Rogue Justice

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘You can’t avoid the tops,’ he said, ‘and you’ll find them very bare and closely watched. They mean to keep their Polish slaves where they belong. Judging by what your two friends say of you, you’re as cunning as a lynx and deadly as rabies, but you can’t travel with one of those machine pistols slung on you.’

  ‘I’ll leave you those. Can you give me a rifle in exchange and a screwdriver?’

  ‘What do you want the screwdriver for?’

  ‘So that I can carry it in two parts, down my trousers or under my shirt.’

  He thought this over. His face – what I could see of it in the dark – showed a reluctance and then cleared.

  ‘I will give you my father’s Mannlicher. She dates back to 1908, but the old lady is accurate at five hundred metres and more if you love and cherish her and find out her little ways. I bought fresh ammunition just before the war and tested it.’

  Feeling that he was making a great sacrifice, I said it was noble of him and asked what his father used it for.

  ‘You won’t have heard of the Rifle Association. That was our answer to the Russia of the Tsars – a hundred and seventy Poles who crossed the frontier from the Habsburg empire and attacked.’

  ‘Well, I suppose she won’t mind if it’s Germans now.’

  ‘She won’t mind if you are behind her, my man. Now sleep as much as you can, for we shall move at night. And you had better leave this poor chap in my charge. He’ll hold you back.’

  ‘I have promised that I won’t desert him.’

  ‘But how far can he walk?’

  I translated the question to Moshe.

  ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,’ he answered.

  It sounds mysteriously better in English than in German. I think of David’s raiding party pinned down by the Philistines in the coastal plain and crying to his God for reinforcements from Jerusalem. A poem of all eternity, yet on its day, I suppose, only the passionate appeal of an over-bold commander.

  ‘He believes he can climb anything on his way to Palestine.’

  ‘I’ll tell that to our priest.’

  ‘The one we were told to call on? He won’t mind helping?’

  ‘Are you forgetting that in spite of all we are still Christians? Now, if only Mr Shapir could ride, the priest and I would have a plan for you.’

  ‘If it has four legs I can ride it,’ Moshe replied when I translated this for him.

  I had thought that his light, lean body was wholly due to pain and starvation. His answer made me look at him again. The muscles were wasted, the face fallen in, but even when well fed that body had been lean.

  ‘A jockey?’

  ‘A trainer and successful. I was foolish enough to believe that would make them forget I was a dirty Jew – so long as the racing tips I gave the Gauleiter were profitable. And then I had a wonder two-year-old. I told him to back it both ways for as much as he could afford. Need I tell you that it lost and badly? These things happen. Next day I was arrested and my stable confiscated.’

  ‘And if he had been a Prussian gentleman of the old school, he’d have shed a tear with you over the second bottle,’ Casimir exclaimed. ‘What swine they give power to! No wonder the rest are rotten with fear!’

  He now seemed very confident, but disappointed us by saying that we must wait a night or two more as he needed a permit and had to collect the horses. He would explain it all later. There was no hope of riding across the frontier into Slovakia but before we had to take to our feet we should be deep in the forests of the Tatra.

  Another night and two more days we had to spend among the reeds. We found that we were not impatient to leave. The peace of sky and birds and water was sinking into us, creating an illusion of safety. This was a home to which we had come – I after the carnage of that journey from Stettin, he after such despair that he had asked to be allowed to die. He was now noticeably recovering. At first he would walk if he had to but, if he didn’t have to, he preferred to crawl. He could even laugh at himself as Moses in the bulrushes when we washed in the icy Vistula, warming ourselves afterwards with the blessed sheepskins outside and vodka within.

  When we were not sleeping or sharing the silence of the river, we discussed the question of what we should do once out of Poland. The map in our memories was quite unable to keep up with the reality of the new frontiers of 1938 and 1939, but the problem was eased by German victories; there were no more Russians to complicate matters for 1500 miles to the east, and in the Tatra region of the Carpathians, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania must, it seemed to us, all meet at a crossroads. All three were politely called independent, which presumably meant that they had their own frontier guards opposite German posts. Any of the lot would gladly arrest us.

  Towards the end of a long night Casimir arrived with a threadbare suit of civilian clothes for me. Two of his partisans took our barge back to wherever it belonged, after landing us on a clean bank of grass, where we found four horses saddled and waiting. To my surprise they were not the rough, sturdy animals of the Polish countryside but cavalry chargers. Didn’t Casimir think that we should be too conspicuous?

  ‘You may well ask,’ he replied. ‘They belonged to two squadrons of our cavalry which rode into Hungary after our defeat and were interned. Recently four officers escaped, stole these horses and rode for home. A mistake. They were better off in the internment camp. They didn’t realize what the Nazis have done to us.

  ‘When they arrived they said that the Hungarians had treated them well and that it was a matter of honour to return the horses. At Cracow the governor-general refused. He said that the Poles were serfs and had no honour, but the military commander who hadn’t heard the word honour for years was amused and insisted that the escaped prisoners were right. He couldn’t detail soldiers to take the horses back without the hell of a row, so he decided to have it done discreetly by reliable Poles. That’s us. And we have all the scraps of paper to take the horses to the frontier. When I asked how we should get back, I was told to walk.’

