The Polish Officer

THE PILAVA LOCAL

In Poland, on the night of 11 September 1939, Wehrmacht scout and commando units-elements of Kuechler’s Third Army Corps-moved silently around the defenses of Novy Dvor, crossed the Vistula over the partly demolished Jablonka Bridge, and attempted to capture the Warsaw Telephone Exchange at the northern edge of the city. Meeting unexpected, and stubborn, resistance, they retreated along Sowacki Street and established positions on the roof and in the lobby of the Hotel Franconia, called for dive-bomber attacks on the exchange building, and settled in to wait for the light of dawn.

Mr. Felix Malek, proprietor of the Franconia, put on his best blue suit, and, accompanied by a room-service waiter, personally served cognac to the German soldiers at their mortar and machine-gun positions. He then descended to the wine cellar, opened the concealed door to an underground passage originally dug during the Prussian attack of 1795, hurried down Sowacki Street to the telephone exchange, and asked to see “the gentleman in charge.”

He was taken up a marble staircase to the director’s office on the fifth floor and there, beneath a somber portrait of the director-pince-nez and brushed whiskers-presented to the officer in command, a captain. The captain was an excellent listener, and the questions he asked inspired Mr. Malek to talk for a long time. Arms, unit size, insignia, the location of positions-he was surprised at how much he knew.

When he was done, they gave him tea. He asked if he might remain at the exchange, it would be an honor to fight the Germans. No, they said, perhaps another day. So Mr. Malek made his way through the night to his sister’s apartment in the Ochota district. “And what,” she asked, “were they like?”

Mr. Malek thought a moment. “Educated,” he said. “Quite the better class of people.”

Mr. Malek had not been thirty years an innkeeper for nothing: the defenders of the Warsaw Telephone Exchange, hastily recruited amidst the chaos of the German invasion, were officers of Polish Military Intelligence, known, in imitation of the French custom, as the Deuxième Bureau. The Breda machine gun at the casement window was served by a lieutenant from the cryptographic service, a pair of spectacles folded carefully in his breast pocket. The spidery fellow reloading ammunition belts was, in vocational life, a connoisseur of the senior civil service of the U.S.S.R., while the commander of the machine gun, feet propped on the tripod, was Lieutenant Karlinski, heavy and pink, who in normal times concerned himself with the analysis of Baltic shipping.

The officer in charge, Captain Alexander de Milja, was professionally a cartographer; first a mapmaker, later assistant director of the bureau’s Geographical Section. But Poland was at war-no, Poland had lost her war, and it was clear to the captain that nobody was going to be assistant director of anything for a long time to come.

Still, you couldn’t just stop fighting. Captain de Milja stood at the open window; the night air, cool and damp, felt especially good on his hands. Idiot! He’d grabbed the overheated barrel of the machine gun to change it during the attack, and now he had red stripes on his palms that hurt like hell.

4:20 A.M. He swept the façade of the hotel with his binoculars, tried-based on the proprietor’s intelligence-counting up floors to focus on certain rooms, but the Germans had the windows shut and all he could see was black glass. In Sowacki Square, a burned-out trolley, and the body of a Wehrmacht trooper, like a bundle of rags accidentally left in a doorway, weapon and ammunition long gone. To somebody’s attic. De Milja let the binoculars hang on their strap and stared out into the city.

A refinery had been set on fire; a tower of heavy smoke rolled majestically into the sky and the clouds glowed a faint orange. A machine gun tapped in the distance, a plane droned overhead, artillery rumbled across the river. War-fire and smoke-had made autumn come early, dead leaves rattled along the cobblestones and caught in the iron drain covers.

Captain de Milja was a soldier, he knew he didn’t have long to live. And, in truth, he didn’t care. He was not in love with life. One or two things had to be taken care of, then matters could run their course.

The director’s telephone was, naturally, of the very latest style; black, shiny, Bakelite plastic. De Milja dialed the military operator he had installed in the basement.

“Sir?”

“Sergeant, have you tried Tarnopol again?”

“Can’t get through, sir. I’ve been up to Wilno, and down to Zakopane, just about every routing there is, but the whole region’s down. We’re pretty sure the lines have been cut, sir.”

“You’ll keep trying.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

He replaced the receiver carefully on its cradle. He had wanted to say good-bye to his wife.

The Wehrmacht assault team got its air support at dawn; three Focke-Wulf 189s diving out of the clouds, engines screaming, cannon firing. But there was more drama than destruction; the 189 carried only one bomb. On the fifth floor of the telephone exchange, Lieutenant Karlinski swept the Breda across the sky and hammered off belt after belt of 7.35 ammunition. Grand streams of tracer, pale in the early light, showered up into the clouds, while hot casings ejected onto the director’s Persian carpet and the office smelled like smoldering wool-until a bullet fired from the ballroom of the Hotel Franconia hit Karlinski in the collarbone and he collapsed back onto the floor and died of shock.

The lieutenant from the cryptographic service took over, while Captain de Milja steadied the tripod with his burning hands and the Russian bureaucracy expert fed belts into the gun. But by then the Focke-Wulfs had run dry of ammunition and headed back to Germany. At which point the telephone rang and somebody on the first floor, voice flat and controlled, informed de Milja that the building was on fire.

For a moment he went blank, the solution much too obvious. Then he said, “Call the fire department.” Which they did and which, on 12 September, worked quite well because the city’s water mains hadn’t yet been destroyed. The firemen ran their hoses into the building on the side away from the fighting and pumped high-pressure streams on the flames, putting out the fire and, as water sluiced down into the switching stations, shutting down every telephone in Warsaw.

The Wehrmacht attack, from doorway to doorway up Sowacki Street, faltered, then collapsed. The support fire, machine-gun and mortar, from the roof of the hotel lasted less than a minute, then the positions were abandoned. Just before dawn de Milja had sent sniper teams to the roofs of adjacent buildings, and when the fighting started they’d knocked down first a mortar man, then an officer. It was improvised-the snipers were armed with hunting weapons and policemen’s automatic pistols-but it worked.

De Milja watched through binoculars as an analyst from the economic intelligence section-the captain thought he specialized in feed grains-a man in his fifties wearing suspenders and a shirt turned up at the sleeves, suddenly appeared at a parapet on the roof of an apartment building and fired both barrels of an old shotgun, the sort of thing one found in the back halls of country houses, along with leather game bags and warped tennis rackets.

