army. The infamous Polish roads, which would turn to mud of a diabolical consistency once the autumn rains began, were dry; and the rivers, the nation’s only natural defense positions, were low and sluggish.
The German attack started at 05:00. Szara and Vyborg both looked at their watches as the first shells landed in the village. Mierczek cranked his field telephone and made contact with the Polish counterbattery at the edge of the forest above the town. Gazing through binoculars, he located the muzzle flashes at a point in the wood on the other side of the river, then consulted a hand-drawn map with coordinates penciled on it. “Good morning, Captain, sir,” Mierczek said stiffly into the telephone. Szara heard the earpiece crackle with static as a voice shouted into it. “They’re in L for Lodz twenty-four, sir,” Mierczek responded. He continued to stare through the binoculars, then consulted his map again. “To the southeast of the grid, I think. Sir.” Vyborg passed his binoculars to Szara. Now he could see the village in sharp focus. A fountain of dirt rose into the air. Then a housefront fell into the little street, a cloud of dust and smoke rolling out behind it. A few small flames danced along a broken beam. He swung the binoculars to the river, then to the German side. But he could see very little happening there.
The Polish field guns began to fire, the explosions leaving dirty brown smoke drifting through the treetops. Now Szara saw an orange tongue of flame in the German-occupied woods. “Two points left,” Mierczek said into the phone. They waited but nothing happened. Mierczek repeated his instructions. Szara could hear an angry voice amid the static. Mierczek held the phone against his chest for a moment and said confidentially, “Some of our shells do not explode.” As the Polish guns resumed firing, Szara saw the orange flash again, but this time in a different place. Mierczek reported this. Two men in dark shirts with their sleeves rolled up went running from house to house in the village. They disappeared for a time, then emerged from a back door with a gray shape on a stretcher.
It was getting harder and harder for Szara to see anything; the pall of smoke thickened until solid objects faded into shapes and shadows. The flashes from the German artillery seemed to change position-there simply, he decided, couldn’t be that many of them in the forest. Then a Polish machine gun opened up from one of the pillboxes. Szara moved the binoculars toward the far bank of the river and saw hundreds of gray shapes, men running low, come out of the woods and dive flat on the ground. Polish rifle fire began to rattle from the houses in the village. A Polish ammunition dump was hit by a shell; the sound of the blast was ragged, a huge billowing cloud swirled upward, brilliant white stars trailing smoke arched over the river. Mierczek never stopped reporting, but the Polish counterfire seemed ineffective. Finally Colonel Vyborg spoke up. “I believe, Lieutenant, you’re trying to pinpoint a tank battery. It seems they’ve cut passages into the woods for the tanks to move around.”
“I think you’re right, sir,” Mierczek said. In the midst of communicating this information his face tensed, but he carried his report through to the end. Then he unconsciously held his lower lip between his teeth and closed his eyes for an instant. “The battery’s been hit,” he said. Szara traversed the Polish woods but could see little through the smoke. Vyborg was staring out the low, uneven rectangle cut into the logs that served as a window. “Give me the binoculars,” he said to Szara. He watched for a few seconds, then said, “Pioneers,” and handed the binoculars back to Szara. German troops were in the river, shielded by the wooden stanchions where the bridge had stood, firing machine pistols at the portals of the pillboxes. The German Pioneer closest to the Polish side was shirtless, his body pink against the gray water. He swam suddenly from behind a stanchion with a rope held in his teeth. He took long, powerful strokes, then he let go of the rope, which floated away from him when he turned on his back and moved downstream with the current. Behind him, soldiers hauled themselves along the rope as far as the stanchion he’d just left. Some of them floated away also but were replaced by others.
“Hello? Captain? Hello?” Mierczek called into the phone. He cranked the handle and tried again. Szara could no longer hear the static. “I think the line has been severed,” Mierczek said. He took a pair of electrician’s pliers from a khaki bag, moved quickly to the low doorway, and disappeared. His job was, Szara knew, to follow the line until he found the break, repair it, and return. Szara saw a flash of the white shirt to his left, toward the battery, then it vanished into the dense smoke hanging amid the trees.
Szara swept his binoculars to the village. Most of the houses were now on fire. He saw a man run from one of them toward the woods, but the man fell on his knees and pitched forward after a few steps. Back on the river, the Pioneers had gained two more stanchions, and crowds of Germans were firing from the ones they held. The fire was returned. White chip marks appeared magically in the old, tarred wood and sometimes a German trooper fell backward, but he was immediately replaced by another man working his way along the line. A little way down the river there were flashes from the front rank of trees and, concentrating hard, Szara could see a long barrel silhouetted against the trunk of a shattered pine tree. He could just make out a curved bulk below the barrel. Yes, he thought, Vyborg had been right, it was a tank. A group of Polish infantrymen moved out of the forest below him, three of them carrying a machine gun and ammunition belts. They were trying to take up a position with a field of fire that would enfilade the stanchions. They ran bent over, rushing forward, one of them lost his helmet, but then all three made it to a depression in the sand between the edge of the water and a grove of alder trees. He could see the muzzle flash of the machine gun. Swept the binoculars to the stanchion and saw panic as several of the Germans fell away from the pilings. He felt a rush of elation, wanted to shout encouragement to the Polish machine gunners. But by the time he had again located their position, only one man was firing the gun and, as Szara watched, he let it go, covered his face with his hands, and slumped backward. Slowly, he got himself turned over and began to crawl for the edge of the woods.
The field telephone came suddenly to life, static popping from the earpiece. Vyborg grabbed it and said, “This is your observer position.” A voice could be heard yelling on the other end. Then Vyborg said, “I don’t know where he is. But he repaired the line and until he returns I will direct your fire. Is there an officer there? ” Szara heard the negative. “Very well, Corporal, you’re in charge then. There are tanks in the woods to your north, at the edge of the forest. Can you fire a single round, short? Even in the river will work.” There was a reply, then Vyborg stared at the map Mierczek had left behind. “Very well, Corporal,” he said. “My advice is quadrant M28.” Szara moved the binoculars to see the impact of the ranging fire Vyborg had directed but was distracted by a group of Germans who had reached the west bank of the river and were running into the woods. “They’re across,” he said to Vyborg. Vyborg said, “You’re too short, come up a couple of degrees.”
Szara glanced at the doorway, wondering where Mierczek was, then realized he was not going to return. Szara could now see muzzle flashes from positions in and above the village as Polish troopers fired at the Germans who had established a flank attack in the woods. Five Panzer tanks moved out of the woods onto the sandy shore of the river, rumbling forward to the edge of the water and forming an angle that allowed them to fire directly into the Polish forces in the village. Szara’s binoculars found the Polish machine gunner who’d tried to crawl away from the beach. He lay still in the sand. “Corporal?” Vyborg said into the phone.
By late afternoon, they were near the town of Laskowa, not far from the river Tososina-uncertain where to go next, possibly cut off by Wehrmacht encirclement, but, narrowly, alive.
They had escaped from the scene of the German bridgehead over the Dunajec-a matter of minutes. Colonel Vyborg had taken the precaution of leaving the staff car, with the sergeant to guard it, up the road from the village. Had it been in the village itself they would now be captured or, more likely, dead. As Polish resistance had worn down, the German infantry had negotiated the river on wooden rafts, isolated the remaining Poles in a few positions at the far end of the village, and demanded surrender. The Poles, from the look of it, had refused. Vyborg had watched the beginning of the final attack through his binoculars, then, unwilling to witness the end, had carefully restored them to their leather case and deliberately pressed both snaps shut. Working their way through the hillside brush they had come under fire several times, German rounds singing away through the branches, but the forest itself had protected them from the German marksmen.
For a time, the road crossing the Carpathian foothills was clear, then they came upon the remnants of a retreating Polish regiment driven back from the border: exhausted soldiers, faces and uniforms gray with dust, wagonloads of bandaged, silent men, walking wounded leaning on their rifles or helped by friends, officers who gave no orders. It was, for Szara and evidently for Vyborg as well, worse than the battle at the Dunajec. There they had seen courage in the face of superior force; this was the defeat of a nation’s army. A group of peasants harvesting wheat in a field stopped working, took their caps off, and watched silently as the troops walked past.
For a time, the sergeant drove slowly, at the pace of the regiment. Then, around noon, the forward units were engaged. According to a lieutenant questioned by Vyborg, a German corps that had fought its way across one of the Carpathian passes from northern Slovakia had now turned east-with extraordinary, unheard-of speed; a completely motorized force that moved in trucks and tanks-to close the pocket and cut off Polish forces attempting to retreat along the road. When the mortar and machine gun exchanges started up and the regiment began to organize its resistance, Vyborg directed the sergeant to take a tiny cart track-two wagon ruts in the dirt- that cut through a wheat field.
