passengers and handing out mimeographed instruction sheets. With some pride of authorship, Byron noticed that whoever had traced his sketch on the stencil had faithfully copied it, even to his crude pictures of the three churches.
Guns in the woods all around the school were thundering away, but at five minutes to one the bombardment begin to fade down. At one o’clock the guns fell silent. The loudest noise was the chattering of refugees in many languages along both sides of the road. Byron could hear birds, too, and the strumming of grasshoppers. It struck him that the noise of grasshoppers was the most peaceful sound on earth. A loudspeaker bawled final instructions in one language after another. Groups of neutrals, picking up their suitcases, began to walk down the sloping road. Finally came the English in a heavy Polish accent, “
At this, the Americans took up their luggage and walked into no-man’s-land.
For two or three hundred yards it was no different than the rest of Praha, but then the asphalt road narrowed and trailed off into a dusty, rutted, one-lane cart track. They passed ruined houses. The barnyards had no animals except for an occasional abandoned chicken wandering and clucking; and some slinking jumpy cats. The road entered woods where sunlight slanted down in green-yellow bars through the leaves. The leader of the Americans, a tall gray Episcopalian minister in a black suit and turnaround collar, checked Byron’s sketch at each crossroad. This strange slow walk between two silent enemy armies took a full hour by Byron Henry’s watch. As he remembered it later, it was like a stroll in company in peacetime through a fragrant autumnal forest. Many fall flowers, blue and orange and white, dotted the dirt road and the woods; the birds chirped and twittered; and the wonderful song of the grasshoppers filled the air. He also remembered becoming very dry-mouthed and thirsty from tension, so thirsty that his legs felt weak. Two other memories stayed with him: the diplomats’ black cars going by, honking the walkers out of the road, with Slote laughing in the front seat and waving at him and Natalie; and then, near the end of the trek, at the bend of the road where the Kantorovicz church appeared, Mark Hartley coming up beside him, slipping his hand through his elbow, and saying, “My name is Mark Hartley, and oy, am I a good Christian!” — smiling at Byron, his face dust-caked and terror-stricken.
All at once, there were the German guns and the German gun crews in the woods. The howitzers were bigger than the Polish artillery pieces, with an appearance of better, newer engineering. Watching the walkers, the soldiers stood quietly at their weapons, in their neat field gray and formidable Wehrmacht helmets. Byron peered at the German soldiers with immense curiosity. The helmets gave them a beetling warrior look, but most of them were young and had the same German faces he had seen in Munich and Frankfurt. Many wore glasses. It was hard to believe that these were the villains who had been pouring flying steel and fire on Warsaw, setting pregnant women aflame, blowing children’s legs and hands off, and making a general shambles of a handsome metropolis. They were just young men in soldier suits and stern helmets, standing around in the shady woods amid the pleasant noises of birds and grasshoppers.
From the first, the Germans handled the refugees better than the Poles had. A mule-drawn water cart — a large olive-painted cylinder on wheels — stood by the road near the church, and soldiers waited with tin cups to herd the thirsty people into a queue. From the water tank, other soldiers guided them toward new clean gray trucks, with thick black deeply treaded tires, so different from the Poles’ dirty deteriorated machines. Wehrmacht officers in tailored long military coats and high peaked caps were talking amiably, though with marked condescension, to the arriving diplomats near a table by the roadside. As each national group came to the trucks, its ambassador or charge gave a typed roster to a bespectacled soldier behind the desk. He called off names, and one by one the people entered the vehicles, which unlike the Polish trucks had wooden seats. The Poles had not troubled with rosters.
There was no bunching up, no disorder. Soldiers stood by with little stools to help up the elderly and to hand the few children to their mothers with a laugh and a playful little swing. At a field ambulance marked with a red cross, medical orderlies gave restoratives. Two soldiers with movie and still cameras roamed the scene, recording all this good treatment of the neutrals. The loading was not quite over when the guns near the church all at once shot off a salvo that made the ground shake. Byron’s watch read a minute past three o’clock.
“Poor Warsaw,” Natalie said.
“Don’t talk,” Mark Hartley said in a low hoarse voice.
“Don’t say
Natalie said, “Look at Slote, will you? Taking a cigarette from a German, for crying out loud, and
“Are you afraid?” Byron said.
“Not any more, now that it’s actually happening. I don’t know why. It’s sort of dreamlike.”
“Some dream,” Hartley said. “It should only be a dream. Jesus Christ. That officer with Slote is coming here.” Hartley gripped a hand on Byron’s knee.
The officer, a blond young man with a good-natured smile came straight to Byron, speaking with a pleasant accent, slowly and precisely. “Your charge tells me that your father is American naval attache in Berlin.”
“Yes, sir. He is.”
“I am a Berliner. My father is in the foreign ministry.” The officer fingered the binoculars around his neck. His manner seemed not very military and rather self-conscious. Byron thought he might be feeling compunction of a sort, and he liked the German better for that. “I believe I had the pleasure of meeting your parents in August at the Belgian embassy, and of dancing with your mother. What on earth have you been doing in Warschau?”
“I was sightseeing.”
“Well, you saw some unusual sights.”
“That I did.”
The officer laughed, and offered his hand to Byron. “Ernst Bayer,” he said, putting his heels together.
“Byron Henry. Hi.”
“Ah, yes. Henry. I remember the name. Well, you are comfortable? Can I offer you a ride in a staff car?”
“I’m fine. Where are we going?”
“Klovno. It’s the nearest working railroad junction, and there you will all transfer to a special train for Konigsberg. It’s more than a three-hour trip. You might enjoy it more in an automobile.”
“Well, I’ve been travelling with these folks, you know. I’ll stay with them. Thanks a lot.” Byron spoke cordially, though this polite chitchat with a German felt exceedingly strange after all his anger at them.
Slote said to Natalie, “We can still make room for you in the Chevy. That wooden slat’s going to get kind of hard.”
She shook her head, looking darkly at the German.
“Give my best to your mother,” said the officer, with a casual glance at the girl and back at Byron. “She was really charming to me.”
“I sure will.”
Several guns fired in succession nearby, drowning out something the officer said. He grimaced. and smiled. “How are things in Warschau now? Very distressing?”
“Well, they seem to be hanging on pretty well.”
Half-addressing Natalie as well as Byron, Bayer said, “A bad business! The Polish government was completely irresponsible, running off into Rumania and leaving the country without leadership. Warschau should have been declared an open city two weeks ago. This destruction is pointless. It will cost a lot to repair. The mayor is very brave, and there is a lot of admiration here for him, but” — he shrugged — “what is there to do but finish it off? This will be over in a day or two.”
“It may take longer than that,” Byron said.
“You think so?” Bayer’s pleasant smile faded. He bowed slightly and walked off, toying with the glasses. Slote shook his head at Byron and followed the officer.
“Why the hell did you get him mad?” Hartley whispered.