The sniper broke the shotgun and withdrew the empty cartridges. Smoke seeped from the barrels as he thrust new shells into the breech. Get down, the captain thought. He saw two German troopers at an upper window, bringing their rifles to bear. Down. The sniper lurched backward, his face showed a moment of pain. But he kept his balance, braced one foot against the parapet and fired both barrels. His shoulder jerked with the recoil, then he fell to his knees, shaking his head grimly at whatever was going on inside him.

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-”

“Yes?”

“She’s in a private clinic. In the countryside, near Tarnopol.”

“An illness?”

“She is-the doctor puts it that she has entered a private world.”

Vyborg shook his head in sympathy and scowled at the idea of illness attacking people he knew.

“Can she be rescued?”

Vyborg thought it over. Senior intelligence officers became almost intuitive about possibility-some miracles could be done, some couldn’t. Once initiated, above a certain rank, you knew.

“I’m sorry,” the colonel said.

The captain inclined his head; he understood, it need not be further discussed. They walked in silence for a time, then the colonel said, “We’ll see you at nine-fifteen, then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Officially, we’re glad to have you with us.” They shook hands. The captain saluted, the colonel returned the salute.

A quarter moon, red with fire, over the Vilna station railyards.

The yard supervisor wore a bandage over one eye, his suit and shirt had not been changed for days, days of crawling under freight cars, of floating soot and oily smoke, and his hands were trembling. He was ashamed of that, so had wedged them in his pockets as though he were a street-corner tough who whistled at girls.

“This was our best,” he said sadly. Captain de Milja flicked the beam of his flashlight over a passenger car with its roof peeled back. A woman’s scarf, light enough to float in the wind, was snagged on a shard of iron. “Bolen Coachworks,” the supervisor said. “Leaded-glass lamps in the first-class compartments. Now look.”

“What’s back there?” de Milja asked.

“Nothing much. Just some old stock we pulled in from the local runs-the Pruszkow line, Wolomin.”

Cinders crunched under their feet as they walked. Yard workers with iron bars and acetylene torches were trying to repair the track. There were showers of blue sparks and the smell of scorched metal as they cut through the twisted rail.

“And this?”

The supervisor shrugged. “We run little trains to the villages, on market days. This is what’s left of the Solchow local. It was caught by a bombing raid on Thursday, just past the power station. The engineer panicked, he had his fireman uncouple the engine and they made a run for Vilna station. Maybe he thought he’d be safe under the roof, though I can’t imagine why, because it’s a glass roof, or it used to be. When the all clear sounded, the engine had been blown to pieces but the rest of the train was just left sitting out there on the track, full of angry old farm ladies and crates of chickens.”

De Milja and the supervisor climbed the steps into the coach. The captain’s flashlight lit up the aisle; wooden floorboards, buckled and gray with age, frayed wicker seats-once yellow, now brown-chicken feathers, a forgotten basket. From the other end of the car came a deep, heavy growl. What are you doing here? de Milja thought. “Come,” he said.

There was a moment of silence, then another growl. This time it didn’t mean prepare to die-more like not yet.

“Come here.” You know you have to.

A huge head appeared in the aisle, thrust cautiously from a hiding place behind a collapsed seat. De Milja masked the flashlight beam and the dog came reluctantly, head down, to accept its punishment. To have deserved what had happened to it the last few days, it reasoned, it must have been very, very bad. De Milja went down on one knee and said, “Yes, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

It was a male Tatra, a sheepdog related to the Great Pyrenees. De Milja sank his hands into the deep hair around the neck, gripped it hard and tugged the head toward him. The dog knew this game and twisted back against de Milja, but the man’s hands were too strong. Finally the dog butted his head against the captain’s chest, took a huge breath and sighed so deeply it was almost a growl.

“Perhaps you could find some water,” de Milja said to the supervisor.

His family had always had dogs, kept at the manor house of the estate in the Volhynia, in eastern Poland. They hunted with them, taking a wild boar every autumn in the great forest, a scene from a medieval tapestry. The Tatra was an off-white, like most mountain breeds, a preferred color that kept the shepherd from clubbing his own dog when they fought night-raiding wolves. De Milja put his face into the animal’s fur and inhaled the sweet smell.

The yard supervisor returned, a bowl filled to the brim with milk held carefully in his hands. This was a small miracle, but “he must be hungry” was all he had to say about it.

“What’s your name?” de Milja asked.

“Koski.”

“Can you keep a big dog, Mr. Koski?”

The yard supervisor thought a moment, then shrugged and said, “I guess so.”

“It will take some feeding.”

“We’ll manage.”

“And this kind of coach?” The captain nodded at it. “Have you got six or so?”

“All you want.”

“Same color. Yellow, with red around the windows.”

Koski tried to conceal his reaction. The middle of a war, Germans at the outskirts of the city, and this man wanted “the same color.” Well, you did what you had to do. “If you can wait for daylight, we’ll freshen up the paint.”

“No, it’s good just like that. We’ll need a coal tender, of course, and a locomotive. A freight locomotive.”

Koski stared at his shoes. They had improvised, borrowed parts, kept running all sorts of stock that had no business running-but freight locomotives were a sore subject. Nobody had those. Well, he had one. Well and truly hidden. Was this the moment? “Six red-and-yellow coaches,” he said at last. “Tender, freight locomotive. That it?”

De Milja nodded. “In about, say, an hour.”

Koski started to shout, something like can’t you see I’m doing the best I can? But a covert glance at de Milja changed his mind-he wasn’t someone you would say that to, much less shout it.

De Milja looked to be in his late thirties, but there was something about him, some air of authority, that was much older than that. He had dark hair, cut short and cut very well, and a pale forehead that people noticed. Eyes the color-according to his wife-of a February sea, shifting somewhere between gray and green. His face was delicate, arrogant, hard; people said different things. In any event, he was a very serious man, that was obvious, with hands bigger than they ought to have been, and blunt fingers. He wore no insignia, just a brown raincoat over a gray wool sweater. There was a gun, somewhere. He stood, relaxed but faintly military, waiting for the yard supervisor to agree to make up his train in an hour. This man came, Koski thought, from the war, and when the war went away, if it ever did, so would he and all the others like him.

The supervisor nodded yes, of course he could have his train. The dog stopped lapping at the bowl, looked up and whined, a drop of milk falling from his beard. A yellow flame burst from the hillside above the yards and the flat crump of an explosion followed. The brush burned for a few seconds, then the fire died out as smoke and dust drifted down the hill.

Koski had flinched at the explosion, now he jammed his shaking hands deeper into his pockets. “Not much left to bomb here,” he said.

“That wasn’t a bomb,” de Milja said. “It was a shell.”

