the barricades which block our advance to the Old Town before nightfall. This is your minimum objective and iffn them Rebs give you the turnabout again, Comrade Major…’ Clement gave Major Hartley an empty, cold smile. ‘Well, ah don’t think it’s necessary to explain to an SS officer who uses big words like con-fee-dent how he should act if he goes and fucks up for a second time, now is it?’
The artillery barrage lasted for two interminable hours. Holed up in a basement, Trixie heard and felt rather than saw the destruction take place outside. She tried to number the explosions but lost count when she reached thirty and the blasts were coming so close together as to merge into one. As she huddled against the basement wall, hands pressed over her ears, all she wanted was for the hammering to stop, to be in a place where she wasn’t frightened that she’d be buried alive. For two long hours she cowered in the corner of the basement, hoping, praying that one of the shells the Anglos were raining down on Warsaw wouldn’t score a direct hit on where she was hiding.
Finally there was silence.
‘Out, out,’ Trixie ordered as she kicked and pushed her troops out of the bunker. ‘Get back to the barricade.’
Reluctantly, tiredly, the defenders did as they were told. Trixie emerged, blinking into the late afternoon sunlight, to a changed landscape. The picturesque Warsaw of only a few hours before was gone and in its place stood a desolate scene of ruined and burning buildings, the air dank and rank with the scorched smell of smouldering astral ether. Trixie gagged at the smell and threw up at the side of the road.
A runner – a small boy wearing the jacket of a dead SS captain – came racing up. ‘Oo is the officer commanding ‘ere?’ he demanded.
‘I am,’ said Trixie.
The boy looked at her suspiciously. ‘Oo are you?’
‘She is Lieutenant Trixie Dashwood, commanding Number One Barricade, Uyazhdov Boulevard,’ said Sergeant Wysochi as he tottered out of a bunker to stand beside Trixie. He looked dreadful but he was alive. Trixie felt her spirits rise.
‘Where’s Captain Gorski?’ asked the runner.
‘Dead,’ said Trixie simply, then held out her hand to take the orders the boy had brought.
To the Officer Commanding #1 Barricade.
Greetings,
It is imperative that this barricade is held until nightfall. The defences behind #1 Barricade have been destroyed by enemy artillery fire. If you yield, Warsaw is doomed: there is no defence between your barricade and the centre of Warsaw. I beg you, as a fellow Pole, to spare no effort in your defence of our people.
May ABBA guide and protect you.
Colonel Jan Dabrowski
Officer Commanding the Warsaw Free Army
‘There is a message for you from our commander,’ Trixie announced in her loudest voice to the troops who were labouring to repair the barricade. ‘We are ordered to hold this street until nightfall. If we fail, Warsaw falls. There will be no retreat, there will be no surrender. I am an officer of the Warsaw Free Army and all soldiers under my command will do their duty.’
The fighting that afternoon was, if anything, more ferocious and more intense than the first attack. The SS had obviously learnt from experience and moved forward more cautiously, house by house, door by door, and, using flame-throwers and grenades, they cleared each house before the main advance reached it.
They brought up more steamers as well, having protected their vulnerable gun and driving ports with wire to prevent firebombs being thrown inside. There was something implacable, unstoppable about the advance, but for all their care and all their planning, in Trixie the SS met someone equally flexible and inventive in her tactical thinking.
She sent Sergeant Wysochi out to mine the basements of the houses that lined the advance of the SS, detonating them when platoons of StormTroopers were inside. She sent snipers under the command of Corporal Zawadzski to harry and disrupt the tail of the SS advance, telling her men to kill officers and signallers. She had the bodies of the dead SS booby-trapped so that anyone touching them was maimed or killed.
But all she and her fighters could do was slow the onslaught: it was impossible to stop the SS advance. By twilight the six armoured steamers spearheading the SS attack force were positioned at the top of Uyazhdov Boulevard ready to begin the final assault on the barricade.
A grimed and cordite-stained Corporal Michalski appeared from the shadows after making a reconnaissance. ‘We’ve had it, Lieutenant. There are six steamers up there and maybe a thousand of them SS bastards. They’re bringing up field guns too. We’re fucked. Best iffn we pull back now.’
Trixie looked around at the soldiers defending the barricade. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty of them left, at least a third of them women and a quarter little more than children. They were exhausted, thirsty and hungry.
Slowly she shook her head. ‘We can’t, Corporal. They’re still evacuating all the civilians from the houses around Pilsudski Square. If the Anglos break through now there’s nothing to stop them slaughtering the whole lot of them. We have to stand.’
The Corporal gave a shrug. ‘Okie-dokie, Lieutenant.’ And then he stopped, looked Trixie straight in the eyes and gave her a salute. ‘It has bin an honour an’ a privilege serving under you, Miss.’ And with that he signalled to his band of boys and girls, who collected up their armfuls of firebombs and the grenades taken from the SS dead and followed Michalski back into the shadows.
Trixie had replaced her Mauser pistol with a Webley taken from a dead SS trooper. Being double-action it was easier for her to fire and a damned sight more accurate, but after an hour of fighting her palm had been ripped to pieces by the kick of the revolver, her right ear was stone-deaf and her fingers were burnt and blistered from loading bullets. By her reckoning she must have accounted for thirty of the SS but for every one she downed two seemed to take their place. The WFA ranks were thinning too: the barricades were littered with busted and twisted bodies.
Trixie checked her watch. It was still only six o’clock. It wouldn’t be dark for an hour and with the steamers only a hundred yards away there seemed little chance of their being able to hold the SS. They needed a miracle.
And the miracle was provided by Sergeant Wysochi.
Where he had scrounged up the explosives Trixie had no idea, but it was obvious from the size of the blast that the mines he had built in the basements of the two houses that faced each other across the boulevard had been huge. The Sergeant waited until the two front steamers were in line with the houses before he pressed the detonator. There was an ear-splitting explosion, the whole street quivered, the fronts of the two tall buildings blew out and then slowly, majestically the buildings toppled forward, smashing into one another as they crashed onto the street below, burying the two steamers as they fell.
There was a ragged cheer from the WFA fighters, but the respite afforded by the Sergeant’s booby-trap was short-lived. Immediately the dust settled Trixie could see SS soldiers begin to clamber over the debris, but without the shield offered by the two steamers they made easy targets. The Poles poured rifle fire into their ranks and children hurled bombs down on them from the windows of overlooking buildings. They died in their dozens but still they came on.
For twenty frantic, ferocious minutes it was nip and tuck. The firing from the SS was incredible. It was so heavy that Trixie was scared to raise her head above the parapet to see what she was firing at, all she could do was hold her pistol up to a hole in the barricade and pull the trigger, hoping that at least some of her rounds found a target.
And then suddenly – miraculously – it was over. As the daylight began to fade, the whistles sounded and the SS began to retreat. Dog-tired and hardly daring to believe what she was witnessing, Trixie slumped to her knees, but even as she knelt she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Looking up, she saw the face of a young green-jacketed lieutenant peering down at her. ‘Do you command here?’ he asked.
All Trixie had the energy to do was nod.
‘You and your fighters are ordered to pull back to Jerusalem Avenue. Keep to the side of the street, keep to the doorways. I’ll manage the rearguard. Good luck.’
