

The Germans were coming, apparently. Supposing
he were not able to get back — who would draw the
money that was due to him at the Town Hall for last
week's road-mending? The fact was, they thought us
out of our minds. Whoever heard of leaving one's home
and running about the country and wanting a horse in
a hurry? A horse is the wealth of a family and years
always passed between a man's first envisaging himself
as the owner of one and this actually coming true. Only
strangers, from some other parish, would engage upon
such an absurdity. Horses do not change hands like

IOI

The Lublin Road

that on the side of the road. But it was very entertain-
ing. More so than watching the bombers and recon-
naissance machines and all that traffic in the sky. At
these they barely troubled to look up. Machinery does
not impress the peasant. He is perfectly nonchalant
about flooding his hut with electricity, filling it from
morning to night with the strident cries of a radio set,
even using the telephone if the government, to whom
he feels no gratitude whatever, cares to supply him
with these things. They do not intimidate him in the
least. The serious things, the things that are approached
with precaution, are manure and transactions about a
horse or a cow; and the inexhaustible spectacle, of
which he never possibly gets tired, is the irresponsi-
bility and general eccentricity of people from any other
parish.

Every one of these scenes was played in exactly the
same way. Every one of them was finally brought to 'a
conclusion when enough time had been gone through
to make it possible, by A. slapping down the same card.
Suddenly abandoning successive airs of indifference,
man-to-man persuasion, raillery and the perfectly
genuine attitude that no bank was paying out money
and that we had practically none at all, A. would put
on the officer manner; and somebody, probably up to
now the most obstructive spirit, would automatically
respond to that. The officer manner could always, in
the end, get us out of the village and, once we had
moved, obtain, say, ten kilometres where fifteen had
been promised and six really intended. More than that
it could not do. Ten kilometres away from home,
not even a purse full of gold, which we were far from
offering, could have overcome the urgency of the

1 02

The Lublin Road

peasant's instinct to turn his horse's head towards
home.

The tracks along which we drove were unsheltered ;
the sun an enemy. The carts we hired were shaped like
boats, and foul with animal droppings. The bundles of
straw and matting on which we sat high above the
wheels slipped forward another fraction of an inch every
time the axles went round. The sheer physical effort of
sitting up on them, the heat, the smell, the heartache
and the fact that all this time we were going just where
we did not want to go — is it possible to describe the
wretchedness of all this? The closed, quite unsympa-
thetic faces of the peasants standing about in groups
and watching the exodus hurt me unbearably. A. did not
mind them. Both he and they were Poles. Ultimately
they understood each other. In 1 9 1 9 he had commanded
a company of just such soldiers, and asked for nothing
better.

The track brought us out on to the Lublin road.
The usual argument about further transport began. I
sat on railings that ran round a little wayside calvary.
Our rucksacks sagged against the cross. When I had
sat there a few minutes I remembered again that I was
among foreigners. A. was fifty yards away, going
through the moves. I had to go to him, but I did not
speak. We had already agreed that we must not talk
French together, or, among peasants, let my halting
Polish be much heard. It would not help us to be taken
for spies. When I could not stand up any longer I went
back to the railings. Some other women were waiting
there now. One of them told a story about a woman she
had seen in a poor street in Warsaw distributing sweets
to children from her bag. She described a thick black

103

The Lublin Road

veil, a pair of glittering eyes behind it, and two police-
men coming up and taking her away. The veil, the
glittering eyes, the chocolates stuffed with corrosive
acid, the insolent laugh with which the woman sub-
mitted to arrest, were like a further instalment in the
adventures of Milady. Only truth would dare to be
quite so melodramatic as that. There was no doubt that
she believed it had really occurred.

'Why did she laugh?' I asked.

'The murderess? Oh, because she knew she would
only have to wait a few days. The Germans will set her
free when they get to Warsaw.'

The conversation flagged. Some kind of bargain was
made. This time the boat-shaped cart, instead of going
through byways and across fields, precipitated us into
the racing millstream of the Lublin Road. It was diffi-
cult for the driver to keep the cart from being over-
turned. The traffic overtaking us was so violent that, if
it had wanted to, it could not have pulled itself up.
What was smashed lay in the road, like a spilt basket
of salad. Once turned towards Lublin, you could not
possibly turn back. The heavy army transport took the
crown of the road. Every kind of vehicle had been
pressed into service. Buses off the streets of Poznan and
Bydgoszcz passed us, masked with green branches and
roughly screened to keep the flies off the wounded.
Aeroplanes flew overhead all day, bombing the traffic.
In a way, the pedestrians had the best of it, at least they
could slip a little aside, out of some of the hell. We
looked with despair at the rich tilled fields, parched
and baked for lack of rain. The Germans hardly needed
the roads. They could roll across the fields almost as
easily as over the macadam. The lovely plain stretched

104

The Lublin Road

away on each side to the horizon, laden with stacked
corn, with piled granaries, fat hogs, Holland cows,
bakeries and mills and smoke-houses; all for the hungry-
Germans. A pedestrian ran up alongside our cart.
Would we make room for a sick man? He could walk
no longer. Of course we would, but what about the
merciless jolting? He was hoisted up and was less ill
than we had feared. He could even sit up on some bag-
gage instead of lying down almost on the axles, in the
bottom of the boat. All that was wrong with him was a
broken arm and fever from the pain of it. One or two
of his comrades exchanged nods of recognition with A.
They had all come from one of the ruined aeroplane
factories. Everywhere mobilizable men were getting
orders to leave the cities. Some were to rejoin their staff
at some secret rendezvous and begin manufacturing
under the new conditions. We still thought that this
might be possible. We still did not know the complete-
ness of the disaster. The Lublin road might look like
a rout. It was not necessarily one. After all, only a
very few people showed any sign of panic, and they
were the people who, in doubt and danger, would have
shown it anywhere.

All along the road cars had come to a standstill.
Overloaded, overdriven, short of oil and water, they
broke down. Many of them lay like turtles in the dust
and had been abandoned. You could have bought a
Rolls-Royce for a gallon of petrol. In another day or
two, you could have bought one for a cigarette. We
passed a small standing car that looked familiar. The
luggage on the back and roof had broken the engine's
heart. On foot and in the filthy pig-carts we had actually
accomplished more than our company of the night

105

The Lublin Road

before. A. had been right. They should have thrown
their luggage overboard.

Every five hundred metres or so we passed a half-
concealed bivouac. Soldiers lay about at ease under the
shelter of larches and birch. The hobbled horses did not
trouble to graze. It was too hot. To every group of
soldiers some small, fascinated, authoritative boy was
temporarily attached. Less enterprising boys stood at a
little distance, wishing they had the same nerve. A
grave young corporal dipped in a bucket and gave me
a drink. The peasant who was with us said :

'What about my horse, brother?'

The young corporal stared at him as if he could not
believe his ears. The very enormity of the demand
finally tickled him. After a long stare he passed up an
empty pail and told the man where he could go to get
water.

'But it's all mud by now,' he added sadly. He sighed.
I had never thought of a soldier sighing in war-time.
The sound of it in the falling afternoon, the taste of the
water he had given me, remain. The water tasted faintly
of green leaves and twigs. I suppose he came from some
village where the well was a long way away. A full
bucket of water painstakingly carried from a distance
has always a handful of fresh leaves and twigs lying on
its surface. They are supposed to keep the water in. I
expect that in all his life he never carried one in any
other way.

After his horse had drunk, our peasant soon aban-
doned us. I lay in a ditch with some other people. A.
came back and said that a woman in a cottage was boil-
ing us some water. A boy had been sent to another
village for cigarettes. Large-scale overtures had begun

106

The Lublin Road

for getting another cart. Wherever A. was, he imparted
a feeling of reality to the surroundings. After all, tea,
cigarettes ! He pulled me out of the ditch and showed
me where I could sit on some stacked wood outside the
cottage, a little way from the road. I remember combing
my hair and wiping off some of the dust and lying down
on the wood. My face and neck and arms were raw from
the sun. The woman came with a kettle and I threw a
little tea into it, and she said that the captain had also
asked for eggs, but that she had none. Her neighbour
had some, but she would not sell them to her.

'She says I will make a profit. She wants the profit
herself. If you want them, she says you must go and
buy them from her. After that, I can cook them.'

We had the eggs. We drank the tea, and put the
black bread we had paid for into our rucksacks.

'I wish you could have slept here,' A. said. 'But this
fellow is putting some straw in the bottom of his cart.
You can lie down on that and sleep. Only the night will
be very cold.'

'Isn't it very dangerous to go on through the night?
All that traffic and no lights.'

'Yes,' said A. 'It is extremely dangerous.' He laced
up the rucksacks and stood up. I had taken out the only
warm clothes I had. A knitted suit that I put on now
over the short-sleeved frock that had been too hot to
bear all day. The cold could be felt already. There were
endless delays between paying for what we had eaten
and getting away. The peasant's wife did not want him
to go with us. He had extorted a fearful price and taken
it in advance. He did not want to go and he did not
want to give up the money. He had a young horse who
kicked and plunged. Everything was made to drag out

107

The Lublin Road

as long as possible: changing his mind a dozen times
about the straw, the coverings, the bread and lard his
wife was to give him. The boy came back with the
cigarettes. More and more soldiers went through the
village. One young lieutenant walking beside his com-
pany was never forgotten by either of us. His pure and
rapt young face stamped itself like a medal on our
minds. It was three months later that A. said to me:

'Do you remember — once — a young lieutenant — we
never spoke to him, I think — a very Polish face? —
where was that?'

'Yes. Before Garwolin. I remember him very well.
But you never said a word about him. I did not know
you even saw him go by.'

The tea and the mouthful of scrambled egg had
taken some of the tiredness out of me. I said hopefully
to A. what I had thought earlier.

'After all, it may not be a rout. It may only look like
one.'

To that he answered me in two words only. In fact, I
remember him hardly making any other comment right
up to the end of the war.

''Quelle deconfitureV And a sigh, like the corporal's.

Quelle deconfiture! From a man who had seen the
great retreat in 19 19, and the rally after it, and the
Bolsheviks pushed back to Moscow by a beaten army,
it was gentle, and it was enough.

108

Chapter 10
FIRST AID POST

A was counting rivers and bridges. Every river,
however small, meant one more bridge between
L. me and the Germans. For the moment he was
thinking only of that. If he could get me behind enough
bridges, he would have time perhaps to leave me in
some remote country house in Polesie or Volynie, be-
fore we had to part. Neither of us yet understood that
he would never be mobilized. That the Blitzkrieg had
come off. Every bridge meant a pause, for it would be
blown up before the Germans got to it. They might
repair it in an hour, but every one of those hours would
be used by A.

The peasant was muttering to himself. The great
river of traffic, blind now, went roaring on with us in
it. All the light had not yet gone from the sky. I dozed
in the straw and covered myself with it from the cold
and could not see the road. Whenever I pulled myself
upward and peered over the sides of my boat, I found
A. sitting dogged and watchful, and his face, too, had
closed like those of the peasants I had seen all day. Only
I could read his. Once or twice I asked him what was
happening. I knew there were still bombers over the
route. I saw an incendiary bomb drop on a wooden

109

First Aid Post

manor-house and its owner standing helpless before the
bonfire. All his wells were full of mud. Men and horses
had been drinking them dry for days. I heard an explo-
sion that sounded like dynamite, and reminded me
passingly of my father blowing firewood out of an Irish
bog with dynamite-sticks. On this childish recollection
I fell asleep again. When I woke, A. had taken the
whip from the peasant's hand and was leaning forward
and himself urging on the young horse.

'What is it?' I asked him again. 'What is happening?'

He only shook his head.

'Lie down.'

I lay down. I wanted to. There was straw and I could
sleep; and whatever was happening, there was nothing
I could do. We stopped with a clatter in a village and
the peasant jumped down and said he would not go
another yard. The whole village was full of forms which
I still seemed to be seeing through sleep. Horses reared
around us. There were no lights, except now and again
the fierce light of an explosion. An officer and a handful
of sappers stood beside a small bridge. Below it ran a
really very insignificant-looking stream. They were
weary and filthy and they were standing by to blow the
thing up.

'Sleep here,' pleaded the peasant. 'It is madness to
go any further. Any one of these lorries will ride us
down any minute. As God is my witness I'll take you
no further to-night.'

The officer in charge of the bridge turned his eyes
when A. spoke to him. He was too weary to turn his
head. They exchanged names and rank.

'Stay here, or go on?' asked A. 'I have my wife with
me.'

no

First Aid Post

'Go on — go on,' said the sapper. To the peasant he
said:

'Do you want me to requisition your cart and your
horse too? If you don't, get on out of this. You have
been paid.'

The peasant thought of his money and went on.
What he said was true enough. Cars, bryczkas, carts like
our own, were being driven off the road and driving
themselves off it. If I had wanted something apocalyptic
I had got it now. That late afternoon, lit only by flares,
full of hurrying shapes, bored by the drone of bombers,
that sense of the Germans being on our heels, the noise,
the voices, the terrified and ejaculating peasant, the
sight of A. flogging a spent horse, his hand coming
down and covering my eyes, and then a red and searing
agony, a mouthful of blood, eyes blind and warm with
it, screams from the dying horse, the cart smashed to
matchwood, myself knowing I must not lose the hand-
bag with my papers and tearing my nails as I clawed
for it on the road . . . the traffic perfectly unconscious
of us in its path. . . blood streaming down my neck
inside my dress and A. talking. On either side of me
piled up sandbags and being told I was lying on ex-
plosives and not saying anything, although I could have
spoken if I had tried. . . .

A. was talking to two soldiers. They were in charge
of a lorry and it was as big as a house and had ridden
us down. At the same time, I was told afterwards, I had
received five shrapnel splinters in the head. I neither
wondered or knew at the time what it had been. I rather
enjoyed that warm blood flowing over me and the sickly
drowsy feeling that went with it. The soldiers were
sorry and they had pulled up, but they did not know

1 1 1

First Aid Post

what they could do. The lorry was full of explosives.
They could not pick up two unknown civilians off the
road and take them on. The trouble was, I was already
in the lorry! A. had done that. Before the drivers had
got their wits about them he had wrenched the door
open and laid me down inside. As I heard the argument
progressing, I groaned instead of speaking. One of the
soldiers came and looked at me. They could hardly lift
me out again and they could not let me stay. I was
determined not to speak. They asked me how I was
and I went on groaning. I knew that A. would get what
he wanted if I left it to him, and I was not sure what he
did want. If I spoke I might say something that would
be quite wrong. A groan could only help, I thought.

The next thing must have been unconsciousness. I
never heard the end of the argument. But they took us
on, on the strength of A.'s military papers and his being
an officer, although not on active service; and also, I
suppose, because they had wanted to all along.

We drove for about six hours, stopping now and
again to give countersigns and fill up with petrol and
for the soldiers to disappear into the darkness and parley
with the sentries and be asked for News. To A. one of
them said:

'Do you know?'

'I can tell,' said A. 'Where were they when you left?'

The soldier shook his head. He was not allowed to
say. His comrade was asleep, standing up and leaning
slightly towards the wheel, ready to take it even in his
sleep if the driver dropped. I remember the intense cold
and A. kneeling and holding me all through the night.
Occasionally one of the men would ask, 'How is she
now?' and curse because the only water they had was

112

First Aid Post

in a square-necked petrol tin and would not run into
my mouth.

I believed I was conscious all the time, but probably
I was not. Once they tried to get a doctor at a First Aid
Post, but there was none there. Once the man who was
not driving offered to hold me in his spell off the wheel.
The lorry was loaded to the limit of the stuff they were
carrying. A. and I were pressed against the roof. Even
passing round the can with the water was immensely
difficult. By feeling with my hands I could tell that A.
was in his shirt-sleeves. The soldiers had put their
greatcoats over me, too. I was warm and partly con-
cussed. Part of my mind was broad awake and the rest
indifferent to everything. What was frightful to think
of was the pain in A.'s voice and the first words he had
said to me when I had let him know I was alive. It was
frightful to know that he could suffer so much. I re-
member the intense rush of the cold on our faces and
all sorts of shapes looming out of the night, and frag-
ments of phrases which are perfectly clear in my
memory, but have no form in which they can be recorded.

At about two o'clock in the morning the lorry stopped
in Lublin. The soldiers knew of a First Aid Post. I
remember that standing up and being helped to walk
in brought me out of my merciful drowsiness. I remem-
ber walking up stairs and thinking: This is it then.
Poland has fallen. The war is lost. I don't know why I
was so certain of it just then, but I was. At least it
helped me to get through the operation. I remember
the pain in my heart and those words 'Poland has fallen'
piercing it while the dresser was busy with my head.
What he did to the head must have hurt cruelly, and I
never felt any of it. I only felt my heart.

h 113

First Aid Post

I thought that the room was in complete darkness. It
appears since that there was really a naked electric bulb
and a white glare. I could not see the light. But I per-
fectly remember the dresser picking up a razor blade
and laying the wounds bare and probing them with a
sort of sharp spoon. I thought he trimmed the edges
with very blunt scissors. Then he poured in the whole
of a bottle of iodine which he had given A. to hold and
packed in five steel stitches, leaning heavily on each one.

'I should put in a dozen,' he said, 'but I haven't got
them. We'll have to do with five.'

He did it all rather slowly. Like everybody else, he
was dead tired. I had time to think. Time to reflect that
this was the 6th of September and that the war was
already lost. When I talk of a pain in my heart instead
of the one I should have been feeling in my head, I am
not using fanciful language. I mean that mental pain,
if it is sharp enough, can produce an actual physical
lesion, and that it produced one in me then. Although
my head has healed, the lesion never will. When the
dressing was finished, they let me lie down on a bed
with A. on the floor beside me. I do not think I can at
all give a truthful description of the night that followed.
It seems that, as with the light, nearly everything I
remember is out of focus somewhere. What is true is
that the dresser and one or two other men lay down and
snored on mattresses in the same room and that every
quarter of an hour or so one of them would have to
spring up and go to the telephone and snatches of con-
versation would fill the room. . . . No, the doctor is not
here . . . no, nobody can go out to a case . . . this is a
First Aid Post . . . well, if he's dead already, that's all
right ... no ... no ... go out and get a dorozka and

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First Aid Post

take him to the hospital . . . well, I know there are no
dorozki, but what do you expect me to say? . . . Oh,
God's Love, get off the line, can't you? . . . The doc-
tor? . . . haven't seen him since this afternoon. . . . Back
to his mattress and his snoring, and the next time it
rang perhaps the other man would get up. Towards
morning the early air raid. Windows rattling, but noth-
ing happening very close to us. The traffic still roaring
through the streets. A. sleeping and myself cautiously
getting off the bed to lie beside him on the floor.

The two men are up and put on their jackets and
shoes. One of them looks at us uncertainly. 'You'll have
to be going out of here, you know. It's against the rules.'
A. wakening and clutching at an ankle. I learn only
now that he injured one foot and jarred the other when
the lorry hit us. All the blood except what is oozing
from under my bandages is rusty and dry now. My
finger-nails are loathsome. All my clothes have great
rusty patches, still sticky, on them. When I move, dried
blood falls like powder out of my hair. My eyes have to
be washed before I can open them. The men are very
kind and bring me a towel wrung out in water. When I
get up as far as my knees I fall over again, and when I
come round I am lying back on the bed and A. is sitting
beside me and the room has been swept.

'But at eight we have to go. As it is, they should
never have kept us the night.'

We drink a little rum and water. The thing is, where
to go? We have no money, and there is no room in
Lublin, and I am very ill. People say that the Govern-
ment is here. Somebody has seen Colonel Beck. A
policeman comes in and leaves a paper. One of the men
who has been here all night sits down silently on a bed

■* ,

First Aid Post

and looks at us. The doctor will be coming in later, he
says. Perhaps he will think of something. There might
be a bed in the hospital. A. goes out and comes back at
eight and the doctor is there. I am not quite sure what
they say or what happens, but I lie on a couch in a room
where the doctor says I may be, so long as nobody turns
me out. I have no idea who might have done so or what
it all meant. I am not even sure how many days I lay
there. When I start trying to work it out, I feel as if I
were dealing with eternity, and I give it up. Perhaps I
was only there some hours. Anyhow, what I am not sure
of I will not invent. All this part, except for the things I
have written, is a well of pain and fever and anxiety
about A., and I am dancing about somewhere in it in
the bucket at the end of the rope. Sometimes the bucket
brings something up from the bottom. Sometimes it is
steady and getting quite near the top. Nearly all the
time, though, it is dancing and kicking, perfectly empty.
The first thing I remember clearly is going to the win-
dow and seeing fresh placards on the walls and people
reading them. As a matter of fact, I think now that they
were old ones and that people were just passing up and
down. When I opened the window the roar of all the
cars still going through the town confused me so much
that I had to shut it again. I could not really read the
placards from there. I read them in some way of my
own, and made out of them that the Reserve Classes of
A.'s age were being called now. So I should be left
alone and wounded in Lublin, and how would he be
able to bear that? I remember hearing a man in the next
room, the dressers', talking and talking, his terrible dry
sobs making everything he said unintelligible. It is A.,
I said to myself. He knows too, and is asking these

116

First Aid Post

people to help me. He has broken down. What shall I
do in a world that has been able to break down even
that man, over whom all changes and chances have been
powerless until now? The sobbing ceased and the
dressers began moving about again. I could hear them
picking up instruments and putting them down. Some-
body, the man who had been in there, opened the door
of my room and came in. His head and face and hands
were stiff with bandages. He showed no surprise at
seeing me there in mine and his coming did not surprise
me. It is queer how natural one is in war. He was a
sergeant or some other fairly high-grade non-commis-
sioned officer. The thermos was on the table and the
bottle of rum. I reached out and gave him the thermos
top full of rum and he drank it, making a face. It was
like warm velvet, and he preferred the fiery rawness of
vodka.

'Well, what happened?' I said. 'Why were you cry-
ing like that?'

They had been in a car, he said. Something had run
them down. His wife, sent hurtling through the air,
had fallen on a naked bayonet. Some ruddy fool . . . she
had twelve wounds, and they had told him at the hos-
pital not to come back. . . .

One of the advantages of all being in something
together is that it is no use wasting words. After he had
told me, I said:

'Well . . . then you'd better stay here. Are they call-
ing new classes? I've been trying to read the posters.'

'Christ!' he said, 'I don't know.' He lay down on the
couch. He had to lie somewhere. He was all in. I think
I put my arms round him. We slept, anyhow. When
A. came, we woke, and the man whose wife had been

117

First Aid Post

bayoneted went away. A. had brought me a piece of
white bread and some tea, and I asked him about the
placards. But what day it was or how long we stayed
there afterwards I have no idea. I think I asked him
that question once farther on, and he said, until the
blood under my bandages had clotted. The doctor had
said that we could stay till then.

j 18

Chapter 1 1
REFUGEE TRAIN

At Lublin we had made a plan.
/ \ Less, I think, because we expected to carry it
X Xout than for the sake of having it. The expecta-
tion of keeping rendezvous with X. had brought us so
far, and had twice let us down. At Lublin there was no
word for us. Warsaw by then was more out of reach
than the moon. If X. was anywhere in the country he
would be at Lwow. It was even more likely that he had
already gone through there and over the Roumanian
border. But Lwow would be worth trying. A private
conversation with the highest local official got us places
on the refugee train, for Lwow via Luck. It was neither
his fault nor ours that the train never went near either
of them. It did not even alter our humour much. We
had not expected great things of Lwow; nor even
counted on getting there. Failing Lwow, we had said,
Pinsk, Polesie, and the Great House of K., where A.
could leave me with friends, in comparative safety, with
some chance of food, clothes, and a roof during the
winter. If by the time we got there there was no general
mobilization order, he would stay until the stitches were
out of my wounds and the worst of my fever gone
down; and if, by then, there were still no orders, he

119

Refugee Train

would go back alone, and find one of the little mobile
companies of skirmishers already harrying the Germans
all over the country and especially in Pomeranie.

Meanwhile we started for Lwow.

The refugee train was a very long one and as it
jerked along it got bombed a good deal. It was a desul-
tory sort of bombing, though, and was really aimed
more at the permanent way than at the refugees. The
permanent way was pretty badly damaged. It was im-
possible to get up any kind of speed. Every six or seven
hundred metres the driver had to pull up; on main lines
the breakdown gangs were still rapidly repairing the
damage the bombs did, but not quite rapidly enough
for a driver ever to accomplish the distance between
two stations without having to fling on the brakes.
There was hardly ever an interval between putting the
brakes on and grinding out of them that lasted long
enough to be described with truth as anything but a
forward jerk.

I have never seen a longer train. Of course, there
were far more open trucks on it than coaches. Also,
somewhere near its tail, there were two enormous
tankers full of benzine. We did discuss their potential
combustibility. The fantastic incongruity of their being
there does not seem to have even occurred to us. After
a week or two of war the only thing that actually would
have made us sit up and rub our eyes would have been
the occurrence of anything which would once have been
normal. The war taught me a good many things. One
of them is that the human animal is not, as a matter of
fact, either sensitive or vulnerable. On the contrary, the
creature has been given the most horrible powers of
endurance. Almost nothing will finish it off. Shock after

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Refugee Train

shock simply produce some further form of adaptation.
Even starvation, provided it does get something about
every sixteenth day or so, is not fatal to it. Bombed and
shelled out of its home, it simply transfers its instinct
for shelter to the four walls of a filthy railway truck,
where the sun and the Heinkels find it out. Bombed
and machine-gunned out of the truck, it lies on its face
on the ground and after an hour or two transfers its
instincts to the hole it has clawed or to a doorway or a
couple of planks. Even in the obscene promiscuity
ordained for it by the agents of Gestapo and Ogpu, in
a twenty-by-twelve foot cellar in which a hundred of
the creatures have been living together for three days,
the instinct finds something to cling to; something out
of which it can make its own personal shelter. It may
be, in fact, it cannot be more than some knack evolved
of freeing an arm or a leg for an instant from the pres-
sure of all the other arms and legs above and below it;
or perhaps being nearer to what air there is, or farther
from it; or something to do with the awful business of
the bowels; some relief, or some change of torture; any-
thing. It does not matter what, so long as the animal
has something of its own ; a habit. A habit is its shelter.
The human animal survives.

The train was not very crowded. The trains for
crowding were in the last half of the war, under the
Russians. The people in the trucks suffered the most. I
was very well off, lying full length, with my head on a
rucksack, on a long seat in a third-class coach. If I
could have taken off my thick coat, I would have been
almost comfortable. I had a good deal of fever, and
there was almost too much punishment in the heat of
the sun striking on the glass and the weight of the foul

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air inside the coach. But I was afraid to take it off even
for a minute. If the coach was hit, if the train was de-
railed, if any of the likely contingencies happened, I
would almost certainly lose it if it was not on my back.
So I lay thankfully and sweltered. Without it, later, I
should certainly freeze. At a station in which we stood
for about thirty minutes, women and boys from the
village handed up great hunks of bread and mugs of
milk and water. The milk had been heavily sweetened
and then burned. I can taste it now. Burnt milk will
never seem so bad again. A window was let down and
I remember a disappointment quite out of proportion
to the occasion because the air would not stir my hair
about as I longed for it to do. From being gummed and
plastered down with fresh blood, my hair had now
become an odious rusty casque fitted to my skull. I
could neither comb it nor clean it, and the bandages
were a torture in themselves, working loose every
minute and being unskilfully tightened without being
rewound. A locomotive with a breakdown gang on the
platform drew level with us, going in the opposite
direction.

'Bydgoscz is retaken,' they yelled to us. The Ger-
mans had lost a lot of tanks. Their losses in men, once
any real hand-to-hand fighting was possible, were al-
ways terrific. A stationmaster farther up the line had
heard it over the wireless, they said. A communique!
One could believe it! I remember our joy. Hel was still
holding out. Warsaw was going to stand a siege. Wild
hopes revived in us. The breakdown gang got under
steam again, to shout to the next friends encountered,
'Bydgoscz is retaken!' Two German reconnaissance
planes hovered over us and went away again, flying very

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Refugee Train

slowly, their noses turned towards their base in East
Prussia. It was early afternoon. This was their second
home flight in the day. Before dusk they would come
over a third time, and then go home for the night,
exactly like birds going home to a rookery. After the
first few days, the German Air Force did as it liked over
the whole country. I hardly remember a moment when
you could look up at the sky and not see some of them.
They did not always remind me of birds. Only in dream-
like scenes such as these, when they flew low over a
quiet countryside, reconnoitring, making bird's-eye
photographs, sailing along just missing the tallest trees
in the forests, soberly making for home at the approach
of darkness. Besides, my fever was mounting. A. got
down and came back with some leaves folded and
pounded in his handkerchief. I forget from what plant
he got them. Something very ordinary, for he could
always find some without having to look far. I have
seen him pound them like that and apply them to a
sprain or a gathering or one of my headaches scores of
times. I lay still and shut my eyes and felt the fever
leave my head a little. An officer who sat on a seat
opposite gave me some quinine and studied the ord-
nance maps that A. had bought in Lublin. He was
looking for his regiment.

Nothing in the war was worse than its chaos. The
first day's aerial attack wiped out more than four hun-
dred aerodromes, hangars, and fuel stores, and paralysed
the communications. The massed tank and armoured-
car attacks rolled over the desperate resistance of the
guards and the few troops that had been hurried up to
the frontiers within the first thirty-six hours. Once that
was done, the mechanized divisions had only to be

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Refugee Train

headed for the interior. On the now famous map pub-
lished by the Volkischer Beobachter you can see the
way they went; irresistible wedges driven with a force
unknown in the world's history into the living heart of
a country.

The anti-tank defence was hopelessly weak. The anti-
tank guns, what there were of them, far too light. The
old story! Money and credits! Poland, up to the very
last hour, asked in vain for both. With armaments on a
scale and weight to offer serious resistance to the Ger-
man Blitzkrieg, she could have saved Europe perma-
nently. As it was, short of artillery, short of ammuni-
tion, short of uniforms, even, with no Air Force and no
liaison between her armies, she secured the mobiliza-
tion of France and England. She was never able to
mobilize herself. No real strategic concentration of her
forces was ever possible. All that the troops could do
was to fight and go down where they stood.