17 September, 3:50 A.M. Freight locomotive, coal tender, six passenger cars from a market-day local. The yard supervisor, the Tatra by his side, watched as it left the railyards. Then it crossed Praga, a workers’ suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw, and headed for the city on the single remaining railroad bridge. Captain de Milja stood in the cab of the locomotive and stared down into the black water as the train clattered across the ties.

For a crew, Koski had done the best he could on short notice. A fireman, who would shovel coal into the steam engine’s furnace, and a conductor would be joining the train in Warsaw. The engineer, standing next to de Milja, had been, until that night, retired. He was a sour man, with a double chin and a lumpy nose, wearing an engineer’s cap, well oiled and grimed, and a pensioner’s blue cardigan sweater with white buttons.

“Fucking shkopy,” he said, using the Polish word for Germans equivalent to the French boche. He peered upriver at the blackened skeleton of the Poniatowski Bridge. “I had all I wanted of them in ’17.”

The Germans had marched into Warsaw in 1917, during the Great War. De Milja had been sixteen, about to enter university, and while his family had disliked the German entry into Poland, they’d seen one positive side to it: Russian occupiers driven back east where they belonged.

The firebox of the locomotive glowed faintly in the dark, just enough light to jot down a few figures on the iron wall. He had to haul a total of 88,000 pounds: 360 people-43,000 pounds of them if you figured young and old, fat and thin, around 120 pounds a person. Sharing the train with 44,530 pounds of freight.

So, 88,000 pounds equaled 44 tons. Figuring two tons to a normal freight car, a locomotive could easily pull twenty cars. His six passenger coaches would be heavy, but that didn’t matter-they had no suspension to speak of, they’d roll along if the locomotive could pull them.

“What are you scribbling?” The irritation of an old man. To the engineer’s way of thinking, a locomotive cab wasn’t a place for writing.

De Milja didn’t answer. He smeared the soft pencil jotting with his palm, put the stub of pencil back in his pocket. The sound of the wheels changed as the train came off the bridge and descended to a right-of-way cut below ground level and spanned by pedestrian and traffic bridges: a wasteland of tracks, signals, water towers, and switching stations. Was the 44,530 correct? He resisted the instinct to do the figures again. Seven hundred and twelve thousand ounces always made 44,530 pounds, which, divided into five-pound units, always made 8,906. It is mathematics, he told himself, it is always the same.

“You said Dimek Street bridge?”

“Yes.”

The steam brake hissed and the train rolled to a stop. From a stairway that climbed the steep hillside to street level came a flashed signal. De Milja answered with his own flashlight. Then a long line of shadowy figures began to move down the stairs.

17 September, 4:30 A.M.

While the train was being loaded, the conductor and the fireman arrived and shook hands with the engineer. Efficiently, they uncoupled the locomotive and coal tender and used a switching spur to move them to the other end of the train, so it now pointed east.

There were two people waiting for de Milja under the Dimek Street bridge: his former commander, a white-mustached major of impeccable manners and impeccable stupidity, serving out his time until retirement while his assistant did all the work, and de Milja’s former aide, Sublieutenant Nowak, who would serve as his adjutant on the journey south.

The major shook de Milja’s hand hard, his voice taut with emotion. “I know you’ll do well,” he said. “As for me, I am returning to my unit. They are holding a line at the Bzura River.” It was a death sentence and they both knew it. “Good luck, sir,” de Milja said, and saluted formally. The major returned the salute and disappeared into a crowd of people on the train.

Guards with machine guns had positioned themselves along the track, while a dozen carpenters pried up the floorboards of the railroad coaches and workers from the state treasury building installed the Polish National Bullion Reserve-$11,400,000 in five-pound gold ingots packed ten to a crate-in the ten-inch space below. Then, working quickly, the carpenters hammered the boards back into place.

At which point Nowak came running, his face red with anger. “You had better see this,” he said. The carpenters were just finishing up. Nowak pointed at the shiny nailheads they’d hammered into the old gray wood.

“Couldn’t you use the old nails?” de Milja said.

The head carpenter shrugged.

“Is there any lampblack?”

“Lampblack! No, of course not. We’re carpenters, we don’t have such things.”

17 September, 6:48 A.M. Gdansk station.

The platforms and waiting rooms were jammed with people, every age, every class, babbling in at least seven languages, only one thing in common: they were too late. Unlucky or unwise didn’t matter, the trains had stopped. A stationmaster’s voice crackled through the public-address system and tried to convince them of that, but nobody was willing to believe it. In Poland, things happened in mysterious ways-authority itself was often struck speechless at life’s sudden turns.

For instance:

The stationmaster’s voice, “Please, ladies and gentlemen, I entreat you, there will be no more service. .,” was slowly drowned out by the rumble of an approaching train. People surged to the edges of the platforms, police struggled to hold them back.

Then the crowd fell silent, and stopped pushing.

Then someone cheered. And then someone else. And then everybody. Poland had been brutally stabbed in the back, and so she bled, bled fiercely, but here was proof that she lived, and could strike back at those who tormented her.

But that was only part of the miracle. Because, only a few minutes later, another train appeared. And if the armored train was an image of war, here was a phantom from the time of peace, a little six-car train headed south for-or so the signs on the sides of the coaches said-Pilava. The Pilava train! Only thirty miles south, but at least not in besieged Warsaw. Everybody had an aunt in Pilava, you went there on a Sunday afternoon and came home with half a ham wrapped in a cloth. Vladimir Herschensohn, pressed by the crowd against a marble column, felt his heart rise with joy. Somehow, from somewhere, a manifestation of normal existence: a train arrives in a station, passengers ascend, life goes on.

But Mr. Herschensohn would not be ascending. He needed to, the Germans would make quick work of him and he knew it. But God had made him small, and as the crowd surged hungrily toward the empty train he actually found himself moving-helped along by a curse here, an elbow there-away from the track. After a moment or two of this, all he wanted to do was stay near enough to watch the train leave, to send some part of his spirit away to safety.

Watching from the cab of the locomotive, de Milja felt his stomach turn. The crowd was now a mob: if they got on this train, they would live. Babies howled, suitcases sprang open, men and women clawed and fought, policemen swung their batons. De Milja could hear the thuds, but he willed his face not to show what he felt and it didn’t. A huge, brawny peasant shoved an old woman out of his way and started to climb onto the coupling between the engine and the coal car. The fireman waited until his weight hung on his hands, then kicked him full force under the chin. His head flew up and he went tumbling backward into the crowd. “Pig,” the fireman said quietly, as though to himself.

But, in the end, the ones who pushed to the front were the ones who got on.

