Alan Furst: The Polish Officer

The Wehrmacht units retreated minutes later, trying to break through to German lines after dark. Most never made it, victims of small bands of soldiers, farmers, teenagers-Poles. And those who got as far as the Jablonka Bridge found that, on the second try, demolition had been complete. The ones who couldn’t swim were found on the bank the following morning.

16 September, 5:40 P.M. Military Intelligence headquarters, Savka barracks.

Order 3135-c: With exception of special documents identified by department directors, all files to be destroyed by 1800 hours.

Captain de Milja watched, motionless, one foot on a chair, as this work was done, as the department clerks burned eight thousand maps. Watched, apparently, without feeling. Perhaps he didn’t care, or cared too much, or had gone off wherever he went when life was too cruel or too stupid. Whatever the truth, his eyes were cold, he could not be read.

The clerks had built a pinewood fire in the great hall, in a fireplace of heroic proportions with the date 1736 carved in the capstone, a fireplace built to roast spitted boar for a cavalry squadron. But this was a clerks’ fire, it smoked and sputtered, and the maps, printed on linen and mounted on wooden rollers, did not burn well.

The office wit had always claimed that the department’s chief clerk suffered from Talpidia, mole-face, a condition encountered in particularly subterranean bureaucracies. The man had been, certainly, a fierce obstructionist-everything had to be signed, and signed, and signed some more. Now, as his clerks ran by him with armloads of maps, he just seemed lost, poked dispiritedly at the ashes with a broom handle, the flames’ reflections flickering on his eyeglasses.

Drawer 4088: Istanbul by street. Istanbul harbor with wharf and warehouse numbers. Surveyor’s elevations of Üsküdar with shore batteries in scale. Bosphorus with depths indicated. Black Sea coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads. Sea of Marmara coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads.

In the fire.

Drawer 4098: Timber company surveys, 1935–1938; streams, logging paths, old and new growth trees, drainage, road access, river access. For forests in Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.

“That series aside, please,” de Milja said.

The clerk, startled, whirled and stared, then did as he was ordered. The timber surveys were stacked neatly atop maps, drawn in fine detail, of the Polish railway system.

16 September, 7:15 P.M. A message was brought by a young ensign, who saluted and stood stiffly at attention while the captain read it. Colonel Anton Vyborg requested his presence, in fifteen minutes, at the guardhouse by the east gate; another officer had been sent to supervise the destruction of the files. The captain initialed the message carefully, then made sure he was on time.

They walked in the stables of the cavalry barracks, added to the Savka fortress when the Tenth Polish Hussars rode with Bonaparte in the Napoleonic Wars. The indoor riding ring-a floor of raked dirt below ax-hewn beams-was by tradition the regimental champ d’honneur; not just pistols at thirty paces, but duels on horseback with cavalry sabers. Beyond the riding ring, the horse barns. The horses stamped their hooves and whickered softly as the officers approached. The air smelled good to de Milja; manure and straw, autumn evening and Vyborg’s cigar. Not the smell of burning buildings, not the smell of burning paper. A cloud of gnats hung in the still air, the light fading slowly from dusk into darkness.

There was something of the Baltic knight in Colonel Vyborg. In his forties, he was tall and lean and thin-lipped, with webbed lines at the corners of eyes made to squint into blizzards, and stiff, colorless hair cut short in the cavalry-officer fashion. He wore high leather boots, supple and dark, well-rubbed with saddle soap. His job was to direct the work of intelligence officers-usually but not always military attachés in foreign postings-who operated secret agents.

“Have one of these,” Vyborg said.

Vyborg lit the captain’s small cigar, then spoke quietly as they walked. “As of tonight, our situation is this: there are fifty-two German divisions in Poland, about a million and a half soldiers, led by thousands of tanks. Our air force was blown up on the ground the first morning. Our allies, France and England, have declared war, and made gestures-of course, we had hoped for more. America is neutral, and disinterested. So, as usual, we find ourselves alone. Worse, Stalin has forty divisions on the eastern border and all our intelligence indicates an attack within hours. Meanwhile, we have half a million men in uniform-or, rather, had. Our communications have broken down, but we know of a hundred thousand casualties and a hundred thousand taken prisoner. Probably it’s worse than that. I suppose our view of the immediate future is implicit in the fact that we are burning the files. But it’s not the first time, and this is Poland, and, for us at least, all is not necessarily lost. You agree?”

“I do, sir.”

“Good. We want to offer you a job, but I’m to emphasize that you have a choice. You can go out to one of the regular combat divisions-we’re going to make a stand at the Bzura River, and, in addition, some units are going to try and hold out in the Pripet Marshes in the eastern provinces. The nation is defeated, but the idea of the nation mustn’t be. So, if that’s what you want to do, to die on the battlefield, I won’t stop you.”

“Or?”

“Or come to work for us. Over on the west side of the building-at least that’s where we used to be. It’s no small decision, but time’s the one thing we don’t have. The city’s almost completely cut off, and by tomorrow there’ll be no getting out. The Germans won’t try to break in, they know they’ll pay in blood for that and they aren’t quite so brave as their reputation makes them out. They’ll continue to send the bomber flights, unopposed, and they’ll sit out there where we can’t get at them and shell the city. We’ll take it as long as we can, then we’ll sign something to get it stopped.”

“And then?”

“And then the war will begin.”

A horse leaned over the gate of its stall and the colonel stopped to run his hand through its mane. “Wish I had an apple for you,” Vyborg said. “What about it, Captain, shall we shoot these beasts? Or let the Germans have them?”

“Can they be hidden? In stables with cart horses, perhaps?”

“It’s hard to hide valuable things from Germans, Captain. Very hard.”

They walked in silence for a time. A flight of Heinkel bombers passed overhead; both officers looked up, then waited. The bombs fell on the southern part of the city, a noise like rapid peals of thunder, then the planes turned away, a few antiaircraft rounds burst well below and behind them, and the silence returned as the sound of engines faded.

“Well?” Vyborg said.

“The west side of the building, Colonel.”

“You know the sorts of things that go on if the Germans get hold of people like us, Captain.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A dossier has been prepared for you-we assumed that you would accept the offer. It will be delivered to your office when you return. It assigns a nom de guerre-we don’t want anyone to know who you are. It has also some memoranda written over the last forty-eight hours, you will want to review that for a nine-fifteen meeting in my office. Questions?”

“No questions, sir.”

“There’s a great deal of improvisation at the moment, but we’re not going into the chaos business anytime soon. We’re going to lose a war, not our minds. And not our souls.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Anything you want to say?”

“With regard to my wife-”