  We had to lift Moshe into the saddle but once he was there I recognized that he and his horse were one living thing. We then set out across the open fields in single file, riding slowly in order to cross the main road in full daylight and avoid suspicion. Even so, we were stopped by a patrol, to which Casimir, leading the spare horse, submitted his permits with proper humility. We two were Slovaks who didn’t speak a word of Polish or German and looked the part huddled in our sheepskin coats and unshaven and squalid. The patrol commander made his men laugh by saying he hoped our permits covered our lice as well.

  Soon we were in the foothills of the Tatra. On the flanks of the wide valley up which we rode, agriculture gave place to forest. The slopes steepened. It was becoming country in which I could avoid capture indefinitely given a supply of food, but I could not see how Moshe would ever be able to climb out of the valleys when we were left on our own. I drew up alongside Casimir to ask him if he had any plans. He said that it depended how things were at the frontier. We would see.

  ‘You were right to leave that uniform behind,’ he said. ‘I have found out more about you from my contact. He wants me to keep an eye open for communist agents. Fool! We are all Poles.’

  The Gestapo, he gathered, were sure that I was in Cracow or nearby. The four men I had rescued were of no importance and so I must have been trying to escape in any way I could and without any definite plan. I might be a Russian prisoner-of-war from north Germany and have stolen a uniform in the camp.

  That was satisfactory. It suggested that they were still looking for the body of Haase and did not know that Don Ernesto was alive. But there was no time to waste. It could not be long before someone in the Sicherheitsdienst put two and two together.

  Up through broad-leaved forest we went to the pines on the narrow summit of the ridges, then down again to oak and beech and g
rass. The country was a miniature of that herring-bone of valleys which drop down from the cordillera of the Andes to the plain of the Amazon, but here at least were paths manageable for our horses in single file. They and we had had more than enough of it when we came down into the valley of the young River Dunajec, where the hush of the forest floor changed to the chatter of fast streams and the beat of falls as the water poured down from the side ravines.

  We had covered some thirty miles when we came to the junction of the Dunajec and a considerable tributary. Between the two was a peninsula bounded as if it were sea shore by a tumble of rocks and here and there sharp little cliffs. Willows overhung the rocks concealing the interior. Casimir turned off the track and forded the Dunajec, then rode round the point to the other side where, shadowed by the forest, was a path leading inland.

  We came out of the screen to a long, lush meadow with a donkey, a cow and some geese on it. At one end was a solid hut of rough timber and a small kitchen garden. The owner of this hidden paradise came out to meet us, long-haired and wearing a black robe which was vaguely ecclesiastical. He embraced Casimir, who was evidently an old friend, and when we had been lengthily introduced addressed me in a sort of English and Moshe in excellent Hebrew – at least Moshe thought it was, having himself only enough Hebrew to say the formal prayers.

  While we were unsaddling the horses and turning them loose in the meadow, Casimir told me that our host had been a Catholic priest who had been unfrocked for heresy and become a hermit, deciding that from then on he would commune with his Maker without outside interference. I sympathized, being myself at bottom a sort of deadly hermit. If not for my self-imposed duty to take arms against Hitler, I could have lived happily and alone in that hermitage between the waters, unknown to all my fellows except the rare forester clinging to the steep and pathless slopes of the valley.

  It was Casimir’s plan that we should camp there for the night and in the morning he would take the horses on to the frontier alone.

  ‘Won’t they expect us to be with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Not necessarily. I might have started out alone. But in case the road patrol has reported that there were three of us, I shall tell them that one of you was badly thrown and the other stayed to look after him.’

  ‘And when you return?’

  ‘Your next move depends on what I find up there. Wait and we will see.’

  He was off at dawn, leading one horse as before and driving the other two in front of him – simple enough since the precipitous mountain forest fenced both sides of the track. He left his father’s rifle with me, saying that, although he had special permission to carry it into the Tatra, any officer up there who wanted to relieve boredom by going out after deer would not hesitate to confiscate it.

  Meanwhile we spent with our host a day of memorable peace. Like any good village priest, he had some knowledge of herbs and simple medicine and played the good Samaritan with Moshe, whose health and colour seemed to respond – owing more to the human love, I think, than to the ministrations. An odd fellow, that hermit! I do not know in what his fearsome heresy consisted, but it was worthy of imitation. Though we had no common language, speech seemed unnecessary. His animals, too, showed marked affection for all human beings, having only this gentle soul by which to judge us. When I bathed in the river, Wanda the donkey accompanied me, while cow and geese lined up and watched approvingly like a party of non-swimmers on a beach.

  Casimir came home in the evening, having made fast time, for it was downhill all the way. He reported that there were Germans on the Polish side of the frontier and that their posts were well placed and very difficult to avoid. He advised trying a rough path which would lead us out of the valley of the Dunajec, across another valley and ridge and then on to the bare uplands above the tree-line.

  Such a journey was impossible for Moshe. Yet it was pointless to remain in the hermit’s paradise and, hidden though it was, far too dangerous for him. I suggested that perhaps I could buy the donkey, for I had not used any of my German marks since Stettin.