When the train was good and full, people packed into the cars, when it looked like a refugee train should look, de Milja raised his hand. Then something stopped him. Out in the crowd, his eye found a little peanut of a man in a long black overcoat, with a black homburg hat knocked awry. He was holding some sort of a case and an old-fashioned valise in one hand, and pressing a handkerchief to his bloody nose with the other. The policeman standing next to de Milja was red in the face and breathing hard. “Get me that man,” de Milja said, pointing.

The policeman whistled through his teeth, a couple of colleagues joined him, and the little man was quickly retrieved, virtually carried through the crowd by the elbows and hoisted up to de Milja in the locomotive cab.

“Better go,” the policeman said.

De Milja signaled to the conductor, who swung himself up onto the train. The engineer worked his levers and blew a long blast on the whistle as the heavily laden train moved slowly out of Gdansk station.

“Thank you,” said the little man. He was somewhere in his forties, de Milja thought, with the face of a Jewish imp. “I am Vladimir Herschensohn.” He extended his hand, and de Milja shook it. Herschensohn saw that de Milja was staring at his battered violin case. “I am,” he added, “the principal violinist of the Polish National Symphony Orchestra.”

De Milja inclined his head in acknowledgment.

“So,” Herschensohn said. “We are going to Pilava.” He had to raise his voice above the chuff of the locomotive, but he managed a tone of great politeness.

“South of there,” was all de Milja said.

At the 9:15 meeting with Colonel Vyborg, de Milja had brought up the issue: what to tell the passengers. “What you like, when you like, you decide,” Vyborg had said.

Vyborg’s room had been crowded-people sitting on desks, on the floor, everywhere. De Milja knew most of them, and what they had in common was a certain ruthless competence. Suddenly the days of office politics, family connections, the well-fed wink, were over. Now the issue was survival, and these officers, like de Milja, found themselves given command and assigned to emergency operations.

The agenda of the meeting was long and difficult and devoted to a single topic: the dispersion to safety of the national wealth. War cost money and Poland meant to keep fighting. And there wasn’t that much. A country like Great Britain had a national wealth of two hundred million dollars, but Poland had only been alive as an independent nation since 1918-this time around-and owned barely a tenth of that.

Stocks and bonds and letters of deposit on foreign banks were going to leave the port of Gdynia on a Danish passenger liner. British pounds, French francs, and American dollars were to be flown out at night by one of the last remaining air-force transports, while millions of Polish zlotys and German reichsmarks were being buried in secret vaults in Warsaw-they would be needed there. Senior code and cipher experts, the cream of Polish intelligence, had already left the country. And it was de Milja’s job to take out the gold reserve, carrying it by train to Romania, where another group would move it on to Paris, the time-honored host to Polish governments-in-exile.

From Gdansk station they traveled slowly through the central districts of the city, where crews were filling bomb craters and repairing rail by the light of fires in oil drums. They crossed the railroad bridge back into Praga, then turned south on the eastern bank of the Vistula. Soon the city was behind them, and the track left the river and curved gently southeast, toward the city of Lublin.

The conductor who’d gotten on the train at the Dimek Street bridge was a man of old-fashioned manners and grave demeanor, with a droopy mustache, a conductor’s hat one size too large, and a limp from wounds received when his train was dive-bombed in the first hours of the war. When he’d reported to de Milja at the bridge, he had stood at attention and produced from his belt a 9 mm Parabellum pistol-a 1914 cannon-and informed de Milja that he’d fought the Bolsheviks in 1921, and was prepared to send a significant number of Germans straight to hell if he got the opportunity.

As the train chugged through the Polish countryside, the conductor went from car to car and made a little speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. Soon we will be stopping at Pilava; those who wish to get off the train are invited to do so. However, this train will not be returning to Warsaw, it is going all the way to Lvov, with brief stops at Lublin and Tomaszow. The military situation in the south is unclear, but the railroad will take you as far as you wish to travel. Passage is without charge. Thank you.”

From the last car, de Milja watched the crowd carefully. But the reaction was subdued: a number of family conferences conducted in urgent whispers, an avalanche of questions that God himself, let alone a train conductor, couldn’t have answered, and more than a little head shaking and grim smiling at the bizarre twists and turns that life now seemed to take. The Polish people, de Milja realized, had already absorbed the first shock of war and dislocation; now it was a question of survival; ingenuity, improvisation, and the will to live through catastrophe and see the other side of it. So when the train stopped at Pilava, only a few people got off. The farther from Warsaw the better-what consensus there was among the passengers seemed to follow that line of reasoning.

For a time, the countryside itself proved them right. South of Pilava there was no war, only a rainy September morning, a strip of pale sky on the horizon, harvested fields, birch groves, and tiny streams. The air smelled of damp earth and the coming October. The leaves a little dry now, and rustling in the wind.

De Milja’s mother was the Countess Ostrowa, and her brothers, known always as “the Ostrow uncles,” had taken it upon themselves to teach him about life; about dogs and horses and guns, servants and mistresses. They were from another time-a vanished age, his father said-but his mother adored them and they lived hard, drunken, brutal, happy lives and never bothered to notice they were in the wrong century.

His father was an aristocrat of another sort: second son of a family occupied for generations with polite commerce, senior professor of economics at Jagiello university. He was an arid man, tall and spare, who had been old all his life and who, in his heart, didn’t really think very much of the human mammal. The vaguely noble name de Milja, pronounced de Milya, he shooed away with his hand, admitting there was a village in Silesia, some forty miles from where the family originated, called Milja, but the aristocratic formation he ascribed to “some Austro-Hungarian nonsense my grandfather meddled with” and would never say any more about it. Exiled to the top floor of the family house in Warsaw, he lived by the light of a green-glass lamp amid piles of German periodicals and stacks of woody paper covered with algebraic equations rendered in fountain pen.

So de Milja’s world, from its earliest days, had a cold north and a hot south, and he spent his time going back and forth; as a boy, as a young man, maybe, he thought, forever. The uncles laughing and roaring downstairs, throwing chicken bones in the fire, grabbing the maids’ bottoms, and passing out on the sofas with their boots on the pillows. Up two flights, a family of storks nested among the chimneys on the opposite roof and his father explained spiders and thunder.

They’d married de Milja off when he was nineteen. The families had known each other forever, he and Helena were introduced, left alone, and encouraged to fall in love. She probably saw the wisdom of all this much more clearly than he did-gazed at his belt buckle, kissed him with swollen lips and a hand on his jaw, and he was hers. Two weeks before the wedding, his favorite Ostrow uncle had taken him into a disused parlor, the furniture covered with sheets, where they fortified themselves with Armagnac, and his uncle-scarlet face, shaved head, glorious cavalry mustaches-had given him a premarital lovemaking lesson with the aid of a dressmaker’s dummy. “You’re not a bull, dammit!” he’d bellowed. “You don’t mount her when she’s at the kitchen stove.”

