The Germans invading Poland made mistakes, they sometimes broke and ran under fire, they disobeyed orders, they refused to advance against tough positions, they misreported gains, and exaggerated reports of the fire they were facing, to excuse retreat. They were ordinary young men. But there were good leaders and stout fellows among them, and the Germans are an obedient, strong-willed people. The Poles did all these wrong things too, and the weight of fire, surprise, numbers, and Case White was all with the Germans. So the invasion went well.
Soon the new companies of tanks — the panzers that became so famous — began to risk long trips into enemy ground far ahead of the front. This was a classic military blunder. The foe closes in behind a company that has ventured too far ahead of its line, pinches it off, and wipes it out. This was precisely what the Russians did several years later to the famous panzers, whereupon their fame dimmed. But now they were a surprise. In their debut against a scared, ill-organized, smaller and weaker foe, on level country in perfect weather, they shone. They proceeded slowly, at only five or ten miles an hour, more like moving lines of large iron bugs than the dashing red arrows of the maps in popular books and magazines. But they looked scary to the Polish soldiers and civilians, and indeed they were lethal enough, these green machines crawling down the roads, out of the forests, and over the ripe grain, firing big shells. From the pellucid September sky, slow clumsy little planes called Stukas kept diving and shooting at soldiers, or children, or animals, or women, whoever happened to be on the roads, to add to the bloodshed and horrid noise. The tanks and Stukas killed many Poles and scared immense masses of them into quitting what looked like a useless fight.
This was the blitzkrieg, the lightning war. It was halted at Warsaw. The fact was not much stressed at the time. The Germans had to inflict on the city an old-fashioned, horse-drawn, Napoleonic bombardment, while the panzer machines limped into the repair shops, low on gasoline and breaking down in large numbers. They had done their work. The Polish armies had been sliced and frightened into fragments. Allied and American newspapers were writing terrified accounts of blitzkrieg, “the new form of warfare.”
But the panzers arrived at Warsaw on the ninth of September. On the tenth the German supreme commander was writing in his battle diary that the war was over. On the seventeenth Warsaw still stood. All available Luftwaffe were making unopposed runs over the city, dumping bombs and hurrying back to Germany for more bombs. Horses were dragging more and more howitzers from Prussia and Pomerania to ring the city and fire shells inside. And still Radio Warsaw played the
Leslie Slote, heading the American embassy’s skeleton staff in Warsaw, was an able and exceptionally clever man, but at the moment he was in the wrong job, because he was a coward. He did not look or act like one. At Yale he had been on the track team, and this token of manliness — which he had carefully selected, knowing the Rhodes requirements — together with his work on the college newspaper, his Phi Beta Kappa key, and his friendships with certain useful professors had won him the scholarship hands down. He had been one of the few popular Americans at Oxford; in the Foreign Service they talked of him as an outstanding officer in his age group. Well aware of his problem, he would never have gone knowingly into a situation requiring physical courage. He had thought much about this hole in his makeup, and he had theories about it, centered on an oversolicitous mother and some childhood accidents. The theories didn’t change anything, but they served to contain the weakness in his own mind as a misfortune like a polio limp, rather than as a blight which could corrode his self-respect. Slote had a high regard for himself, his powers, and his future. Bad luck had now put him in a spot where all his broad political knowledge, all his gifts of analysis, humor, and foreign tongues were of little avail compared to the simple capacity to be brave. That, he lacked.
He hid the lack with an inner struggle that was showing at the surface only in absentmindedness, continuous headaches, irritability, and a tendency to laugh for no reason. When the ambassador had asked him to stay on, he had burst out laughing. Since the first word that the Germans were coming, and especially since the first air bombs had fallen on Warsaw, he had been in a black panic, hungering for word that he and the other Americans could leave. He had bandages on several fingers where he had bitten his nails raw. And then the ambassador had asked him to stay on in this horror! The shrill laugh had welled up out of him. With a quizzical look the ambassador had let it pass. Most of the people in Warsaw had reacted well to the air attacks, swinging over to almost lighthearted determination and stoicism, once the first bombs failed to kill them. But for Slote the hell went on and on. Every sounding of an air raid alarm all but deprived him of the ability to think. Down into the thick-walled embassy cellar he would dart with everybody else, ahead of most, and invariably he would stay down until the all clear sounded. In a way, being in charge was a help. It looked proper for him to move out of his apartment into the embassy, to stay there, and to set an example of strict compliance with air raid rules. Nobody guessed his trouble.