That blisteringly hot day in September, on that
refugee train, we had no facts and no Volkischer Beo-
bachter map to make things clear to us. The officer
with the quinine still expected at some point within the
damnable circle in which he had been going round for
nine days, to find his regiment. He was charming, and
so were the two others who joined us and who were on
the same sleeveless errand; the impression they chiefly
gave me, nevertheless, was of men who for a very long
time had been nursing very bad tempers. Looking for
one's regiment is hardly the forty-year-old officer's idea
of a campaign. All three were round about that age;
A.'s contemporaries. All four had the same memories.
The students' defence of Lwow. The comrades, the
stolen permissions, the last ball in Grodno before the

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Rejugee Train

Bolsheviks got there, and the trains going over Nie-
men's wooden bridge. The draught of sour milk sliding
down the throat after a battle. The nights on guard in
the great Warsaw warehouses and the size of the rats
that came up out of the basements. The forced marches.
The retreat and the victory and the old Field-Mar-
shal.

'But this is the first time that we have gone about
looking for our regiments!'

The first one offered me some more quinine. The
second slipped his haversack off his shoulder and put
his feet on it. The third merely looked out of the win-
dow. He was bored. We were all bored. The man with
his feet on the haversack looked downward at it in
disgust. I was not sure what was disgusting him until
he said:

'A gas-mask for a bloody cavalryman!'

The compress on my forehead was warm right
through by now. It was a break in the boredom to
have A. change it. For one thing I liked watching
him pound fresh leaves and fold them into the hand-
kerchief. Everything he did with his hands was done
superbly well. The man who had been looking out of
the window watched him too.

'Now I know who you are,' he said. 'I didn't remem-
ber your name, though I felt I should have. What I do
remember is the way you use your hands. You used to
sharpen all our pencils in the Engineering School.'

To me he said :

'He used to take them away from us. He despised
us. We hacked into the graphite with penknives in-
stead of using a razor blade!'

'He has always taken them away from me,' I said.

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Refugee Train

The compress was put on my forehead. The train
moved.

'Where is Smigly?' asked the second man suddenly
and violently. 'I'm sick of being told that he's in Poz-
nan and that he's in Grudziadz and that he's below
Lwow. What I want to know is, where is he?'

As we did not know, we did not tell him. We wished
he would not brood and then explode. It was odd and
fortunate that he managed to explode in a voice in-
audible beyond the group we made. The other people
in the coach were enjoying themselves more. A woman
with several small children and a young husband had
come from Radom. They described the hand-to-hand
fighting in the streets and the ceaseless bombing and
intermittent artillery; and the way their house had
started sliding before they got out. Now they were
giving the baby sticky lemonade and looking forward
to arriving at Auntie's. I forget where Auntie's was.
Anyhow, it hardly matters, because I know that they
never got there. And if they had, how unlikely that they
should have found Auntie! The whole Polish nation
had started on its travels. A girl of about twenty leaned
her head on the shoulder of a man whom she addressed
as Colleague. They had both come from Czestochowa,
and both were clerical workers in one of the bureaux of
the P.K.P. This is what the Polish National Railways
were always called. The P.K.P. was one of the miracles
of the post- Versailles Poland. Only the Northern Baltic
and Scandinavian railways could stand a comparison. I
do not know whether railroad and coach and locomotive
building is something inherent in the Polish tempera-
ment; but any Pole with whom I have ever travelled
outside Poland has always begun a rail journey by cast-

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Refugee Train

ing an expert eye about him and pronouncing, accord-
ing to the circumstances, and always without a mistake :

'This waggon is pre-1916,' or 'These are German
coaches, left over from the So-and-So Contract, after
the Paris Exhibition,' or 'Imagine the old Russian
horse-boxes still being used for passengers!' or 'The
Belgian coach-builders never seem to have realized that
one needs room for one's knees.'

No amount of smartening up and re-upholstering
and no distance from the original works could mislead
my Polish companions. I thought of some of those
journeys out of the past as I listened to the tired voice
repeating 'Colleague . . . Colleague.' If ever the full
story of the German war in Poland is written, there
must be a full dress Roll of Honour for the Polish
railway servants. From the first to the last they were
never out of the firing-line. While the war lasted they
drove and conducted the trains, many of them for
twenty-four hours at a stretch. They starved, they froze,
they did their own repairs, God knows how. When they
could have slept, they staggered about the lines hauling
away wreckage that was the normal job of a swinging
crane. They cheered and consoled the passengers and
struggled the length of the trains, packed like no sar-
dine-tins ever were, with a can of milk and water or
crusts and gruel heated on the locomotive for a wailing
child. The bombers and the machine-gunners never left
them alone. When one was put out of action, another
colleague stubbornly took his place. Even among them-
selves they were almost anonymous. All the old shifts
were broken up. No man ever knew where his mate
would come from; only that a mate would be there.
Whenever a train broke down or went off the rails or

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Refugee Train

buckled up into scrap-iron under a hail of bullets, the
survivors took the next one on. The one thing they
could not do was to tell us with any assurance where we
were going. Nobody ever knew. We went wherever a
bridge could be propped up or a loop line laid, and with
the proviso that somewhere they should be able to find
coal and water. Under the occupations they did the same
thing. The only difference was that instead of raiders
and machine-guns in the air, an agent of Gestapo or of
Ogpu rode on the locomotive itself, and kept a revolver
pressed into the nape of the driver's neck. Another
agent went round with the conductor, with a revolver
covering the small of his back. I am not sure as to what
the Germans further did, but I do know that the
Russians ordered them to cut the Polish Eagle out of
their caps,, and that the Eagle nevertheless was still
there when I last travelled in one of the Russian com-
manded trains. Under the third of the occupations,
under the Lithuanians, there were no revolvers; but
every stationmaster and higher official was degraded in
the very first days, and by the end of a week almost
every Pole on the railroad had received his dismissal.
Before I left Lithuania the Polish engineers were work-
ing with wheelbarrows along the lines not far from
Kowno. The last Pole to whom I said farewell in Poland
was a guard on the station at Wilno. He saw the pass
from the Lithuanian Military Governor that allowed
me to travel to Kowno and apply there for a visa to go
abroad.

Crying bitterly, I told him that I was going to
England to tell our story; that so long as I lived I
would live only to work for Poland. That we should be
coming back. That Poland would again be free.

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Refugee Train

'But when will help come, pani Angielka} How are
the people to hold out? War is nothing. Hunger and
misery and imprisonment, that's how the real work is
done! When is help to come to us? Must we wait until
the spring?'

As I write, there is spring in London; in Poland,
neither light nor change. The crops that are following
last year's sowing are concentration camps, famine, and
despair. The peasants of the Vistula are transported to
Germany, and the peasants of Bug and Niemen to
Siberia. The Polish fields are sour with blood and all the
Polish bread wasted and set down before dogs.

'But when will help come, -pant Angielka} How are
the people to hold out?'

129

Chapter 12

MURDER AT CHELM

^ \ J e reached Chelm some time in the late after-
\ /\/ noon. The station gates were shut against us.
Y Y Air-raid sirens were screaming in the town.
There was not the slightest hope of making a dash for
it. The train had not, in fact, finished slowing down
before the raiders came over. We counted twenty-
seven. There may have been even more. As far as I am
concerned, the bombardment at Chelm has won the
prize. I have been closer to death, I suppose, on several
occasions; but I have never looked so closely at what
seemed to me like the other side of death. The scene at
Chelm was a crater in hell.

There was not an anti-aircraft gun in the whole town.
As a matter of fact, I doubt if there was even a rifle.
The Heinkels came down so low that they seemed to
be gliding on to the roofs. Only the soaring columns of
fire and smoke and the flying wreckage and the dense
blackness for kilometres around forced them up higher.
At one point they were compelled to make a half-circle
detour and come back again. They could not see what
they were doing. The one thing they most wanted to
hit, the petrol refinery, was never touched that day.
Houses caved in like packs of cards. The station was

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Murder at Chelm

strewn with overturned coaches and all the glass in the
town blew out. For sheer wantonness and savagery I
am sure that the German airmen never did better. As
families ran out from the blazing houses they were
machine-gunned with the precision that sportsmen in
shooting galleries employ to knock the heads off clay
pigeons. Inside the train, a first impulse to panic had
been got under. A few bullets came through the roof
and did no harm. Those who had headed for the open
were now lying quite still in unnatural, crumpled atti-
tudes. It required little more demonstration that the
best chance, if there were any chances, was to stay on
the train. A sort of dust-storm blew in through the
shattered windows as the falling bombs ploughed up
the sandy soil on either side of the railroad. We lay
beneath the seats with our heads covered with anything
soft like a haversack that could be reached for. I re-
member striking mine on an iron stay and feeling the
scab come off one of my wounds and the familiar sensa-
tion of warm blood running down my neck again.
Women prayed aloud and covered their infants with
their bodies. A. covered mine with his. I remember
thinking, not for the first or last time:

'Now it really is the end. And we are together. This
is good.'

The raiders turned their particular attention to the
train. Their time was already up. They had still to get
home to the rookery. There was no more hope of des-
troying the refinery that day by direct bombing, for it
was no longer possible to make it out. Very likely, how-
ever, as the fires got worse, more and more under way,
it would blow itself up from the scorching heat, and the
rest of Chelm with it. The long train, a little removed

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Murder at Chelm

from the inferno of their own creating, made a plain
target. How they failed to hit us I am still unable to
imagine. The bombs they unloaded tore up the ground
one after the other and still we were lying under the
seats, half buried under broken glass and a centimetre
of flying sand and soil, listening to the slam and thud
of the bombs and the detonations that seemed to be
striking off the wall of our own skulls. Still we were
alive and waiting for the next one. I have no real idea
of how long it all lasted. Again it is one of those periods
that get mixed up with eternity when I start counting.
What distinguishes its horror for me from all the count-
less others was a strong sense behind it of a personal
intention to flatten us. As a bombardment it was not just
one more example of the totalitarian conception of war-
fare. Heaven knows we were used to that. It was the
vengeance of the German marksmen who had not been
able to hit the refinery. In it was released the real desire
of creatures made like ourselves so to mutilate and
pound us with their explosives that we might be only
mangled pieces of fibre driven below the surface of the
earth. The knowledge of what evil really is, what it can
do to the human spirit open to receive it, has never left
me since that hour at Chelm. I had felt it before, and I
was to feel it again and again in a Gestapo prison ; but
never so strongly. To-day I cannot look at a map and
see Chelm on it without shuddering. Chelm is the place
in which I understood the man who wrote : Myself am
hell, nor am I out of it. When I think of it, as I am
doing now, for the first time it seems to me almost pos-
sible to forgive the Germans. As a race they have been
born under a curse.

The raiders went away. It was almost dark. They

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Murder at Chelm

would be late in reaching East Prussia. As for us, late
or early, it was all one. A., who had been foremost in
keeping the women and their families in the train, drove
them out of it now. A priest, stumbling over his soutane,
helped. Dozens of children clung to his skirts.

'Get them a kilometre at least away from this,' A.
commanded. When they were all out, he said:

'And you too. Come on.'

I came on. The ground was loose and sandy and
much pitted with shell-holes. Some of the children sat
down and said they wanted to go home. Half of the
carriages on our train had turned over, and lay along
the edge of the embankment.

'What odds?' I said. 'Let it blow up. Must we go
any farther?'

We went much farther. Until we could no longer
feel that wall of heat against our faces. The town was as
white-hot as a foundry. Then we lay down and watched
it. An old cow was one of the casualties. All through
the bombardment she had stood beside the train, rear-
ing her gaunt head into darkness and bellowing like a
Beast of the Apocalypse. I have never heard such a
horrible sound. When it was over, she had given three
or four more great retches, like a clapper striking
against hollow leather, and died. She was not wounded,
anywhere. It was heart failure. I never knew before that
a cow could die like that. The soaring spars and beams
from houses blown sky-high began to come down again,
their fire dying out in showers of sparks. Little by little
the sky cleared, and, though the columns of flame were
still climbing, they were not spreading. Incredible as it
seems, the fires were being fought down. From every
direction volunteers came running towards the holo-

*33

Murder at Chelm

caust. One man, almost mad with grief and fury, pulled
up to curse A. and the priest who were turning their
backs on the town.

'Men! Do you call yourselves men! Turning away
from it! And there are women alone in that bonfire!'
His lungs were almost bursting. Without waiting to
hear what they said, he ran on again. As a matter of fact
they said nothing. The children, after a little hesitation,
began to play with some tall dried thistles they found in
a field. The glow in the clearing sky was not exactly red
in colour. It reminded me of molten fire, livid and run-
ning, seen when I was a child, at the casting of a bell.

Soon we went back to the train. The locomotive and
what was left of the coaches had advanced. In the
station buffet there was a light burning and somewhere
behind the counters a place where, by some means, it
was possible to get hot water. I know, because A.
brought me some and we poured it on to the wet tea-
leaves kept over from the last time we had drunk. The
buffet was crowded. The dead lay inconspicuously on
the floor, covered with coats and tablecloths and any-
thing there was. Here we were much farther from the
town than we had been before. The raiders had caught
us on the far side of a level-crossing. Nevertheless the
roar of the fire came to our ears all night. It was a
curious loud yet muffled sound, like a tiger purring
very close to you. We must have walked miles that
night. In and out of the rails and across the sleepers
and up and down the embankment and back again to
the buffet, and then all to do again. It was fearfully
cold. We could walk no more, we sat down on the
permanent way and dozed against each other. Half a
dozen times A. said:

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Murder at Chelm

'You've had enough of this. Come and lie down in
the train.'

It was the one thing I would not do. The railwaymen
said we would leave again before morning. There was
company in their sullen voices and in the swinging of
their bull's-eye lanterns. It was better to be with them
than with the women in the coaches. The stationmaster
had sent our locomotive to Brzecz-nad-Bugiem, where
it was needed. Communications were still going through
there to Modlin. If there was a spare locomotive, we
would move too, some time. Probably also to Brzecz.
Anyhow, not to Luck, our destination. By going to
Brzecz, we would actually be nearer to our starting-
place than we had been when we got on the train. It
hardly seemed worth while having to come all the way
round for that, nor to have gone through that last bom-
bardment. We laughed, and the railwaymen laughed
too. Compared with what they had been doing, we were
travelling in a straight line.

In the burning town there had been a big colony of
railwaymen's families. In one house alone twelve women
and children had been trapped and burnt alive. Two
colleagues had been riddled from head to foot with
bullets.

'Like colanders,' said one of the voices. Only now
and then a displaced lantern showed some angle of a
face. They were moved and desperately angry. A., who
had no coat, was too cold, and at last we climbed up
and lay down on a couple of seats in the dirt and ashes.
A woman whose fingers had been shot away groaned
for hours. Another implored the absent and invisible
stationmaster to give us a locomotive. She had been
long enough in Chelm, she said. I must say I agreed

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Murder at Chelm

with her. I felt I would rather be anywhere else on earth
myself. Every few minutes she burst into yet another
ejaculation.

'Don't you realize', she demanded, 'that every minute
here is making it too late for us? If the train does not
run through the night, it might as well not run at all.'

The stationmaster, being about a quarter of a mile
away, did not answer. One or two of the railwaymen,
who had also come up in search of more warmth, said,
'That's right. You tell him where he gets off,' with
feeling. Now, in a way, it was warmer, because of the
huddle of bodies, but not much. It was impossible to
stuff the windows. I remember passing into a state in
which I was absolutely indifferent as to whether the
train moved or not. What it did was to shunt about for
hours and finally, not far off midnight, back in the
direction from which we had come. It seemed possible
that we were returning to Lublin. Nobody knew. 'The
driver'll know,' said the railwaymen. The trouble was,
he didn't. He was only obeying signals from the station-
master, who did not know either. The locomotive that
had shunted us was uncoupled and moved up the line
again. It seemed certain that when the early morning
raid came over we would still be there. Then another,
more energetic locomotive came and joined us, and
jerked us forward again. By one o'clock we were run-
ning out of Chelm and northward to Brzecz-nad-
Bugiem. I remembered our making up our minds not
to go there while there was still a choice, on the 6th of
September; as we had eaten scrambled egg and sat on
a pile of timber in the peasant's back-yard. The fretful
women gradually ceased talking. A., who could sleep
anywhere, fell asleep; and woke, vexed and authorita-

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Murder at Chelm

tive, when I cautiously tried to cover him with the grey
army blanket we still had. Very soon he was asleep
again. A moon came up and silvered everything. A
night raid became possible, but unlikely. Why should
they bother? They had all day, and all the time they
needed. I held a few bloated tea-leaves in my mouth to
moisten it. Whenever I think about having nothing to
swallow, my throat seems to close and I panic. Tea-
leaves were a help. By the time it was morning we were
running through country very like Ireland. I thought:
Not so good for tanks; and for a moment I forgot
Chelm and the cow and those hours spent in stumbling
up and down over sleepers. It is bitter now to remember
how long we went on like this, hoping. At about five
o'clock we stopped a few kilometres outside Brzecz,
with the signals against us. Not far away an aeroplane
or two cruised along an airfield and took off and sailed
away over hangars.

'There is an anti-aircraft battery here,' said one of
the railwaymen. 'They say the Government is here, too.
Anyhow the town is well guarded. Brzecz has hardly
been bombed at all.'

137

Chapter 13
BRZECZ-NAD-BUGIEM

,rzecz-nad-Bugiem was an important and very big
station, junction for most places in Poland. Our
train brought us within about half a mile of the
platforms and stopped in a siding. From there we had
to walk. The heavenly early morning freshness on every-
thing and our own filthy and limping staleness must
have been in remarkable contrast. I am sure we did not
notice it. At the time the urgent preoccupations were
to find a hospital and, if possible, some food.

In the station, I sat on the rucksacks and A. recon-
noitred. A lad in the glorious embroidered clothes of
the Hucul highlanders stood beside me and bit into an
enormous piece of bread and a pickled cucumber. I
didn't really care about the bread, but the pickle made
my mouth water. In summer, all day long, in the Polish
towns, the wooden carts of the cucumber-sellers used to
creak up and down the streets. I cannot imagine any
South Sea fruit more deliciously refreshing than those
little green and yellow cucumbers. A. used to tell me
about his childhood and of breathless dog-days in
Russia when his father would spend the whole forenoon
lying naked on a shelf in a brick bath-house with a

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Brzecz-nad-Bugiem

samovar beside him, drinking one boiling hot glass of
tea after another while a servant came in and out with
constantly renewed bath towels.

His own charm against dog-days was iced water-
melon, but he would not eat it out of a refrigerator.
In that same half-legendary childhood, the melon was
brought in from the fields, plunged into a cauldron of
water, kept at boiling point some moments, and then
instantly exposed again to the straightest and hottest
rays of the sun. Cut into after exactly the right number
of seconds of this treatment, the rosy, faintly perfumed
flesh inside was as perfectly chilled as if it had come
from the bottom of a deep well. But bath-houses, samo-
vars, and acres of water-melon are not always acces-
sible. Cucumbers you could always get. Every little
shop sold them.

The cucumber-sellers were a part of the life of the
streets. In the country, we pickled great jars of them
ourselves, perfuming them with heads of dill, a bead of
garlic, and a bouquet of parsnip leaves and bay. Fer-
mented beside the stove, the jars were later cooled in
the earth. No wonder I watched the lad with envy as
the juice of his ran down his chin. Probably I looked
ravenous. Anyhow, after consideration, he held out the
bread and motioned for me to break off a piece and eat
it. I could hardly say: 'No, give me your cucumber.'
Once I tasted the bread I was glad of it and hid a piece
in my pocket for A.

In spite of the bombing of the station and its environs
there were few ruined buildings in Brzecz, almost no
gaping windows, and few shell-holes. A., coming back,
commented:

'I bet they'll be sorry before the day is out that a

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train with us on it came in this morning! You know
what'll happen now!'

It was true. From first to last, wherever we stopped,
even for a few hours, we brought bad luck with us ; as
if to command, as soon as we arrived, the bombing or
the fighting either began or was immensely intensified.

On the other hand, so long as we stayed, the worst
never happened. It was only as soon as we left, that the
place would be altogether destroyed. So that we had
really as much claim to being well received and made
much of as we had to being thrown out on our necks.
But we could never make up our minds whether we
were scourges or protectors. It is fantastic the number
of times this happened. It happened at Garwolin, of
which not one stone remained on another, not one living
soul to sit and lament among the ruins, after we had got
through. It happened at Lublin. Chelm was bombarded
for the first time when our train stopped there, but
ceaselessly and daily bombarded and finally all but
obliterated after we had left it. The same thing was to
happen in Brzecz, and within the next few hours, just
as A. predicted. In the meantime:

'Have you found if there's a hospital?'

'Three. The Jewish one is the best, they say. Very
clean. Only, can you walk? The dorozki are not allowed
outside a certain radius and all the hospitals are in the
suburbs.' He ate the piece of bread and suggested to
the Hucul lad that he should help to carry our ruck-
sacks. The three of us left the station and immediately
there was a warning and everybody had to take cover
again.

Our cover was a sort of park, very sandy and full of
flies. Horses were tied up to all the trees. The early

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Brzecz-nad- Bugiem

freshness was over and the sun began to beat down
through the wilted branches. There was a tent with a
Red Cross painted on its flap. We thought that there
might be a doctor there but there were only young girls
and flies and a few orderlies, and the heat was even
worse than outside. Still, it was somewhere to sit. Hun-
dreds of refugees were standing about, not talking
much ; waiting for something. They had no idea what.
The tied-up horses were theirs and they had no fodder
to give them. Beyond such a disaster as that a peasant
cannot think. But each felt it profoundly in his heart.
The tent and its equipment were wretched. What
bread there was was turning sour. There was no milk
and very little water. The few people there had no real
training. In a day or two even such shelters ceased to
exist almost everywhere. Lwow, I have been told, had
a well-organized Red Cross which held out for a long
time, but I did not see it. The Wilno Red Cross also
held out, until the Lithuanians came. On the whole,
though, and obviously, it was impossible for any kind
of organized relief work to operate. But everywhere
anyone who had a crust shared it. Anyone who had a
room filled it. Women without children took the coats
off their own backs and wrapped other women's chil-
dren in them. A cigarette would be passed round a
whole group of people on a platform or in a cellar. The
worse things got, the more there was of this. In the
beginning there was still the strong instinct to preserve
oneself and what was one's own. The great exodus from
Warsaw, in the main, was a selfish enough affair : as the
misery and anguish piled up the self-forgetfulness,
resource, and heroism of people themselves were re-
inforced at every instant. It is an extraordinary thing

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to me to recall that life on the roads of Poland; and,
very especially, the last and saddest months that began
on the 17th of September, when three enemy armies
settled down to the organized frightfulness of three
occupations. All that time I was in the provinces seized
by the Soviets. In the name of Communism, millions
were violently deprived of liberty, property, decency,
citizenship, family, sanctuary, and food. Every kind of
human right, except the right to suffer, which no tyrant
up to now has ever tried to take away, was denied. The
gospel of the brotherhood of man was propagated by
tanks and machine-guns, by looting and burning, house-
to-house perquisitions, mass deportations, murder,
'executions' where there had been no trial, sacrilege,
torture, and the deliberate creation of famine. And all
the time, the victims were living like brothers ! All the
time, the pure and maddening dream of Communism,
for the first time since it was thought of, was actually
being interpreted in action! The partisans of Com-
munism, whenever and wherever it crops up, have
invariably depraved it. Of all man's dreams, it has been
the bloodiest and the most fatal.

In Poland under the Soviets, I found out at last the
mystery. It is only its victims who are able to make it
work.

We took a dorozka and jolted over the cobbles to the
hospital. I forget how our driver got permission to go
so far. Probably he just took it. The drive was very long
and the glare and heat terrible. I had nothing with
which to cover my head. The flies, always bad in Poland,
were insufferable all that autumn. On the way to the
hospital they tried me, I think, almost to the limit.
Gorged blowflies, buzzing about in the folds of my

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Brzecz-nad-Bugiem

bandages and impossible to dislodge. Crawling on my
face, stinging my hands.

There was no shade even under the trees. Thousands
of refugees lay about on the ground in every park or
square and even on the pavements. The sun burnt them
up, most of them still had a little food brought from
home. Lard and black bread and gruel. But no fodder
for the horses, and very little water. No milk for the
children. The police tried desperately to bring a little
relief and to keep a little order. Some streets were
closed to ordinary traffic. There were far too few police-
men to regulate the circulation. The driver of a dorozka
would not listen or go round another way. Orders and
explanations had no effect on him. He had not yet had
time to modify his stubborn coachman's mentality.
Street regulations and young policemen still seemed to
him the fair game they had always been. The police-
man, himself driven by inexorable necessity, replied,
not by the customary patient banter, but with the raised
butt end of his rifle. These are the unforgettable sights,
the true face of war. At such moments her grin is far
more ghastly than any you see her wear on a battle-
field. In the hospital, a doctor came out to us.

'Very well. Wait in here. In the meantime, no talk-
ing. Answer none of their questions.'

A crowd of curious women and young girls in a
corridor were shut out. They had come with burns and
whitlows and accidents and cuts to be dressed. There
were no wounded yet in Brzecz. The doctor was
keeping his beds for them. A nurse came in and talked
to us.

'He's always like that,' she said. 'He thinks women
are hopeless.'

143

Brzecz-nad-Bugiem

I asked her if I could wash somewhere. A sister let
me use a sort of scullery where cold water ran from a
tap on to a flagstone and ran away through a grid. I
have never enjoyed any bathe in my life so much. There
was no lock on the door. People came in and out and I
never bothered my head about them nor they about me.
The floor and even the flagstone was littered with
filthily repulsive men's clothes.

'For God's sake,' said the sister, 'don't touch those!'

I couldn't help touching them. She had to touch
them herself when she passed in and out. I had to put
my own clothes somewhere and there was not one nail,
hook, chair, or anything else in the place.

'Oh, well,' she said, 'I suppose it doesn't matter.'

'What's wrong with them?'

'It's only that they're absolutely full of venereal
disease,' she said. They looked it. They were so repul-
sive that they ceased to disgust and filled you with pity
instead. You thought of the bodies that had gone about
wearing them. A. came too, and washed. When we had
finished we both felt that it had been splendid. The
doctor said he would dress my head and took me into
a crowded surgery. While it was being done, a girl of
about twenty was having a stitch put into her hand
somewhere and I remember thinking:

'If you're going to yell like that now ' But, very

likely, later, when they came, she was perfectly quiet
and brave.

After the dressing, I asked if I might comb my hair.
A probationer in a summer frock sat down behind me
and tried to do it. She took immense pains. In the end,
we broke the comb. However, we did get a lot of the
dried blood out of it and we cut away some of the worst

144

Brzecz-nad-Bugiem

knots. The doctor said to A. that the stitches must come
out in another week, at the latest.

'When the cicatrizing is complete, her head can be
washed in ether.' He added: 'Or very clean petrol.' I
don't know where he thought I should get either. The
nurse took me into a small empty ward and gave me a
cigarette. When I wanted to keep it for A. she said she
had a whole packet. She had some milk, too, at home,
she said ; in her room. While the doctor had been doing
the dressing, she had arranged with A. to take us there.
As soon as he came back, we would go. She was not on
duty. She was only there because she had slept in the
hospital the night before instead of going back through
the town.

'Tell me where the Germans really are,' she said.
'Never mind the doctor. He thinks we'll all have
hysterics.'

'Where are they? Everywhere,' I said.

She lit another cigarette. She had been brought up
in Ukrainia and smoked like a Russian.

'I remember the Bolsheviks,' she said. 'My old Aunt
— they tired her so much before they killed her! But
the Szwaby will be worse.'

'Where has A. gone? Why has he left me?'

'The doctor has allowed him to telephone. He is only
on the other side of that door. He is trying to find
friends.'

'Oh,' I said, 'with his almanack? Yes, of course. Of
course he will find somebody.'

'Then smoke a cigarette,' she said, 'and wait. What
else can we do? Look, there are the photographs of my
children. They are with my mother. Some day the boy
will be grown-up and he will fight for Poland.'

k 145

Brzecz-nad-Bugiem

A. came back.

'In half an hour I shall have a bed for you,' he said.

When I last saw him, he had destroyed his almanack.
In it the members of a Polish Academic Corporation
can find the names and addresses of all the others. These
corporations are very ancient. In the Middle Ages, I
think, the guilds in England must have been very like
them in spirit. At any time, in any circumstances, one
comrade can ask any honourable service of another and
be certain of obtaining it. In Lublin, we had spent our
last night under the roof of a comrade of A.'s corpora-
tion, also found on the telephone. If I did not write of
it in its place, it was because his fate was so frightful
that I lacked the courage to evoke the memory. He and
A. had never met before. When they did, they kissed,
and the stranger said: 'Everything in my house is thine.
Stay as long as thou hast need and take with thee on
leaving everything that thou canst use.'

The exchange of thee and thou can hardly be pro-
duced in English, and I will not try to do it. In Polish
and other languages it has profound and moving sense.
Almost as soon as A. had sat down, a man in a corporal's
uniform burst into the room. Again the kiss and the
instant exchange of thee and thou. With this man, who
was a surgeon attached to the hospital and had just
heard of our arrival, A. had been acquainted twenty
years earlier. The man who was to take us into his home
was on his way. The surgeon, hearing of A.'s arrival,
had set off before him on a bicycle. After the embrace,
he had to leave again almost immediately. Another five
kilometres back to his post, under that sun !

'But you will come to breakfast all the same?' pleaded
the nurse. 'Your friend will come too.'

146

Brzecz-nad- Bugiem

'Look,' she said to A., 'the photographs of my chil-
dren. The boy is twelve already. . . .'

We went out into the garden and fell half asleep
there. The hospital began to cast a shadow as the sun
went round. Even the flies troubled us less. M. came
and it was arranged that after breakfast we were to go
to his flat. He had already told his wife and she was
expecting us. At midday he would come there himself.
He, too, had a bicycle and rode away on it. Our dorozka
still waited and took me back towards the town. A. and
the nurse walked. Both were desperately avid for to-
bacco. Nearly all the little kiosks had their shutters up.
The nurse had her own ways of obtaining some. They
were continually stopping and palavering with one per-
son and another and whenever they secured a cigarette
each immediately smoked a half of it, and the palavering
and disappearing in and out of doorways and stopping
behind or going up side streets and suddenly appearing
in front of the dorozka began again. The police would not
allow the dorozka to stop. To keep in touch with the others
we had to drive round squares and come back to them,
and turn and descend streets which we had just mounted ;
it was all part of a sort of feverish dream and abominably
wearisome, and yet how could they help it? They needed
tobacco far more than they needed food. When we got
to a wretched row of houses up a cobbled street the nurse
said: 'This is my home,' and took us inside.