In the event, the problem did not arise: she never bent over to get the bread out of the oven because she never put it in-that was done by a series of country girls charitably called maids, more than one of whom had flipped the back of her skirt at him.

Over time, Helena changed. At first she would flirt, touch him accidentally with her breasts, and hold him between the legs with both hands. But something happened, she would only make love in the dark, sometimes cried, sometimes stopped. He learned to work his way through her defenses, but in the process discovered what she was defending. He began to realize that the membrane that separated her from the world was too thin, that she could not tolerate life.

She’d gotten pregnant, then lost the baby during an influenza epidemic in the winter of 1925. That was the end. In the deepest part of himself he’d known it, known it the day it happened. For three years, everyone pretended that everything would be all right, but when little fires were started in the house she had to go to the doctors and they prescribed a stay at a private clinic near Tarnopol “for a few weeks.”

Absence from the world cured her. He didn’t say that back in Warsaw, but it was true. Visiting once a month, bouquet in hand, he could feel the calm she’d found. In fact she pitied him, having to live amid anger and meanness. In good weather they walked in the forest. She, wrapped in a shawl, said little, lived in a self-evident world-there was nothing to explain. Once in a great while she would reach over and take his hand, her way of saying thank you.

He woke suddenly, snapping his head erect just as his chin grazed his chest. He stood braced against the doorway of the last coach, track falling away through rolling fields, wheels in a steady clatter. When had he slept? Not for a long time.

He cleared his throat. Sublieutenant Nowak was pointedly looking elsewhere-no commanding officer of his, de Milja realized, would ever be seen to drift off.

“Coming into Deblin, Captain.”

De Milja nodded. Nowak was too young-fresh-faced and eager. Out of uniform, in his Sunday suit, he looked like a student. “Map?”

Nowak unfolded it. Deblin was a river town, where the Wieprz flowed east into the Vistula. The route south continued into Pulawy, Krasnystaw, Zamosc, Tomaszow. Crossed the river Tanew into the Ukrainian districts of Poland at Rava-Russkaya. Then the major city of Lvov, down to Stryj, a sweep around the eastern tip of German-occupied Czechoslovakia-known as Little Ukraine-into Uzhgorod, and finally across the border into the Romanian town of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains.

Four hundred and fifty miles, more or less. With the locomotive making a steady thirty-five miles an hour, about fourteen hours. Nowak heard the airplanes at the same time as he did, and together they looked up into the clouds. A flight of Heinkel bombers, in V formation, headed a little east of due north. That meant they’d been working on one of the industrial cities in the south, maybe Radom or Kielce, and were on their way home, bomb bays hopefully empty, to an airfield in East Prussia, probably Rastenburg.

“Nothing for you down here,” de Milja said quietly.

He’d done the best he could: it was just a little train, yellow coaches with red borders on the windows and a locomotive puffing through the wheat fields. Pastoral, harmless.

The Heinkels droned on. Below and behind them, a fighter escort of ME-109s. The pilots were bored. Sneak attacks on Polish airfields had blown up the opposition on the first day-and stolen their war. Now their job had little to do with skill or daring. They were nursemaids. From the wing position, a fighter plane sideslipped away from the formation, swooped down a sharp angle in a long, steep dive, flattened out in perfect strafing attitude, and fired its 20 mm cannon into the annoying little train chugging along below as though it hadn’t a care in the world. The pilot had just broken off the attack, soaring up through the smoke of the locomotive’s stack, when the radio crackled furiously and the flight leader gave a short, sharp order. The plane slipped back into formation, maintaining rigid spacing and perfect airspeed discipline all the way home to East Prussia.

The engineer remembered his orders and followed them: slowed down, rolled to a stop. Flight excites hunting dogs and fighter pilots, nothing standing still interests them for very long.

De Milja called out to Nowak as he swung off the platform: “Go through the cars, get the dead and wounded out, see if there’s anybody who can help.”

He ran along the track, then climbed into the cab of the locomotive. A column of steam was hissing from a hole in the firebox, the engineer was kneeling by the side of the fireman, who was lying on his back, his face the color of wood ash, a pale green shadow like a bruise already settled on his cheekbones. De Milja cursed to himself when he saw it.

The engineer was breathing hard; de Milja saw his chest rise and fall in the old cardigan. He went down on one knee and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “That was done well,” he said. Then: “You’re all right.” More an order than a question, the of course unvoiced but clear.

The engineer pressed his lips together and shook his head-very close to tears. “My sister-in-law’s husband,” he said. “My wife said not to ask him.”

De Milja nodded in sympathy. He understood, patted the man’s shoulder twice, hard, before he took his hand away. The engineer said, “She-,” but there was nothing more. It was quiet in the fields, the only sound the slow beat of the locomotive’s pistons running with the engine at rest. A bird sang somewhere in the distance. The fireman raised his hands, palms up, like a shrug, then made a face. “Shit,” he said. As de Milja leaned over him, he died.

Nowak had the casualties laid out in a beet field; a dark woman with hair braided and pinned worked over them. When de Milja arrived, she put him to work tearing cotton underdrawers into strips for bandages and sent Nowak running up to the locomotive for hot water.

“This man has been shot through the foot,” she said, carefully removing the shoe. “Went in above the heel, came out the sole just here, behind the second toe.” She put the bloody shoe aside. “Foot scares me, I’m unfamiliar with it.”

“You’re a nurse?”

“Veterinarian. A paw or a hoof, there I can help. Grab his hand.” De Milja held the man’s hand as the veterinarian swabbed on antiseptic from a big brown-glass bottle.

“A little girl is dead,” she said. “She was about ten years old. And a man in his forties, over there. We looked and looked-there’s not a mark on him. An old woman jumped out a window and broke her ankle. And a few others-cuts and bruises. But the angle of the gunfire was lucky for us-no glass, no fire. It’s fire I hate.” She worked in silence a moment. “It hurts?” she asked the patient.

“Go ahead, Miss. Do whatever you have to. Did I understand you to say that you were a veterinarian?”

“That’s right.”

“Hah! My friends will certainly get a laugh when they hear that!” De Milja’s fingers throbbed from the pressure of the wounded man squeezing his hand.

A grave-digging crew was organized, which took turns using the fireman’s shovel, and a priest said prayers as the earth was piled on. The little girl had been alone on the train, and nobody could find her papers. A woman who’d talked to her said her name was Tana, so that name was carved on the wooden board that served as a gravestone.

De Milja ordered the train stopped at a village station between Pulawy and Lublin, then used the phone in the stationmaster’s office-he could barely hear through the static-to report the attack to Vyborg, and to revise the estimated time of arrival “in the southern city.”

“The Russian divisions have crossed the border,” Vyborg said. “They may not reach your area for a day or so, but it’s hard to predict. The Germans are headed west-giving up territory. We believe there’s a line of demarcation between Hitler and Stalin, and the Russians will move up to occupy the new border.”

“Does that change anything for us?”

“No. But German aircraft have been attacking the line south of you. The railroad people say they can keep it open another twenty-four hours, but that’s about it. Still, we think you ought to find cover, then continue after dark. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All the roads out of Warsaw are now cut. This office is closing down, so you’re on your own from now on. Consider that to have the status of a written order.”

“Understood, sir.”

“So, best of luck to you. To all of us.”

The connection was broken.

A corporal in the Geographical Section had made a specialty of hiding trains. Using his hand-drawn map, de Milja directed the engineer to a branch line south of Pulawy that wound up into the hills above the Vistula. There, twenty miles west of Lublin, a gypsum mining operation had gone bankrupt and been shut down some time in the 1920s. But the railroad spur that ran to the site, though wildly overgrown, was still usable, and a roofed shed built for loading open railcars was still standing. Under the shed, with the engine turned off, they were very close to invisible.

17 September, 8:25 P.M.

Over the years, the abandoned quarry had filled with water, and after dark de Milja could see the reflection of the rising moon on the still surface.

The engineer had patched the hole in the firebox, using tin snips, a tea tray, and wire. A big kid, about fifteen, from a farm village volunteered to work as the fireman-what he lacked in skill he’d make up with raw strength. Nowak took the opportunity to sight-in four rifles, which, with a few boxes of ammunition, had been hidden behind a panel in the last coach. He chose four men: a mechanic, a retired policeman, a student, and a man who didn’t exactly want to say what he did, to be armed in case of emergency.

There wasn’t much else they could do. The engine moved cautiously over the old track, heading east for the ancient city of Lublin, the countryside dark and deserted. The passengers were quiet, some doubtless having second thoughts about being cast adrift in a country at war. Maybe they would have been better off staying in Warsaw.

They reached Lublin a little after ten. Warehouses along the railroad line had been blazing since that afternoon, and the city’s ruptured water mains meant that the fire department could do little more than watch. The train crawled through thick black coils of heavy smoke, the passengers had to wet handkerchiefs and put them over their noses and mouths in order to breathe. A brakeman flagged them down. De Milja went up to the locomotive.

“We’ve been ordered to get you people through,” the brakeman said, “and the crews are doing the best they can. But they bombed us just before sunset, and it’s very bad up ahead.” The brakeman coughed and spat. “We had all the worst things down here; wool, creosote, tarred rope. Now it’s just going to burn.”

“Any sign of Russian troops?” de Milja asked.

“Not sure. We had a freight train disappear this morning. Vanished. What’s your opinion about that?”

It took forever for them to work their way through Lublin. At one point, a shirtless work crew, bodies black with soot, laid twenty-five feet of track almost directly beneath their wheels. The passengers gagged on the smoke, tried to get away from it by taking turns lying flat in the aisle, rubbed at the oily film that clung to their hands and faces, but that only made it burn worse. Farther down the line an old wooden bridge had collapsed onto the track and the huge, charred timbers were being hauled away by blindfolded farm horses. A saboteur-identified as such by a sign hung around his neck-had been hanged from a signal stanchion above the track. A group of passengers came to the last coach and pleaded with de Milja to get off the train. Nowak got the engine stopped, and a small crowd of people scurried away down the firelit lanes of the old city.

And then, once again, the war was gone.

The train climbed gently into the uplands east of the Carpathians. Warsaw, a northern city, seemed a long way from here-this was the ragged edge of Europe, border land. They ran dark, the lamps turned off in the coaches, only the locomotive light sweeping along the rails where, as the night cooled, land mist drifted through the beam. Beyond that, the steppe. Treeless, empty, sometimes a few thatched huts around a well and a tiny dirt road that ran off into the endless distance, to Russia, to the Urals. Now and then a village-a log station house with a Ukrainian name-but down here it was mostly the track and the wind.

De Milja stood beside the engineer and stared out into the darkness. The boy who’d taken the fireman’s job fed coal to the firebox when the engineer told him to. His palms had blistered after an hour of shoveling, so he’d taken his shirt off and torn it in half and tied it around his hands. When he stepped away from the furnace he shivered in the night air, but he was a man that night and de Milja knew better than to say anything.

At some nameless settlement, the train stopped at a water tower, the engineer swung the spout into position and began to fill the tank. It was long after midnight, and deserted-only the sigh of the wind, moths fluttering in the engine light, and the splash of water. Then, suddenly, a girl was standing by the locomotive. She was perhaps sixteen, barefoot, wearing a soiled cotton shift, head scarf, and a thin shawl around her shoulders. She was the most beautiful girl that de Milja had ever seen. “Please, Your Excellency,” she said-the dialect was ancient and de Milja barely understood her-“may I be permitted to ride on the train?”

She raised her hand, opened her fingers to reveal a pair of tiny gold earrings resting on her palm.

De Milja was speechless. The engineer, standing atop the front of the locomotive, stared down at her, and the boy stopped shoveling coal. The hem of the shift was spattered with mud, her ankles thin above dirty feet. She is pregnant, de Milja thought. She stood patiently, her eyes not quite meeting his, a sign of submission, her other hand clutching the shawl at her throat. But when de Milja did not speak, she looked directly at him and, just for an instant, her eyes lit up green fire as they caught the light, then she hid them away.

“Please, Excellency?” The earrings must not be worth what she thought; her voice faded in defeat.

“You do not have to pay,” de Milja said.

Her face hid nothing, and it was plain how she had struggled, all her life, to understand things. She had never been on a train before, but she knew one or two people who had, and she had asked them about it, and one certainly had to pay. Atop the locomotive, the engineer swung the water spout away so that water splashed on the ground beside the tracks until he shut it off.

De Milja waited for her to ask where they were going, but she never did. “You may ride on the train,” he said.

Still hesitant, she closed the earrings in her fist and held them to her throat. Then turned toward the passenger coaches. Did he mean what he said? Or was he just making fun of her? No, he meant it. Before he could change his mind she ran like a deer, climbed cautiously onto the iron step of the first coach, peered inside, then vanished.

Past Lvov, then Uzhgorod.

Sublieutenant Nowak took the watch for an hour, then a little after four in the morning de Milja returned. Now the train was climbing a grade that ran through a pine forest, then past Kulikov, then deeper into the mountains that marked the southern border of Poland.

Captain de Milja and the engineer saw the dim shape ahead at the same moment. De Milja wondered what it was, and squinted to bring it into focus. The old man swore and hauled on the brake with both hands. The wheels locked and screeched as they slid on the iron rails, and the train finally shuddered to a halt just short of the barrier, tree trunks piled across the track.

The light was strange at that hour-not night, not yet dawn-so the shapes coming toward them from the forest had no color, and seemed to glide on mist, like phantoms in a dream, with white plumes steaming from the horses’ nostrils in the cold mountain air.

The bandit leader-or ataman, or headman, whatever he called himself-was not to be hurried. Rifle at rest across his saddle, he walked his horse to the cab of the locomotive and stared at de Milja. “Get out,” he said softly. This was Ukrainian, of which de Milja understood that much at least. The bandit was perhaps in his fifties, wore a peaked cap and a suit jacket. Two or three days’ white bristle covered a stubborn jaw below the small, shrewd eyes of the farmer’s most cherished pig.

De Milja jumped to the ground, the engineer followed, the boy did not. Hiding, de Milja thought. All along the train, passengers were filing out of the coaches, hands high above their heads, lining up at the direction of the bandits. The leader looked him over: where was the danger in him? Where the profit? De Milja met his gaze. Back by the coaches there was a rifle shot. The bandit watched to see what he would do, so he did not turn around to see what had happened.

“Who are you?” the leader asked.

“I work for the railroad.”

The bandit did not quite believe that. “You ready to die up in a tree?” Ukrainian executions lasted all day. De Milja did not react.

“Hardheaded, you people,” the leader said. “You’re finished,” he went on. “Now it’s the Germans and us.”

De Milja was silent.

“Carrying anything valuable on that train?”

“No. Just people heading for the border.”

The bandit glanced back at the passenger coaches, de Milja followed his eyes. The passengers had their hands on the sides of the railcars, their baggage was laid out on the ground so that the bandits could pick and choose what they wanted.

A bandit on a gray pony rode up beside the leader. “Any good?” the leader asked.

“Not bad.”

“Gold?”

“Some. Polish money. Jewelry.”

“And the women?”

“Good. Four or five of them.”

The bandit leader winked at de Milja. “You won’t be seeing them again.” He paused, something about de Milja fascinated him. “Come over here,” he said. De Milja stepped forward, stood beside the bandit’s boot in a stirrup. “Give me your watch. It would be a railroad watch, of course.”

De Milja undid the strap, handed up his watch, long ago a present from his wife. The bandit glanced at it, then dropped it in his pocket. “Not a railroad watch, is it.”

“No.”

The leader was getting bored. With one hand he raised his rifle until de Milja was looking down the barrel. “What do you see in there?” De Milja took a deep breath, the bandit was going to ask him to look closer. One of the passengers screamed, de Milja couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The bandit on the gray pony trotted a little way toward the sound. A rifle fired, a flat, dull crack like the earlier shot; then another, deeper. The bandit leader puffed out his cheek so hard it burst in a red spray, his horse shied and whinnied. De Milja grabbed the harness and pulled himself close to the horse’s body. The barrel of the rifle probed frantically, looking for him. Somewhere above, the bandit was wailing and cursing like a child. De Milja hung on to the reins with one hand and snatched the rifle barrel with the other. The weapon fired but he didn’t let go. Then the boy came out from behind a locomotive wheel and hit the bandit on the head with the shovel, which rang like a bell as the rifle came free in de Milja’s hand and the horse tore away from him.

The other bandit danced his pony around and shot the boy again and again, de Milja could hear the bullets hit, and the boy grunted each time. He fumbled the rifle around to firing position but the bandit galloped away, jumped his horse over the coupling between cars and disappeared. De Milja flinched as something hissed by his ear. Then Nowak called to him from the coal car and he ran up the ladder mounted on the wall as a bullet struck a silver chip out of the iron and the locomotive’s light went dark. Two horses thundered past, then a cluster of rapid rifle shots, a yell of triumph.

Nowak was lying on the coal at one end of the car, firing a rifle into the darkness. De Milja threw himself down beside him. Between the train and the forest, dark shapes were sprawled amid clothing and suitcases. A yellow spark from the trees-both he and Nowak swung their weapons. Nowak fired, but de Milja’s clicked as the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He threw it aside and worked the pistol free from beneath his sweater. “Who has the other rifles?” de Milja asked, meaning the weapons they had hidden behind a panel.

“Don’t know, sir,” Nowak said. “It’s chaos.”

He couldn’t permit chaos. Rolled over the lip of the car, slid down the ladder on the other side, stood between cars for a moment, then jumped to the ground and ran along the length of the train. The conductor ran by him going the other way, eyes white, teeth clenched, pistol held up in the safe position. Combat-mad, he never even saw de Milja, who wondered who he was chasing. Passengers were climbing through the coach windows; some of them had gotten a horse off its feet and it kicked and whinnied in terror as they tried to kill its rider, who howled for mercy. De Milja stepped on a body, then through a tangle of clothing that reeked of cloves-hair tonic from a shattered bottle. He tripped as he leaped for an open doorway, then went sprawling into the last coach.

The smell of gunpowder and urine hit him like a wall. Someone moaned softly, but mostly it was very dark and very quiet-the people packed together on the floor were breathing audibly, as though winded. A bullet from the forest went through the car and a triangle of glass fell on a seat without breaking. A silhouette rose suddenly in the middle of the car and returned the fire.

As de Milja crawled along the aisle, the train moved. Barely, only just making way, but he thought he could feel the logs being slowly forced off the track. The engineer is alive, he thought, using the locomotive like a bulldozer. The rifleman knelt quickly, moved on his knees to a neighboring window, straightened up, and fired. It was Herschensohn, the violinist. The homburg was jammed down on his head, a muscle ticked in his jaw, and he was muttering under his breath-“Stay still, you”-as he took aim.

De Milja reached the far end of the car-the back of the train-just as something seemed to give way and, with the sound of splintering wood, the train moved a little faster.

“Wait!”

A running shape burst from the forest-the peasant girl who’d begged to be let on the train at the water tower. “She got away!” Herschensohn had appeared beside him. The girl ran in panic, tripped, went sprawling on her face, struggled back up again, limping now and much slower. She waved her hands and screamed as the train gradually picked up speed.

