With a one-week section on the management of espionage-thus the folded newspapers. And the cold exterior. This was no pretense for Mercier; he didn’t like Uhl, who betrayed his country for selfish reasons. In fact, he didn’t like any of it. “Witness the ingenuity of Monsieur D,” said the elfin captain from the
Stay. Good boy, good girl. Remember the ingenious Monsieur D.
In Mercier’s desk drawer, at his office on the second floor of the embassy, was a letter resigning his commission. Written at a bad moment, in the difficult early days of a new job, but not thrown away. He couldn’t imagine actually sending it, but the three-year appointment felt like a lifetime, and he might be reappointed. Perhaps he would try, the next time he was at the General Staff headquarters in Paris, to request a transfer, to field command. His first request, using the prescribed channels, had been denied, but he would try again, he decided, this time in person. It might work, though, if it didn’t, he couldn’t ask again. That was the unofficial rule, set in stone: two attempts, no more.
Riding the trolley back to central Warsaw, he wondered where he’d gone wrong, why he’d been reassigned, six months earlier, from a staff position in the Army of the Levant, headquartered in Beirut, to the embassy in Warsaw. The reason, he suspected, had most of all to do with Bruner, who wanted to move up, wanted to be at the center of power in Paris. This he’d managed to do, but they had to replace him, and replace him with someone that the Polish General Staff would find an appealing substitute.
And for Mercier, it should have been a plum, a career victory. An appointment in Warsaw, to any French officer or diplomat, was considered an honor, for Poland and France had a special relationship, a long, steady history of political friendship. In the time of the French kings, the French and Polish royal families had intermarried, French had become, and remained, the polite language of the Polish aristocracy, and the Poles, especially Polish intellectuals, had been passionate for the ideals of the Enlightenment and the Revolution of 1789. Napoleon had supported the Polish quest to re-establish itself as a free nation, and French governments had, since the eighteenth century, welcomed Polish exiles and supported their struggle against partition.
Thus, in the summer of 1920, after fighting broke out in the Ukraine between Polish army units and Ukrainian partisan bands, and the Red Army had attacked Polish forces around Kiev, it was France that came to Poland’s aid, in what had come to be known as the Russo-Polish War. In July, France sent a military mission to Poland, commanded by no less than one of the heroes of the Great War, General Maxime Weygand. The mission staff included Mercier’s fellow officer, more colleague than friend, Captain Charles de Gaulle-they had graduated from Saint-Cyr together with the class of 1912-and Mercier as well. Both had returned from German prison camps in 1918, after unsuccessful attempts to escape. Both had been decorated for service in the Great War. Now both went to Poland, in July of 1920, to serve as instructors to the Polish army officer corps.
But, in mid-August, when the Red Army, having broken through Polish defense lines in the Ukraine, reached the outskirts of Warsaw, Mercier had become involved in the fighting. The Russians were poised for conquest, foreign diplomats had fled Warsaw, the Red Army was just a few miles east of the Vistula, and the Red Army was unstoppable. Captain Mercier was ordered to join a Polish cavalry squadron as an observer but had then, after the deaths of several officers and with the aid of an interpreter, taken command of the squadron. And so took part in the now-famous flank attack led by Marshal Pilsudski, cutting across the Red Army line of advance in what was later called “the Miracle of the Vistula.”
At five in the afternoon, on the thirteenth of August, 1920, the final assault on Warsaw began in the town of Radzymin, fifteen miles east of the city. As Pilsudski’s counterattack was set in motion, the 207th Uhlan Regiment, with Mercier leading his squadron, was ordered to take the Radzymin railway station. A local fourteen-year-old was hauled up to sit behind a Uhlan’s saddle and guide them to the station. It was almost eight o’clock, but the summer evening light was just beginning to darken, and, when Mercier saw the station at the foot of a long, narrow street, he raised his revolver, waved it forward, and spurred his horse. The Uhlans shouted as they charged, people in the apartments above the street leaned out their windows and cheered, and the thunder of hooves galloping over cobblestones echoed off the sides of the buildings.
As they rode down the street, the Uhlans began to fire at the station, and rifle rounds snapped past Mercier’s head. The answering Russian fire blew spurts of brick dust off building walls, glass showered onto the cobblestones, a horse went down, and the rider to Mercier’s left cried out, dropped his rifle, tumbled sideways, and was dragged by a stirrup until another rider grabbed the horse’s bridle.
They poured out of the street at full gallop and then, at a call from Mercier’s interpreter, split left and right, as drivers ran from the Radzymin taxis, and passengers dropped their baggage and dove full length, huddling by the curb for protection. Only a small unit, a platoon or so, of Russian troops protected the station, and they were quickly overcome, one of them, an officer with a red star on his cap, speared with a Uhlan’s lance.
For a few minutes, all was quiet. Mercier’s horse, flanks heaving, whickered as Mercier trotted him a little way up the track, just to see what he could see. Where was the Red Army? Somewhere in Radzymin, for now the first artillery shell landed in the square surrounding the station, a loud explosion, a column of black dirt blown into the air, a plane tree split in half. Mercier hauled his horse around and galloped back toward the station house. He saw the rest of the squadron leaving the square, headed for the cover of an adjoining street.
The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, vision blurred, ears ringing, blood running from his knee, the horse galloping off with the rest of the squadron. For a time, he lay there; then a Uhlan and a shopkeeper ran through the shell bursts and carried him into a drygoods store. They set him down carefully on the counter, tore long strips of upholstery fabric from a bolt-cotton toile with lords and ladies, he would remember it as long as he lived-and managed to stop the bleeding.
The following morning found him in a horse-drawn cart with other wounded Uhlans, heading back toward Warsaw on a road lined with Poles of every sort, who raised their caps as the wagon rolled past. Back in the city, he learned that Pilsudski’s daring gamble had been successful, the Red Army, in confusion, was in full flight back toward the Ukraine: thus, “the Miracle of the Vistula.” Though, in certain sectors of the Polish leadership, it was not considered a miracle at all. The Polish army had beaten the Russians, outmaneuvered them, and outfought them. In crisis, they’d been strong-strong enough to overcome a great power, and, therefore, strong enough to stand alone in Europe.
A few months later, Captain Mercier and Captain de Gaulle were awarded Polish military honors, the Cross of
After that, the two careers did, for a time, continue to run parallel, as they served with French colonial forces in the Lebanon, fighting bandit groups, known as the Dandaches, in the Bekaa valley. Divergence came in the 1930s when de Gaulle, by then the most prestigious intellectual in France’s military-known, because of his books and monographs, as the “pen officer” of the French army-won assignment to teach at the
For Mercier there was no such notoriety, but he had continued, quite content, with a series of General Staff assignments in the Lebanon. Until, as a French officer decorated by both France and Poland, he’d been ordered, a perfect and appealing substitute for Colonel Emile Bruner, to serve as military attache in Warsaw.
At the central Warsaw tram stop, Mercier got off the trolley. The gray dawn had now given way to a gray morning, with a damp, cold wind, and Mercier’s knee hurt like hell. But in truth, he told himself, not unamused, the ache was in both knees, so not so much the condition of the wounded warrior as that of a tall man who, the previous evening, had been making love with a short woman in the shower.
Mercier went first to his apartment, changed quickly into uniform, then walked back to the embassy, a handsome building on Nowy Swiat, a few doors from the British embassy, on a tree-lined square with a statue. In his office, he typed out a brief report of his contact with Uhl. Very terse: the date and time and location, the delivery