Dawn of September the seventeenth found him at the big desk, a smoking pipe clenched in his teeth, carefully redrafting his latest dispatch to the State Department on the condition of the embassy and of the hundred or so Americans trapped in Warsaw. He was trying to retain all the urgency and gravity of the message, while editing out traces of his private hysteria. It was a hairline to walk, the dispatches, and he could not tell whether the American government had any idea of the plight of its nationals in the Polish capital.
“Come in,” he called to a knock at the door.
“It’s broad daylight outside,” Byron Henry said hoarsely as he walked in. “Shall I open the curtains?”
“Anything going on out there?” Slote rubbed his eyes.
“Nothing unusual.”
“Okay, let’s have some daylight,” Slote laughed. They both pulled back the heavy black curtains, admitting pallid sunshine in broken patterns through the diagonally crossed timbers in the windows. “What about the water, Byron?”
“I brought it.”
With the curtains open, one could hear the dull far-off thumps of German artillery. Slote would have preferred to leave the curtains closed for a while longer, shutting out these daytime noises of gray, broken, burning Warsaw. The quiet of the black-curtained room lit by a desk lamp might be illusory, a false conjuring up of peaceful student days, but he found it comforting. He peered between the timbers. “Such smoke! Are there that many fires?”
“God, yes. The sky was terrific until the dawn came up. Didn’t you see it? All red and smoky wherever you looked. Dante’s Inferno. And these big orange star shells popping all over, way high up, and slowly floating down. Quite a sight! Over on Walewskaya they’re still trying to put out two huge fires with shovels and sand. It’s the water problem that’s going to lick them, more than anything.”
“They should have accepted the German offer yesterday,” Slote said. “They’d have had at least half a city left. There’s no future in this. How on earth did you fetch the water? Did you manage to find some gasoline, after all?”
Byron shook his head, yawned, and dropped on the long brown leather couch. His sweater and slacks were covered with brick dust and soot, his long shaggy hair was in a tangle, and his eyes glowed dully in purple rings. “Not a chance. From now on we can forget about the truck. I saw fire engines stalled in the middle of the street. Gasoline’s finished in this town. I just scouted around till I found a cart and a horse. It took me most of the night.” He grinned at Slote, his lower lip pulled in with exhaustion. The Government of the United States owes me one hundred seventy-five dollars. The hardest part was getting the boiler off the truck and onto the cart. But this peasant who sold me the cart helped me. It was part of the deal. A little sawed-off fellow with a beard, but strong. Jesus!”
“You’ll get paid, of course. Talk to Ben.”
“Can I stretch out here for a minute?”
“Don’t you want breakfast?”
“I’m not sure I have the energy to chew. I just need a half hour or so. It’s quiet in here. That cellar is a mad-house.” Byron put up his feet and collapsed on the leather cushions, a meager long dirty figure. “There’s no water at the opera house corner anymore,” he said, closing his eyes. “I had to go clear over to the pumping station. It’s a slow horse and it sure doesn’t like pulling an iron boiler full of sloshing water.”
“Thank you, Byron. You’re being a great help.”
“Me and Gunga Din. ‘You may talk of gin and beer,’“ Byron mumbled into his elbow, “‘when you’re quartered safe out ‘ere’ — where’s Natalie? At the hospital?”
“I daresay.”
Byron fell asleep. The telephone rang harshly but he didn’t stir. The mayor’s office was calling; Mayor Starzynski was on his way to the embassy to discuss with the American charge a sudden development of the highest urgency. Excited, Slote phoned the marine sentry at the gate to admit the mayor. This must be news:
