The Polish Officer

“Perhaps you could find some water,” de Milja said to the supervisor.

His family had always had dogs, kept at the manor house of the estate in the Volhynia, in eastern Poland. They hunted with them, taking a wild boar every autumn in the great forest, a scene from a medieval tapestry. The Tatra was an off-white, like most mountain breeds, a preferred color that kept the shepherd from clubbing his own dog when they fought night-raiding wolves. De Milja put his face into the animal’s fur and inhaled the sweet smell.

The yard supervisor returned, a bowl filled to the brim with milk held carefully in his hands. This was a small miracle, but “he must be hungry” was all he had to say about it.

“What’s your name?” de Milja asked.

“Koski.”

“Can you keep a big dog, Mr. Koski?”

The yard supervisor thought a moment, then shrugged and said, “I guess so.”

“It will take some feeding.”

“We’ll manage.”

“And this kind of coach?” The captain nodded at it. “Have you got six or so?”

“All you want.”

“Same color. Yellow, with red around the windows.”

Koski tried to conceal his reaction. The middle of a war, Germans at the outskirts of the city, and this man wanted “the same color.” Well, you did what you had to do. “If you can wait for daylight, we’ll freshen up the paint.”

“No, it’s good just like that. We’ll need a coal tender, of course, and a locomotive. A freight locomotive.”

Koski stared at his shoes. They had improvised, borrowed parts, kept running all sorts of stock that had no business running—but freight locomotives were a sore subject. Nobody had those. Well, he had one. Well and truly hidden. Was this the moment? “Six red-andyellow coaches,” he said at last. “Tender, freight locomotive. That it?”

De Milja nodded. “In about, say, an hour.”

Koski started to shout, something like can’t you see I’m doing the best I can? But a covert glance at de Milja changed his mind—he wasn’t someone you would say that to, much less shout it.

De Milja looked to be in his late thirties, but there was something about him, some air of authority, that was much older than that. He had dark hair, cut short and cut very well, and a pale forehead that people noticed. Eyes the color—according to his wife—of a February sea, shifting somewhere between gray and green. His face was delicate, arrogant, hard; people said different things. In any event, he was a very serious man, that was obvious, with hands bigger than they ought to have been, and blunt fingers. He wore no insignia, just a brown raincoat over a gray wool sweater. There was a gun, somewhere. He stood, relaxed but faintly military, waiting for the yard supervisor to agree to make up his train in an hour. This man came, Koski thought, from the war, and when the war went away, if it ever did, so would he and all the others like him.

The supervisor nodded yes, of course he could have his train. The dog stopped lapping at the bowl, looked up and whined, a drop of milk falling from his beard. A yellow flame burst from the hillside above the yards and the flat crump of an explosion followed. The brush burned for a few seconds, then the fire died out as smoke and dust drifted down the hill.

Koski had flinched at the explosion, now he jammed his shaking hands deeper into his pockets. “Not much left to bomb here,” he said.

“That wasn’t a bomb,” de Milja said. “It was a shell.”

17 September, 3:50 a.m. Freight locomotive, coal tender, six passenger cars from a market-day local. The yard supervisor, the Tatra by his side, watched as it left the railyards. Then it crossed Praga, a workers’ suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw, and headed for the city on the single remaining railroad bridge. Captain de Milja stood in the cab of the locomotive and stared down into the black water as the train clattered across the ties.

For a crew, Koski had done the best he could on short notice. A fireman, who would shovel coal into the steam engine’s furnace, and a conductor would be joining the train in Warsaw. The engineer, standing next to de Milja, had been, until that night, retired. He was a sour man, with a double chin and a lumpy nose, wearing an engineer’s cap, well oiled and grimed, and a pensioner’s blue cardigan sweater with white buttons.

“Fucking shkopy,” he said, using the Polish word for Germans equivalent to the French boche. He peered upriver at the blackened skeleton of the Poniatowski Bridge. “I had all I wanted of them in ’17.”

The Germans had marched into Warsaw in 1917, during the Great War. De Milja had been sixteen, about to enter university, and while his family had disliked the German entry into Poland, they’d seen one positive side to it: Russian occupiers driven back east where they belonged.

The firebox of the locomotive glowed faintly in the dark, just enough light to jot down a few figures on the iron wall. He had to haul a total of 88,000 pounds: 360 people—43,000 pounds of them if you figured young and old, fat and thin, around 120 pounds a person. Sharing the train with 44,530 pounds of freight.

So, 88,000 pounds equaled 44 tons. Figuring two tons to a normal freight car, a locomotive could easily pull twenty cars. His six passenger coaches would be heavy, but that didn’t matter—they had no suspension to speak of, they’d roll along if the locomotive could pull them.

“What are you scribbling?” The irritation of an old man. To the engineer’s way of thinking, a locomotive cab wasn’t a place for writing.

De Milja didn’t answer. He smeared the soft pencil jotting with his palm, put the stub of pencil back in his pocket. The sound of the wheels changed as the train came off the bridge and descended to a right-of-way cut below ground level and spanned by pedestrian and traffic bridges: a wasteland of tracks, signals, water towers, and switching stations. Was the 44,530 correct? He resisted the instinct to do the figures again. Seven hundred and twelve thousand ounces always made 44,530 pounds, which, divided into five-pound units, always made 8,906. It is mathematics, he told himself, it is always the same.

“You said Dimek Street bridge?”

“Yes.”

The steam brake hissed and the train rolled to a stop. From a stairway that climbed the steep hillside to street level came a flashed signal. De Milja answered with his own flashlight. Then a long line of shadowy figures began to move down the stairs.

17 September, 4:30 a.m. While the train was being loaded, the conductor and the fireman arrived and shook hands with the engineer. Efficiently, they uncoupled the locomotive and coal tender and used a switching spur to move them to the other end of the train, so it now pointed east.

There were two people waiting for de Milja under the Dimek Street bridge: his former commander, a white- mustached major of impeccable manners and impeccable stupidity, serving out his time until retirement while his assistant did all the work, and de Milja’s former aide, Sublieutenant Nowak, who would serve as his adjutant on the journey south.

The major shook de Milja’s hand hard, his voice taut with emotion.

“I know you’ll do well,” he said. “As for me, I am returning to my unit. They are holding a line at the Bzura River.” It was a death sentence and they both knew it. “Good luck, sir,” de Milja said, and saluted formally. The major returned the salute and disappeared into a crowd of people on the train.

Guards with machine guns had positioned themselves along the track, while a dozen carpenters pried up the floorboards of the railroad coaches and workers from the state treasury building installed the Polish National Bullion Reserve—$11,400,000 in five-pound gold ingots packed ten to a crate—in the ten-inch space below. Then, working quickly, the carpenters hammered the boards back into place.

At which point Nowak came running, his face red with anger. “You had better see this,” he said. The carpenters were just finishing up. Nowak pointed at the shiny nailheads they’d hammered into the old gray wood.

“Couldn’t you use the old nails?” de Milja said.

The head carpenter shrugged.

“Is there any lampblack?”

“Lampblack! No, of course not. We’re carpenters, we don’t have such things.”

17 September, 6:48 a.m. Gdansk station. The platforms and waiting rooms were jammed with people, every