De Milja was abruptly shoved aside. A man in a gray suit, with carefully brushed hair, leaped off the train and ran toward the girl, circled an arm around her waist and tried to help her. No longer young, he could barely run fast enough to keep up with the injured girl. “For God’s sake don’t leave us!” he yelled.

The bandits, on horseback and in the woods, saw what was happening. De Milja pinpointed the muzzle flashes in the half-light. The range was absurd but he aimed with both hands, changed the action to single-shot, and squeezed off round after round from his automatic. Herschensohn muttered angrily under his breath, talking to the target, as he fired his rifle. A young woman in a sweater and skirt jumped from a window, stumbled, came up running, took the girl around the waist from the other side. De Milja heard footsteps pounding above him as Nowak ran down the roof of the car, firing into the trees. Somebody yelled “Save her, save her, save her,” like a chant, and others took up the cry. De Milja thrust his empty pistol into his pocket and stood on the lowest step as the three people gained on the car. Herschensohn was firing over his shoulder and Nowak was shouting something from the roof. The three faces were distorted with exhaustion, with tears of effort, mouths gasping for breath, hands clawing frantically at the railings beside the door. But as the last log rolled away, the locomotive accelerated, the three runners flailing and staggering as the platform moved away from them.

Then the train quivered-the shock slammed de Milja against the wall-and suddenly the runners were close. He reached out and grabbed handfuls of shirt, coat, hair, whatever he could get, and hung on desperately. Someone caught the back of his coat just as he started to fall onto the tracks, other hands reached over his shoulders, people yelled, shoes scraped on the boards as somebody fought for traction, and the two rescuers and the girl were hauled aboard with a cry of triumph.

De Milja ended up on hands and knees as the train-something wrong with the way it ran now-slowly ground through a long, gentle curve. At the bottom of the embankment lay what was left of a truck: cab torn in half, gasoline flames flickering over the radiator, a tire spinning, a mounted machine gun aimed at the sky, and a man, arms flung wide, half-buried in a pile of broken brick.

When de Milja worked his way forward to the cab of the locomotive, he found bullet marks everywhere-the Ukrainian gunners had had their moment-and a very pale engineer. They’d mounted a machine gun on a brick truck and parked it on the tracks behind the log barrier. Just in case.

For the last hundred miles they were well up in the Carpathians, some of the passes at seven thousand feet, and the train switched back over ridges and granite outcrops, through sparse grass and forests of stunted pine where hawks floated on the mountain thermals. The train barely went now, maybe ten miles an hour, crawled along a trestle over a thousand-foot gorge as the passengers prayed silently and not-so-silently, oil trickling from beneath the engine. The sun didn’t reach them until ten in the morning; they were cold, there was nothing to eat, and very little water.

They crossed the Tisza River; there’d been a fire on the bridge, but it still held. De Milja walked along in front of the engine, watching the track bow under the weight, trying not to hear the sounds the wooden girders made. They traveled for a time beside a deeply rutted dirt track, where stone mileposts gave the distance to Romania. A burned-out Polish army car had been shoved into a ditch, a wagon and a pair of horses hit by a dive bomber, a truck lay on its side in the middle of a mountain stream.

They worked at it all day, Nowak and de Milja taking turns standing with the engineer in the locomotive, sometimes running the train themselves since he was long past exhaustion. Slow as their progress was, there were no other trains. The stationmaster at Mukachevo told them the Germans had bombed the lines running south-the Polish railway system didn’t really exist any longer.

They were what was left. De Milja and Nowak changed into officers’ uniforms a few miles before they reached the frontier at Sighet. The train stopped at the Polish border station, but it had been abandoned: an empty hut, a bare flagpole. A mile farther on, at the Romanian customs post, a tank was parked with its cannon facing down the track. “So,” said the engineer, “we are expected.” De Milja took a set of papers, prepared in Warsaw, to the Romanian major who greeted him at the wooden barrier pole.

The two officers saluted, then shook hands. The major was dark, with a movie-hero mustache and excellent manners. Yes they were expected, yes everything was in order, yes they’d be processed through in a half-hour, yes, yes, yes. The sun dropped lower in the sky, the children cried because they were hungry, the truth was to be seen in the eyes of the passengers on the train: despair, boredom, fatigue-the refugee life had begun. Please be patient, the Romanian major said. Please.

Two Polish diplomats materialized; eyeglasses, Vandyke beards, and overcoats with velvet collars. Negotiations continued, they reported, but a diplomatic solution had been proposed: the Polish passengers could enter Romania-temporary immigrant status would be granted-the Polish train could not. A troublesome technicality, but. . The hanging sentence meant what can be done? Poland could no longer insist on anything. It was a former nation now, a phantom of international law.

Meanwhile, de Milja used the diplomats to make contacts he’d been given in Warsaw, and with a few code words and secret signs, things started to happen, not the least of which was the delivery of hampers of bread and onions and wormy pears brought by Romanian soldiers.

And eventually, long after dark, another Polish Captain Nom de Guerre showed up. They recognized each other from the meeting in Vyborg’s office: shared a cigarette, a walk by the tracks, and the news of the day. Then a phone call was made and, an hour later, a train appeared at the Romanian frontier post: a few freight cars, a small but serviceable locomotive, and Polish regular army soldiers with submachine guns. This train was moved up to the edge of the barrier on the Romanian side, and the Antonescu government, an uncertain mistress to several lovers-England, Germany, Russia-agreed that the passengers could bring whatever baggage they had onto Romanian soil.

It was very dark at the border, so pitch-pine torches were brought. And several volunteers among the passengers were given prybars. The floorboards in the coaches were prized up and, by flickering torchlight, the Polish National Gold Reserve, more than eleven million dollars, was carried into Romania.

Standing with Nowak by the train, Captain de Milja felt his heart stir with pride. From the Pilava local, with its shattered windows and bullet gashes, its locomotive reeking of singed bearings and burnt oil, the passengers handed out crates stamped NATIONAL BANK OF POLAND. Blood had been shed for this; by a locomotive fireman, a ten-year-old girl, a boy from a country village. By a conductor of the Polish National Railways who, teeth clenched, pistol in hand, had disappeared into the darkness. De Milja did not believe it had been shed in vain and stood very nearly to attention as his little army struggled past with the heavy boxes: Vladimir Herschensohn, his violin carried off by Ukrainian bandits, the veterinarian who had treated the wounded, the pensioned engineer, the peasant girl, the man and woman-from some comfortable professional class-who had run onto a battlefield to save a life, a few country people, a few workers, women and children. Poland had lost a war, this was what was left.