Mila 18 - Leon Uris

She left the door open and turned out the light. There was a tiny ray from a hall light downstairs. Gabriela listened at the landing for Alexander to reach bottom. She heard Alex’s voice. She tensed, waiting for another sound. It seemed like forever. She fought off the agonizing desire to scream out his name and bolt down after him. Then ... a slow, clump, clump, clump. It labored up and up, each step seeming more painful than the last. Clump ... clump ... clump ... clump ...

Gabriela fell back into the room, her heart throbbing violently.

Clump ... clump ... clump ... Dragging and then a deep wheezing breathing.

His hulk cut a shadow on the landing. He stood wavering on his legs and fighting for his breath. He moved for the door, groping in the darkness.

“Andrei?” she whispered.

He groped into the room, stumbling like a blind man, and found the bed and crawled on it and groaned with pain and weariness.

Gabriela burst with desire to turn on the lights, but she dared not. She leaned over the bed quickly and her hand felt around his face. His eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth. They were all there. Arms, hands, fingers, legs. All of him was there!

He smelled putrid from the smokes of battle and dried blood and sweat, and his hair was matted with dirt. He lay and groaned weakly.

And then Gabriela became calm. She sat on the edge of the bed and lifted his head to her lap and petted him gently. His face burned with fever and he gripped the bedcover and convulsed.

“It’s all right, dear, it’s all right now.”

“Gaby ... Gaby ...”

“I’m right here, dear.”

And Andrei cried. “They killed my beautiful horse,” he sobbed. “They killed Batory.”

The shrill screams of the air-raid sirens erupted from Bielany to Rakowiec and from Praga to Kolo as new flames were about to be added to the old as the rape of Warsaw heightened.

“They killed my horse ... they killed my beautiful horse ... they killed him ...”

Chapter Thirteen

Journal Entry—September 17, 1939

THE PIE HAS BEEN cut. Poland, the historic whipping boy, is again acting out its ancient historical role. Hitler has paid off in his deal with Stalin. The Soviet armies have jumped us from the rear, obviously moving to preset borders.

The German invasion has awed the most advanced military thinkers. Smigly-Rydz, the government, and the foreign legations have fled. They say some of our army has been able to escape.

Somehow Warsaw continues to hold out, but I wonder if Polish courage does not prove that the bloodless collapse of Austria and Czechoslovakia was the better way out?

ALEXANDER BRANDEL

Dateline, Warsaw

September 21, 1939

by Christopher de Monti

(Swiss News)

How long can Warsaw hold out? How long can Mayor Starzynski keep this city rallied? This is the question asked ten thousand times a day.

It is a strange battle, a commuters’ war. Soldiers and those civilians pressed into labor battalions take up their positions on Warsaw’s outer defense perimeter. When their relief comes, they catch a trolley car back to town to their homes.

Often the front lines begin where the trolley lines end. Troop movements are by red and yellow street cars, taxis, horse-drawn droshkas, and teamster wagons.

On the perimeter there is a strange conglomeration of humanity in the labor battalions digging trenches and preparing fortifications. Old bearded Orthodox Jews, secretaries, housewives in gaily colored babushkas, students in university class caps, children, bankers, bakers.

All over Warsaw long lines queue up for their ration on ever worsening shortages. Water, in some sections, is doled out by the bucketful. Water priority must go to the fire department for its round-the-clock fight to keep the city from going up in flames.

The women waiting in lines stay put despite artillery fire and air raids. Yesterday nearly a hundred were buried by a collapsing wall.

Around the city, both famous and unknown buildings and landmarks are pocked with shell holes. Warsaw’s only skyscraper, the fifteen-story Prudential building, a visible target for German long guns, has suffered better than eighty hits. It still stands intact, although only a single window on the tenth floor remains unshattered.

Poland’s pride, the Stare Miasto, the Old Town Square with meticulously preserved Renaissance houses and historic shrines, is being leveled lower each day.

Statues of Poland’s heroes which adorn her many squares and parks are now headless, armless, and swordless. The magnificent fountains of the Saxony Gardens and the Lazienki are dry; the swans that filled their lakes have fled, and no one seems to know where.

Despite the situation, a strange calm has fallen over the city. There are amazing semblances of normalcy, and the Poles have not lost their traditional sense of humor. Two papers manage to get published each day. Radio Polskie plays Chopin around the clock between dramatic urgings from Mayor Starzynski. The long-awaited German frontal assault must come sooner or later. How long can Warsaw hold?

Chris pulled his report from the typewriter, hastily marked over the errors with a green grease pencil, and put it into a large envelope.

When the phones went out a week before, Chris was able to obtain a wire until that was broken, then radio. Now Warsaw was completely cut off from communication with the outside world except for the one Radio Polskie station operating for the city on an emergency basis.

There was a sudden break for Chris when arrangements were made for a two-hour truce the next day to allow the balance of the American Embassy personnel to evacuate to Krakow. Chris went to Thompson, who agreed to carry out his reports and Rosy’s photos in a diplomatic pouch. Both of them worked feverishly, Rosy shooting up film and Chris doing a series of articles not requiring a dateline but which could run as an “eyewitness” account in papers around the world even after Warsaw’s fall. It would stand as a great scoop for Swiss News.

Rosy handed Chris a stack of photographs, and he went through them, marking them and checking their captions. Pictures of broken houses and twisted girders dangling in grotesque shapes and stunned mothers kneeling beside dead children and stunned children kneeling beside dead mothers. War’s harvest, a photographer’s field day. Dead, bloated animals whose curious expressions asked what they did to be caught in the middle of man’s folly, and the images of old ladies praying to Gods and Virgins who do not hear them and trench diggers and exhausted bucket brigades.

Ervin Rosenblum’s camera did justice to war. Chris put the pictures into folders.

“Where’re the rest of them?” he asked.

“The Kodak lab just went out of action. I’m going to see if I can’t get enough junk to rig up a darkroom in my basement.”

“Well, if you can’t make prints, you’ll have to let me send your negatives.”

Rosy grumbled. The most horrible thought to any photographer was to surrender exposed film which could not be duplicated if ruined. But Chris was right. It would probably be the last chance to get the pictures out of Warsaw.

Rosy went into his familiar routine of jiggling flash bulbs in his pocket and playing with the shutter stops on his camera. “It’s going to be rough on the morale, watching the last of the Americans leave tomorrow,” he said. “It will affect us worse than a half dozen bombing raids. You know how it is—everyone has an uncle in Gary or a brother in Milwaukee.”

“Yeah,” Chris agreed, “it will be rough all right.”

“How come you’re not evacuating?”

“Why should I? I’ve got an Italian passport and this is a Swiss News Agency bureau. Switzerland isn’t at war. Maybe I want to be on the welcoming committee for my liberators.”