The small room was overflowing with people. I re-
member being made to lie down on the bed. Some
bombs were falling on the railway station, quite far off.
Nobody heeded them much. After all, there was no
milk and I remember how I longed for some. Even
more than I had longed for the cucumber. A man of

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Brzecz-nad- Bugiem

about seventy-five sat at a table. He had all the marks of
extreme poverty and an air of great race. I have for-
gotten his name. A. knew it. He had been a celebrated
inventor and engineer and had known A.'s father. Now
he had a small mill somewhere and ground the peasants'
flour. The house seemed to be his. But I really never
grasped the identity of anybody. A man who had spent
the morning trying to get petrol came in with bottles of
methylated spirits and said he could make his car go on
that. Two children whose father had been killed in
Poznan came and sat on the bed beside me, quarrelling.
The nurse seemed to have taken charge of them, too.
The old man was making cigarettes. In his youth he
had been a political suspect, deported to Siberia. He
spoke with philosophy of the marches in chains, the
convoys and the frequent deaths of prisoners on being
suddenly exposed to fresh air and light when the
marches began. It is all as God wills, he said. Neverthe-
less, his lips trembled as he recognized the inevitability
of another partition of Poland. The nurse must have
ruined herself to feed us. There was no table and she
spread scrambled eggs swimming in hot lard and glasses
of tea and different kinds of ham and some very sour
bread and all the cigarettes on chairs for us. It was
impossible not to accept such passionate hospitality;
and impossible, too, not to keep thinking all the time
one was eating it of how much one had wanted milk.

When we left, the bombing had come much nearer.
The nurse came quite a long way with us and showed
A. where he could still buy a pair of socks. She even
bargained about the price with the shopkeeper.

'If you stay in the town, come and see me,' she said.
'Come to the hospital again. Or here.'

148

Chapter 14

PEOPLE DURING AIR RAIDS

At M.'s there was a hot dinner. Almost immediately
I \ after it was eaten, a German reconnaissance plane
X JLpassed over the town. We made plans, I remem-
ber, and looked at maps. When the rains come . . . their
tanks are rotten . . . their artillery is too heavy for our
terrain . . . the eastern marshes . . . the cavalry . . .
guerilla tactics. ... It is useless to record these endless
conversations. It is useless to record how we tried station
after station on the radio and how the Germans, as usual,
were jamming Warsaw One and Two; and how Bara-
nowicze and Wilno (harder to jam) replied to us with
heroic reminders of Poland's past, but no war news ;
and Rome with dance music; and Paris with dance
music and an advertisement for somebody's fil -pur
d'Ecosse. Nor of how one of the women in the room
broke down and cried at the sound of French vowels
and the other, gravely considering her with beautiful,
short-sighted eyes, nodded and said:

'A cause du temps perdu? Cela se comprend.'

When the reconnaissance plane had passed a few

smoke rings hung in the air. In this way the important

targets were marked for the squadron of bombers that

followed within a quarter of an hour. The first explo-

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People during Air Raids

sions were terrific. The M.'s looked at each other.

'This is it in earnest,' they said. 'Brzecz has not been
bombed like this before.'

The Air Warden, the wife of a colonel, a friend of
the M.'s, sent up to say that we had better come down
to the cellar. The two men shrugged their shoulders.
The building was of reinforced concrete ; the cellar had
nothing to recommend it. If the building went, the
cellar would most certainly be sealed. Before we had
time to consider it, all the glass in the building blew
out. The room we were in was immediately silted over
with earth and sand and rubbish from the street. The
white tablecloth remaining from dinner was lifted by
the draught and fluttered against a wall. A bomb of at
least five hundred kilos had fallen fifteen metres from
the front door. The house stood like a rock. The raiders
were straight above us. A second bomb fell within a
few inches of the first. This time the house shuddered
from top to bottom.

'Better go down,' said the men. 'Not to the cellar,
though. It would be better to go outside than there.'

We went down the stairs and stood in a passage on
the ground floor. The colonel's wife was there, with
the other people who had been in the house. A couple
of servant women wept bitterly because their children
were alone at home and we would not let them leave the
building. A wooden house in the street was already
burning fiercely. The smoke poured into the building
through the shattered windows. Other fires were break-
ing out in all this quarter of the town. As at Chelm, the
sky was darkened. A few people were killed by timbers
from the burning houses that had soared in the first
explosion and now came crashing down.

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People during Air Raids

M.'s wife stood within her husband's arms. A. held
me in his. Even then, one might be hit and the other
left, but it was the best we could do. The passage where
we stood led through a pair of heavy doors on to a
courtyard. The blast from the explosions and the pres-
sure of the air kept slamming them open and shut with
a noise like a thousand locomotives shunting. People
ran in from behind, from little wooden houses and
shops, and joined us. I remember seeing a woman jump
a fence. Half a dozen men tried to keep the pair of
doors shut. It was impossible. All that happened was
that the doors, instead of yielding, blew right in and
one of the men was killed. The house, instead of shud-
dering, started tilting.

'Out of this,' ordered M. and A. together. We went
out, crossed the courtyard and took refuge in a shallow
covered trench scooped out of sand. There was no exit
and it was not deep enough for an average grown-up
person to stand upright. I don't know how many we
were in it. There were a number of children. The weep-
ing women still clamoured to be allowed to go home.
The volume of smoke and the fumes of the explosives
were so overpowering that our faces streamed with water
from our inflamed eyes. That trench was really hell. No
stays or even planks had been laid in the interior. We
sank in sand. Sand ran down our necks, entered into
every recess of our clothes, finally filled our mouths.
The Jewish owner of the house we had just left came
tearing through the courtyard. He had come from
another part of the town. He demanded whether his
wife and child were safe. His little daughter answered
him firmly from the farthest and most asphyxiating end
of the trench.

*5*

People during Air Raids

'Yes, Papa. Mamma is here. We are both here.'
The father had lost his head and tried to force his
way from the mouth of the trench to the unseen cavern
from which he could hear the child's voice. The men
nearest the opening were obliged to stop him, as the
policeman, in the morning had been obliged to club the
stubborn coachman. The air became worse and worse.
The bombardment lasted longer than any other we en-
dured. The raiders were being driven away from the
station and the railroad by the battery we had been told
of. In revenge, and to lighten their own escape, they
simply unloaded their whole cargo on the most exposed
part of the town. The air in the trench became so bad
that those near the opening who could breathe and get
out, left it; otherwise those farthest away would have
died. M. and A. stood outside with a few others. They
counted more than thirty bombers straight overhead.
On this occasion, certainly because of the presence of
the battery, they did not come down and machine-gun
the population. For once Hitler's dictum 'destroy every-
thing that can stand up, everything that can lie down,
and everything that can flee' was neglected. I think a
few fighters went up. There seemed to be shrapnel puffs
in the sky, but it was difficult to be sure. I lost my shoes
in the sand and never found them again. Fortunately
they were only sandals lent me by Z.'s wife. The tennis
shoes I had come so far in were still in the bathroom
where I had left them. Weeks later I acquired a pair of
rubber boots.

The crowding and the vicious air brought on hysteria
far more effectively than the falling bombs. I remember
sharing with Z. and the colonel's wife the duty of being
loud-voiced and bossy. In my halting Polish I shouted

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People during Air Raids

down weeping women. I even slapped one on the hand.

'Be quiet,' I said. 'How dare you cry? If this is death,
we shall be dying for Poland. Trudno! We shall all go
straight to Heaven. If we are to live, crying will not
help. This is not the last of them. To-morrow will not
be better than to-day. Trudno /'

No translation I can think of gives the exact sense of
that Polish word. Literally, it means difficult. In use, it
means a dozen things. The nearest to it, as I used it
then, is Corporal Nym's 'It must be as it may.' As I sit
here, recording this, I have just used it involuntarily to
an English housemaid. She has asked me if she is to
throw away the spoonful of coffee still left in the pot.
Otherwise the pot cannot be washed. But it is a pity to
throw away coffee. Then fill up my cup with it, I say.
But the cup is already too full. She stands irresolute
between my breakfast and the sink. Not enough of my
attention really given to this problem, I have looked up
at her and shrugged my shoulders. Trudno, I say. She
wants to know what I mean. What was the word? I find
it very hard to explain to her. Of Brzecz-nad-Bugiem
she has certainly never heard. She has a fiance in France,
but I doubt whether we would get much further were I
to mention even the Corporal and Agincourt. Nothing,
I say; and she has thrown away the coffee. I daresay
there is no better solution.

In the trench one thing finally became clear. It would
have to be abandoned. As they were not machine-gun-
ning to-day, there was, anyhow, little point in staying
in it. Those at the closed end were already so far gone
that they had to be carried into the open. Fewer bombs
were falling and they were now falling farther away. As
somebody remarked on this, there was quite a small

*S3

People during Air Raids

slam on the other side of the fence dividing our court-
yard from shops and gardens, and a trench, just like our
own, was so thoroughly and accurately disembowelled
that of the twenty-five or so people sheltering in it not
one was afterwards recognizable.

Even air raids come to an end. The house had steadied
itself and stood. We went back to the flat and looked
round it. No one could live there any more. The M.'s
had given us a hot dinner and lent us slippers and
arranged for me to wash our few belongings in their
bath and had given us a clean bed. That was in the
morning, when they had still been householders. Now
they too were vagabonds. Z. collected a few absolute
necessities in a small case. The sour-smelling and
bloody rags that I had emptied on the bathroom floor,
mixed up with a little lard and some spilt tea, were
crammed back as they were into the rucksacks. As we
left the house together another German plane appeared
in the sky. We stood, looking up. Was this one, too,
conducting a squadron of raiders? But it was only the
photographer. It is quite impossible to describe how
loathsome the great bird seemed to us, swooping and
circling above the smoke and ruins, calmly, for the
delight of German eyes, eternizing on his German films
the Polish hell.

We camped in the upper part of an empty villa, far-
ther from the station, in a quarter still intact. In the
garden of this villa there was a comparatively good dug-
out, with a roof and stays. It was generally full. Per-
sonally, I never felt that sitting in a shelter made any
difference. This shelter was the first (not counting the
trench) and last I was ever in. Generally speaking, there
were none. I still think of the hours spent in it as a

r54

People during Air Raids

special division of Time, having nothing to do with any
other. Twice on the first afternoon, after the big attack,
we were driven down to the dug-out. Perhaps eight times
during the next day. At about eight o'clock on the
evening of that day we left the villa and waited all night
on the station for a train, and we never saw or had news
of M. and Z. again. I do not know why it all seems so
long and as if it had made a tie that will go on binding
us together for ever. I do not know whether they are
alive or dead. People I have known for thirty years are
not as real to me as a young woman engineer called
Kalina, whose surname I think I never heard, who was
a friend of Z. and with whom, in all, I spent perhaps
two hours. Bogdan was only a voice. He was so full of
malaria, said his wife, that he stayed underground from
one raid to another. Whether he was down in the cold
dug-out or above it in the sun, he never stopped shak-
ing. His two huge dogs used to come down looking for
him, lugubriously howling. Each of us had his own
place along a plank. Each of us could find it in the
darkness and sit down quietly. Only the dogs paid no
attention to these arrangements and sent the sand flying
in our faces and set their great paws on our chests and
tore from one end of the horrible place to the other,
until M. would lose the last of his patience and get up
and turn them out. I think I never saw Bogdan, but I
am as intimate with him as I am with myself. The officer
of Reserve, with the short black beard, who used to sit
outside the dug-out, never inside it, during raids, was
unknown to everybody. He was a man of about fifty
and rapidly going melancholy mad. He was in Brzecz,
he told us, to look for his regiment, which, of course,
he never found. He, too, was ill. I remember how he

People during Air Raids

used to say to me, forcing himself to be gentle: 'Come
up here and sit in the sun' ; and when we had sat for a
little and looked at each other, his shoulders would begin
trembling again with his terrible anger and he would
point to me, in my filth, and to Kalina and A., ravenously
eating green tomatoes, and to the roving dogs and the
smouldering town, and to M. and Z. mutely exchang-
ing the looks which A. and I no longer risked, and say:

'The mark of the beast 1 The mark of the Prussian!
A little more and we shall all be living like wild men.'
I never understood why he said, a little more. That is
how we were living then. On the afternoon of the
second day he ceased to come. Nobody knew where to
look for him. The dug-out was the only place and the
air raids the only time in which he had appeared to us.
Dead or alive, I think of him as still restless; still look-
ing for his regiment.

There was a grandmother, too, with a child of three
or four. Like animals, they would crawl above ground
into the sunlight for a while, and the old woman would
try to make the child play. Nothing she said or did
could keep it from staring, dumb, up into the sky. I
never heard it speak, only scream. Underground, it
screamed without ever stopping except when suddenly
it fell asleep. The poor grandmother did not recognize
it, but the little thing had gone out of its mind. All my
recollections of that dug-out begin and end with the
eyes of the elderly officer sitting outside, and the child
screaming and the grandmother praying 'Our Lady,
Queen of Poland . . .' and sometimes 'Agnus Dei, qui
tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. . . .' To the child
on her knee, too, she said always: 'My Lamb.' I think
she confused the two.

i56

People during Air Raids

Z. fed us with a little thin gruel. We had no light
and no gas. On the second day she got some wood and
lit a fire and, after all, the partridges that had been in
the larder at the flat were still there and M. and A.
cleaned and cooked them and so we had hot midday
dinner two days running. I remember how gay we all
pretended to be. In the evening, we were to leave them.
It was in this fire, very carefully, so as not to put it out,
that I destroyed the Union Jack the dressmaker in
Warsaw had made.

In the afternoon, a big man in a beret blocked the
entrance of the dug-out during a very hot bombard-
ment and a laughing voice asked for Pani Kalina, and
at the sound of his voice Kalina exclaimed: 'Anton!
thou!' It was one of the officers of the anti-aircraft
battery. Our eyes, accustomed to the darkness, could
make out the gleam of his face and the dome of his
shoulders against the opening. To him we were in-
visible.

'Presently,' he said. 'They will soon be gone. Then
you can come out and talk.' In the meantime M. went
up and they sat together on the parapet, talking in low
voices. They were very merry.

'Who else is down there?' asked Anton.

M. told him.

'And A.Z.,' he said, 'my comrade, with his wife.'

'A.Z.,' said the other. 'A.Z. who used to lead the
mazurka!' It was all of his academic career that he
remembered. The difference of a few years in their ages
had made A. a brilliant and distant figure to a student in
his first term. Now it was he in his beret and uniform,
distributing cigarettes and inventing absurd war com-
muniques for us in his soldier's argot, who blazed with

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People during Air Raids

glory. But all his prestige abandoned him suddenly at
that recollection. He felt himself young and lost again.
When A. too went and sat on the parapet, he introduced
himself with diffidence.

'Good health,' said A. They embraced and kissed. I
am sure that in their student days they had never ex-
changed one word. A. reached down a hand to me and
I came and crouched on the duck-board beside them.
He knew that I hated him to go even that distance from
me when bombs were actually falling. Although I never
said so, he knew that I always hoped that it would all
end, and the sooner the better, in a direct hit for us
both. The newcomer was besieged with questions from
below. Everybody wanted to know if there were really
French and English fliers with the battery; con-
scientiously adding to each question: 'Of course, if it's
a secret we know you mustn't tell.'

'If there were, it would be a secret, and I wouldn't
tell.' There was no more to be got out of him than that.
The raiders, as he had foretold, did go away for a time.
It was never for long. They might have been flies
battening on a carcass. Kalina and the officer talked
apart. She gave him one of the stunted tomatoes and
they said good-bye to each other. I never knew what he
was to her. Perhaps a colleague out of the past. Perhaps
more. At any rate, she called him 'thou'. It was no
business of mine. On leaving he took a rose from the
wall and put it in his beret. It happened that he said
good-bye to me the last. I was appalled to see what
sorrow and foreboding was really in his face, behind
his insouciance of an old campaigner.

'There are some English officers here,' he said, very
low. 'I tell you, because you are English. But leave

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People during Air Raids

Brzecz as soon as you can. I cannot tell you why. I have
said the same to Pani Kalina. Do not stay here another
day.'

J59

Chapter 15

P.K.P.

^ \ 7e ate a little gruel in the dark. The bit of
\ / \/ candle we had burnt down to the table before
T T we began. There was so much to say. We were
leaving so soon. Almost every day there was this little
death to be died. At each remove, we loved and went
away, and no news could follow us and there was no
hope of a return. I ate lying down on the bed, and could
just make out the places of the others by a sort of
movement of the darkness. A. said: 'Are you ready?'
and I said: 'Yes.' As we walked from one end of the
town to the other, A. had to carry the two rucksacks
and hold me up as well. Fire-engines were still trying
to keep the destruction from spreading. The fire of the
first afternoon had gone on licking up all the wooden
property around it. The firemen had had to give it up.
Now, as we passed it, and the house containing the
M.'s abandoned flat, it had burnt down to a sort of
mammoth brazier, but it was still purring away. Rather
like a tiger that had been satisfied, this time. There is a
frightfully evil sound about the purring of a satisfied fire.
Every few minutes a jet of flame shot up from it, fanned
by the wind, and sank down again. It was no longer
dangerous. All the harm it could do had been done.

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P.K.P.

The walk, except when we were within the orbit of
the fires, was accomplished in complete darkness. It
was not exactly a walk. I do not know what it was. I
know that it has left me still tired.

'The bridge here, I think?' said A. at last. We
crossed it, with other shapes, and descended to the
station. Our hope was to get on a train running in the
direction of Pinsk. A. had friends among the landowners
in Polesie and on the borders. But only if a train ran
through the night. In the day-time, travelling by train
was a harrowing kind of suicide. As a matter of fact we
waited all night and did travel by train from dawn until
late afternoon on the next day. But, at that moment, we
did not expect to. We had promised the M.'s to return
if there was no train before daylight. All night long one
train after another ran through the station. Some of
them without stopping. With steel blinds and machine-
guns on the roofs, troop trains, refugee trains. Live men
going to Modlin and Bialystok. Men coming from
Modlin and Bialystok, dying and dead. Stretchers being
carried out of them past us almost at a run. I remember
thinking: God, why can't they carry them slowly; and
realizing that the men on them were too far gone for it
to matter any more. Most of them had died on the way.
And anyhow, there was no time. There was never time
for anything. The Germans were always too near. Mod-
lin still stood. Bialystok was theirs. Every few hours the
train for Pinsk was announced, and then turned out to
be going somewhere else. The stationmaster and the
guards and all the P.K.P. men worked like demons.
Those who could, lay down on the bare ground and even
on the railroad and snatched a little sleep. It was impos-
sible to get into the waiting-rooms or even to lie down
l 161

P.K.P.

on the platforms. The waiting-rooms were the worst;
packed until you wondered why the walls did not push
out, filled with the reek of unwashed bodies and the
sickly gangrene smell, running with the even fouler
smelling liquids that of necessity circulate in conditions
like these. Nevertheless, hundreds and hundreds of
human beings slept, and the strange peace of sleep
relaxed their ghastly faces almost as though they had
been in their beds. One girl, I remember, sat on a
bicycle, her head and shoulders on the handlebars, and
her sleep was deep and good. As for myself, I could not
keep awake. Even walking up and down did not help,
nor the bitter cold. A. said that he had often seen
men marching fast asleep, but he had never expected
to see me do it. In the end I simply lay down and slept
with my head pressed into the loins of my neighbour
and somebody else's arm across my mouth. Sometimes
A. stood beside me. If I woke and looked for him, he
was not far away, but he never slept or lay down all
night. My neighbours woke and moved away as cau-
tiously as they could. I could just make out the dimmed
bull's-eyes of the lanterns at their waists. I had lain
down among the railwaymen, then. The thought was
reassuring and made me feel I was with friends. Others
wedged into the vacant places. In perfect amity we kept
each other warm. I had the grey army blanket, too; ours
was a good encampment. All the same, the cold was like
a knife and my head was uncovered. I remember think-
ing that and opening my eyes to find A. forcing rum
between my teeth. After midnight I got up and walked
again. A. said:

'There won't be a train for Pinsk at all after to-night.
The stationmaster has just said so.' By one o'clock there

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P.K.P.

was still no train for us. I lay down again; where I
could. This time my neighbour did not warm me.
Queerer still, I found I was not warming him. The
closer the other sleepers pushed us together, the colder
he grew. Then I understood. He was dead. Disgusted,
I pushed him off. It seemed just bad luck that I should
have drawn such a good-for-nothing bedfellow. If any
woman tells me she would have thought of his probable
wife and children, or wondered if he had suffered much
before he died, she is a liar. Those are only the things
one thinks of afterwards. I can think of them now, with
my pen in my hand. Not then. What we all thought of
was: how many hours till daylight, until the first raid?
What a shambles the place would be. What a perfect
photograph we should make afterwards, from the air,
smeared all over the station and the railroad like cul-
tures on a glass slide.

Every three or four minutes or so, quite far away
now, the flame fanned by the wind shot up from the
brazier we had passed on the way, flickered, and sank
down.

Towards morning, in the first grey light, a very long,
empty train was kept locked until the last minute. A few
soldiers were picketed alongside it. Two taciturn guards
came and opened the coaches. The blinds remained
down. By some extraordinary feat of will-power the
railwaymen pressed the crowd back a little. Nobody
was allowed to approach the train. The stragglers
among the rails were driven off. From somewhere un-
known (they must have come over the bridge and down
the same road as ourselves, but there was no hint of
their coming; and what possible passage had been
made for them through the waiting-room and along the

163

P.K.P.

platform I cannot imagine even now) there came into
sight a file of men and women, two or three abreast,
as grey as the light, their lowered heads and shoulders
covered with sacks. Only their nostrils and mouths
were free. Their hands, manacled perhaps, I do not
know, were crossed and held together inside their drab
sleeves. Because they all wore the same dress, with
the same sleeves. The file must have been at least a
kilometre long, although we never saw more than the
breadth of the railroad of it at a time. For perhaps
twenty minutes the drab-coloured column crossed the
lines without ever appearing to change. Those who
were swallowed up by the train and those who flowed
into their places from behind were absolutely indis-
tinguishable. They passed between weary soldiers and
the weary picket handed them on to the train. Neither
kindly nor unkindly. I am sure they were not thinking
about them; only about the cold and the possibility of
some sleep, and of getting the numbers right. A sheep-
dog does not ask questions about the direction in which
he has been told to guide his sheep ; what he has to do
is to get them there. Only we, the civilians, stood gap-
ing at this sight which, to them, simply meant more
standing about, more blisters on their feet, another
convoy, still less chance of a sleep.

For the first time A. began to fume a little. Very
little. Only somebody who knew him so well could have
discerned it. I realized that, for the first time, he too
was wondering whether there would ever be that train
to Pinsk. Fifty times during the night I had said: Do
you think there will really be a train ; and fifty times he
had replied, with half-amused patience: Yes.

We told each other no lies. Whatever he thought of

164

P.K.P.

the situation, at any time, he faithfully told me. Now
he said:

'So that is what that fellow who came to see Kalina
meant! The battery has gone. They are no longer going
to defend Brzecz.'

'How do you know?'

He nodded to the line of human ants still crossing
the railroad.

'Don't you see? Do you know what that is?'

'No.'

'They are emptying the prisons. Those are the con-
victs. Going east.'

At five o'clock the P.K.P. men began shouting:
Pinsk! Pinsk! This time the train was really going
there. The stationmaster came out and told A. so him-
self. The battery had gone and the convicts were gone ;
and a mass of people, quite beyond my counting, for
the most part clamouring, obstreperous, panic-stricken
Jews with their poor belongings in bundles on their
backs, and their money (for they always had money)
God knows where, but safe, were going. A. and I were
going. But the stationmaster and the P.K.P. men
stayed. The P.K.P. men never got out, never retired,
never broke. I wonder if any cavalryman would mind if
he were told that, beside the glorious story of the Polish
cavalry, there is another that need not grow pale and
that is infinitely less likely to be remembered or told.
It is the story of the servants of the railway company.
They too should have the name of a Polish Army
Corps. I can never honour them enough.

The stampede for the train left me indifferent. I
knew perfectly well that A. would secure some place
for us. When he had, I found that we were in a first-

i65

P.K.P.

class carriage, that I was leaning back against cushions,
and that somebody was giving me a cigarette. It was an
extraordinary sensation to be comfortable. In the com-
partment next door there were only three passengers.
The door, however, was locked and the blind was down.
One of the men with us explained why.

'The Voivod from . He has all his papers with

him, and an aide. They are destroying everything. The
third man is a judge. He is doing the same thing.'

A. and this man, a doctor, and then some other doc-
tors, his colleagues, began to talk in low voices. In
Poland, where any conversation between strangers be-
gins by each giving his name and professional title, if
he has one, and where every man of a certain age and
class has the same souvenirs in common, and in effect
the same traditions, it is possible immediately to recog-
nize the person with whom one is talking. Cousinship,
too, has a tremendously wide net. Certain words, such
as Warsaw Polytechnic, Defence of Lwow, the Paris
Mission, the names of a few men, and certain years, are
passwords. The names of the academic corporations
even more so; but strangers are not likely to exchange
these until they have heard the others. A. knew per-
fectly, after the first few seconds, with whom he was
talking, and that it was all right. I leaned back against
my cushions, glad to be out of it. Whenever I opened
my eyes, A. nodded across to me and said: Sleep.

The doctors told him how to take the stitches out of
my head later, if he could not find anybody to do it. I
saw them again, more than once, in the most curious
circumstances. One of them, the one who was the most
communicative, turned up again and again, always hun-
dreds of kilometres away from where one had seen him

1 66

P.K.P.

last. In Germany itself, he was a prisoner with me. He
was one of the last Poles whose hand I touched. As we
said good-bye, he was still — as he had been on that first
train journey — smiling, unruffled, rather loquacious

I am not going to describe the next few days. Every-
thing that has been put down is what I saw and heard.
There are omissions, but there is not a single addition.
I am being absolutely honest about this.

The record breaks here, in this train going eastward,
running through daylight and never out of the line of
fire. Where I can resume the story, in the second part
of this record, we shall already be in eastern Poland, in
Polesie — the marshlands — on our way to the estate of
our friend, Pani N., where the Russians invaded us,
and where the whole heartbreaking Polish retreat from
the eastern marches passed through the demesne,
bivouacking in the house and around it.

In that record too there will be inevitable gaps. (In
the first place, 'N' is not even the initial letter of a
famous name with many lines and branches, encrusted
in that province for many hundreds of years.) But it
will in the same way be the truth.

167

PART TWO

Chapter 16

POLESIE

^ Jl Te did eventually get to K. in Polesie. It had
\ /\/ been impossible to meet X. anywhere. I have
f f not got the date to refer to. Almost every scrap
of paper had to be destroyed at one time or another. But
it was probably all of six days before the Russian march.
K. was the same, and yet not the same, as I remem-
bered it. All the outside things were there; all the old
order and abundance. The larders could have stood a
siege. Over a hundred and thirty young hogs were fat-
tening in the styes. For all the drought, the seventy
demesne cows of pure Holland strain provided enough
milk and cream and cheese for the Great House and to
spare for the K. Co-operative Dairy. Fresh butter was
churned for the table every day. Pani N. still went about
the gardens, the bakeries, and the byre, in her patched
skirt and thick stockings, with her scissors and keys
hanging from her belt and a little flat basket on her arm.
Her stockings had been darned so often that as a last
resource they had now been mended over the heels with
squares of cloth. When she was not walking, she was
doing the estate accounts or turning a garment or sort-
ing winter beans, or one of a dozen other things. From
seven o'clock in the morning until the whole household

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Poiesie

had gone to bed at night, she never spent an idle half-
hour. Every guest that came to the door had his place
at table set by herself. It made no difference whether he
was an engineer, a forester, a Russian pope or a prince.
I have seen her pick up in her fingers a potato baked in
its jacket and put it in the gravy on the schoolmaster's
plate. A general and the garden-boy had a water-melon
shared out between them with her own pocket-knife.

Wherever she appeared, the work immediately went
better. Anybody whom she liked accompanied her. It
might be Nikifor the swineherd. It might be her cousin,
once Poland's ambassador in London. A. was her fav-
ourite. For his sake she tried, as she said, to make me
eat. The soups, the cream, the sauces, the charcuterie,
the hors-d'ceuvres, the braised fowl and boiled fish, the
dishes of groats, millet and barley topped with crack-
ling lardons, the maize cobs swimming in butter and
the pancakes stuffed with sweet cheese of any one day's
dinner were not, she considered, fortifying enough.
When we walked round the garden she cut me bunches
of the tiny white grapes she grew against a southern
wall. When we came in she sent for two or three boiled
eggs, so horribly soft that she expected me to stir them
round in a glass and spoon them into my mouth. When
I was lucky something called her away and A. got them.
He really enjoyed eggs like this. In between she gave
me honey, milk, and pieces of white bread sugared over
and baked light brown, rather like biscuits, in the oven.

But the stream of refugees, the total lack of news, the
wild growth of rumour and the persistent jamming of
the wireless, the mourning (never spoken of) for a great-
grandchild dead in Warsaw on the first day of the war,
the absence of Krzyztof, the child's father, and the heir,

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Polesie

believed to have perished with the whole of his regiment
somewhere near Grudziadz, and the helpless aching of
our hearts, made it all into a sort of uneasy entr'acte. All
the accessories of a normal life still miraculously existed.
Only the life was not normal. In the middle of a forced
conversation somebody would suddenly stop dead. The
jokes were too successful. Everybody was too ready to
be amused. The ones who were being amusing, looking
round at the other haggard faces, would suddenly realize
what their own must be like, and give it up. Getting
through time was like trying to swim in the Dead Sea.
We did the most incredible, fantastic things. Like sit-
ting under an arbour smothered in roses, reading novels
from the library in Pinsk! Whatever else I forget, I shall
never forget the horror of that sort of thing. In Warsaw,
women were throwing themselves against the German
tanks, into a jet of machine-gun bullets, with buckets of
boiling water. Warsaw schoolchildren were standing
night and day on the roofs of houses, shovelling off the
incendiary bombs before they had time to burn
through.