  Casimir went with me to open negotiations. Our host flatly refused to sell Wanda, saying that she was like a daughter to him in his loneliness: but, since our need was indeed great, both would go with us until we were near the frontier and ready to cross.

  That I could not allow. I asked Casimir to tell him that we might be shot on sight and certainly would be if captured. He and Wanda, our accomplices, must expect to share the same fate.

  There was more conversation between the two. I could see that the hermit was insisting on some plan and that Casimir was trying to dissuade him.

  ‘He says that there can be no danger in the thick forest, so he and Wanda will go with you as far as the tree-line and set you on a route which will take you down into Slovakia without any more climbing.’

  In the morning we regretfully said goodbye to our saviour Casimir. He had left his people alone too long and was always afraid of some too impetuous action in his absence like their attack on the wood. The most troublesome duty of a leader of partisans was, he said, to prevent premature adventures which could lead to penetration of the cell. Any indiscretion could be fatal to all of them if the presence of Doubled-Up and Broken Face in the village together with the uniforms and arms were discovered. I can only hope that his instinct for survival in the midst of German and then Russian armies carried his courageous little cell safely through to the Poland they served.

  We set off along the banks of the tributary valley and then tackled the steepest of all forests we had met, where there were no obvious paths but only barren gaps between trees, each clinging to its pocket of soil. Wanda dictated how we should proceed. She had a light load of our sheepskins and food for a couple of days but refused to carry Moshe on her back as well, though our hermit spoke severely into one long and obstinate ear, while I reminded her that in Mediterranean lands donkeys as small as she would carry some massive grandmother and her full basket. However, she had no objection to towing Moshe at the end of a rope, taking three of her delicate steps to one stumbling stride of his.

  At rest in the paradise I had not seriously tested the hermit’s mutilated version of English. His eyes and hands were alone capable of communicating whatever was necessary. But in unexpected emergencies speech is essential and I found that if I spoke slowly he could understand me very well, but could not reply. He then tried Latin on me, and the position was reversed. I could understand him but, in spite of a classical education from the age of nine, I could not reply. One might think teachers believed that citizens of the Roman empire only communicated with each other in writing.

  Down into another valley we went and up another ridge. The narrow top was all rock and pines and led gently downhill. The hermit said that the frontier straddled the ridge and was somewhere below us. He proposed that we should leave Moshe and Wanda to rest and eat while he and I went ahead to detect the guard post, if any, and settle on a route which could be easily found and followed at night. I refused to hear of it. I would go out alone and when I returned he and Wanda must make for home at once.

  The first sign of the frontier was a wooden watchtower, unexpected in such remoteness. Evidently the hermit’s knowledge of the borderland was out of date; the summit of the ridge, with its fairly open forest and silent, easy going over the pine needles, must have been a favourite route for illicit travellers between Poland and Slovakia. Trees had been cut down along the line, so that I could get a good view of the post from the edge of the remaining cover. There was a guard close to the watchtower and barbed wire – an impassable roll of it – closing the approach. My first thought was that the enemy could have chosen a better spot for the barrier, since it seemed unlikely that the wire ran all the way down to the valleys on the east and west sides of the ridge. Any enterprising fugitive ought to be able to find a way round it.

  I started by exploring the promising western side, which was below t
he watchtower’s line of sight. The trees had not been cleared and the wire disappeared into them. In case the engineer of the SD had been more professional than I thought, I approached very cautiously and found that the wire ended at the edge of a precipice, and a crumbling edge at that. So I went back and tried the eastern side. This was too bare and steep for all but a scatter of trees. A network of goat paths ran between the rocks, here and there blocked by wire. I suspected that anyone who confidently avoided the obstruction would have his foot blown to bits, or at least set off an alarm. The guards were bound to get their man, especially if there were a searchlight on the watchtower to help.

  I turned back into the safety of the pines and was about to rejoin my companions and report that this route offered little hope of getting across into Slovakia, when a party of five men, bristling with arms, set out from the guard house for an evening patrol. Some of them were at the mercy of the Mannlicher slung on my back, but that would do us no good. The consequent alert all along the Polish side of the frontier would mean that we should walk into trouble at easier crossings where the guards might otherwise be taking their duties less seriously.

  Dusk was falling as the patrol did a short round of that difficult east side. When they failed to flush any Poles or partridges from the shelter of the rocks, they filed off into the forest on the summit of the ridge, going out along the eastern side and certain afterwards to search the west. If I had been alone there, they could search as long as they liked, but they could not miss the group of two men and a donkey even if Wanda kept her mouth shut. That was improbable, for she liked to welcome the stranger.

  Action of some sort I had to take. I thought of allowing them to be arrested and attacking as they were brought back to the guard house. But would they be brought back? One was a Pole and the other a Jew, both expendable on the spot. Then I thought of giving the patrol more sporting game to hunt, but if I got away it would only be a temporary help to the others. I remember wondering what was on the other side of the frontier and whether Slovaks, in the improbable event of wanting to slip into Poland, would have the same trouble at that post which I had conceitedly judged to be badly placed.