beside him as he spoke. Slote said nothing, but gnawed his pipe in an annoyed way.
The car started off on a rough, zigzag ride toward the river. Warsaw had been crumpling in the past four days. A strong wind was blowing away the smoke, and beautiful morning sunshine gave a mocking look to the streets. But smashed buildings met the eye everywhere. Thousands of windows had been blown out and patched with bright yellow plywood. Warsaw was becoming a place of smoke, broken masonry, and yellow patches. The sidewalks and gutters were broken and cratered, and spiky tank traps and barricades cluttered main intersections. Glowering nervous soldiers at these intersections stopped the car with raised machine guns, their fingers at the triggers. Few other people were in sight. Far off cannon drummed and thumped. Each time that a soldier lowered his gun and waved them on, Slote laughed boisterously.
“What I find so incredible,” he said, as they came to a long stone bridge over the Vistula, crowded with carts, trucks, and bicycles, “is that this thing is still standing at all. Haven’t the Germans been bombarding it for two weeks?”
“Well, you see, they are just not quite as devastating as they would have us believe,” the Swedish ambassador said. “Nor as accurate.”
The car drove out on the bridge, over the broad brown river serenely flowing between Warsaw and its eastern suburb, Praha, a place of low houses and green woods. Behind them in the sunshine, under a soft smoky blue sky, Warsaw at this distance looked surprisingly unharmed: a broad metropolis with wide avenues, baroque church domes, tall factory chimneys, and many climbing columns of black smoke. It might almost have been a manufacturing city on a busy day in peacetime, except for the yellow fires billowing up here and there, the flashes like summer lightning all around the horizon, and the distant whumping of the artillery. Several busloads of singing and joking soldiers went past the car. Some waved at Natalie and shouted. Many soldiers were also heading the same way on bicycles.
“Where are they all going?” Natalie said.
“Why, to the front,” said the ambassador. “It’s quite a war. They leave their guns and go home for lunch or dinner, or perhaps to sleep with their wives, and then they take a bus to the front again and shoot at the Germans. Madrid was rather like this when I was there during the Civil War.”
“How far do we go?” Slote said. Here over the river the gun booms from Praha were louder.
The ambassador pursed his lips. “I’m not sure. We have to look for a schoolhouse with a stone goose in the front yard, a hundred yards or so past a wayside shrine.”
On the other side of the river, they found a scene of ruin. Broken houses, burned tree trunks, and fallen trees lined the narrow tarred road, which was so torn up by shell-fire that the car had to detour time and again on dirt tracks. A camouflaged heavy Polish gun in the woods suddenly went off as the limousine bumped along one of these paths. The driver swerved and brushed a tree, the passengers leaped in their seats. “My God!” Slote said. The car steadied up and drove on through the wooded flat land of Praha. They passed a house with its roof ablaze, and the family outside dolefully watching. Loud explosions went off around them, two or three a minute. Sometimes they saw flames from gun mouths in the woods, though the guns themselves were invisible. Sometimes through the trees they could observe Polish gun crews feverishly moving about. It was all novel and exciting, at least to Byron, and they seemed to be enjoying this wartime sightseeing in perfect safety, despite the unpleasant bumping along grass and dirt to avoid the shell holes. But then a German shell burst near the car, throwing up a geyser of dirt which rattled and tinkled on the limousine roof.
Slote said, “Christ Almighty! We’re at the front right now!”
“Yes, the schoolhouse must be right past that next curve,” the ambassador said. But past the curve they saw only four log houses around a dirt courtyard, where several pigs trotted here and there, bewildered by the gun noise. Beyond, the straight tar road continued into leafy woods and smoke, and visibility ceased.
Slote said, “Please stop the car.”
The ambassador glanced over his shoulder at him, rubbed his nose with a pink hand, and spoke to the driver. The car pulled to the side of the road.
“I didn’t in the least understand from you,” Slote said, gesturing with the pipe clutched in a fist, “that we were going into the actual zone of fire. Are you sure that we haven’t missed a turn, and that we aren’t behind the German lines right now?”
The ambassador pushed out his lips. I don’t believe we’ve come more than three miles from the bridge.”
Slote burst out laughing, and jerked the pipe at Natalie and Byron. “These young people are my responsibility. I can’t expose them in this way.”
Two loads of soldiers came along in lumbering old street buses with route numbers still displayed in front and faded movie advertisements on their sides. The soldiers were singing, and some waved out of the window at the halted limousine, or gave good-humored yells in Polish.
“Clearly we’re not yet behind the German lines,” said the ambassador.
“Nevertheless we’ll have to take these civilians back to Warsaw,” Slote said. “I’m sorry you and I misunderstood each other.”
Natalie exclaimed, “But why? There’s no reason on earth to take us back. I’m perfectly all right.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t time.” The ambassador deliberately scratched his eyebrow. “The cease-fire will probably come within the hour. As soon as we get back, I’ll have to start assembling my party.”
“So will I. But it’s up to the Poles and the Germans, after all, to ensure that the neutrals cross the lines safely.”
The ambassador glanced at his watch. “Colonel Rakowski asked that we come out and view the route ahead of time. I really do think we’d better go on.” Two heavy guns went off in the woods — RRUMPH RRUMPH! — one to the left, one to the right. The chauffeur whirred the ignition.
“
“But my dear sir, you should see the route, too. Our parties may get separated later in the woods.”
A peculiar feeling knotted Byron’s stomach. The ambassador’s faultless manners did not obscure what was happening, and Slote represented the United States. He said, “Leslie, I think you’re dead right about Natalie. Why not take her into one of those log houses and wait? I can go on with the ambassador and get the information, if you like.”
The ambassador at once said cheerfully, “Excellent idea! We can go and return in ten or fifteen minutes, I’m sure.”
Slote opened the car door and got out. “Come on, Natalie. We’ll wait in the one with the green blinds, Ambassador. I saw a woman at the windows.”
Natalie stayed in her seat, looking from Slote to the ambassador, her mouth pulled down unpleasantly. The ambassador said to her in a stiff European tone, “My dear, please do as you are told.”
Jumping out, she slammed the door and ran toward the house. Slote hurried after her, shouting. The limousine shot forward in a rattle of pebbles. The haze ahead thinned as they drove into it. About half a mile further along they came upon the shrine, a luridly colored wooden Jesus on a gilt cross in a sheltering frame; and not far beyond that was the schoolhouse. Several soldiers, smoking and talking, lounged in front of it around a stone goose bordered with red flowers. Byron thought that if Leslie Slote could have held on only three or four more minutes, he would have been all right. That one bad moment in the limousine, when the dirt hit the roof, had been unlucky for him.
Colonel Rakowski hailed the Swedish ambassador with a shout and a hug. He seemed in unrealistically good spirits, Byron thought, and indeed all the staff officers looked too chipper, considering the bad news that shrieked from the military map of the front on the wall: a crude thick red crayon circle, completely ringing Warsaw. On other walls of the schoolhouse, bright kindergarten pictures hung. Rakowski, an enormous man with pointed blonde moustaches, and a big nose empurpled by good living, led the visitors out a back door, and along a leaf-carpeted path to a concrete gun emplacement, where grimy, whiskered men stripped to the waist were piling shells. Motioning the visitors to come on up, the colonel climbed the shallow cement slope and mounted the sandbags. Byron followed the ambassador. A forested plain lay before them, dipping toward the east, with a scattering of houses and farms, and three widely separated church spires. Puffs of smoke out there, Byron realized, came from German artillery.