One could understand people doing that. Nothing
fantastic there. Just grim earnest. War. Just standing
up to the Germans again. This time against tanks and
incendiary bombs, as it happened; but, in sum, for
Polish women and children, nothing new. All in the
day's work; all part of what the dogged, exasperating,
smiling Poles mean when they shrug their shoulders
and explain laconically: Polski los (the Pole's lot). No
phrase could possibly be more eloquent. Everything is
in it. Their exact opinion of their neighbours. Their
opinion of themselves. Their incurable contempt for
death.

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Polesie

But reading novels in a sunny arbour was pure Grand
Guignol. I remember an engineer looking up from a
translation of A Passage to India and saying mildly: 'The
difficulties of the English in India are hardly at all of
the kind one would suppose, not having read this book.'
The absolute peak of fantasy seemed to me to have been
touched by that sentence. In the evenings we laid out
patiences. Pani N. and A. knew dozens. Two packs of
patience cards in a small leather box used to be taken
out of Pani N.'s dressing-table drawer and lent to me.
Nobody else was allowed to use them. Each evening,
once I had finished with them, she wrapped the box up
in its paper again and put it back. A present from
Krzyztof. Heaven knows how long she thought she was
going to preserve it. She was eighty-three and her first
recollections were of a childhood in Siberia, between a
father in chains and a mother who had followed him
into exile. The Great House of K. had been destroyed
three times in her lifetime, and rebuilt another three.
When her father had been made a convict. By the Ger-
mans, during the last European war. By the Bolsheviks
in 1920. Each time what was rebuilt was plainer and
poorer than it had been the time before. When I knew
it, it was still called the Great House, but it could
hardly be compared with an English farmhouse. Only
Pani N., in her worn clothes, with her stained and work-
hardened hands, made it splendid. It was the Great
House because she lived in it and because she had built
it, when she was already more than sixty, with those
very hands.

Polesie is a queer country. There is still jungle there
and the only virgin forest in Europe; waterfowl and
strange fish and innumerable prairie flowers. The elk

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Polesie

still skims over the marshes and the last auroch in the
world moves ponderously through the forest. The golden
lynx, as long as a jaguar, glides along the giant trees like
a patch of sunlight. The black stork walks about all the
summer. Waterways take the place of roads. The Great
Houses stand on islands and the villages are linked by
boats. In winter the white partridge comes when the
snow comes. The marshes and the waterways freeze.
Sleighs dash about and the boats are laid up and the
pace of everything is accelerated. Only the blood of the
grey bear slows down and he curls himself up and
sleeps. Our own road to the Great House had stopped
outside L., the market town thirty miles away. We were
met there by the agent from K. Pani N. was old and the
heir, a professional soldier, nearly always absent. Of late
years the agent had had great authority. Pani N. even
liked to have him sleep in the house and come to meals
with her, as well as having his office there. A peasant's
cart was commandeered for me. The little boy who
drove it was very discontented. As we passed out of the
town, we passed a man, probably his father, to whom
he called an explanation.

'It is an order!'

The father shrugged his shoulders and stood to watch
us out of sight.

I urged the boy not to gallop. A. and the agent were
following us on foot. He gaped at me and pulled up.

'How far is it to the river?' I asked.

'What river?'

'The river where the boat is waiting.'

'I don't know.'

'Then where are you taking me?'

'I don't know.'

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Polesie

About a kilometre out of the town we turned aside.
I could see no river, only a kind of waving steppe, on
which sedges grew instead of corn. The men came up
again, and the boy was sent back, grasping his copper
coins, not saying a word, as discontented as he had come.
The agent shrugged his shoulders. After fifteen years
on the property, fifteen years in which he had progres-
sively ameliorated the peasants' lot, he expected nothing
of them. At each new transaction they evinced the same
eternal stubborn peasant distrust. His shrug was exactly
the same gesture as the boy's father had made earlier.
An order! Very well. Unexplained, of course. Who
could explain the subtle caprices of the gentry? Who
would try?

'Where is the river?' I asked.

The agent called. An old man came out of his hut,
carrying a flat paddle. A. lifted me down from the cart.
I saw now that a very long, shallow punt lay among the
sedges.

'Will she take us all?' asked the agent.
The old man lamented. The water was getting lower
and lower. The fish were dying from the heat of the
sun. The marshes could be crossed on foot, even by a
stranger who did not know the secret ways. The wild
fowl were leaving. Since the marshes were inhabited,
such a drought had not been known. The forest fires
could not be extinguished. The peasants' cattle gave no
milk. Only the cattle at the Great House still had a
little pasture not quite burnt up. Probably it was the
end of the world.

'And That One . . .' he broke off and looked over his
shoulder. 'Master, tell us ! Will He come here? Will He
come to the poor folk of Polesie?'

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Polesie

'And wouldn't you be glad if he did?' asked the
agent. 'Aren't you always complaining about the Gov-
ernment that's done so much for you! God knows, why
wouldn't he come ! I'm told there was an aeroplane went
through the town yesterday, and flying so low down
that she went up the street almost on her wheels!'

The old man said nothing. It had been market-day
in the town. The police had been moving about in the
square all day, breaking up the groups of peasants in
too excited discussion. What was significant was that
the plane had flown away in the direction of Minsk,
over the Soviet frontier. A shopkeeper had told us that.
The peasants were as mum as the dead about it except
between themselves. They had seen nothing, heard
nothing, and knew nothing when the gentry or the
shopkeepers or the police spoke.

'That One!' repeated the agent. 'He's afraid to say
"Hitler". He thinks the word would burn his tongue.
They remember the Germans here all right, after hav-
ing them for two years!'

'And the Russians?'

The agent shrugged his shoulders.

'Ah, the Russians ! The famous Raj ! That's another
story. Peasants are all land-mad. They believe anything
the agitators tell them. The Raj, indeed! Ah, I wish
them joy of it. . . .'

At the word Raj, the old man bent low over his
paddle. Soviet propaganda has had its ground fatally
well prepared here. During the Partitions, Russian
government systematically stultified the borderland
peasants. From father to son, from son to great-grand-
son they successively sank to the level of the Russian
moujik. After that, from 19 14 onwards, millions of

m 177

Polesie

Russian soldiers, already muttering social revolution,
stood all along the Front here and right down to the
south. When revolution broke, the peasants perceived
that these men, so like themselves, could change the
whole face of the world overnight. Pilsukdsi and the
battle of Warsaw changed it again. The Bolsheviks
retired behind the frontier, licking their wounds. The
Russian influence lingered. Polish policy could only set
itself to reform. Build and open schools. Drain the
marshes. Gradually redress grievances. Aim at pro-
gressively raising the standard of living. Unlike the
Russian propaganda, it could not promise a new heaven
and a new earth. Untiring underground agitation kept
the people discontented. Raj is the peasants' name for
Paradise, and their paradise was Soviet Russia. As their
fond imagination pictured it. A paradise in which all
the land was taken away from the 'nobles' and given to
themselves. Something as far removed from the real
Soviets, from enslaved and gloomy Russia, as heaven
from hell.

Lying in the bottom of the boat I already had a bed
of hay and dried rushes. A. had no coat. The coachman,
Ivan, with horses and wraps, was to meet us higher up.
Fever shook me from head to foot, and there was noth-
ing to cover me with. In these marshes, cursed by mos-
quitoes, it is very easy for a fever to take a bad turn.
They piled more hay over me and pushed off. The high
sedges brushed our faces, parted to let us through and
closed in behind us. Standing only a few yards away,
nobody who did not know the country could have told
that we were passing. Of course the marsh folk them-
selves can tell by the direction of a bending reed or the
flight of a marsh fowl or the movement of the fish higher

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Polesie

up everything that goes on in their preserves. In the
days of the Russian gendarmerie, fugitives lived for
years in these places, fed and guided by the natives,
without being ferreted out. In the Carpathians the
southern borderlands, among the mountain gorges and
scrub, the Austrian gendarmerie played the same un-
ending game of hide-and-seek.

The fierce heat of the sun was over. Very soon, said
the agent, it would be bitterly cold. He frowned at the
clothes in which we had lived since Warsaw — A.'s light
suit; the white kid shoes hanging in strips from my feet.

The higher up we got, the more the punt scraped on
the bottom. Wherever we went, there was horror. Even
in winter, when the lakes and slow-moving rivers are
frozen, much of the marshland itself freezes only very
superficially. The vegetation rotting below is so closely
packed that it smokes and keeps warm. A foot wrong
and the stranger is choked in mud above his mouth.
And now in the autumn, no rains on the horizon!
Drought in Polesie. A sky so limpid that a bird leaving
her nest on the ground could be picked out from a
thousand feet up. The marshland a passage for tanks.

'Yes,' said the agent, 'and at the Great House not a
drop of water in the moat! Every cask and barrel on the
place splitting open. There is no water to stand them in.
The horses have to drink in the courtyards, and even
then at the end of a day there is only mud in their
trough. The water-melons are only fit to throw to the
pigs. Stunted. Empty inside. Half the maize cobs are
empty. Even the pigeons start spinning suddenly and
drop dead in the dust.'

From now on the boatman pulled the punt more than
he paddled. Even so, it scraped and stuck. In the end,

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Polesie

over some bad bits, A. and the agent had to lighten it by-
getting out too.

I remember the strangeness of lying on my back
and watching the sky as we travelled along. Its limpid
blueness, its exquisite beauty, was perfectly empty. For
hours we travelled like this and still the illusion con-
tinued. I could not think of it as anything else. I remem-
ber thinking over and over again, unbelieving: a clean
sky. I looked at it timidly. I should have liked to feel its
purity, but I could not, and cannot now. To me, the sky
has been so fouled, like almost everything else in the
world, that I hate to look up at it. A fair day, with sun-
shine and a dazzling clear dome of blue, only makes me
think of visibility. Just as it is hateful to see how easily
water runs from the tap when you turn one on. It no
longer means just water. It means the patient queues,
kilometres long, waiting for a drop of it, in Warsaw,
and the German machine-gunners mowing them down
in the sun.

Night came down on us, still travelling. It came down
suddenly and it was very cold.

'The horses should be about here,' said the agent.
He began to shout through the darkness. 'Ivan, o-hee!
O-hee, Ivan!' The punt still advanced, through total
darkness. The old man still had to descend the water-
way to his home. No answer came from the land: 'Ivan !
O-hee, Ivan! O-hee! O-hee!' We had been nearly three
hours on the water. I had no idea how much farther we
had to go.

The note they sent quivering over the marshland, the
empty echo of it, the punt, the darkness, the wall of sedge
on either side of us, the silent movement of the paddle
through the water, the sense of being utterly lost if left

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Polesie

for an instant alone, the dampness and weight of my
grass bed, heavy now with dew and with all its perfume
faded, how long did they last? I thought they would last
all night. Sleep and fever got the better of me again. I
woke to hear Ivan's own 'O-hee!' coming closer and
closer. There was the stir of horses and their harness
somewhere very near. In black, impenetrable darkness,
as it seemed to me, but in what must have been as clear
as daylight to him, the old man brought the boat to the
side and guided us, one after the other, over a sort of
causeway of pointed stones. The agent indifferently
walked through the water in his high leather boots.
The punt started to descend.

We climbed up into the cart. Away from the water it
seemed lighter. A. was glad of a pelisse with a thick
bearskin lining. I was glad to see him put it on.

'Drive on,' said the agent. A. and I sat together on
the usual stuffed sack laid across from one side to the
other. The ground was terribly uneven. If A. had not
held me, I should not have kept on a second. Partly
because I persisted in sleeping; partly because I was so
exhausted, that I had no power of holding on.

At the first bridge we were challenged. The agent
advanced and spoke. His voice and horses were imme-
diately recognized. But it made no difference.

'An order.'

'But from whom?'

'From the Gmina.'

Under Polish administration, the Gmina is the local
commune; its officials are the Wojt and the Soltys,
roughly translatable as village mayor and reeve.

'But there was no such order at three o'clock this
afternoon. I saw the Wojt myself in L. He said nothing

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Polesie

about it. You can't stop people from going home
and at this time of the night. Such an order is for
strangers.'

The guard only muttered. They were delighted to
have this occasion for scoring off the agent.

'An order. You must go round.'

'But there is no way round. Come, don't be fools.
You know me. Who are you? Stand out, let me see you.
Nikifor? Wassilv?'

They retreated still farther into the shadow of the
bridge. One of them, the farthest away, began to
threaten Ivan. Everything he said to Ivan was meant
for the master.

'And be off now, and quickly. Do you want us to turn
your horses for you? We're too long talking here with
you, as it is.'

In the end, we had to turn.

'In God's name,' said Ivan, 'how'll I get the horses
through the scrub? Your honours must both get down
and help me.'

The surly guard yelled after him mockingly. Quite
where we passed nor how it was done, I don't know. I
know we drove off the track and across roughly cleared
forest-land and then in and out among trees and that
after that we had to go down into the dry bed of a river
and up the other side. The horses slid down on to their
haunches. Ivan at their heads shouted in the queer
patois I did not understand. A. and the agent were
hanging on to the traces. As for me, I had been made
to lie down in the straw and hold on to the sides of the
cart.

'Can't I get down? Can't I walk with you?'

'No. Lie down and keep your eyes shut.'

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Polesie

There was an instant, I learnt afterwards, when the
off-horse started to roll over and the agent slipped the
trace and got him up again. One more terrific heave, an
almighty strain, and they were out and up on the other
side of the river-bed.

At the next bridge the same manoeuvre, but fairly
easy this time. At the third, no guard. The agent
snorted.

'Just like them. God, when I see the police to-mor-
row!'

A journey that should not have taken an hour lasted
three. The agent fell asleep. I fell into I don't know
what coma of exhaustion, pain, and grief. Only A.,
immobile in his pelisse, neither slept nor altered nor
took his eyes off the road.

'What do you think that order means?'

'To keep the track open.'

'But for whom? Since no-one is allowed to travel. . . .'

'For troops.'

'For troops,' said the agent, wakening finally. 'Look,
Ivan, we are home.' A lamp shone. 'When will that boy
learn to keep the lights covered? Duren!' He got down
and led us in. An old lady and a young man, the village
schoolmaster, rose from bending over a little wireless
set.

'A.Z.', said the agent, 'and his wife. We have a bed
for them, I suppose? And food at once. Where are the
servants?'

The best thing was that they gave me at last a glass
of milk.

183

Chapter ij
THE FIFTH PARTITION HAS BEGUN

At K. I first read the stanzas of Mickiewicz pub-
/-Alished in 1832. They might have been written
JL \-last September.

Oh, Polish mother! when from thy sons eyes the light of
genius shines . . .

When, with bowed head, he listens to the history of his
sires . . .

Oh, Polish mother, ill are these -pastimes for thy son . . .

Because though peace shall gladden all the world; though
nations, rulers, minds, shall be at one; thy son is called
to battle without glory . . .

Then bid him early choose for his musing place a lonely
cave . . . with noxious reptiles shall he learn to hide his
anger beneath the earth; to make his thoughts impene-
trable . . . to poison speech . . .

Our Saviour, when a child at Nazareth, played with the
little cross on which he saved the world. Oh, Polish
mother! amuse thy child with his future toys.

So must thou early wreathe his little hands with chains and
harness him to the convict's barrow . . .

For he may not go as the knights of old to plant the cross
in triumph in Jerusalem . . . nor as the soldier of the
newer world . . .

His challenger will be an unknown spy, a perjured Govern-
ment will wage war with him. A secret dungeon will

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

be his battle-field. A strong enemy will -pronounce his
doom.
Andy vanquished, his tombstone will be the scaffold's wood
. . . his only glory the weeping of a woman, and the long
night talks with his compatriots. . . .

Saint Josaphat, Patron of Ruthenia, pray for us.
From Russian, Austrian and Prussian bondage,

Deliver us, O Lord.
By the martyrdom of thirty thousand knights of Bar who
died for faith and freedom,
Deliver us, O Lord.
By the martyrdom of twenty thousand citizens of Prague,
slaughtered for faith and freedom,
Deliver us, O Lord.
By the martyrdom of the youths of Lithuania, slain by the
knout, dead in the mines and in exile,
Deliver us, O Lord.
By the martyrdom of the people of Oszmiana, slaughtered
in God's churches and in their homes,
Deliver us, O Lord.
By the martyrdom of the soldiers murdered by the Prussians,

Deliver us, O Lord.
By the martyrdom of the soldiers knouted to death by the
Russians,

Deliver us, 0 Lord.
By the wounds, tears and sufferings of all the Polish
prisoners, exiles and pilgrims,
Deliver us, O Lord.
For a universal war for the freedom of nations,

We beseech Thee, O Lord.
For the national arms and eagles,

We beseech Thee, O Lord.
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The Fifth Partition has Begun

For a happy death on the field of battle ,

We beseech Thee, O Lord.
For a grave for our bones in our own land,

We beseech Thee, O Lord.
For the independence, integrity and freedom of our country,

We beseech Thee, O Lord.

In England, in France, in Scandinavia, in the intern-
ment camps in the Balkans, in the Baltic countries, in
the concentration camps in Germany, in the labour
camps in the heart of Russia, in Siberia, in the Polish
ships, in their own country, the homeless, wandering
Poles are saying that Litany now. And the Litany of the
Polish Pilgrim :

Kyrie Eleison. Chris te Eleison.

God the Father who didst lead Thy people forth from the
captivity of Egypt, and didst lead them to the Holy Land,

Restore us to our native land.
God the Son, who wert tortured and crucified, who didst
rise from the dead and who reignest in glory,

Raise our country from the dead.
Mother of God . . . Queen of Poland and Lithuania,

Save Poland and Lithuania.
Saint Stanislas, Patron of Poland,

Pray for us.
Saint Casimir, patron of Lithuania,

Pray for us.1

I had plenty of time to ponder over Mickiewicz. We
got up at seven o'clock to listen to the problematic wire-

1 This and all other translations from Adam Mickiewicz included
in this book are taken from the work of Miss Monica Gardner.

186

The Fifth Partition has Begun

less programme. The batteries were dying slowly and
surely, but we could still occasionally get Baranowicze
and even Wilno. Moscow, too, out of sheer despera-
tion. Then one evening, by what seemed a miracle,
there was LONDON, speaking in Polish. Any of us
who are still alive will never forget that thrill. I believe
it was the schoolmaster who made the great discovery.
After that, the whole day only existed to be got through
until 9 p.m. and the communique in Polish. We dis-
covered, too, that exactly before and after it (I think)
the same news was given in Czech and in French, from
the same station. The same news, but always with some
apparently unmeditated variant. To us, it was the vari-
ant that made the news. There was never anything very
striking. Nearly all of it was plain bromide, but when
we had listened to all three and done our own additions
and subtractions (with a certain very cautious fraction
or two from Moscow) we were able to guess a little
about what was happening elsewhere. All the same,
most of our guesses were wrong; in the sense that they
were always incomplete. We might get news of a battle.
We never got news of a whole Front. We did not in
fact know whether any Front still existed, anywhere.

We heard from London of Polish divisions going
into action, of brilliant Polish successes at various points
against fantastic superiority of numbers and equipment
on the German side. Of terrific German losses in men
and material, and of Hel and Warsaw still holding out
and sending messages to the world. But of the campaign
as a whole we never heard a word. We were driven to
violent alternations between unreasonable hope and pre-
mature despair. Our own common sense told us that the
Polish strategy must always be to fall back on the east

187

The Fifth Partition has Begun

and to reform a mobile army in the marshlands. That
unexplained peremptory closing of the roads to all
civilian traffic, even out of one village to another, of our
first night journey through Polesie, had seemed the
confirmation of it. If they could do that, and if the rains
came, there was hope of holding the Germans for six
months or more. Until, as we thought then, our allies
in the West should have got beyond Saarbrucken. Saar-
brucken, in our meagre war news, was a name of which
we were already getting very tired.

A few machines flew daily over the trees, too high
for their colours to be identified. They always seemed
to fly between the same two points and more or less at
the same times. It seemed probable that they were our
own, doing liaison work. But we could not be sure.
Everything was very extraordinary. No German bom-
bers came near us. The villages were left in peace. The
air war seemed to have stopped short of the marshes ;
which was nonsense. There was a strong sense about all
this of there being something up, but nobody knew
what. There was just one thing we all knew. That for
the desperate chance of holding the Germans there must
be rain. Long soaking days and nights of it; filling up
the marshes, washing away the dirt tracks, immobiliz-
ing the German wheels. Instead, the sky grew more
brazen every day, the soil harder and the marshes more
parched. Every day, for hours at a time, we watched the
heavens for a sign. For one small cloud. Once the clouds
came. The whole sky went livid like lead. The heat was
molten. We expected a terrific thunderstorm, and after,
it, at last, the rain. I remember our absurd and puerile
joy. I remember how we thought of all of 'Ours', and
how, after all, perhaps. . . . We sat on the veranda before

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

the house, paced up and down the perron, noted how a
plant or two stirred, how no birds sang, how the cattle
crowded round the herdsman. But still not a drop of
rain. At midday we said to each other: You cannot
expect it to break before then. Some of us asserted that
we could smell it coming. And, in fact, punctually at
midday, the heavens did seem to be wrung by one last
great convulsion ; and, out in the garden, we found our-
selves suddenly spattered with water. Huge, warm
drops. Just spattered, and then it was over. As an
answer to prayer, it was grotesque. It was worse than
complete indifference. The effect was exactly like that
of a giant hand having squeezed a dried lemon. We
walked back to the house in silence. I think it was then
that, for the first time, some current passed between us
and the peasants. We could not say what it was. It was
they who knew. As we passed them they lowered their
eyes; equivalent of a secret smile.

There was no more tobacco in the shop. No more of
anything that came from cities. The shopkeepers no
longer kept shop. But everything was easy to do without
except tobacco. Tobacco is a necessary poison. All other
needs in Polesie are so exiguous that, if it were not for
this incurable craving, it would be hard to think of
anything of which the peasants could be deprived. No
other physical hardship troubles them. Fevers and mos-
quitoes and half-aquatic living conditions pickle them
too well from the day they are born. But without to-
bacco they grow desperate. In normal times Pani N.
kept large stocks of it, brought out from Pinsk. The
peasant, who seldom has spending money, could always
get his tobacco from her. In the day books of the estate
tyton (tobacco) recurred scores of times against every

189

The Fifth Partition has Begun

name. None of them had ever dreamt of being thankful
for the foresight that provided it or for the hours of
patient book-keeping, all done by herself, that it in-
volved. It is much more likely that they thought she
made a profit out of it. Now that the stock was gone
and she could get no more, they were sullenly resentful,
convinced that she was keeping it from them. At almost
every hour of the day one of the Indian-like figures
would appear on the porch.

'Pani DziedziczkaP When she looked up, the owner
of the voice would come silently in, crossing the floor
with bare feet that left a white patch of dust at every
step. The desire for tobacco would draw him right up
to the bureau where it had always been kept, at the far
end of the living-room. He would even put out a hand
to touch the wood, as if that could give him something.

'Pani DziedziczkaP No more. The powerful being,
if invoked by name sufficiently often, would end by
working the miracle. They were really incapable of
apprehending that she no longer could. 'Pani Dzied-
ziczkaP No explanations had any effect on them. And
the same indefinable something which had become
visible in their attitude as we walked through the vil-
lages, or when we met them walking on the private
paths near the house where they had never ventured
before, began to come indoors with them too. This was
a great change. The hardiest village spirits, in normal
times, even the Communist agitators themselves, of
whom every village had a few, lost their hardihood once
actually over the threshold. It made no difference when
Pani N. even took the key out of her belt and unlocked
the drawers to show them that there was no tobacco
left. Finally, suspicious, more convinced than ever that

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The Fijth Partition has Begun

somehow, for some reason, the gentry were cheating
him, the visitor would go away. On our side, for each
repetition of the comedy (and the repetitions became
maddeningly frequent — one had to go through it a
dozen times a day) an extra call had to be made on our
reserve of nerve.

Without tobacco I watched them disintegrate a little
more each day. I imagine that the cafard of an Indian,
the unexplainable, incurable cafard of which the white
man can make nothing, must be rather like it to watch.
If there had been tobacco, lots of things at K. might
have turned out differently. The refrain of the Russian
propaganda was: We are bringing you tobacco. We
are bringing you salt. The peasants were drunk with
joy when they heard it. Many of them set out and
walked to Pinsk and back, over one hundred and twenty
kilometres, to meet the promised trains from the east
bringing them provisions. When day after day no trains
came, when the Russian soldiers themselves begged
them for sour bread and cucumbers, the first doubts of
the magnificence of what had happened to them began
to enter their obscured heads. Within a few weeks they
were to see the trains going out of Poland, piled with
cabbage for Moscow, the Holy City of their Paradise.

At this time, too, the schoolmaster, who slept in the
house with us and was a peasant himself, received
strange warnings. One of his friends said: 'Come down
to the village and sleep among us. Do not sleep alone.
Above all, do not go to the Great House. Nobody will
go there any more.' The schoolmaster, like us, knew
that something was brewing, but could not tell what.
'Half the children did not come to school to-day. When
I walked through the village, a few of them ran away

191

The Fifth Partition has Begun

from me. They have news. I am sure that they have
news. God help us if it's what I think.'

The gardener came back from Pinsk. The haricots,
the eggs, cheeses, and charcuterie he had taken with
him to feed Pani N.'s cousin in the town house came
back too. Lying among them was the cousin. She was
stout, partly paralysed, full of rheumatism, and about
sixty-six years old. Pinsk was being bombed by the
Germans. Her servants and friends had implored her
to go out to K. where she had been brought up. She
had brought with her the title-deeds and the estate maps
of K. and all the gold and jewellery she could. For her-
self, some clean stockings and her workbox. Neither of
these two women ever thought of anything as belonging
to themselves. Everything was for Krzyztof, the heir.
Until they knew for certain that he was dead, they pre-
pared stubbornly to defend his property. The pictures
she had been obliged to leave on the walls. Between air-
raids, leaning on her two sticks, helped by her old ser-
vants, she had packed the miniatures herself. The
gardener would not wait for more. As it was they had
worked all day. The journey had been far worse than
our own across scrub and through river-beds. As soon
as night fell the gardener had insisted on their begin-
ning it. Driving all night, in the morning he had felt
himself near enough to home to risk driving in daylight
as well. The cart was terribly overloaded and the two
fast horses stood like a pair of broken-winded hacks
before the house. The gardener and A. and the agent
lifted the heavy old woman down. She was twisted with
cramp and the agony in her limbs. But she stayed on the
veranda until the chest with the papers and the minia-
tures and the worn leather cases, the chest she had

192

The Fifth Partition has Begun

brought for Krzyztof, was lifted down too. Hours after-
wards the cramp was only passing off. But she ate the
supper of an ogress.

During these days refugees never stop coming; eat-
ing, sleeping a little, and moving on. The house is too
full already to contain any more. The offices and the
dairy and the schoolhouse are full, too. Eight women in
ragged cotton dresses — one, in fact, has only a cotton
wrapper — turn up one evening, with two boys and a
horse and cart. They are rich peasants from Poznan,
bombed out of bed one night. A time-bomb drove them
again out of the cellar in which they took refuge. They
have walked all across Poland. The old horse, too
wretched to have been requisitioned for the army, has
been able to do no more than drag the cart on which
they have piled some bedding and a few sacks of
potatoes and gruel. Now they have nothing left. Their
feet are already full of cracks from sleeping out at night.
It is too early for serious frostbite. Pani N. has nowhere
to put them. Finally they are given straw to lie down on
in the bakery. Trudnol The gardener comes in and says,
why not put them to work? In return they will get their
food and a roof to cover them. The peasants are less and
less reliable. Even the demesne people, on regular
wages, keep hanging back. Nobody refuses to work,
but nobody works. To-morrow, if something is not
done, there will be no corn for the sixteen horses. No-
body has touched the winnowing machine for days.
The women sleep beside the ovens and waken so much
refreshed that they come to beg clothes of us on the
veranda: Anything at all, they say. They are so cold
with their bare legs; and then what they have is so
filthy. They are going to heat water and wash out their
n 193

The Fifth Partition has Begun
rags. They can very well lie naked in the straw for one
night.

They do not believe me when I tell them that I am
no better off than themselves. That I literally have not
even the oldest, most ragged bit of linen to give them.
It is constantly brought home to me how little people's
ideas can be changed fundamentally. These people have
been through it all themselves. How can they be so
incapable of understanding that the same thing has hap-
pened to us? No, I am Pani, A. is Pan. We have some
mysterious, invisible resources. Some unexplained
forces bear us up. I tell them that I am just as much a
beggar as they are; that I too am living on charity.
More so than they, because I cannot hoe potatoes and
milk cattle and grind flour as they will be doing to-
morrow. A., at least, earns his keep. I suppose he earns
mine too. Pani N. is devoted to him, and the agent, the
schoolmaster, and the engineer (the agent's evil genius)
are jealous. Every day dozens and dozens of people are
fed and rest a little and pass on; and later, I suppose,
they perished. On the roads, in the woods, in sacked
and garrisoned towns. There are no words in which it
would be possible to convey the misery we witnessed.
A whole nation was homeless. Mothers were looking
for their children, soldiers for their regiments, husbands
and wives for each other. The half of them had no plan,
no provisions, no idea where they were going; nowhere
to go. There cannot be a roadside in Poland where the
starved and frozen bodies of these people do not lie. To
almost all of them must have come a day when, after
prodigies of endurance, weeks and months even of
existing somehow, after having escaped death a hun-
dred or a thousand times, the cold was just one degree

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

too cruel or the handful of roots just this once too in-
sufficient. So they died, and lay where they died. There
cannot be a road in Poland that is not bordered by these
milestones. 'Let them walk to Warsaw,' said the Ger-
mans, when they drove every Polish man, woman, and
child out of Gdynia, in the coldest winter Europe is able
to remember. And set out to walk they did. At every
few yards somebody, many even, must have fallen out.
Cased in ice, they must have bordered the route ; rotting
only in the spring thaws. The route from Gdynia to
Warsaw runs through any room in which a Pole sits
alone. If Mickiewicz were writing to-day, he might
have added a stanza to his litany :

By the haunted memories, by the dreams, insomnia and
imaginings of those who survived.
Good Lord, deliver us.

Pani N. continues to go about her occupations. Half
by the exercise of her authority, half by the promise of
the bright printed cotton squares the women prize for
their heads, she succeeds in getting a few workers from
the village. One woman is put to wash. Two others
carry the chaff away from the winnowing floor. The
peasant who is the best hog-killer in the district has to
be courted for two days before he will come. In the end
she goes down to the village and faces him herself. In
the evening he actually comes, and for the whole of the
next day everybody seems to have red hands. Bucketsful
of insides are being carried about everywhere. All the
women from the village suddenly turn up and stand
about, each one waiting to carry off something. Blood
puddings and sausages are being manufactured all day
in the kitchen. Out of the kitchen a passage opens into

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

the only big room in the house. This is the only living-
room for everybody above kitchen rank. All the other
rooms are bedrooms and open off it. There is no upper
storey, only some low attics and a pigeon-house on the
roof. The stairs up to the attics rise out of the living-
room, and Pani N. keeps the keys. Even the house-
keeper has to come to her for them. The most important
of the larders is up these stairs. All the dry foods are
there. The flours, the haricots, the maize, the stored
apples and water-melons, and the joints of hog are
carried up there.

A. takes the stitches out of my head with a pair of
scissors. The wounds ache, and I feel sleepy and dull
and, at the same time, my perceptions have never been
keener. It does not make sense, but there it is.

The very evening of the day when A. removes the
stitches a car stops outside at about eight o'clock. There
are four or five men in it. Somehow room is made for
them for the night. They are the men with whom we
travelled in that train from Brzecz. The doctor looks at
my head and says he could not have done the job better
himself. In the morning they go on again. It is the
morning of the 1 7th of September. In the afternoon the
agent has horses brought round. We must go to the
Gmina, he says; about fourteen kilometres off. As
strangers, we have not the right to settle in the com-
munity without having our papers examined. My head
aches so much that I dread the thought, but there is no
help for it. Pani N. sees us off. At the last minute she
sends a boy running after us with a huge tartan cloak of
English cloth. It is about fifty years old and goes by the
name of Abysynka at K., since Haile Selassie was photo-
graphed in something very like it.

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

On our way we drive through several villages. The
attitude of the peasants is more marked than ever. A
few ostentatiously turn aside as we go by. The agent
takes no notice. Ivan is surly. The road runs almost all
the way through exquisitely beautiful forest. The agent
says that for anything we could offer him he would not
come along here on a winter's night without a light.

'Wolves?' asks A.

'Yes. Not that they're very dangerous. They're not.
There's too much game in the forest. They're never
hungry enough to hunt in packs. With a light, they
never come to within smelling distance of you. But
without one. . . . And I have a horror of the brutes.'

The sky is empty. All the same, habit makes me
instinctively uneasy when we get into a clearing and go
along without cover.

On our way into K.W. where the Gmina is, we meet
the Wojt on his way out of it, with two or three other
men on a bryczka. The agent hails him and jumps
down. When he comes back to us, he will not talk. We
get through our business and drive home again. The
agent's brow gets heavier and heavier. I am not the only
one who feels something horrible about this afternoon.
Clouds blow up. Clouds which we no longer expect to
bring us rain. But the evening gets chilly and grey. I sit
inside Abysynka and its huge folds keep me warm,
head and all. As we pass through the villages again, not
a soul calls a word of greeting. During supper the agent
sits hunched up in his chair at the top of the table. For
the first time since we have been there, he is not in-
terested in food. He is a very stout, very brusque man.
Ideal when things are going well, likely to crumple
when they are not. Already he looks as if a little sawdust

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

had run out of his stuffing. Even the engineer cannot
get a word out of him. While we are still eating he
pushes back his chair and walks off into his office. The
locked drawer of his desk is tried. He comes back, a
little relieved. His revolver is still there.

'Do you know what that son of a was up to?'

he asked suddenly. 'That Wojt. On his way to destroy
all the town's flour!'

Consternation fell on the table.

'Why?' asked Pani N. calmly.

'Why? An order! Do those fools ever tell you any-
thing else when you ask them a question?'

'Then They must be very near,' said somebody, with
an air of having discovered America. Probably the
housekeeper. She was perpetually saying things like
this.

'Yes, but who?' said the agent, and we realized that
he was not any longer thinking of the Germans.

A figure stood outside the glass doors, looking into
the room. Lately people had been looking in at us in
this way. None of us ever stirred. Sheets and rugs were
hung on the windows by way of black-out, but our
heads and our movements were visible to anyone who
wanted to see in. After a while the watchers always went
away. This time, though, the door-knob was turned. A
Polish colonel entered. Very tall, very spare, with burn-
ing eyes in a deathly white face, he walked up to Pani
N.'s chair and took her hand. If I had never seen any
more of him, I should have remembered just those few
steps and that one sight of his face. When they had
greeted each other, she presented him to us. It was
Colonel W., the famous skirmisher, who, with the even
more famous J., harried the Bolshevik rear day and

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The Fifth Partition has Begun
night in the last war, in these same marshes, with a
force of ten or twelve men.

'Nineteen years!' said the old lady. 'Nineteen years!'

'Twenty,' said the colonel. 'Twenty, since I had
typhus and lay on that sofa in your house in Pinsk.'

'But after that — poor S. was in prison. They let me
visit him in the end.'

'And we packed the china and the miniatures. And
Sikorski evacuated you to Warsaw.'

'Sit down,' said Pani N. 'Sit down and eat.'

'Yes,' said the colonel, 'but I have something to ask
first. I have some men outside. I want to bring them in.'

They came in behind him. Perhaps ten of them. Not
all in uniform. W. was raising a skirmishing party
again. Perhaps A. would join them.

Of them all, only three stand out quite distinctly.
Colonel W. A tall fair boy of twenty-four or so, whose
wife was in Warsaw and who had an English mother.
This boy was one of those out of uniform. The third
was the Rotmistrz, a typical cavalry captain; rolling a
little out of the saddle, as tough as whalebone, with
beautiful manners, and eyes that behind their sparkle
were really as cold as steel. Before supper was ended he
was asleep, his cheek on the arm of the man next to
him. All the others have become blurred.

In all eight thousand or so of them were to pass
during the next week. After the first few hundred, one
remembers only the uniform: the ones that needed
nursing, and the ones with the worst feet.

The colonel ate enormously.

'The more gall I have in my heart,' he said, 'the more
ravenous my stomach. I have observed it any number
of times.'

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

A smile, instead of lightening, darkened his features.
It was a spasm of pain more than a smile. After supper
he told us how he had been with his family in Poznan
when the Germans attacked. How in the hour or two
that remained at his disposal he had tried to convoy his
wife, his old father, his nieces, and the feebler members
of his huge household to another estate, a little more
retired, a little out of the line of tanks. He had had time
to see the convoy cut in two by a German column. The
half that stayed on the German side simply went down
under the wheels. He heard his old father cry out and
he had to go on and leave him. The refuge he had
counted on for the other half was a battleground when
they reached it. Artillery had done for the house. Its
owners were moving about in the battle, picking things
up off the ground. The lighting was lurid and he could
very distinctly see them doing this from half a kilo-
metre away, and, half a kilometre away, in the middle
of a road along which the Germans were rolling, in the
line of artillery fire, is where he left the women. The
time allowed by his mobilization orders had run out.
He had not the shadow of an alternative.

'So I left them there.'

His little band was asleep. We were talking inti-
mately. He took Pani N.'s worn hands and kissed them.

'Not even time to kiss my wife's hands! Not a word
of farewell!'

Pani N. began to collect the supper plates.

'Krzyztof's boy is dead,' she said. 'Krzyztof too, per-
haps. But you and I are alive. When we are gone, there
will be others. "Poland has not perished yet, while we
live to own her." '

'Ah,' said the colonel. 'Poland!'

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The Fifth Partition has Begun

I can still hear the change in his voice. The passion ;
entirely absent when he had been telling his personal
tragedy. A little after that he left us, to lie down in
another room and sleep. It was midnight. One might as
well turn on Moscow; the station one was always sure
of being able to get even with our burnt-out batteries.

At any time the mere sound of the high-pitched
Russian voice, with its barbarous placing of accents, is
exasperating. At present I have to shut my teeth hard
to endure it at all. The usual cliches spin about the
room . . . Stalin . . . the People's Army . . . parachutes
. . . our invincible motorized units. . . .

The invincible motorized units are new. Instead of
enduring, we listen. As we listen, we all rise to our feet.
I have heard of being petrified with horror. Now I see
it. All the people round me are petrified. If you touched
them they would fall over. I am petrified myself. An-
other thing I have heard of is happening. I can feel my
cheeks going hollow. The Russian voice does not stop
for anything so insignificant. We may have stood there
like that, rigid, for half an hour. When the voice stops
at last, nobody in the room says anything. All our
voices have dried up.

The Soviet Army has crossed our eastern frontier.

The Fifth Partition of Poland has begun.

201

Chapter 18
LAST POLISH SOLDIER

A lmost as soon as it was morning, W. and his men
Z-\ appeared.
i. 1 At the sight of us, on the same chairs, in the
same attitudes, broad awake, they thought that we had
been there all night. The windows and doors had not
been opened. The floor was unswept and the cut water-
melons and the used knives of the night before were
still piled on the table.

Instead of going through to the yard, they leaned
against the stone and the doors and looked at us.

'We were afraid of wakening you,' they said. 'We
were going outside to the pump. Why have you not
been to bed?'

We had been to bed. At least, we had gone to our
rooms. But it had not been possible to sleep. Daylight
had brought us all back here. Separating at all had only
been for the servants. There had been no need for them
to know last night.

'But they will have to know now.'

The schoolmaster lifted his eyes.

'They have known for a week.'

It was perfectly clear to us now that they had.

'For our first night off the ground since — what is it?

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Last Polish Soldier

— two weeks?' said the Rotmistrz, 'we chose a good
one! I suppose you said: don't wake them. Let them
sleep while they can : well, we did. I never slept so well
in my life.' He sat down heavily and stared at the
colonel.

'The bastards,' he said. After a while, with

increasing difficulty, he said it again. 'The — — bas-
tards.'

A servant came into the room and took the water-
melons and the dirty knives away.

The Rotmistrz said, 'Good morning, comrade,' and
went on staring at the colonel. Pani N. said nothing.
She was packing up cold chicken and sausage for the
party to take away in their haversacks. The servant
came in and out with breakfast. While we ate it Pani N.
told us that the agent had gone. He had come to her
room later in the night, and she had told him that he
must do as he wished.

'He has enemies in the village. The Communists
have him on their list. He has not always been very
wise. All he has done for the peasants will not count
now. They will remember only the other things. The
fines he has made them pay. The times he has lost his
temper. The agitators he has sent to prison.' She added:
'But it is very bad.'

It was. It was unlucky. Our situation was so bad
anyhow that only one thing could make it worse, and
that one thing the agent had done. He had shown fear.
In the peasants' mind the agent and the family were
almost the same thing. Any action of his involved us all.
Even so, we did not make a tragedy out of it. By making
no mistakes, with the advantage of Pani N.'s immense
personal popularity and by not yielding an inch of pres-

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Last Polish Soldier

tige, we might hold out twenty-four or forty-eight hours
longer; but that would be the most. Not one of us
doubted that the most horrible, and probably long
drawn-out, agony awaited us. The Bolshevik methods
are only too well-known in Poland. In the last war,
even men, even soldiers, killed themselves rather than
fall alive into their hands ! We were perfectly matter-of-
fact about it; my own preoccupation was, would my
brain not break down? Already, great mists of grief and
horror overwhelmed me often; confusing my mind. I
was afraid of not doing as well as the Poles ; of dying
badly. I had one hope — that A. would go with the skir-
mishing party. Alone, I would manage somehow. One
can always manage, by taking one minute at a time. By
thinking: this minute will pass. I need only bear this
minute now. The next one when it comes I could
manage, if only A. did not have to look on at what they
did to me. If they could not offer me the one choice I
was not sure of refusing — between mercy for him and
being a renegade myself.

This is the frightful preoccupation of anybody in the
situation we were in then. It is no use knowing that you
have courage. Almost anybody can have that. What
nobody can know about themselves beforehand, is the
sheer mechanics of how long brain and body will hold
together. Few prisoners take their own lives to escape
from the sufferings of their bodies ; thousands to escape
becoming traitors ; to make it impossible for their tongue
to speak.

The party left and A. remained. Now that the agent
had gone, he felt that he could not leave Pani N.

Nothing happened at once. We listened to Moscow
at intervals. All that was said was extraordinarily vague.

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Last Polish Soldier

The wildest rumours circulated. That the Russians
were really marching against the Germans. That
Colonel Beck was in Moscow. The peasants, still un-
sure of their ground, hesitated to commit themselves.
The first red flag to come out of hiding had been flown
from the schoolhouse roof during the night. When the
police boldly took it down, not one of them lifted a
finger. But they no longer worked, even on their own
holdings. The policemen (there were only two) passed
between hedges of hostile faces. Wherever we went
there were groups talking. Standing about the grounds.
Some women even broke flowers off the bushes near the
house. When Pani N. showed herself they fell back,
half-foolish, half-surly. But they always came back
again. The younger ones even came right up to the
windows, looking in.

'They are counting,' said Pani N. in her calm voice.
'Choosing what they will have.'

Sometimes we wondered whether she was too old to
realize what was happening. Her refusal to make any
change in her habits was so absolute. Since W. left she
had been arranging her indoor plants for the winter;
re-potting them exactly as she had done every year. My
own hands were icy, in spite of the thick gloves she lent
me, from splitting up clumps of root and puddling in
soil and water. We did this on the verandas, in full view
of the peasants, spending hours over the work. But
when she looked straight at you, and you saw the steady
light in her blue eyes, and listened to one of those rare
remarks, whose tone never altered, you knew that her
eighty-three years were not kind to her. There was no
blurring of anything.

The actual military position was, of course, unknown

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Last Polish Soldier

to us. As a matter of fact, from September 12th on-
wards, the German divisions were not in too good a
position. In spite of their surprise attack, their over-
whelming armament superiority, the net of espionage
and sabotage prepared by the German minority inside
Poland, and the unprecedented hardness of the ground
making tanks invaluable and cavalry almost useless,
they had begun to suffer considerable defeat. The
mechanized divisions had advanced so fast that their
flanks were unprotected. On the Kutno-Lodz front
German divisions were already routed and 30,000
prisoners taken. Our own troops had learnt the advan-
tage of retreating rapidly before motorized units, and
then cutting them off from their base. The hopes of a
Polish army being able to make a fighting retreat into
the eastern marches, and there reform on favourable
ground, were very real and very well founded. The
Russian move destroyed these hopes, and destroyed
them completely. Even so, our troops fought on. Lwow,
after repulsing several German attacks, was now at-
tacked by the Russians. As the Russians advanced, the
Germans retreated.

A clear territory was always left, by agreement, be-
tween the Germans and their allies. On September
22nd, Lwow finally fell. Warsaw, surrounded and
besieged, held out until the 27th. The peninsula of Hel
until the 29th. Even the Poles could not fight two
gigantic invaders simultaneously. When I look back on
it now, knowing the facts, I am surprised how nearly
we guessed it all. How accurate the scores of maps were
that we roughed out on the white American cloth cover-
ing the K. dining-table. Voices that I shall never hear
again explained to me a hundred times that the Ger-

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Last Polish Soldier

mans were advancing too quickly; that to leave their
flank exposed has invariably been the German mistake,
and the cause of German defeat. Our personal life was
in ruins. The future could bring only deeper personal
anguish, because it could only separate us. Whatever
way events went, it could not possibly continue to keep
us together. But until the 1 7th of September, there was
still hope of Poland, and therefore hope for us.

On the night of the 1 7th, standing petrified around
the wireless set, hope left us. Our hearts broke.

The stream of refugees now began to flow in the
opposite direction. Those who had come from the west
to the east began to pour back from the east towards the
west. I suppose there was never anything like it. No
human misery can ever have equalled this misery of the
refugees in Poland. Bombed and shelled and machine-
gunned out of their homes by the Western barbarians,
they had dragged themselves hundreds and hundreds
of miles, enduring every kind of progressive wretched-
ness and horror, only to fall into the hands of the
barbarians from the East.

Their fate has been lingering and atrocious. Com-
pared with it, a wholesale massacre would have been
merciful. But nobody then took the trouble to massacre
them, and, as they were alive, they had to act. They had
to keep moving in the third week in September, be-
tween the two millstones, while the millstones still kept
apart — later, wherever chance flung them. Some into
the German occupation, some into the Russian. Others
to the pits in which hundreds of nameless bodies lie
piled together. Others to the yards, to face the execu-
tion squads. To concentration camps. To labour camps.
To Siberia. To Germany. To internment camps abroad.

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Last Polish Soldier

The only place to which none of them ever went was
home. At K. there was food and rest for an hour or two.
Without it, they would have perished a little sooner!
The help we gave only prolonged suffering.

On our set, we could still hear London, very faintly.
Poland was still in the news. We learnt that Modlin
and Hel still stood. The whole civilized world, they
said in London, was moved and awed by the heroism
of the Polish people. We heard the Lord Mayor of
London's broadcast to the Burgomaster of Warsaw, to
Stefan Starzynski, now in Dachau, the worst concen-
tration camp in the world. But we heard no single voice
from England speak of a Russian aggression. As to
that, silence; the silence of the grave.

Our frontiers had been crossed by a second invader.
Our eastern provinces were overrun; our armies in a
sprung trap. The murder the Germans could not do
alone, the Russians had come in to finish. The future
line of demarcation between the two occupations was
already being discussed in Moscow. And from London
not one word. Not even recognition of a fact.

On the Western Front, no advance. From America,
protests. Rumania (pledged to us by a treaty), neutral
and ill-disposed. Hungary, our oldest friend in the
Balkans, neutral. Belgium neutral. From Italy, 'Polonia
liquidata? The rumour that Turkey had joined the
Allies, false after all. It would be hard for anyone who
was not there to imagine those evenings of ours around
the wireless.

As well as the refugees, troops were going through
K. In all, we must have fed and temporarily sheltered
as many as seven or eight thousand. The retreat was
made in good order. But the men were desperately

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Last Polish Soldier

weary, half-starved, and short of everything. Marines
from Gdynia had been marching between fifty and sixty
kilometres a day. Rumour, of course, came with them.
They knew even less than we did. Lots of them still
believed that once the Russian and German armies met
they would fight between themselves. We heard again
that members of the Polish Government were in Mos-
cow. That Hitler had been assassinated. That Spain
had joined the Allies. Half of the men were too dead
beat to talk at all. Horses, relieved of their loads, lay
down with heaving sides and never stood up again. At
one time the house itself became a sort of headquarters,
with thirty or forty staff officers under its roof. A field
telephone (I helped to lay some lengths of it) worked
all night. This was towards the end of the week, when
the Russians were already as near as Pinsk. Communi-
cation was being maintained with the small outposts
that had been left to cover the retreat. Bread was baked
all day and all night. Hogs were slaughtered and their
flesh cooked almost before it had stopped quivering. A.
had to oversee everything. The soldiers were too ex-
hausted even to survey their bivouac fires. We were
afraid of a fire starting. The milk that had seemed so
plentiful was now hardly sufficient just for the sick. For
the worst cases of fever and dysentery, we had only two
remedies, a drop of what still remained of the rum
brought from Warsaw or A.'s own concoction prepared
from the shells of fresh walnuts. The concoction, A.
said, if only he knew how to make it properly, was the
oldest known remedy against cholera. By guessing, in-
stead of knowledge, at least it did no harm. Half our
patients recovered. That is, they were able to stumble
away from K. We called that recovery. Boots and dress-
o 209

Last Polish Soldier

ings for their feet were what they needed most. Only
the very sick stayed more than a few hours. There was
no time in which to do anything effective.

The Russians did not use their Air Force as the Ger-
mans did. That is, they were not bombing refugees and
civilians, or towns from which the garrisons were with-
drawn. The Moscow wireless was still repeating, 'we
come as friends', and promising everybody heaven on
earth.

Small Polish units, when surrounded and taken
prisoners, were disarmed, and only their officers were
kept under arrest. Private soldiers and non-commis-
sioned officers, once disarmed, were told they might
return to their homes. But reconnaissance planes were
used to make strategic concentration impossible. The
bombers only waited. Any large formations of troops
were pounded from the air. For this reason, it seemed
likely that K. might, at any moment, become a shambles.
The troops continually passing through and bivouack-
ing in the house and demesne could not be hidden.
There were too many of them. It was not possible even
to cover the fires.

There was also the possibility of a battle, if the Rus-
sians moved their artillery nearer. What is queer is that
I remember those days as days of comparative security.
The circle around us that had been narrowing so fast,
widened again during them. The peasants fell back
again while there was one Polish soldier left. Each night
A. said to me, 'Take off your clothes, lie down in bed
and sleep. When it becomes impossible I will tell you.
In the meantime, sleep while you can.'

The soldiers told us of meetings with the Russians.
Polish and Russian patrols had stumbled across each

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Last Polish Soldier

other here and there, far from their own lines. The
Russian soldiers were friendly, emptying their pockets
for the tobacco-famished Poles. Many of them had said
that they did not know what to make of this war. They
had been told that they were to march straight through
against the Germans. They had had no idea that their
commanders meant treachery to the Poles. Later, we
confirmed this, too. Nevertheless, they fought wherever
they were put to it. Their own officers drove them on
from behind and the G.P.U. agents drove on the officers.
But their teeming superiority of numbers hardly
counted. It was their Air Force that made further
Polish resistance impossible.

At the end of the week, on Friday or Saturday, I
cannot now remember which, the last Polish soldiers
went. The police had already been evacuated. The
peasants, with folded arms and their eyes on the ground,
watched the column out of sight. The refugees and the
soldiers had never stopped saying to us: 'You must be
out of your minds. In a town at least, you have a chance
of not being noticed. One can always get lost in a crowd.
By being found here, you label yourselves "the nobles"
. . . you are signing your own death warrants.'

Pani N. would not hear of leaving. If K. had been
only her own property, it is just possible that she might
have gone. As it was, she made the excuse that Krzyztof
had left it in her charge. She could not leave unless it
was Krzyztof himself who told her to. I think, though,
that she would not have gone anyhow. In her secret
heart she hoped for a bullet. She wanted to die at K. If
she had gone I suppose we would have gone with her.
As she would not, we stayed.. There was no heroism
about any of it. Neither on her side or on ours. All she

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Last Polish Soldier

did was to obey her strongest feelings, to stay on was
what she really preferred. As for us, we preferred it too.
There is a strong human instinct for dying on one's
own doorstep, so long as the doorstep is still there. As
by then we had no other, K. had come to mean just that
doorstep to us.

At six o'clock in the evening only Pani N., her
cousin, the schoolmaster, A., and myself remained.
From the very beginning, the weather had been un-
canny. It was uncanny now, too. I have never seen a
more lurid or more oppressive evening sky. Arm-in-
arm, A. and I paced up and down in front of the house.
There was nothing to say. The lurid light faded. Night
began to come down and the autumn roses to fill the
air with sweetness after the heat of the day. I had
grown used to tears on the faces of men. But I was not
used to A.'s. Even on the road to Lublin, kneeling for
hours to hold me in his arms, with my blood soaking
into his clothes, his eyes had been dry. They were not
dry now. I know that his thought was : shall I ever see
the Polish uniform again? Shall I ever again wear it
myself?

As we went indoors, he said :

'To-night, you must not take off your clothes. Not
even your boots. This is the time for which I wanted
you to be ready. You see how well it was that you slept
while you still could.'

212

Chapter 19
THE PEASANTS COME CLOSER

We were alone now with the peasants. There
was neither Polish nor Russian rule.
This was the moment from which the agent
had run away.

The servants brought in supper as usual. We ate,
and showed no signs of our surprise. After supper, as
usual, the wireless. No lamp, for the paraffin had been
finished days before. A few brands blazing on the stove
did to see by. Between nine and ten we went to our
rooms. The uneasy night wore away. It was no more
than that. A few shots were fired in the park, straight
into the air. From time to time, a face was pressed
against a window-pane and then silently withdrawn.
Feet stirred on the verandas until morning. We were
under surveillance. But nothing at all happened. The
day passed exactly like the last days before the 1 7th.
The troops gone, the peasants moved nearer again.
They did not attack us. They did not even enter the
house. But they sat down on the verandas and did not
stand up nor speak as we moved in and out. Their own
faces were troubled. During the night things became
worse.

In the morning A. and the schoolmaster harangued

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The Peasants come Closer

all the peasants who would listen. If we were to have
Russian rule, and it seemed that we were, then let us
have it as soon as possible. Whoever K. belonged to,
whether to Pani N., or in fact, to the peasants, there
was no sense in allowing it to be sacked, and perhaps
burnt. In that way, it was difficult to see how anybody,
except a few bandits, would be any better off. A guard
should be kept on property. Bands of marauders were
already infesting the villages. Another twenty-four
hours like this and we should be living in a state of
blazing anarchy. A committee and a militia would be
Russian government. They could not object to that.
And there would be law and order, instead of blood-
shed and looting. When the Russians came, somebody
would have to pay for what had been done already. Let
them set about choosing a committee immediately, and
the committee should form its militia and allow no
other individuals to carry arms.

The peasants listened, deeply troubled. In their
hearts they were afraid of their own leaders, all of whom
were armed while they were not. It was true that the
whole village would have to pay if crimes were com-
mitted. The Bolshevik advance up to now had not been
in the least what had been expected. There was still no
salt or tobacco. The towns were still without bread or
the barest necessities. The trains, instead of bringing all
that had been promised from Russia, were going back
there stuffed to the roof. The Bolshevik hand, for the
time being, was even heavier on the peasant than on the
proprietor. Looting was rigidly forbidden. Stories came
in of peasants summarily shot in the back of the head
(after having been told with the familiar Bolshevik
technique to turn about and walk away) for simple pil-

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fering. The land, after all, it seemed, was not the sort
of fabulous cake they had imagined ; to be cut up into
slices and handed round on a plate.

They had been told that it was their own, but now
that it was being taken away from 'the nobles' they were
not being allowed to touch it. The marauders who
always follow a beaten army had begun to prey not only
on the great houses but on the peasant holdings as well.
Cattle had already been driven off from the village. They
agreed with relief that a committee and a militia were
what was wanted. We did not know it at the time, but
this was actually the Bolshevik programme. K. was now
its own Soviet. The Commissars from Moscow arrived
only on the 6th of October.

When we got up the next morning, a red flag was
flying from the roof. The militia had taken over the
estate office as its headquarters. The flag had been
planted there; not yet squarely in the middle of the
whole house. We were prisoners, but we were not per-
sonally interfered with. Our meals were still served by
the house servants. On Wednesday, the 27th, Warsaw
fell. We heard of it at once, on the broadcast from
London. I can find no way of describing how we lived.
What I was myself most conscious of was the frightful
slowing-down of time. At nine o'clock in the morning
I would wonder how it could possibly not yet be night.
Often what we felt was not even sorrow. The mind will
not feel indefinitely. There is a point at which all feeling
stops.

It must have been about this time that I destroyed
my diary.

From the first twenty-four hours the Soviet was a
farce. The members of the Committee quarrelled like

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The Peasants come Closer

thieves. The village council was helpless. All the power
was in the hands of those who had arms. A Russian
proclamation was posted, ordering all citizens to hand
over their arms to the militia. A. buried his. Fifty yards
from the house there was an overgrown shrubbery,
never visited by the peasants. When the German troops
had withdrawn from occupying K. at the end of the last
war they had left a rough grave there, with a cross but
no name. Its tenant must have died in the house. The
N.'s, when they returned, had respected it. During my
own time at K. I was always irresistibly drawn to it.
The heart of the shrubbery was always dark. In the
terrible drought the rotting leaves underfoot gave a
consoling illusion of moisture. The grave itself was so
quiet, I so keenly envied the man lying there, that I
could not keep away. A. was more practical. There was
no grass on the mound. The loam would not show signs
of disturbance. More leaves were falling on it every day
and soon the snow would fall, too. He buried his arms
beside the German. Carefully taken to pieces, coated
with lard and rancid butter, wrapped in hand-woven
linen, they can wait there twenty years. Or one. Until
there is a chance of using them. A whole arsenal of arms
lies buried in the soil of Poland.

Then the militia came, they took away all the sport-
ing guns, an old revolver, and a useless Colt. During
this week they gradually took over everything. The
house was searched daily. Inventories of what was now
said to be the peasants' property were begun daily and
never finished. It is not that the peasants cannot read
and write. It is that they have no heads on their shoul-
ders for what is not their business. They are incapable
of any kind of organization. What they understand is

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The Peasants come Closer

the seasons, the rivers, the forest, and the soil. In this
kind of knowledge there is nobody who can teach them
anything. But within three days the flour was sour.
Somebody had left a window open. The salt was spilt
and wasted. The maize was left to spoil. Out of sheer
anger at the sight of it, we went out and worked in it
ourselves. I stripped maize cobs ten hours a day. Weeks
afterwards I still had the welts left on my hands. For
the rest of my life I never want to see maize or haricots
again. The winter beans were left to freeze on the
verandas in the now nightly frosts. Nobody would dig
the potatoes. The beetroots and the cabbage lay on the
surface of the ground and froze too. The Holland cows
stood in the stalls all day. The people from three villages
ran with jugs and bottles to milk them. Each sloven
would milk as much as she wanted, perhaps trying two
or three cows out of greed, and leave the rest. None of
the herd was ever milked clean. For days they bellowed
with pain and then went dry. The few hogs that re-
mained were better off. The swineherd went doggedly
about his business as he had always done. The hogs
were what he cared for in this world. The Soviet seemed
to him a joke. The gun-dogs starved at the end of their
chains. Two died in the sun. The fowl escaped into the
trees. The over-ripe melons and tomatoes, already past
the time when they should have been gathered, turned
to mush. The kitchen and the estate-office were full of
feasters twenty-four hours a day. What was not eaten
was trampled into the floor. The Great House, which
could have stood a siege when we came to it, self-
supporting all the year round, would soon have empty
larders and gaping cupboards. Fortunately there was no
vodka. Ever since I knew anything about eastern

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The Peasants come Closer

Europe, I had known that Poland is Europe's frontier
there. Any shrinking of Poland in the east is an advance
of Asia. I saw it now with my own eyes. The Polish
dyke had been levelled. The tide from Asia was up to
our necks within a week. Nobody meant much harm.
But nobody did any good. Russians not only do not
know how to act. They cannot. Apathy, indecision,
violent impulses having nothing to do with reason,
total lack of measure; we saw it all at K. once the
Russian influence was paramount. The new masters
simply could not grasp the idea of plenty being exhaus-
tible. Because there were hams in the larder, flour in
the bins, and salt and sugar in the barrels when they
took them over, they supposed that the store was inex-
haustible. They thought that these things had come
there by nobody's effort, all they had to do in this new
paradise was to enjoy it. Only every day they quarrelled
more violently with each other. Each was afraid of his
neighbour benefiting. The ukase against looting was
actually observed; more for this reason, at first, than
out of fear. But as the days went by, they grew heartily
afraid, too. Some of them went to Pinsk to see the
Commissars and came back gloomy and apprehensive.
It seemed that they were only now hearing of the
collective farming that is the hated negation of every-
thing a peasant desires. They did not yet realize, but
they began to suspect for the first time, what we had
always been sure of — that K. and the other confiscated
properties would be exploited by collective labour.
Nobody would get anything and they would have to
work harder than they ever did in their lives before.
The 'nobles' could not help losing, but the people
would not be allowed to gain. Already we heard mur-

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The Peasants come Closer

mured regret from the majority for the vanished Polish
administration. Even the leaders could not quite hide
their trouble. One or two of them, helpless against so
old an instinct, came secretly to Pani N. and to A.,
admitting their bewilderment and demanding advice.
A. looked at them with that ironic half-smile of his that
has always made him enemies.

'My children,' he said, 'be thankful if they stop short
at not giving you K. ! And your own holdings? Do you
think they will leave you those? and your own winter
potatoes and straw, and your cow and your couple of
hogs? Wait. A day is coming. Poland is down now.
And, as you watched us going, you thought that you
were up. I tell you, you will have enough of your Rus-
sian brothers. When the Polish soldiers march back
again, you will be kneeling outside your houses to kiss
their hands.'

We stayed long enough to know how true his words
were. When the Polish soldiers march back again — at
the very sound of the words, the heart almost stops
beating. But the eastern provinces will look for them
longest and meet them with the wildest joy. The Presi-
dent of the Committee, the shrewdest man in the village,
was also the first man in it to realize his own disaster.

'Within three years,' he said to us, 'you will be back
here again. As for me, I am a man who is finished.
Nobody trusts me any longer. Least of all the peasants
whom I have unknowingly helped to fool.'

News of battles with the Russians reached us. Stories
came in that the majority of the troops that had passed
through K. had been massacred farther on. The columns
had been bombarded from the air. During two days we
had heard distant detonations. Peasants who had been

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The Peasants come Closer

commandeered to drive wagons came back with terrible
accounts. Half of them may not have been true. But
two things were. That two peasants who had been in
the baggage train came back wounded, with shrapnel
in their bodies, and that all of them had abandoned
their horses. A peasant will abandon his brother more
readily than his horse. So that in the main, the stories
must have been well founded. We heard, too, that
Brzecz-nad-Bugiem had been retaken by Polish troops
and held for a day, after a battle in which the Rus-
sian troops were fearfully punished. How true that
was, either, I do not know. I do know that long,
crowded hospital trains of wounded left for Russia, and
that, for some reason the Russian Command now
changed its tactics. Even small troop concentrations
were savagely bombarded. Polish officers taken prisoner
were sent to internment in Russia itself and a distinction
was made between non-commissioned officers and pri-
vate soldiers. All this does seem to support the story
that the Russians had suffered an unexpected and heavy
defeat somewhere. Right up to the end outside Poland,
I always heard it said that this had happened at Brzecz.
We continued to receive our food at table. The ser-
vants were not prevented from serving us. But we now
got only what the Committee handed out for us. Even
this worked fantastically. One comrade would be for
keeping us on the shortest rations. Another would
stealthily pass the keys to the housekeeper for half an
hour. The president himself killed two fowls for us.
Another member of the Committee found them and
took them away. We lived from moment to moment,
taking all these things as they came. If there was food,
good. If there was not, we chewed melon seeds until

220

The Peasants come Closer

there was. A. ate walnuts all day. The mechanical grind-
ing of his jaws did something to relieve his craving for
tobacco, as terrible as the peasants' own. Sometimes,
somebody would get a few cigarettes from somewhere.
People kept passing all the time. The Russian soldiers
in Pinsk continued to give away theirs. Occasionally,
one of our guard (we were loosely guarded by the
militia — this, like everything else, went by caprice)
would get one in this way from a friend who had made
the journey there and back; and when he did he usually
handed it round for A. and myself to puff at and hand
back.

The feeling against the agent grew. The peasants
despised him for the first, and suspected him. They
knew that his reason for going now was to see and
himself talk things over with the Commissars. They
were convinced that in some way (quite unexplainable,
but still they were convinced) he meant to do them out
of the treasure that was to fall to them. Their attitude
even to us grew more aggressive as he did not return.
For some days they had now been coming into the
house, of course; but not yet into Pani N.'s own bed-
room. For the first time some of them did so on Satur-
day, on the pretext that the agent had possessed arms
that he had not handed over, and that they had been
hidden by Pani N. somewhere among her own things.

She said:

'I have told you that I have done nothing of the kind.
I have told you. You have all known me all your lives.
Has a single one of you ever heard me tell you a lie? I
am eighty-three now; not likely to begin.'

All the time we kept our hands at least busy. We
darned, stitched, sorted the ubiquitous haricots, any-

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The Peasants come Closer

thing at all. I remember that Pani N. was coring and
slicing apples as she said this; she might have really
been expecting to dry them for the coming winter, by
her air. Her question contained a sort of mild curiosity,
no more.

When nobody answered, she asked again:

'Well, speak up, can't you? Have you or have you
not?'

As many as could shuffled away from her. There was
a ripple right through the crowd. Of disapprobation.
The intruders left her room looking foolish. A murmur
greeted them, a few standing far back, not likely to be
recognized, even said loudly 'Shame!' 'Why can't you
take your time?' The situation, so far as it went, was
saved again. But we were not in the least misled by this
kind of reaction. Just as easily the wrong word pro-
nounced by one of us might have unchained demons.

Once that happened, once the first blows were ex-
changed, or the first drop of blood shed, K. could be
gutted and blazing within a couple of hours. Not even
fear of the Russians would quiet the crowd until its
peculiar madness was over. If they thought of the
Russians at all, it would only be to remember that the
inconvenient witnesses must be silenced while there
was still time.

It was increasingly difficult to pick up London on
our set. But the terrific Moscow station is audible on
anything. The Committee did not know how to use the
set, so A. used it for them. Three times a day. The
windows and doors of the living-room were set open
each time and the crowd listened from outside. The
Committee and the militia (they were really one; any-
body who had arms was a member of both) came in-

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The Peasants come Closer

doors. Within the Soviet there was an unmistakable
class system. Those who were left outside were treated
with contempt by their elected representatives. These
gatherings round the wireless were fearfully trying. It
was not easy always to appear indifferent. The smell, the
crowding and the staring irritated nerves already over-
strained for too long. Very few of the listeners had the
least idea what was being said. Their Russian was al-
most a patois. But the grandiloquent sentences, the
assurances that the 'invincible People's Army' was
being met everywhere with acclamation, that class dis-
tinctions had been wiped out for ever, that heaven
had really arrived on earth, and all the rest of the
vague Moscow perorations (never any different in sub-
stance and never likely to be, since I first heard Mos-
cow speak) impressed them enormously. They stood
with their hands clasped on the butt-ends of their
rifles, their eyes fixed in space, like children fascinated
by a fairy-tale. Sometimes I even felt that they were
moving and pitiful themselves. A few sat. None felt
really happy sitting in Pani N.'s home, without her
invitation, violating her privacy. Only their new prin-
ciples demanded the gesture. Unwilling to sit down
himself, each would pull forward a chair for the man
next to him, bolder for another than for himself. When
it was finished, A. would be asked to repeat it all once
more to them. Only then did they really understand it.
When we could get through, we turned on Rome and
London for ourselves. It was seldom possible to pick up
anything. Our guards listened resentfully to the un-
known languages, and yet they were not quite ready to
forbid our listening if we liked. Right up to the end
they received the news of German victory with con-

223

The Peasants come Closer

sternation. They were as impatient as ourselves for the
French to break the Siegfried Line. Over the fall of
Warsaw and the entry of the German troops they
groaned with anger and indignation. They complained
against the United States for not coming immediately
to the help of the three Allies. I cannot emphasize often
enough how naive, how, in fact, childlike, they really
were. They could not see cause and effect at all. They
could not see in Russia the ally of Germany, whom they
detested. Only the almost supernatural means by which
they were all to become wealthy landowners. In no
sense, and at no time, were they in their hearts anti-
Polish. But greed and their own credulity and ignor-
ance, for which they can hardly be blamed, made them
incapable of judgement. They did not wish for Poland's
ruin. They only wished for a state of things in which,
as they thought, their impossible dream could be real-
ized. Nobody could explain to them, for they could not
understand, that one thing fatally involved the other.
When we destroyed the Polish flag which was always
kept in the upstairs room and flown on national holi-
days, we were saving it from the Bolsheviks, not from
the peasants. I was reminded of the day in Brzecz when
I did the same thing with a Union Jack.

The waiting was so intolerable that we ourselves
began to be impatient for the arrival of the Commissars.
Each day was harder to bear. Our jokes were altogether
too thin. A. and I began to avoid being alone together.
Yet if he left me for a minute I dragged myself after
him. Most of the time I was so weak that I could hardly
sit up on a chair. A. was secretly desperate. At the best,
we would have to begin our wanderings again. It was
perfectly obvious that I could not keep up for long.

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The Peasants come Closer

I can never re-tell our conversations. In the room we
had, always warm, next to the kitchen, the walls were
almost black with autumn flies. The flies stung our
hands and faces as we lay on our backs, on our bed,
talking. We were never anything but matter-of-fact.
The newcomers kept on promising that there would be
no oppression, no religious persecution. That everyone
would be allowed to live on the produce of his own
work. All classes would be levelled, but anyone who
could work could eat.

Only we did not believe it for an instant. The mass
of the Russians in their own country are destitute,
terrified and enslaved. If the machine could not work
properly at home, in a country whose natural resources
should make it the richest in the world, it was not likely
to work better in devastated and occupied Poland. That
is, even with the best will in the world. But, in fact,
there would be no good will. No Pole who was not a
renegade could hope for anything better than starva-
tion. The fate of whole populations would be deporta-
tion, a shorter or a longer agony, and a nameless death
in prison or the mines. All this has happened just as we
foresaw it. Every day during the long winter the rail-
roads were choked with trains, carrying numberless
hundreds of thousands of human beings. The cargo,
when it arrived, as often as not, was frozen to the walls
and floors of the uncovered trucks. In Kiev day after day,
the stevedores, with picks, unloaded deliveries of corpses.

We looked forward and foresaw all that. A. had a
kind of courage I have never had. It is peculiarly Polish.
It not only never surrenders. Even I could manage that.
But it is also a determination to survive, and to begin
again, at all costs, and in all circumstances. Because

p 225

The Peasants come Closer

Poles have it, Poland has remained alive, and goes on
living. In our conversations I could never look forward
to better luck than the chance of dying together. If we
could lie down somewhere, on the same roadside, when
starvation and too great exposure overtook us, and just
have that, I thought that we would have been lucky-
after all. I said so. But it was the least likely thing to
happen. Both of us knew that I had infinitely less re-
sistance than A. and he would never shorten his own
sufferings. After twenty or thirty years even of Siberia,
men have returned and served Poland. What they could
endure, A. would endure. I knew him too well to dream
otherwise.

But, equally certainly, until martyrdom became neces-
sary, he was not the man to desire martyrdom. Lying
on his back in that room, tormented by flies, rolling
an empty cigarette-holder between his teeth for hours,
he worked out another plan. When he said to me, 'I
will take you to England yet, and myself to France to
the army,' I cried out in protest. I could not bear any
renewal of hope. It is easier when you hope for nothing.
But what he said, he almost invariably accomplished.
We followed his plan in the end to the letter. We left
K. and went to Wilno and crossed the Lithuanian bor-
der in contraband, all as he had worked it out before he
told me about it. He did get me to England, which was
what he chiefly intended. He did not get to France
himself.

On Sunday the agent returned from Pinsk and
brought news with him. This, Sunday, was the ist of
October.

226

Chapter 20
THE COMMISSARS ARRIVE

The agent had seen the Commissars. A new
quarrel was just beginning, affecting Polesie.
Some townships wished to be governed directly
from Moscow, others from Minsk. A secret society had
begun to distribute handbills, demanding the exter-
mination of 'the Polish lords'. Pinsk was without food.
The shopkeepers had been ordered to open and keep
open, but they had none of the necessities, bread,
paraffin, leather, cloth, tobacco, or salt to sell. Money
had no value. Nobody knew what coin would be cur-
rent, zloty or rouble, and nobody had confidence in
either. We were told that Pani N.'s cousin, S., had been
murdered. Later we heard that it was his brother who
was dead. The old ambassador died a few weeks later of
exhaustion and grief. Another cousin, Prince J., had
been taken to Russia as a hostage. The agent had met
and spoken with him somewhere in the streets or along
the route — I forget now exactly where. The agent's talk
was all about relatives, neighbours, old friends. Pani N.
heard it all without a quiver. For S. she had had a special
tenderness. In the last Bolshevik invasion, she had
visited him daily in prison; obtained for him permis-
sion to play cards, and walk in the air of a courtyard.

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The Commissars Arrive

Afterwards she had nursed him through a long fever.
Of her own daughter, the mother of Krzyztof, whose
estates lay on the other side of Pinsk, the agent had no
news. Two or three times during the journey he had
been questioned and arrested by the militia. Each Rus-
sian official before whom he had been conducted had
dismissed their zeal with impatience.

'Leave it, leave it. Look to your own business,' said
the officials. 'This man is looking to his. Everything
has its own time.'

This Russian policy continued almost until we left
the country. First they established themselves securely,
with the smallest loss of men and material possible.
While they were doing this they tolerated the bourgeois
and held the peasants and the town workers who be-
longed to the Party both short and tight. The last thing
they wanted was the destruction of property or violent
outbreaks of popular passion. For a few weeks they
even seriously hoped to see a Polish majority come over
peacefully to Communism. Once that illusion was over
and their hands were free, they disarmed the militia,
took the illusion of power away from the local com-
mittees, and settled down to the reign of darkness and
terror that has since cut off Russian-occupied Poland
even from the German-occupied half on the other side
of the Bug. Their own troops live behind barbed-wire
fortifications, forbidden to mingle with the conquered.
The Russian frontier is as impenetrably closed as ever.
This has been one of the severest disappointments of
the Party leaders who laboured for the Party programme
during twenty years. Like Moses, they have led the
people, but have not been allowed to see the promised
land. Total Russian night has swallowed them, just as

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The Commissars Arrive

it has swallowed almost one hundred and eighty million
human beings inside Russia itself. I have never really
understood why their commanders allowed the Russian
Army the few weeks of comparative liberty they had ;
then they moved freely about in the towns and villages,
turned over the contents of shops (particularly in Wilno,
which had hardly suffered bombardment at all), asked
and answered hundreds of questions, and betrayed with
every look, exclamation, and gesture their astonishment
at what they saw. A little farther on, I shall have more
to tell about this. About other expropriations and other
peasant communities also. I have tried to make it clear,
I want to emphasize, that K. and Polesie in general was
particularly fertile soil for Russian propaganda. In
other communities the peasants themselves opposed the
expropriations.

The agent's return became known. The whole vil-
lage hurried to the Great House. The women stood a
little apart from the men. As it was Sunday they were
all dressed in their best. Many of them had silk skirts
and ornaments round their necks and on their arms.
They did not know how well off they still were. The
Polish peasants were poor. By western European stan-
dards, wretchedly so. The peasants of Polesie were
among the poorest of all. But they were not nearly so
poor as the Russians who had told them that they were
living in slavery under a capitalist government. When
the villages, convoked to mass councils, innocently
turned up in these holiday clothes, the Russians were
first stupefied and then furious. The wearers of em-
broidery were told that they were not workers, but
bourgeois. Almost capitalists. All these things were con-
fiscated at once. It is true that they were also much

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The Commissars Arrive

better dressed than Pani N., who, even on Sundays,
wore her turned dresses and her thick stockings and
boots made in the village. She came out now on to the
veranda and sat down on a stool. I remember that I sat
beside her. The eternal basket of beans stood between
us. Several hundred peasants clamoured together for
the agent. Pani N. would not even turn her head to-
wards them.

'I have finished with them,' she said. 'There was a
crowd like this the day of my father's funeral. They
carried him to L. on their shoulders to the burying
ground, thirty kilometres or more. And look at them
now. Each is afraid of the man standing next to him.
Not one of them dares to take his hat off his head in
my presence. They are children, not even bad children.
But I am finished with them. I am too old. I will not
change.'

The scene was more than extraordinary. As I
watched it I remembered that the same scene has been
acted and re-acted in these borderlands for hundreds of
years. At every period of crisis, it is to the same natural
pivot, contained within the Polish Great Houses, that
the community has turned. Everything from the outer
world has come this way. Victory and defeat, births and
deaths, accessions and abdications, national heroes and
tyrants, John of Vienna, Catherine of Russia, Napoleon,
Bismarck; all have been announced, saluted or execrated
from these wooden verandas. No wilder paradox could
have been invented; Pani N. a prisoner, the 'nobles'
accused and proscribed, K. confiscated and the com-
munity turned proprietor, and yet spiritually the same
scene. Uncertain of everything in its heart, mistrustful
of every source but one, the crowd which had us in its

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The Commissars Arrive

power, and was soon to prove its power absolutely, had
come there in obedience to their strongest instinct.
From the Great House would come assurance and
direction. The question 'did anyone of you ever know
me to lie to you?' could not have been more astonish-
ingly answered. That the individuals in the crowd were
not aware of their own motives alters none of the sig-
nificance. At least, they were enough aware of the need
in their hearts, momentarily to forget their carbines,
their brassards of authority, and all their present pro-
motion. Even the militia let their arms slope from their
hands, propping them against anything. I said to Pani
N.:

'Look at them. Look at their faces. All this misery
will pass. It is true that they are children. What is
happening now is a nightmare. They will waken and
throw it off. K. and the thing it stands for are immortal.
I don't know how long it will take, or what will have to
be borne first, but K. will be itself again.'

'I shall not see it,' she said. 'I am too old. I thought
I should die here, and that the same men who carried
my father on their shoulders when they were young,
would carry me, too, now that we are all old.'

I could not say, 'If you do not see it, Krzyztof will.'
We no longer believed that Krzyztof was alive. I could
not say, 'If not Krzyztof, then his son.' The child had
died in Warsaw, on the first day of the war. There was
no other direct heir. Before such sorrow I had to be
silent. Pani N. now deeply disturbed me. Her father's
peaceful death, after Siberia and an old age of great
personal and family trouble, would not leave her mind.
I could only hold my tongue and sadly kiss her faded
hand as it came up out of the basket with a handful of

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The Commissars Arrive

those beans. I knew I was no use to her. I was too young
by fifty years.

The agent was no good. Within two hours he had
lost his influence again. Pani N. still refused to think
seriously of leaving. A. now did all in his power to
persuade her. The Committee were in the mood to let
her take with her a stock of food for the winter and her
strictly personal possessions. Her house in Pinsk still
remained. She could have existed in a corner of it. The
Commissars had said as much. At times she would agree
but only from weariness. She may even have wished to
go. The thing was, she could not. Like the trees in her
park, she belonged there, and neither her roots nor
theirs could leave the soil of their own accord. Only a
force from outside could fell the trees or dislodge the
child of the men who planted them. To end a discussion
she would say: 'Very well. To-morrow we shall see. But
I cannot go just yet. I must leave the book-keeping in
order.'

For hours and hours each day she sat at this book-
keeping. Her back never bent. She put the pen aside
only when the arthritis in her fingers brought on a par-
ticularly violent cramp. When the cramp passed, she
would go on again. At nightfall she complained of
having no lamp to continue by. For the first time she
complained of the agent, too. Up to now, in the face
of the rest of us, she had always found excuses for his
faults.

'I am the one to blame. I forgot that he came from
small beginnings and I made too big a man of him. My
grandson warned me, but I never listened. I am a very
obstinate old woman. In good times the poor fellow
served us all well. Both K., and the peasants. But in bad

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The Commissars Arrive

times, to fall well from a high place you have to be used
to height. We can hardly ask the poor fellow to be
better than he was born.'

Now she was not so lenient. The book-keeping was
in arrears. It was an obsession with her to finish it.

'Too much driving about the country,' she said more
than once. 'Too fond of sport and company!' These
were the severest things she said about him. On Tues-
day he left us again. The Commissars were said to be
as near now as K.W. He was supposed to be going for
news and returning the same night. There was nothing
to be done with him. He would go, and of course, he
failed to return. I must hurry over the next few days.
The image of Pani N. sitting before her books, calling
in one unfaithful servant after another and steadily, day
by day, over a period of six months, eighteen months,
two years sometimes, going over his account, haunts me.
The peasants had seldom taken their wages. What they
preferred was to accumulate a sum over years, only
taking off it such trifles as tobacco, an occasional length
of cloth or hide for the moccasins they made themselves,
until they wanted it for getting married, buying a horse
or building a new cabin. This closing interview made
each of them uneasy. Many attempted to speak and
could not. Only one or two betrayed a sense of triumph.
Pani N. would neither show nor acknowledge any
emotion. All her life she had worked harder than any
of them. She had not ever thought even of a bank
account of her own. Only the estate account. Every-
thing taken from the land went back into the land. The
forest paid the crushing taxes and gave her the fire she
sat by; nothing more. No life could have been more
useful, more laborious, or more democratic. But to

^33

The Commissars Arrive

endure this last blow she had to stiffen. Even for Niki-
for, the gentle swineherd, who wept as he took his
money and openly said that God would send His curse
upon such crimes, she never unbent again. I think, too,
that everything except K. itself had begun to lose its
personality for her. All of us, even A., whom she loved,
moved a long way out of focus. She would have seen
us all go and hardly remarked it. We ceased to suggest
her own going. We understood that it was an imper-
tinence.

'But in the end she will be driven out,' said A. 'She
fancies that they will shoot her. Or that they will let her
exist in a corner here, instead of going to Pinsk. That
some of the older people would let her have at least
potatoes. But, unless they do shoot her, what will hap-
pen now is that they will turn her out with nothing.
She should have gone while there was time.'

'To what?' I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. To the same thing, only
a little delayed. His own mind was more and more set
on reaching Wilno and attempting the frontier. But I
find I cannot write about that, either. Nor about the
schoolmaster, whom I have sworn to find again, if we
both live and even though it should take me twenty
years; and whose story ought to have been in this book.
Nor about Pani N.'s cousin, who had come with the
gardener from Pinsk, and who in saving the miniatures
and the treasures of Krzyztof from the Germans, and
bringing them here, had in fact made a present of
them to the Bolsheviks. That she had also brought the
estate map was an even more serious chagrin. We were
now too closely under surveillance to attempt to conceal
it anywhere. A few weeks before we might have found

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The Commissars Arrive

an iron box and buried it. It was tremendously bulky
and stout. It now had to lie as she had brought it, flat
on the bottom of a wooden chest. So far, no search had
been made for it. In the future, so long as the map
existed, at least the demesne and the forest could be
reconstituted. Because they still accepted their obliga-
tions to the future. It would not be theirs. They had no
future ; but so long as there was breath in their bodies
they would not cease to make the effort or abdicate the
handing on of what they had received.

These were the last days at K. We ate sometimes,
slept, too. Feared to look at each other. Died by inches.
Our separation really began on the first day of Septem-
ber. There were more than two months still ahead of
us before we were allowed the coup de grace. That we
stayed together so long was a savage multiplication of
suffering. There was not a moment of all that time in
which the parting was not being repeated. We must
have been taken from each other a hundred thousand
times, instead of once. In this book I have never wanted
to write of personal anguish. If I am doing it now, it is
only to illustrate as clearly as I possibly can the book's
title. What we suffered, millions suffered and are still
suffering. The frightful bereavements of the war are
nothing beside the bereavements of the Occupations.
What A. and I endured for months, others are enduring
still. I suppose there is not a family left in Poland whose
surviving members are together ; the few who are must
fear every instant, as A. and I did, even to look into
each other's faces, in anticipation of what else is to
come. I know that when A. and I did finally lose each
other, there was relief in it for both of us. Both felt: that
agony is finished. Now, anything may happen. Nothing

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The Commissars Arrive

will ever be worse. They cannot make us suffer any-
more: to have reached that, is to have lived through
more than the individual's share of human suffering.
What is to be the sum of the suffering of millions, in
whose name I have, most humbly, written down every-
thing that is here?

On the sixth, a Friday, there were rumours all the
early morning and at about eleven o'clock a mass meet-
ing outside the schoolhouse. We learned that the Com-
missars had at last arrived. The schoolmaster and the
housekeeper went to see and hear them. The rest of us
sat on round the table. Pani N. found me an old scarf
to darn. The cousin continued to run a coarse ticking
for a straw mattress. Pani N. counted on her little
Chinese frame and made additions and subtractions and
wrote them down in her books as calmly as she had
been doing all the week. A. sat down beside me and
said dobrze} all right? He began to re-read one of the
novels. The meeting lasted less than an hour. After it
the Commissars in a car, the president of the Com-
mittee, on the running-board, and the rest of three vil-
lages, on foot, arrived and entered the house. The
Commissars were young. There were only three of
them. Their uniform was of good quality, with the red
Soviet star on the collarband. Their revolvers hung
more than half-way down between their thighs and
their knees, exactly within arm's reach. Their faces are
harder to describe. I had seen brutality and sadism, but
not yet quite what I saw in these faces. They looked so
old in cruelty that even cruelty could no longer give
them satisfaction. Later, I saw this look so often that I
almost ceased to notice it. None of the three was of
anything like pure Slav origin. On the contrary, like

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The Commissars Arrive

the majority of G.P.U. agents, they were strongly Mon-
golian or Kalmuck. Their epithet in Poland was 'the
Chinamen'. Their methods are probably Chinese. The
accounts long current of their hypnotic power over
prisoners and the moral effect of their cross-examina-
tions were confirmed to me over and over again.

To a certain extent, I have even personal evidence of
both, but not enough to make me an absolutely first-
hand witness. The farthest I can go as a witness is to
state my own conviction that these accounts are true.
The Commissars did not care at all how the peasants
dealt with their own problems. The peasants were told
that they were a Soviet and must find their own way of
settling disputes and of dealing with the Great House.
The work was to be continued, but it was to be co-
operative, and there were to be heavy penalties for any
thefts or private profits. The Great House itself, how-
ever, was turned over to the peasants by the Commis-
sars, who suggested that it should be used as a work-
men's club.

Before they left, the Commissars gave one further
order. Pani N., her cousin, and ourselves were to be
out of the house in two hours.

When they left, we were ordered out of the house by
the militia and locked up in one of the larders. The
Soviet took final possession of everything. There was a
solemn Committee meeting in the living-room. The
peasants sat in our places round the table. As usual,
they quarrelled bitterly. We could hear their furious
voices and violent entrances and exits. The housekeeper
and Antek, the house-boy, were also shut up with us.
Antek, who was motherless, had lived in the Great
House since he had been two years old. Pani N. had

237

The Commissars Arrive

first come on him asleep in a box of potato peelings in
the kitchen. Ever since he had had shoes to wear, he
ate, as often as not, from the same dish as Pani N.,
standing behind her chair, lorded it over the house-
servants, who detested him, and despised the village.
He was, I think, thoroughly detestable. Even Pani N.
said so, but she was never angry with him for long. His
age was now about thirteen, and he was extremely
handsome and lively. His father was the president of
the Committee. The fall of the Great House had not
brought him down with it. On the contrary he had in a
sense gone up. He looked forward to a future as full of
privileges as his past had been. Few people can ever
have been as well served by both worlds. Pani N. was
so used to his presence that even in these last few weeks
she had never stopped, before saying anything, to con-
sider whether he was in the room or not.

'A spy? Of course he is spying,' she said occasionally.
'Much good may it do him. What should any of us be
trying to conceal by now?'

A. regarded him with equal indifference. Until this
morning when Pani N. had been cold and he had re-
fused to bring any wood. Then he had boxed his ears
for him, and the wood had been brought.

'What is it you think you are?' asked A. 'Do you
suppose your father is founding a dynasty?'

This being locked in with ourselves upset him now
tremendously. The new world which had turned his
father into a president might not be going to work out
so well after all. Pani N.'s favour had perhaps been a
better thing to count on than the favour of three or four
hundred people at once, all theoretically equal and all
necessary to the election of a president. Although he

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The Commissars Arrive

had never dreamt of being sorry for his mistress, he was
quite desperately sorry for himself.

We were all sufficiently bad-tempered. Pani N. sat
staring straight in front of her. There was a wooden bed
in the room, but although she admitted that her head
ached we could not induce her to lie down on it. The
window had iron bars ending in spikes at the top, but
by putting a hand through it was possible to open a
square of glass and let the air in. She kept on demand-
ing fresh air, even when this square was open.

The air was, in fact, both fresh and chilly. The room
we were in never caught the sun all day. Its walls were
always cold. My own head ached, too, more than usual,
but precisely from the cold. I had left off my bandages
and forgotten to pick up a shawl. It was obvious that
Pani N. had a fever. She had no coat, but she had
brought a pair of walking boots. Now she tried to put
them on and found she could not stoop to lace them.
When I began to do it for her, Antek was thoroughly
jealous.

'Nobody can put on her boots for her as well as I can.
Have I not always put on your boots for you, Pani
Dziedziczka?' He knelt and laced them quickly and
neatly. It was true that nobody else did it as well. This
is the sort of absurdity which occurred scores of times in
the most tragic circumstances. 'La Comedie humaine,'
said the cousin, smiling. Antek had never heard of that.

He had no idea, either, of how funny his conversa-
tion was. Pani N. had lately given him a cake of per-
fumed soap, a length of stout calico, and the pictures off
some old calendars. The old trunk he had stored them
in had no lock and somebody had stolen the soap and
the pictures.

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The Commissars Arrive

'But they were mine,' he kept repeating indignantly.
'My -property? He expected Pani N.'s sympathy. His
moral indignation was entirely genuine. When I said,
'Oh, shut up, Antek. We're all sick to death of you,' he
turned his back on us and sulked.

When he was tired of sulking he told us two pieces
of further news. One was that the Commissars when
visiting the upstairs room had swept a lot of little
silver-topped bottles off a shelf (Krzyztof must have left
them there sometime) into their pockets. They had also
carried off a pile of stockings and handkerchiefs. The
peasants, who, for their part, had been warned that not
so much as a straw must be missing from the inventory,
were seething with anger. The second piece of news was
that the unlucky agent had chosen for another return
the hour of the Commissars' visit. His enemies in the
village had denounced him for so many comings and
goings. He was certainly a spy, they said. Long ago he
had proved himself an enemy to the people.

He was now locked up, like ourselves, but alone.
One of the objects of the meeting now going on was
to decide what was to be done with him. Antek was of
the opinion that this time it would really end in their
shooting him.

So were we.

240

Chapter 21

THE GREAT HOUSE CHANGES
HANDS

A bout three hours later the guard was taken off. We
I \ were told that we might come out.
X \. Where we were to go, once out, was more
difficult. The Commissars themselves had ordered our
expulsion. Within two hours. Exactly as we stood. This
time limit had already been passed several times over.
It was night.

Pani N. now knew that she must leave K. Up to the
last moment she had hoped for the end, somehow, to
come there. She had, for instance, deliberately attempted
to provoke the Commissars.

The president said awkwardly:

'Somewhere in the village can be found for you. Per-
haps in the morning, I shall be able to get you horses.'
He meant, her own horses. They now belonged neither
to her nor to anybody. Only to the community. Three
or four hundred people would have to agree to it. Each
already regarded all the others with suspicion, resent-
ment, and fear. Nothing would be easy to arrange.

Pani N.'s physical endurance began to weaken. The
president said:

'Take her to her own room. Let it be on my head.
They all hate me already. In a few days I shall be got

Q 24I

The Great House changes Hands

rid of, anyhow. I never did a worse day's work for
myself than the day I let a rabble elect me.'

It was true. If they feared and suspected each other,
the whole four hundred together were envious and sus-
picious of the nine or ten in power and of the president
most of all.

The old Dziedziczka lay on her bed. For the first
time she broke down. I would have preferred to see her
dead.

'I should have gone when your husband wanted me
to,' she said. 'I never believed they would really do it.
Go now and ask that man, that Antek's father, for me.
Ask him to leave me here another night.'

I was to ask him. Her back was bent at last. I could
not decide to do it. She muttered, catching hold of my
hand:

'Anything. So long as I have not to drag about in
their village till morning! I shall not mind the ditch
to-morrow. Only, to be out of their sight.'

That was what the Commissars had said, when we
asked what they would do with her.

'Nothing. What should we do? An old woman, not
worth a bullet. Let them take her six kilometres and
leave her in a ditch. If she gets out of it, let her walk to
Pinsk.'

The president agreed that she should stay. There
was not a single remedy of any kind left in the house.
Her amazing will actually asserted itself again and sent
her temperature down. At about nine o'clock we were
given some food. The agent had been given nothing.
None of us was allowed to see him. Antek reported that
he was still there. An interrogation was going on.

The schoolmaster had never been treated as a

242

The Great House changes Hands

prisoner. The Commissars had said that, for the time
being, he should continue to open the school. The only-
change was to be that the teaching of history and re-
ligion was forbidden. The schoolmaster had refused
these conditions. He now intended, if possible, to make
his way back into the German occupation. His family
were Mazovian peasants. Perhaps he would find some
of them still alive. The village, he thought, would let
him go safely, although they were very angry that he
was refusing to stay with them. He had two coats. One,
of thick sheepskins, he gave to A., who had nothing.
When we had come to K. we had thought him rather
a poor fellow. He was timid and, we thought, easily
influenced. His constitution was tubercular and he did
not seem to have any stamina. In adversity, we found
that he was a hero. It was his persistence that now suc-
ceeded in getting some food and a glass of tea for the
agent. Antek was allowed to carry it across. But nobody
could succeed in getting permission for a word with
him. Antek and another man who secretly kept in com-
munication with us reported that there was a strong
division among the peasants as to his ultimate fate. The
majority were afraid of bloodshed. Not only because,
once it began, you never could tell where it would stop ;
but also because they were afraid of Russian reprisals.
A whole village had already been burnt out because
some of its violent spirits had taken questions of life and
death into their own hands. The agent's private enemies,
who were four and who, in fact, terrorized the whole
community, were determined on having his skin any-
how and risking what happened after that. A third
party, influenced by the president, were for compromis-
ing between both the others. Their idea was to send

243

The Great House changes Hands

him to Pinsk to a Russian court-martial with a strong
recommendation for his execution, and, once he had
been escorted far enough to put him out of the reach of
local passion, to lose him on the way. What did finally
happen, we never had any certain knowledge, because
we did not see it with our own eves. But the evidence is
that he was shot that night. There was a light until
about two o'clock in his prison. The interrogation,
which can only have been a series of insults and prob-
ably torture (the peasants could not have conducted
even the semblance of a judicial proceeding), went on
until then. After that, the lights were extinguished
everywhere and everybody went away, even the regular
guard from the estate office converted into a gendar-
merie. At about half-past three there were five rifle
shots not far from the house, and a quarter of an hour
afterwards a whole salvo, again from rifles. Almost
simultaneously, two revolver shots put an end to the
firing. It was almost like seeing the thing happen, it
was all so obvious. They had taken him to the edge of
the forest, possibly at first for the sport of it. Unfor-
tunately they already knew that he was a coward. The
other man's fear is an irresistible excitant once blood-
letting is in the air. In the forest, he had been tied to a
tree or perhaps ordered to run. The first shots had been
for amusement. Possibly the second round also. But
somebody had lost his head and fired in earnest. The
revolver shots had been necessary to finish the victim
off and end the scene. We could not help reconstructing
all this for ourselves. It was whispered to us beneath the
v/indow before it was light. More convincing than all
that, though, were the looks and bearing of our guard
when they woke us. Horses had been got for us. Our

244

The Great House changes Hands

rucksacks were given back. We took away a strip of
blanket apiece and nothing was said. They did not even
examine our rucksacks, or, if they did, they made no
objection to our having hidden in them about half a
stone each of sugar and salt and a great piece of smoked
lard. The schoolmaster was allowed to bring us two
pounds of black bread from a cabin where the house-
wife had just baked. A woman, the wife of a Polish
sergeant who had been killed defending the frontier,
and her two children, who had remained behind the
flood of refugees and been lodged in a corner of the
bakery, were hurried away in our company. They could
not get rid of us fast enough. They were furtive, instead
of arrogant. Sullen with each other and curiously on the
defensive with us.

The president was green. We demanded either to
remain or to have Pani N. leave at the same time. Noth-
ing was of any use. We were obliged to abandon her.
The schoolmaster was still there, still free. We won-
dered how long that would last. The president swore to
us that he would get her away safely, in his own time.
It is true that the peasants had absolutely no ill-feeling
against her. They had once even loved and been proud
of the Old One, as they often called her, but affection,
in the balance against cupidity, of course had had no
chance. It still seemed unlikely that they would harm
her physically. That is, they would send her to die of
exhaustion and slow starvation, but they would not
murder her as they had, almost certainly, murdered the
agent. I believe they never realized at all the extent of
what they were doing. Somehow, somewhere, the gentry
always have houses and gold. In Pinsk, or elsewhere,
some miracle proper to the gentry would continue to

245

The Great House changes Hands

provide for the Dziedziczka. It was out of K. that they
intended to drive her, because K. was the land; the
thought of land made them drunker than barrels of the
strongest vodka could have done. The passion for land
is a permanent intoxication, unlike the intoxication of
spirits. It comes into the world with a man and never
leaves him again. Not even when he leaves the world
himself, because then he carries it back with him into
the soil.

At about seven o'clock in the morning we said fare-
well to her. No sign of the weakness of last night's fever
appeared in her face. She stood on the veranda like the
Rock of Ages, her short white hair blowing back from
her face. Half of the estate map was wrapped round her
body, underneath all her clothes. The cousin had done
the same thing with the other half. She still doubted,
she said, that the clothes they were wearing would
actually be stripped off their backs. Everything else she
had abandoned. When she left her room, she had called
Antek and given him a few old letters.

'Destroy these. They might harm you now. These
are the letters you wrote me when I was away in Pinsk
and first had you sent to school. I have kept them too
long as it is. You can take them away.'

I cannot guess the secret of her fondness for Antek. I
do not believe what the village said, that he was in reality
Krzyztof's son and not the son of the peasant who
acknowledged him. There was not a drop of good blood
in the little monster, nor a feature of the family in his
face. But Pani N. had been old and lonely and stubborn.
Her own child never came near her. Behind her stern
exterior she was tender and indulgent to a fault. Antek,
with his beauty and gaiety, had crept into her heart.

246

The Great House changes Hands

This was the last act I saw her perform. As he took the
letters the boy's face crimsoned. He hesitated. I remem-
ber that I picked them up and looked over them. Antek
knew I was his enemy and I never pretended I was not.
They were full of childish gratitude, impatience for her
return, naive glory at his own progress, and protesta-
tions of attachment and respect. Each ended with a
phrase difficult to translate out of Polish. Roughly,
Antek-ever-given-to-the-service-and-love-of-K.-and-of
Pani-Dziedziczka.

'Take them, animal,' I said. 'Take her last present.
And I hope every crumb of bread you eat from this day
till your last will turn as sour in your mouth as the
words you wrote when you got your bread from her.'

He said that he would tell his father. That I had no
right to abuse him. He had done nothing wrong. But
he would have liked to refuse the letters, if he had had
the pluck. He did half push them back across the table,
then pounced on them again and ran with them to the
stove. When they were burnt, he crept back to Pani N.
on the far side of me, and bending down shamefacedly
kissed her sleeve. She did not look at him. On the
veranda, A. knelt down to leave his kisses on her hands.
Our guards looked on. They shrugged their shoulders,
but they did not interfere. The sergeant's wife did the
same thing, and so did I.

While we were dressing, the president had given us
a paper, written in Russian, signed by himself. It set
out that we had been at K. between such and such dates
in the character of refugees. It was really a safe-conduct
for us at least out of the district. One was not supposed
to move at all without a permit. A. had all but been shot
as a spy during the Commissars' visit, as it was. One of

247

The Great House changes Hands

the neighbouring villages harboured a young man who
had himself been a paid spy of the Polish Government
and had several times crossed and returned over the
Russian frontier during that career. The best means he
could invent of distracting attention from himself was
to denounce somebody else and so he had denounced
A., particularly alleging the crimes of listening in to
foreign stations and of repeatedly asserting that the
Polish Government and the Polish Army would return.
Nothing infuriated the Russian officials so much as this
assertion. An inquiry had been made, not only about A.
but about 'the arrogant foreign woman described as his
wife'. The president's paper gave us cover. His col-
leagues knew nothing of it. We promised not to pro-
duce it until we had left K. If it was a safe-conduct for
us, it was also an insurance policy for himself. We were
not simple enough to take all he had done for unadulter-
ated good feeling. That there was also good feeling in it
somewhere, is true, nevertheless. He said:

'Do not forget me. When the old order returns here,
remember that I did this for you.'

In his heart, he had given up the Russian Paradise.
'At the most,' he said, 'we have three years. I am an
honest man, although you treat me now as though I
was no better than a bandit. I shall be one of the first
to be pulled down by my own. After that, if I am still
alive, when the Polish Army returns, I am a marked
man for them, too. It was I who led the village.'

Very curiously, I still have the paper. There are
plenty of others I should have preferred to keep. If I
am there, it may save his neck for him some day. I
would a little rather save his neck than not. He was not
really a bigger scoundrel than many who will come out

248

The Great House changes Hands

of it all better. He knew that we had long memories.
One of the last things I heard the Polish radio say was :
Remember, all of you who are listening. Learn off by
heart names and places and evidence. If necessary,
remember for years.

I am glad to be able to remember the name of one
man whose instinct was towards mercy, even if he was
an old fox, a liar, and a great deal too given to his pro-
pensity for changing his coat.

After we left the track an attempt was made to isolate
A. from the rest of us, but it did not succeed. At about
midday we got on a train. The train took us south into
Volynie and then north again. All along the way we saw
the same scenes repeated; the same movement of
refugees. The Russians were allowing the trains to take
passengers for a few days longer. Those who wished to
return to the German Occupation could do so now, or
never. The line of demarcation had at last been agreed
upon. A Red officer in the train somewhere lent us a
Russian newspaper and there was a map in it of the new
Polish Partition. P.K.P. men were still driving and
conducting the trains. Among the refugees the most
noticeable groups were the expropriated landowners.
They were recognizable whatever they wore and no
matter what plight they were in. After going very far
south we began to go north again and changed to
another train after a long wait on the station at Sarny.
The Red soldiers left the civilians alone on the whole.
This train stood for hours in the night on some siding.
The sergeant's wife had brought her bicycle to K. with
her and was now bringing it back home. One of the
little girls was ill, but there was nothing we could do
for her. The window glass was broken. A. and I dozed

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The Great House changes Hands

against each other, half stupefied by the cold, although
it was only October. During these hours a man of about
forty and a tall boy who looked about twenty got into
our compartment. Both were famished and dressed in
the most wretched clothes. At first we did not talk.
Talking was dangerous. But we lent them our blankets
and gave them some cold tea from our bottle. It was
good tea, from K., with a fruit juice in it that helped
against the dysentery that was the first misery of the
refugees. But instinct easily recognizes its like. Very
soon we were friends. The friendship begun that night
lasted through innumerable adventures right up to the
day we left for England. These two and two other men,
comrades of theirs, were the last Poles to hold me in
their arms before I left for Lithuania. We meant to
meet again. To do tremendous things together. They
were dearer to me than brothers. But they are lost with
the rest. Dearest Rudy, Wladek, Zbyszek, and Papcio,
we did what we could for each other, but we were all
doomed from the beginning. Do not come any more at
night, to stand beside my bed and reproach me with
your haggard faces. A few inches of candle from my
pocket gave us a light to see these two by. We stuck it
in its own grease on the saddle of the bicycle. The boy
turned out to be less than sixteen. His father had had
his throat cut in a cellar on the first day of the Gestapo's
taking over in Danzig. The boy had been incredibly
manhandled. After escaping he had walked all across
Poland. For ten days he had had nothing in his belly
except green tomatoes and a little water. His one aim
was to cross a neutral frontier and get to the army in
France. The man was an employee of a Warsaw insur-
ance firm, on the Reserve. He had left Warsaw in

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The Great House changes Hands

obedience to the early order that men of military age
were to leave the capital. He had fought on the same
fronts as A., when they were both young. I have never
known a human being so modest, so courageous, and
so Christian. In appearance he was insignificant. He
was literally incapable of regarding anything as his own.
The boy, Rudy, had been picked up by him somewhere
along the route. The story of their route, apart and
together, would fill a volume. Their two comrades, also
chance meetings, young tank officers of twenty and
twenty-two, had been taken by G.P.U. the day before.
They did not expect to see them again. We exchanged
names, but the soldiers' affectionate nickname of Papcio
(Little Papa) stuck to C. and suited him to the letter.
Before the candle burnt out we chewed a little lard
together. The sergeant's wife and her children left us
in the early morning, getting down from the train a few
kilometres from their home, if it still existed. Papcio
and Rudy left us just before Slonim, where they hoped
for twenty-four hours' rest. We agreed, if we could, to
meet again in Wilno. We ourselves had nobody there
and no plan of where to go, but there were always ways
of sending and leaving messages. If we all got there, we
were sure to meet. On the station at Slonim a face was
pressed to the window and there were stifled exclama-
tions of joy. This was Wladek, whom, with Zbyszek,
they had given up. We did not meet him then; only
dimly saw the meeting happen on the platform. After
Slonim, Baranowicze, and, through Lida, over Niemen
and into Wilno.

The conditions of the journey (it can only have lasted
about forty-eight hours and seemed like weeks) were
naturally utterly wretched. Although the wagons were

251

The Great House changes Hands

not locked, as they were later, and sealed, the result was
much the same. The crowding made it impossible for
anybody to move under any circumstances. There were
a great many Polish soldiers on the train, disarmed and
sent home, many of them starving and wounded. They
were so consumed with fury and grief that they did not
care what they did. I listened to one of them try, by
every provocative word in his vocabulary, to insult the
Red officer who had lent round the map. The officer
understood Polish perfectly. He must have, because he
spoke it. I have seldom seen a more profoundly melan-
choly face than his. He stood for hours, when, after all,
a few people were sitting. He might have taken one of
the places for himself. Unlike the G.P.U. men, his
features were pure Slav; even half Polish. Almost cer-
tainly he came from somewhere along the borders,
where Russian and Polish blood is mixed. It would have
been hard to say what he was thinking. It is unlikely
that there was any romantic pity in his mind. But he
refused to be drawn into the quarrel the Pole was dying
for. It need not even have been a quarrel. One revolver
shot would have done. His melancholy glance wandered
several times to the face of a sleeping woman with two
children lying in a feverish sleep of their own across her
knees. I do not suppose he had romantic thoughts about
helpless women and children, either. But when the flies
buzzed about the children too much, he mechanically
put out a hand and brushed them away.

252

Chapter 2 2

WILNO

^ jl Te arrived in Wilno on the evening of the
\ /\ / 8 th. There we were only about eighteen miles

V T from the Polish-Lithuanian frontier. Anyone
succeeding in crossing this frontier might get to the
Allied and neutral consulates in Kovno. From Kovno
the way to France lay either through Latvia from the
port of Riga or still farther north through Estonia and
the port of Revel.

One thing had been certain.

From the moment Poland lost her independence,
three other states must immediately lose theirs.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the so-called 'Baltic
States', fell when Poland fell. Their defeat was not a
degree less crushing. The only difference was that they
accepted it without firing one shot. They were even
proud of their good management. Army officers of these
three countries, as the Russian garrisons took over their
own ports and defences, derided the defenders of Wes-
terplatte, of Warsaw, of Hel. In their eyes only mad-
men did such things. Polski honor (the honour of the
Poles) was quoted ironically. Somewhere in every con-
versation a Pole was sure to have that expression flung
at his head.

253

Wilno

'He wanted Danzig,' repeated a Lithuanian soldier
to me in genuine stupefaction. 'Why did you not give
it to Him? When He asked for Memel in March, we
gave it. Why cannot you Poles be satisfied to behave
like other people?'

As he said this, he had just finished adjusting his
uniform. The Lithuanian uniform is extremely impres-
sive, and he was proud of its effect. He was now clean-
ing his rifle. His revolver lay on the table between us.
'But what', I asked 'are those for? As fancy dress
they are very expensive. And if, instead of asking, an
enemy invaded your country? Would you fight then?'
'If we thought we should be defeated, certainly not.
You Poles must have known it. It is all pride with you.
Polski honor! A man does not need honor. What he needs
is bread and a warm coat.'

'And you have both,' I said, 'and the Poles have
neither. Each has what he prefers, so we need not argue
any more. The material in your coat is excellent, and so
long as the buttons and the epaulettes cause you no
discomfort, I hope you may live to wear it a long time.'
He was a kind-hearted man. All the food we had
eaten during three days had come from him. For more
than a week he slept on a cold floor so that I and
another woman, another Polish officer's wife, might
sleep in his bed. He had, in fact, almost all the virtues
except a little courage and any kind of foresight. For
lack of those two virtues, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania
walked into slavery and then congratulated themselves
on it. Sovietization, if things continue as they are, can
only be a question of time for them. No countries less
desire such a regime. In it lies the ruin of everything
they claim to value; the well-being of materialism. To

254

Wilno

safeguard that, they accepted ignominy. If they had
only known it, in seizing the safeguard, they gave away
the thing they meant to guard.

Estonia fell the first. Latvia was the next. Finally, by
the beginning of October, it was the turn of Lithuania.
In the course of talks in Moscow, it was made clear to
the Lithuanian Foreign Minister that the occupation of
the Polish-Lithuanian frontier and the garrisoning of
Wilno had been carried out not only for the subjection
of Poland. The Red Army now stood within a day's
march of the Lithuanian capital. Effectively, whether
she consented or not, her occupation was as good as
begun. In return for complaisance, she might, however,
have Wilno, and the district of Wilno. The Russians
were anxious, for some time longer, to avoid open
aggression in the eyes of the world. Except against
Poland, of course. As for Wilno, they did not want it
once they themselves had deported as much of its popu-
lation as they had use for, emptied its banks, and looted
its public and private buildings. The Lithuanian people
were assured by their broadcasting stations, their Press,
and their statesmen that the desire of their hearts had
been granted to them. In their joy, the people lost sight
of what it would cost them. It is inconceivable that the
statesmen did, but the promise of Wilno turned their
heads. In the first days of catastrophe the Polish refugees
and the Polish units attempting to escape and reform in
France had met with great kindness over the frontier.
Forced by their declared neutrality to intern all captured
troops and their officers, the Lithuanians did everything
to make internment tolerable. It is not giving away any
secret to admit that by turning a blind eye wherever
they at all could, they gave the first contingents of Poles

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Wilno

every opportunity of getting through. These generous
sentiments gave way now before an ignoble sense of
triumph. Lithuanians allowed themselves to rejoice at
seeing, as they said, the Polish pride corrected. The
Polish Legation in Kovno was forced to close. Refugees
were no longer received, even into camps, but driven
back again across the frontier, which remained occupied
by Russian troops until the 27th of October. German
and Russian pressure obtained drastic severity in the
internment camps. Police visits and perquisitions har-
ried private families who had begun by opening their
homes and hearts to the refugees.

Anti-Polish propaganda was disseminated by every
possible means; even from pulpits. It is only fair to say
that plenty of people, while publicly blaming the Poles
and the late Polish Government for everything imagin-
able, privately continued to show kindness and hos-
pitality whenever they dared. But a new gulf of misery
opened beneath the feet of a people already savagely
tormented by two invaders.

That misery increases as time passes. I shall be criti-
cized by friends as well as enemies for saying so, but I
do say it. Lithuania's guilt is greater than the guilt even
of the first two. It is more than six centuries since the
Polish and Lithuanian nations voluntarily united their
history, their interests, and their blood. Only the will of
the enemies of both ever disunited them again. The act
by which Lithuania, after the last war, became an inde-
pendent republic, was an act directly inspired by Ger-
many, whatever it has been made to appear. In recog-
nizing the Fifth Partition, in seizing and occupying
Wilno, the Lithuanian republic betrayed not only an
heroic and helpless neighbour. She betrayed her own

256

Wtlno

brothers and cousins. She betrayed such men as Adam
Mickiewicz and Josef Pilsudski, both Poles who to the
last day of their lives cherished above everything the
Lithuanian soil from which they and so many other
Polish patriots were born.

When we arrived in Wilno, of course, a lot of this
had not yet happened, and most of what had was not
known. Even about Estonia and Latvia there was the
greatest uncertainty. No news that did reach Poland
then could be considered either complete or reliable.
The first hint of it was given us in the Latvian Legation,
still open. We went there to ask whether, should we
succeed in leaving Poland, we were likely to receive a
Latvian transit visa. The Minister was extremely
amiable. Neither he nor we made any allusion to the
means by which the actual leaving was to be done. Each
of us knew that, if at all, it would have to be by what is
called crossing the Green Frontier. That is, by slipping
through the patrols somewhere in open country and
risking a hail of bullets on the spot. To call it a risk was
in fact to employ words wrongly. With twelve thousand
Red soldiers, it was reckoned, occupying a frontier of
not many kilometres, it was a lot more like a certainty.
Still we had the notion of trying it. The Polish-Lithu-
anian frontier cut villages and holdings in two all along
its length. On one side of it you would find a farmhouse
and on the other side the farm buildings and the well.
The farmer had to cross into another country to till his
own fields or water his stock. It could not be otherwise.
To draw a Polish-Lithuanian frontier at all was such an
irrational undertaking that it could produce only ab-
surdities. The Lithuanians holding land in Poland and
the Poles doing the same in Lithuania, within a certain

r 257

Wilno

territorial limit, were allowed backwards and forwards
by presenting their permits to the frontier guards.
Naturally, there was a great deal of latitude within the
limit. A familiar-looking figure taking a familiar path
would not often be challenged. Naturally, too, there
was tremendous business done in contraband; another
reason for the guards to avoid too searching examina-
tions. The frontier had no depth; there was not an inch
of neutral zone. Much of the line was thickly wooded.
For twenty years, crossing the Green Frontier had been
child's play even for a complete stranger, if he had made
himself friends in one of the villages and had plenty of
aplomb. It should not be altogether impossible now,
even under the nose of twelve thousand Bolsheviks. It
was at least as attractive a chance as remaining where
we were. Once across, we had some cards to play.
Among others, we still had our passports, of the kind
called consular, given in Paris in 1937, and valid until
October 1940. Our official domicile had never been
Poland, but France. The Minister agreed. Our pass-
ports were very satisfactory. But why did we not go to
see his Lithuanian colleague at the Hotel George? He
said this in a very significant way, with a little nod of his
head and a discreet look. We set out for the George.

'The Lithuanians are up to something,' said A. 'The
colleague, by all means.' We walked miles. The streets
teemed like anthills with refugees and Russian soldiers.
Until midday the sun was still hot. Also, we walked
with everything we possessed, afraid to leave even a
rag for a moment. A. was still limping from the crash
of the bryczka. I noticed here even more than at K. how
much he had aged in five weeks. His hair got greyer
daily. There was no way of concealing my own lame-

258

Wilno

ness from him. I had no real boots, only high rubber
snow-boots, and nothing inside them. I do not know
when I had last taken them off. The pain they caused
me was endless. On pavements, being jostled against at
each step, I made agonized progress. A. smiled his
beautiful stern smile at me, from time to time. 'Dobrze?'
I said, 'Dobrze.' If I ever had a wish, all through the
time together, it was that A. could have been mobilized
at once and been spared all that. With all my heart I
wished him the happy death on the field of battle that
the Polish litany prays for. From beginning to end,
nothing but the hardest choice ever came his way. If I
had known the end then, and what more he was to
suffer through me, I suppose I would still have gone
on walking, still said, 'Dobrze,' but I am not sure. Any-
how, we did not know. In the hotel, we saw the secre-
tary. The Minister was not there. The secretary was a
young woman. Her air was at once condescending and
important. She also, quite sincerely, did mean to be
kind. Officially she had no instructions and no news
whatever. She paused, and added that the situation was
extraordinary. That another tremendous change was
likely to happen in a day or two. That, in short, Wilno
and the Wilno district seemed certain to come under
Lithuanian protection, if Russo-Lithuanian talks con-
tinued to be satisfactory. If the bargain were really
made, instead of our having to get into Lithuania (like
our first friend, she ignored, and at the same time, per-
fectly understood our notions for getting there),
Lithuania would come to us. The Bolshevik occupation
in which we now found ourselves, instead of having to
be somehow left, would itself leave us. The Lithuanians,
she said, once in power in Wilno, would certainly be

259

Wilno

distinguished by their broadmindedness and the help
they would extend to the unfortunate Poles. We limped
out of the Consulate.

'So that', said A., 'is what the sons of bitches are up
to. A very charming young lady. I should like to slap
her behind.

'All the same,' he added, 'we shall undoubtedly fol-
low her suggestions.'

The first thing to do was to find some kind of refuge.
To describe how we found it would take a whole chap-
ter. A Hungarian woman married to a Pole, and her two
children, occupied a basement room in the flat of a small
Jewish shopkeeper. Her own home had been in the
quarter of Wilno that had been bombarded. Her hus-
band, to whom the Jew had obligations, brought his
family here, before leaving with his company. A spy
had brought her news that he was in an internment
camp. Through her, a second room was found for us
in the same basement. WTe were to pay for it with salt
or sugar, in which we were rich. The room was, in fact,
so icy cold and so infested by cockroaches that we lived
almost altogether with Ketty and the children in theirs,
which was a little better. Ketty had never either seen or
heard of us before, but we lived like one family. I still
think of her whenever I have soup. I can buy now for
eightpence a tin of soup that, diluted, would have lasted
the five of us for three days. The plateful she gave me
in the first five minutes of our acquaintance must have
been wretched stuff. I remember I thought it heavenly.
What I cannot buy is that glow again, and A.'s joy in
seeing me fed. Neither of us was actually starving, but
exhaustion would not let me digest the raw smoky fat
we had been living on. I had vomited it so often that for

260

Wilno

the last twenty-four hours the first taste of it had brought
the vomiting on before I could even try to swallow. To
Ketty, almost more than to any of the others, I promised
that this book should be written. I wish there were more
about them in it, and less about myself. Our room con-
tained absolutely nothing except an iron bed with no
mattress. A. rolled up his sheepskins for a pillow, and
Ketty lent us feather quilts. After the ruin we had seen,
Wilno appeared to us almost untouched by the war.
The houses still stood. The townspeople had their own
clothes, bedding, furniture and stores. Ketty had white
flour and melted lard and whole rows of jams and jelly.
A. and she rose at five in the morning and stood in the
bread queues till eight. The Russians allowed the town
a little black flour daily, after the troops had had all they
wanted. They took turns at carrying coal in one of our
rucksacks from the cellar of Ketty's old house three or
four kilometres away. When we had a fire in the stove,
life seemed even luxurious. After my soup, I slept and
then remained in bed with recurring spells of fever and
a sudden attack of pleurisy. I remember Ketty procur-
ing from somewhere half a cupful of milk and giving it
to me mixed with honey somebody else had brought;
the first and last time we saw milk in Wilno. A. and she
made soup from flour and fat. The children never went
seriously hungry, not at that stage. Flour pastes were
filling. Ketty went out every day to look for potatoes.
Sometimes a peasant would bring them into the town
and barter them against clothing or salt. The children
lived chiefly on pastes and black bread. Neither of the
basement rooms had any kind of arrangement for cook-
ing, but the house-porter still had some fuel and when
there was a fire he would always make room for a sauce-

261

Wilno

pan that A. or Ketty would carry across the yard. The
Jewish proprietor did the same thing. He had a station-
ery shop on the level of the street and did business with
the Russians.

As a class, the Jews went over wholesale to the Bol-
sheviks. In Wilno and elsewhere the worst type of Jew
turned informer overnight. Thousands of the same Jews
who had counted on the Polish Army to save them from
Hitler arrived as refugees from the German Occupation
and proceeded to sell the Poles in the Russian Occupa-
tion like hot cakes. Even the G.P.U. agents whom they
guided from house to house expressed contempt for
these self-appointed jackals. Many Jewish individuals
must have felt the same, only painfully and deeply.
Nevertheless, the truth remains that within the Russian
Occupation the patriot's worst enemy at this time was
his Jewish fellow citizen. The Bolshevik regime, the
Jews thought, meant power for themselves. In the
towns and even in the villages (K. was an exception in
having a purely peasant population) the local Committee
and the militia, supposed to represent the entire com-
munity, began to be made up entirely from this rene-
gade and revolutionary Jewish element. How it has
been since, I do not know. I think it likely that their
day is already over.

Our landlord himself said very little. He was a good
sort of man, and he hated the upstart type of Jew as only
Jews can. We were fairly secure from a surprise so long
as we lodged with him. No Jewish houses were searched.
The house-to-house searches went on every night, from
curfew (at six o'clock by Polish time, eight o'clock by
the new time taken from Moscow) until the lifting of
curfew in the early morning. The loot taken was human

262

Wilno

beings. Four or five long trains of prisoners left every
day for Russia. Others remained on the railway sidings
indefinitely, until it was almost impossible to distinguish
between the living and the dead. As long afterwards as
the beginning of December, a Lithuanian official told
me of the appalling truck-loads of victims they had
found still there when they took over the city, and still
there in December ; and of the Soviet indifference and
apathy, more than genuine sadism, before facts of this
kind. Lithuanian intervention did not interest them
either. Somebody, some day, was going to go into the
matter. In the meantime a few dozen victims more or
less — they could not imagine why the Lithuanians even
troubled to ask questions. For all I know those trucks
are still standing on the sidings. The first convoys were
taken from among what were called the political sus-
pects. That meant, without exception, every Pole who
had administered the Code. Judges, magistrates, and
every other member of the legal profession, down to the
lawyers' clerks. It included any private citizen who had
ever sat on a jury to try a member of the Communist
party. Every Pole who had in any way stood for national
leadership in the town. Every Pole whose scientific,
literary or other labour had been in a national direction.
All these had figured under the label of Political Sus-
pects or Patriots on lists drawn up long before the Red
Armies passed the frontiers. Gaps in the lists were filled
up by the informers. By the time we arrived in the town,
it was the turn of the professions and the skilled trades.
Doctors, dentists, engineers and, after them, mechanics
and artisans. Any skilled manual labourer, even a lock-
smith or a zinc-cutter, was needed for the interior of
Russia, where skilled labour is absolutely lacking. A

263

Wilno

population of one hundred and eighty million cannot
produce, under its present regime, even the artisans it
needs. It cannot, apparently, produce even cabbage.
The thunderstruck inhabitants of Wilno saw the depar-
ture of cabbages, worn brooms, wooden tables, trestles,
and rough plank flooring torn out of barracks and insti-
tutions, for Moscow. The Russian uniform was poorer
and shoddier than the poorest garments the towns-
people, anxious not to show themselves in wool and
furs, could muster. The soldiers, while they were still
allowed to talk with us, exclaimed, admired, and ex-
claimed again at the riches of a provincial town in
reality never rich; beautiful but frugal, ruined and
beginning to be famished. All their wonderings and
exclamations had a single theme. How could these
things be possible in a capitalist state? The capitalist
state, they had always been told, consisted of a bour-
geois minority and a people of slaves. On the contrary,
they now saw with their own eyes a country in which
every citizen was a bourgeois. Our doctors, our learned
professions, they said, do not live like a doorkeeper lives
here. A few, who dared, passionately uttered: They
have lied to us ! At the same time, with the profoundest
melancholy, they realized how far-reaching for them-
selves would be the consequences of their having per-
ceived the lie: We shall never return to our homes, they
said ; we will never be allowed to cross our own frontiers
again. Either we will be shot, or it will be Siberia, in
chains. They will not dare to let us tell what we have
seen. They did not realize yet that there was a third solu-
tion of their problem. That arrangements had already
been made for them to keep eternal silence in Finland.
One other thing had also been certain. Once the

264

Wilno

Baltic countries had accepted servitude, the Finns
would be attacked and would defend themselves.

Officers read and wrote with difficulty. An engineer
described his own studies: 'First I went to the village
school for three years. After that they sent me to
the township and put me through a mangle in the
Polytechnic for two more.' Many of them had never
seen watches before. They tested unknown things by
putting them in their mouths, like children. Face creams
out of tubes were not so bad. Coloured cakes of soap
made them angry by lathering on their tongues and
having an unexpected taste. At a performance of a
propaganda play commanded at the theatre, women
Commissars turned up in nightdresses of artificial silk
tricot, bought in the town, which they had supposed to
be evening gowns. The audience was quite unable to
control its laughter. A police charge could not have
stopped it. The Russians had sense enough to realize
that laughter is a weapon too. The mortified Commis-
sars were obliged to retire. Until they did the per-
formance simply could not go on. Soldiers appeared in
the villages demanding civilian clothes: when the time
comes, they said to the peasants, we will go together
against Moscow. The most curious and most startling
thing the townspeople observed was that some of them,
passing before a church, furtively made the sign of the
cross. This was not the generation which hated Christ.
It was, we had supposed, the generation which did not
even know Him. When he asked them what they meant,
they said: 'In our homes the old people have told us
secretly about this Man, and shown us His Sign.'

265

Chapter 23
FRONTIER POST

The Russo-Lithuanian agreement was announced.
A little later it was ratified. Wilno was to be
handed over by the 16th of October. The
Lithuanian Government broadcast their intention to
maintain friendly relations with the Poles under their
jurisdiction, to supply Wilno with food, to concern
themselves about the refugees, to inflict no language
penalties and to close no Polish schools. The young
woman in the Consulate was radiant. The Jews were
crestfallen. The White Russians were furious. The few
thousand Lithuanians living in Wilno almost burst
with importance. The Poles were not asked what they
felt, and there was nothing left to them except to feel.
The Russians, I daresay, laughed. At any rate, up to
the 1 6th and for another eleven days after it their
armoured cars rumbled through the streets all night
and stood outside the shops, the University and the
Banks all day. When Wilno was handed over, it was
as empty as a cracked nutshell. Even the radio station
had been blown up and the scrap taken away. The
Lithuanian Army waited humbly at the frontier, cooling
its heels. When they were at last allowed in, there was
hardly a seat or a table left in the barracks they took

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Frontier Post

over. Even the floors had been ripped up. Metal knobs
and finger-plates and locks were taken even from pri-
vate apartments. Typewriters from offices. Money out
of tills. The entire bag of tricks, including the gas
burners and the revolving chairs, from the laboratory
of the University. After the 1 6th a good deal of doubt
even began to be expressed as to whether the Russians
had ever intended to hand the city over at all.

Not to have handed it over would have been such a
characteristically Russian joke. In Polish there is a say-
ing: 'Muscovite pleasantry.' There have been so many
of these pleasantries in Poland. As for instance in 1905,
when the Tsar first promised the people a Constitution
and then turned the guns of the citadel on them when
they ran out unarmed into the streets of Warsaw to
demonstrate their joy. Five thousand men, women, and
children fell on the Place of the Theatre alone. Every
day, the train bringing the Lithuanian authorities was
looked for. But the Russians, when they had first occu-
pied the frontier, had torn up the railroad. The authori-
ties would have to come by air. The secretary told her
audience at the George that the Red troops had been
withdrawn from the frontier. The peasants coming in
from the villages reported that they were still there.
Then the peasants stopped coming altogether. The
Bolsheviks had opened all the prisons when they had
first arrived. The countryside was infested by bandits,
as well as by troops. The aeroplanes from Kovno did
not arrive, either. The Consulate was besieged. The
arrests went on, by day now as well as by night. A force
of Polish irregulars, under Dombrowski, made light-
ning raids on the Russian forces in the suburbs. The
wireless gave us dance music, when we tried London.

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The first news of what was being prepared for Finland
reached us from Budapest. The chances of ever getting
to France seemed more infinitesimal than ever. Never-
theless, we steadily prepared for the undertaking. The
first day I was able to sit up in bed, I began to knit a
pair of gloves. I remember looking round me and think-
ing, this really is a war picture : Ketty laying her water
trap for cockroaches, the children sitting patiently,
watching A. cut up food, the room like an ice-house,
two young officers in civilian disguise playing chess.
The gloves were quite seriously intended for the pass-
age of the Baltic. A second pair had to be made for A.
For these I had only the brightest green wool, ripped
out of something of Ketty's. Wool could not have been
said to be worth its weight in gold, because with all the
gold in the world you would not have been able to buy
any.

None of us had ever made gloves before. They turned
out very oddly but they were gloves. Also, they did
cross the Baltic. After that, they went to a concentration
camp in Germany. I have no idea where they are now.

When I was well enough to go out (and I had to start
going out as soon as I could stand, so as to be ready for
moving at any moment) the little twelve-year-old girl
gave me her boots. Nobody else had any to fit me. For
the first time since Warsaw my feet were comfortable.
A Polish soldier had given me a pair of stockings. For
underclothing Ketty gave me a woollen pair of bathing
trunks of her husband's. Papcio, Rudy, and Wladek
turned up. Wladek had fought everywhere where the
fighting was hottest. At Modlin, at Zamosc, right down
to the Rumanian frontier and again at Lwow. His com-
pany had finally been completely cut off and sur-

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rounded. After fighting all night, in the early morning
the Commandant gave the order to surrender. The
remnant preferred annihilation.

'Not good enough,' said their officer. 'For me, yes.
I am an old man. But you are all young. Better let them
take you now, save your lives if you can and fight again.
Fixed as we are, no man has the right to throw his life
away to-day.'

Wladek was twenty. His father had fallen at the head
of his own regiment. He had been brought up to sol-
diering. He obeyed and persuaded others to obey. His
friend Zbyszek had tried to kill himself with his own
revolver rather than yield. A Polish soldier lying on the
ground beside him mortally wounded, had made one
terrific effort, heaved himself upward and knocked the
revolver from his hand and fallen back dead. The Bol-
sheviks had taken their arms and torn off their regimen-
tal badges. Wladek, Zbyszek, and others had escaped
later and made their way northwards. Ukrainian peas-
ants had given them civilian clothing and hidden them
during daylight. At night they had advanced again.
Ten were murdered. The Polish front had moved from
Poland to France. The burning idea in all their minds
was to get to that new front. This meant fighting a very
different sort of battle. Within the occupation they had
to avoid the continual traps of informers and secret
police while still trying to get food and shelter with no
means but their wits. The Jewish informers could pick
them out as cadets by some air they had, some way of
moving and speaking, however disguised. In countries
that were neutral only in name they had to overcome
the obstruction of officials. Seven visas were indis-
pensable. They had to learn to deal in lies and forgery;

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to starve, hide, and wait. All this they were willing to
undergo in order to continue their fight for Poland on
new ground. All the setbacks they experienced never
lessened their determination. Out of the 1 7,000 Poles
in Lithuania only 1,400 or so got to France. The rest
failed. They never stopped believing in a Polish future;
not even when they knew they would not get away,
when they began to turn backwards, to melt over the
frontiers again, back to the Occupations, into ambush in
the forests, to redden the snow with more Polish blood.
Papcio had an agonizing cough that never left him
again. People in Wilno were able to help with clothes.
The Red Cross tried to keep a kitchen open. I should
need a whole book to tell of all our expedients, dangers,
miseries, and glories. The town was full of young offi-
cers in hiding and disguise, trying to get farther and
over to France. All of them had had to destroy their
papers, to keep them out of the hands of the G.P.U.
All of them had to be supplied with false ones. There
were centres, as there were in Kovno later, where
miracles were achieved. No account of the audacity,
cool-headedness, and ingenuity of these young men,
few of them even in their twenties, could ever do them
justice, even if it were possible to attempt one. Ob-
viously it is not, at least until the war is over, because
these are secrets costing more than lives. As the Rus-
sians' time in the city shortened the arrests became
more and more indiscriminate. For a Red soldier to
dislike something about your face was enough. This
pretext for arrest was given over and over again. An
agent would ask, after days of interrogation, in which
nothing at all was found out because there was in fact
nothing to find: 'Why was this man (or this woman)

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brought in?' and the guards would find nothing to
allege except: 'His face was not pleasing to me.'

Between the old Russian administration under the
Tsar and the new one under Stalin, the difference is only
in name There is the same ignorance and slovenliness
among officials. The same secret police. The same sys-
tem of interrogation. A Russian will still empty his
pockets for you one minute and carry out an order for
your execution the next without so much as changing
his expression. Soldiers halted by the roadsides shared
their soup with women and children who asked for it.
But at the next move they would as little think of turn-
ing their heads after a comrade who fell out as after a
refugee or a dead dog. Children are not more fatalistic
or more insensible. In the streets, crawling with them,
A. would say:

'It is too much. To have to look at them againY

Only the Russians could produce in him this nervous
exasperation. He had been brought up in another Rus-
sian Occupation, when Poles were tortured, trans-
ported, flogged; sent to rot in prison, to freeze in
Siberia, to break their hearts in France and America,
to serve in foreign armies all over the world, wherever
a lost cause or a desperate Legion raised a flag.

There is not one Polish family whose members,
within living memory, who have escaped these fates,
have not been persecuted at home ; liable to the extrem-
est penalties, and even the hangman's rope, for the
crimes of speaking their own language, reading their
own poets or teaching to their children the history of
their own fathers; who have not been spied upon even
in their beds, informed against, sold; harried day and
night, indoors and out of doors, at home or in business,

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in the streets or at Mass, by an unspeakably corrupt,
barbarous, sadist and imbecile gendarmerie controlled
from Moscow and St. Petersburg. After 191 8 he had
been part of that Polish army of volunteers, students,
and boys who, short of every kind of ammunition, half
trained, in rags of uniform, bootless, had thrown the
Russians back towards Asia.

'The same manoeuvres,' he said, 'the same way of
handling their arms, the same outland faces, the same
loutish imbecility! Riding us down in their forage carts,
scratching and crowding and chewing in our streets
again. Body of God!'

Oaths were not A.'s habit, either. He cursed now
blackly and bitterly. I had always known that he hated
the Russians. As certain creatures hate each other,
instinctively, out of a sort of race memory, from under
the skin. Ketty trembled when he was out of doors. She
said that the G.P.U. men never took their eyes off him.
They have a way of watching without moving. Only
their eyes move. We could never understand how he
escaped being arrested.

'Those sheepskins and boots !' Ketty exclaimed often.
'Instead of making a moujik of him, they only draw
attention to that air of being dziedzicz.1

He was never even questioned. I thought myself that
it was his extreme inflexibility that saved him. To save
his life he could not have lowered his eyes before a
G.P.U. man or walked an inch out of his way to avoid
one. A cur dog hardly ever bites when he is treated like
this. Whoever came back in the morning without bread,
Ketty and A. always secured at least two pounds. They
needed to. The children, if they were never very hun-
gry, never really had their appetites satisfied either.

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Many people gathered in the basement room. There
was always somebody who had not eaten for days. Rudy
was the most difficult to feed. Whatever was put into
him was too little. His stomach incessantly demanded
compensation for his fifteen and a half years, his six feet
of height, the cellar in Danzig, the green tomatoes, and
the slimy water. His appetite embarrassed both himself
and Papcio, who tried to eat less than ever to make up
the ravages. A. not only took care to get bread for our
own party; he forced order on other queues, putting
somebody of his own into each of them. The Jews, at
least while they lined up for bread, had to take their
turn, and so had the Russian soldiers who wanted more
than their issue. From five o'clock each morning, when
he took his sheepskins from under my head until he
returned with bread, I lay and wondered how long his
luck would hold. Each night, from curfew to curfew,
when he was indoors, with us I wondered the same thing.
He had not destroyed, and would not destroy, his pass-
port or his military papers. Once detained, it was the
heart of Russia for him. An engineer, with Paris
diplomas. An officer. A veteran of the Bolshevik war.
Decorated. A defender of Lwow. Twice the porters'
books were scrutinized. Registration was compulsory
for all males passing one night in the town. Not to have
registered, if they ferreted you out, meant certain death.
To register was to fall into a trap. The luck held on
both occasions. On one of them, a Russian officer came
into the room by one door and A. simply rose and walked
out of it by another. This sort of thing was always hap-
pening. The Russian looked at the pile of feather quilts.
He could not be bothered to see if there were somebody
hidden under them or not. My four needles and the
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way I lay on my back with the knitting close to my face
diverted him. He did open the door that had just closed
but went no farther down the passage. He came back
and held out his hand. In clumsy Polish he asked:

'What is this?'

'A glove,' I said.

'Why do you knit lying down?'

'Because I am ill. I cannot sit up.'

'Is it because you have no food that you cannot sit up?'

'We have plenty of food.'

He shrugged his shoulders. A few inches of the glove
was done. He still held out his hand and I tried the
circle over his wrist. Oskar, the little boy, was there and
he looked on as I would have looked on at his age if a
talking bear had suddenly stepped out of one of my
books and into the nursery. The Russian asked some
other questions, I have forgotten what; something
about the time. He had three bracelet watches, one
above the other on his arm. The question was intended
to display them. He was excessively pleased at having
three watches. When he had consulted them all he
straightened his arm again and signed to me to take back
my knitting, but he still stood.

Oskar's school books lay on the table. He had the
idea of showing them to the visitor.

'All lies,' said the Russian indifferently. But he was
quite interested in the volumes with pictures. When he
went, Oskar sighed with disenchantment. I knew
exactly what he unconsciously felt, because I felt it,
too. An inhuman creature had strayed inside our human
circle for an instant and tried to communicate with us,
and now it was gone and we had neither captured nor
understood it.

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Our refuge daily became more precarious. The
owner, fairly naturally, disliked the coming and going
of so many young men. Papcio and Rudy did our in-
telligence work. They were the least noticeable of our
own band, because they were the most haggard and
scarecrow. News reached us from all over the Russian
Occupation. Irregular Polish troops were still fighting.
Towns here and there were in Polish hands for a few
hours and only retaken with great losses. There had
been trouble between the allies over the line of demarca-
tion. The Germans had been the ones to give in. Bialy-
stok, which they had wanted badly, had been evacuated
after all and handed over to the Russians. A Bolshevik
Commission coming into it after the Germans had left,
exclaimed :

'All the same, how low the Germans are!' Dead and
dying Polish soldiers lay in heaps on the bare floors of
completely gutted hospitals. There was not a drop of
water or an inch of lint in the place. Maggots crawled
out of their wounds. Praga, a suburb of Warsaw across
the Vistula, was to be Russian too. The Germans were
required to keep strictly beyond the river. The early
tolerance within the Russian Occupation was wearing
ofT. Churches were being closed. Catholic prelates were
arrested. The cathedral in Pinsk was blown up with
dynamite. Orthodox priests serving the Ruthenian and
Ukrainian congregations were buried alive. The peas-
ants, horrified and faced with starvation, were burying
their root crops and driving their live stock into the for-
ests. Horses, particularly needed in Russia, were being
requisitioned all over the place. The local Soviets were
all being discarded and replaced; banks, industries,
small trades and handicrafts, already more than half

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ruined, were completely paralysed by incorporation
within the disorderly and incapable Soviet bureaucratic
machine. The railroads were choked with coal going to
the richest minefields in the world! Even the locomo-
tives never came back. The Russians dreamed of con-
verting them to use on their own broad-gauge roads.
Almost certainly they have never been touched. In the
next war they will be found rusting somewhere along
the route to Moscow. Even the land was robbed. Noth-
ing was sown for the coming year. The late autumn
crops rotted where they grew. Trees were hacked down
wholesale; great wedges driven into the forests in the
first few weeks of looting and nothing planted to heal
the scars. Frequently whole communities, told that the
forests were theirs to strip were afterwards accused of
sabotage and savagely punished. The first experiments
were made in collectivization. Famine spread beyond
the towns to the villages and farms.

Six of us decided that we must leave Wilno. Papcio,
Wladek, Rudy and Ketty, A. and myself. If the Lithu-
anian frontier was open we would cross it legally. If it
was still guarded by the Russians, we would cross it
illegally, somehow or other. For five of us, Wilno had
become too hot. Ketty might have stayed, but she was
determined to find her husband, either in Lithuania, if
he was interned, or in France if he had got through. By
staying where she was, she would never know anything.
A friend came and took charge of the children. For
three days, Ketty said: 'Time to get to Kovno and back
from the French and British Consulates with news.'

'Once in Kovno,' said somebody to us wistfully, 'you
will be as free as birds !' I often thought of that when we
actually were there.

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I forget the exact day on which we started. It must
have been very shortly after the 16th. The Russians
took so little trouble about the Lithuanians that neither
the Consul nor his staff had the least idea of the real
sequence of events. The secretary assured us again that
there would be no difficulty at the frontier. Everything
was in Lithuanian hands, she said. Of course, it would
be a rough journey. The damage to the railroad had not
been repaired. As there was still no communications, no
mail and no bag, she gave us a whole packet of letters
for Kovno, some of them addressed even to Ministers,
and asked us to deliver them. The railway company
unhesitatingly sold us tickets marked 'Wilno-Kaunas
via Landwarow'. The story of how I still come to have
them is too long to tell. It is also too painful. But here
they are. I have just had the curiosity to look at them.
They are stamped 18.X.39, so after all I do know the
date on which we left. It is an extraordinary sensation
to hold those things in my hands now.

The frontier, when we reached it, was heavily occu-
pied. It was only by heroic obstinacy that we reached it
at all. The recollection of that day and night, of the
courage, endurance, and gaiety of my companions, is far
harder to bear now than the terrible hardships that we
shared were then. I have tried and tried until I can
spend no more time trying. I cannot fill up their chronicle,
and nobody else ever will. The full Polish story never
will be written. The acts are hurried into the ground
with the witnesses. What survivors there are turn dumb
with pain and resentment, like beasts flogged out of
their wits. I can only write that on the night between
the 1 8th and the 19th, we crossed the frontier, that a
Bolshevik patrol was never farther than fifty yards from

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us, during the six hours and the length of kilometres
the adventure took. Once across, a Lithuanian patrol
fired on us and captured one. The rest of us, after
scattering, reassembled. We decided to give ourselves
up to this patrol in the hope that they would arrest
us and send us to Kovno — where in fact we wanted
to go. Not out of loyalty. There was no loyalty of
that kind between us. The four men thought of them-
selves first as soldiers and only afterwards as friends.
But because it was clear we could get no farther.
Behind the frontier guards a whole army was drawn
up waiting for their triumphal advance on Wilno. We
were bogged in mud to our knees soaked, to the
skin, and lost. The guards took us to the post. After
scrutinizing our papers, our persons, and the packet of
letters and hearing our stories, they said we must go
back again. They could neither imprison us, nor let us
through. We belonged to the Occupation. The Bol-
sheviks would do us no harm, they said. A palaver lasted
for hours. At the end of it, Papcio, Wladek, and Rudy
were sent back. Ketty, A., and myself were allowed to
remain. Unofficially and on parole. We lived in the
post; slept in straw with the guards, shared their bags
and their tobacco and some gleams of good fellowship
until the 28th of October. Whenever it was not against
their interests they were kind to us. They did not re-
mind us more than fifty times a day that we were now
a conquered people and that it was in their power to
show us favour. The post was as near to the frontier as
one side of this street is to the other. The Bolsheviks
patrolled it in companies of never less than six. The
Lithuanians, on their side, avoided encountering them.
When the dark figures, in heavy coats to their heels,

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seldom speaking, crossed the skyline the Lithuanians
dived into their guard-house. For ten days, twelve hours
a day, I walked up and down that frontier myself,
thinking of the politicians responsible for it and who
never set eyes on it and do not know where it is. On the
Lithuanian side, all the time I was there, 1 never met a
soul who spoke anything but Polish, except the guards
and the generation going to school. Since Lithuania has
been an independent republic the archaic Lithuanian
language has been compulsorily revived.

It is curious and ancient, the nearest language in the
world to Sanskrit, and full of the same words as Hin-
dustani, but it is not the living language of the people
growing up to use it. Polish is that. The people in the
village hated the guards. In fact, they were not bad
fellows ; but they were too raw. Post-war doctrines had
been pumped into them by a propaganda machine and
they had not been able to defend themselves against the
process. They were aggressive and chauvinistic, and
thought that they were so because they were frontier
guards and had seen the way things were. In reality, it
had been the other way round. Because they were to be
frontier guards, they had first been taught to be the
other things. During those ten days we continued to get
messages through to other Poles in Kovno. We touched,
we thought then, but we were wrong, the peak of
anxiety, false hope, and mental sufFering. The crisis of
physical sufFering whose germs we had been carrying
about with us for so long passed unnoticed. The three
who had been sent back lived on the other side under
cover a day or two until the patrols picked them up. We
saw it happen. Their captors were mounted. The fall-
ing afternoon light showed us only silhouettes. The

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long-skirted greatcoats covered the flanks of the horses.
The prisoners ran at saddle-height, outlined against
the same skyline. The whole scene passed like a mov-
ing frieze, appearing and disappearing again once or
twice between wood and water. A peasant from that
side crossed secretly to tell us, but we already knew.
This peasant and his family had been robbed of clothes,
furniture, and livestock by the Russians. They were not
peasants, said the Bolsheviks. They were bourgeois.
Only bourgeois could have a wall-clock and an arm-
chair with arms and a straw seat. His dying son was
hidden in a hayrick with nineteen wounds in his body.
The German civilians in a Polish town had given him
those on the first day of the war. As he climbed into an
armoured car, his hamstrings had been cut from behind.
On Friday, the 27th, the Lithuanians were allowed
to take their prize. The army slithered forward through
the mud. It was a much less glorious affair than they
had counted on. Torrents of rain had fallen while they
waited. Equipment, uniforms, boots, sky and route
were all reduced to one muddy monotony. The Lithu-
anian soldier's heart is in his uniform; galons, side-
arms, shakoes, and white gloves are what he marches
for. Wilno was taken over in an atmosphere of glum
anticlimax. On Saturday, food trains and a Lithuanian
mission went from Kovno. We found that turning back
to Wilno was the only thing left to us to try. The Com-
mandant of the post had done what he could for us ;
and we had rewarded him fairly badly. We had been
troublesome guests. One of his own guards had stealthily
carried letters between us and a consulate in Kovno.
The Commandant had been reprimanded by his chiefs.
I honestly think that he behaved better than we did.

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But now he had had more than enough of us. We were
personally conducted across the line to the ex-Polish
side.

'Get yourselves permits and come back,' he said.
'With permits, we shall always be delighted to see you.'

It was not easy to conceive how we were to get to
Wilno. There were no trains for civilians. The roads
and fields were impassable. Both were infested by
marauders. The corpses of the robbed were stripped
of their clothes; even false teeth or metal stoppings
were wrenched out of their jaws. We got there, as it
happens, with the food train and the mission, simply by
asking the young colonel at the head of it to take us
along. The train had halted for three minutes for water.
I don't know why he agreed. I think because he could
not read our consular passports and they looked very
impressive. We told him that we were British journa-
lists.

The journey was not very long. We stopped at only
two or three stations. The mission took itself very
seriously. Officers put their heads out of windows and
waved enthusiastically to children herding cattle and
peasants who came and stood dumbly before their
doors. In Landwarow, where the halt was longest, they
even had themselves photographed throwing chocolates
and cigarettes down among the rails. Of course a few
children, half-grown louts and Jewish hawkers scram-
bled for them. The rest of the spectators stood listless,
hungry, and cold. Their expression was not quite
scornful. It was more patient than that. It said, as
clearly as if the words had been spoken :

'We are keeping our bravos until later. Until our
own army marches back.'

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The officers were disappointed; puzzled also. The
chocolates had been thrown with perfect goodwill. The
entry into Wilno was equally a fiasco. The parades, in
full dress, of the next day, Sunday, were carried out in
the atmosphere of a funeral. The townspeople, for the
most part, stayed indoors. The lines of people along the
pavements stood with folded arms and bent heads, as if
they were looking down into a grave.

Papcio, Rudy, and Wladek were at liberty again, and
waiting for us in Wilno. Eels would have been easier to
hold.

On Monday A. obtained three passes. They were the
first out of occupied Wilno, and the military governor
signed them himself. The third was for Rudy. From
now on he was adopted. In this, and every other declara-
tion of identity, he figured as our nephew, the son of a
sister of A. If perjury could have saved him, he would
have been saved.

In the evening we arrived in the Lithuanian capital.
Exactly fifty-five days since the afternoon when we had
left our own. Not a day more. I remember that we stood
together before a mirror and that we said before our
double reflection : 'Who would believe, looking at those
faces, that it had been less than ten years?'

282

Chapter 24
POSTSCRIPT

Up to now, I have tried to tell a story. Nobody
can be more conscious than myself of how
badly it has been done. Added to all my grief,
is the grief of not having told Poland's story well. Again
and again I have broken down in the writing of it. Since
the first day I landed in England, from a German
prison, there has not been a single hour in which I have
not been labouring at this duty, in one way or another,
and it is still not done.

Since the 1 st of September 1 939 I have been running
a race with exhaustion. Mental exhaustion is overtaking
me now so fast that I have despaired innumerable times
of ever setting all the story down. I know now that I
never will set it down. Not as I planned it. Not as A.,
when the parting did come, left me the charge of doing
it. If I could have done it, I should have understood a
little why I have had to live, when so many I love are
dead. Why I am free when the whole of Poland is in
prison. Why all my efforts, first to stay in Poland, after-
wards to return there, could never come to anything.
I can only finish it now with an outline of events,
dates, and journeys.

These dates and journeys will take you as far as

283

Postscript

the day on which we started our journey to England.
From Kovno in Lithuania we travelled through Lat-
via to Riga and from Riga to Revel in Estonia. From
Revel we crossed the Baltic in a neutral ship, on our
way to Stockholm. A quarter of an hour out of the
Swedish territorial waters, the ship was captured by a
German cruiser. A German crew, armed with machine
guns and hand-grenades, was put aboard and took us to
a port in Germany. In this port we were handed over
to Gestapo. Days later, I was freed and given a visa out
of Germany. I never saw A. again. From Germany I
was sent to Scandinavia. From Scandinavia I came to
England. But of the things that happened in Kovno and
after Kovno I shall not attempt to tell you any more.
The 8 th of December, the day we left there, is the last
date in this book.

284

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