As they had been driving through Eastern Poland, they had seen few troops on the road, and, except for unusually large knots of people gathered outside the still lighted cafés, there was no indication in the suburbs of Warsaw that this day had prematurely sealed the fate of millions.
‘Mighty quiet, isn’t it?’ remarked Rex, as they neared the centre of the city. ‘You wouldn’t think there was a war on.’
As he spoke they caught a faint, distant hum. In scarcely more than a minute it had increased to a thunderous roar. Somewhere, belatedly, an air-raid siren screamed its banshee note. The people in the street began to run in all directions. Blinds were nastily pulled down, lights flicked out; a police whistle shrilled a frantic warning. A thin, wailing note followed by an angry swish sounded above the drone of the aircraft engines. Somewhere ahead there was the boom of an explosion. Another and another followed, each coming nearer.
Suddenly, the road in front of them seemed to rise up. Screams of terror were mingled with the crash of falling glass. The Nazis had begun their ghastly work. The war was on—and on in earnest.
8
Night in the Stricken City
They were saved only by Rex’s magnificent driving. As he flung the wheel right over it looked for a moment as though they were going straight through the shattered windows of a drugstore, inside which something had already begun to burn; but, as they mounted the pavement, the car swerved again, tilted on two wheels, bumped and ran back on to the road, missing the yawning crater that the bomb had made by a matter of inches.
More bombs were falling behind them now, and a lurid flare suddenly shot up to their right, where an oil-drum had burst on the roof of a tall building. The staccato crack of anti-aircraft guns was now added to the din, but even by the wildest stretch of the imagination it could not be called a barrage. Much as the Poles distrusted and loathed the Germans, they had not plumbed the depths of the callous brutishness that would send an air armada to murder men, women and children indiscriminately in the congested streets of the Polish capital, without warning and on the very first night of war; so they had sent nearly all their anti-aircraft to war stations and reserved only a few guns to protect the Warsaw Arsenal.
As Rex drove on towards the old city they could hear a second wave of bombers coming up from the west. Slowing down, he shouted: ‘Shall we try to make Jan’s place or run for cover?’
‘Keep going,’ the Duke shouted back. He felt that there was little to choose between the open street and the scant protection offered by the old brick and plaster buildings they were passing. Moreover, if Jan’s mansion were under observation, the middle of an air raid offered the best possible opportunity of reaching it unseen, as the watchers would almost certainly have taken cover.
‘It’s in one of the blocks near the Zamek, didn’t you say?’ shouted Rex.
‘Yes. When we get there His Excellency will direct us.’ Taking out his pistol, de Richleau pointed it at his prisoner and added: ‘No tricks now!’ For your own sake as well as ours, you will be wise to guide us to the Lubieszow mansion by the shortest route.’
‘All right! All right!’ Mack hastily agreed. ‘But for God’s sake don’t point that thing at me. If another bomb drops near us the jolt may send it off.’
He had hardly spoken when the second wave of bombers let go their eggs. All hell seemed let loose. There was a great burst of orange flame further up the street. The façade of a tall building stood out for a moment silhouetted in the glare, its empty windows lit by the red fires raging behind it. Momentarily it seemed to hover, then it bent outward with the slowness of a tired old man and suddenly collapsed, its brick and masonry cascading into the road and sending up huge clouds of choking red-hued dust.
The car lurched from the blast, but Mack’s fears were groundless, as de Richleau still had the safety-catch on his pistol. Again Rex saved them from a smash, or piling up on the great heap of rubble that now blocked the road ahead. Mounting an island and shaving the lamp standard on it, he heaved the car round by a right-angle twist into the side-street they were passing. Two minutes later he turned left and brought them out into the square of the Zamak—the Palace of the old Polish Kings—with its cypress trees and famous granite column on which the great statute of Sigismund III has stood for three hundred years.
As Mack leaned forward to give directions the legend concerning the statue flashed into the Duke’s mind. Sigismund wears the cope of a bishop and a mitre-like crown. In his left hand he holds a huge cross, and in his right a curved sword which for centuries pointed upward. The Poles had a superstition that not until the sword of Sigismund pointed downward would they be free. During the 1914-18 war the terrific shocks resulting from the dynamiting of Warsaw’s bridges displaced the blade, and after the war Poland regained her hard-won freedom. Sadly de Richleau wondered how long she would now be able to retain it.
From the square they passed through several short, old-fashioned streets until Mack told them to pull up and pointed to a big house on their right. They could not see its full extent, but a flare dropped by one of the German aircraft momentarily lit the narrow way, enabling them to glimpse a three-storey, stone-fronted building that had a low Roman arch with iron filigree gates leading to an interior courtyard and, further along, a tall nail-studded door reached by three narrow stone steps, flanked by ancient iron flambeau holders.
The raid was still in progress, but the bombs were now falling on a section of the city some distance away. Searchlights streaked the sky, occasionally picking up and holding one of the Nazi murder planes. They were flying quite low and made little attempt to evade the beams, knowing the hopeless inadequacy of the ground defences and treating them with contempt. An ambulance clanged past the end of the street, its bell ringing wildly: a nearby block had received a shower of incendiaries and was now blazing with a lurid glare.
Marie Lou’s heart was beating wildly as she got out of the car with the others. De Richleau hustled Mack in front of him while Rex ran forward and tugged at the old-fashioned iron bell-pull that dangled beside the nail-studded door.
For a minute or two they stood clustered together at the bottom of the steps, then the door was flung back to reveal a hugely fat, bald-headed man with a small pointed beard, who held aloft a big brass oil-lamp in his free hand.
‘Come in! Come in!’ he cried in Polish. ‘Quickly, before these accursed Germans kill us all.’
As they slipped inside de Richleau asked if Jan were at home.
‘No, no, my master is at the front,’ wheezed the Polish Falstaff as he led them hurriedly across the uneven surface of the highly polished wood that floored a wide hall. ‘Come down to the cellars, We shall be safe there, even if they drop a Big Bertha on us.’
In the uncertain light they caught a glimpse of a great carved stairway, tapestries, bearskin rugs, old weapons on the shadowed walls and polished brasses, then they were following their guide through a low arch under the side of the great staircase and down a broad flight of stone steps.
‘It’s bad luck that the Germans should have put the electric power station out of action in their first raid,’ remarked the Duke.
‘Have they?’ replied ‘Falstaff’, wagging his bald head. ‘Well, that will not matter to us here. It shows only how right my master is to stick to the old ways. He has often said to me, “What was good enough for us Poles before the partition, Borki, is good enough for us today”; and his sainted father was like that before him, so we have never defaced our fine house with the ugly contraptions of gas or electricity.’
At the bottom of the stairway they entered a series of cellars, all roofed with massive Roman arches formed from huge blocks of stone. The air raid was now only a dull roar in the distance. As they entered the third cellar they saw a group of people, mainly women, sitting about with coats, and dressing-gowns evidently hastily pulled over their night attire.
A slim figure whose golden hair flashed in the lamplight suddenly detached itself from the gr
oup and came running forward. Next moment de Richleau held Lucretia in his arms and was murmuring: ‘Thank God! Thank God you’re safe.’
‘And you!’ she cried. ‘And you! I’ve been most terribly anxious these last few days. Jan wouldn’t let me telphone Lubieszow, and I feared that brute Mack had arrested you all!’
‘On the contrary,’ laughed the Duke, ‘His Excellency has afforded, and is still affording, us his personal protection.’
With a little gasp Lucretia recognised the Polish statesman just as she disengaged herself from the Duke’s embrace to kiss Marie Lou.
‘And Rex!’ she exclaimed. ‘What in the world are you doing here? But where is Richard?’
‘I only wish I knew,’ replied de Richleau with sudden gravity. ‘He and Simon left Lubieszow three nights ago to pick you up and bring you to a secret rendezvous, so that we could all make a break for the frontier together. Have you no news of them at all?’
‘No, none. I did not even know that Simon and Rex were in Poland.’
‘And what of Jan?’
‘He got back here yesterday morning, but he stayed only about twenty minutes; just long enough to tell me of the terrible treachery that had been planned at Lubieszow and that he was on the run because he had tried to kill—er—someone. He’s gone into hiding and is now—’
‘That’s enough,’ the Duke said abruptly. ‘It would not interest His Excellency to know where Jan is at the moment; and that he is still safe is all that matters to us. I should have warned you,’ he added in Spanish, ‘that His Excellency is our prisoner and knows that if he makes one false move, such as appealing for help to the servants here, either Rex or I will blow out his brains.’
More explanations followed, and it transpired that the Falstaffian Borki was Jan’s major-domo, who had been placed in charge while his master was away. The rest of the group were all household servants, the men among them consisting of only an old butler, an even older head groom and a lame porter, all the others having left to join their reserve regiments on notification.
After Lucretia had told Borki that the new arrivals were friends of his master he accepted them with the utmost politeness; and, on learning of their long journey, himself went to the deserted kitchens in search of cold food for them, while the elderly butler was sent off into the inner cellar to get a couple of bottles of hock.
By the time they had finishd this most welcome repast the air raid was over. Borki ordered some of the servants to prepare beds for the newcomers and packed the rest off to their rooms; then he led the way upstairs and escorted his master’s guests to a damask-hung sitting-room on the ground floor.
‘What does Falstaff know about Jan’s situation?’ de Richleau asked, speaking Spanish again in a quick aside to Lucretia.
‘I shouldn’t think Jan gave him any details of the plot,’ Lucretia answered in her sibilant mother tongue, ‘but he knows that his master has quarrelled violently with some of his superior officers, and in consequence, has gone into hiding.’
‘Does he know where?’
‘Yes, Jan is still in Warsaw. He is at his old tutor’s flat, and as we didn’t think it safe to use the telphone we arranged that Borki should act as messenger between us.’
‘He is to be trusted, then?’
‘Implicitly. To him no member of the Lubieszow family can do wrong, and I am sure that he would lay down his life for any of them.’
‘Good.’ The Duke turned to Borki and spoke in Polish. ‘The Contessa tells me you are aware that your master is in great danger. That is the reason for His Excellency’s presence here. We are holding him as a hostage for your master’s safety. Can you suggest a place where he could pass the night without arousing the suspicions of the servants that we are keeping him here against his will? Comfort must be a secondary consideration to security. It may cost your master his life if we allow our prisoner to escape.’
Mack stepped forward threateningly and snapped at the bulky majordomo: ‘If you aid these people it will cost you your life. I warn you. They are foreign spies—dangerous enemies of the State. Poland is now at war, and the Government will have assumed emergency powers as from this morning. To aid and abet your country’s enemies is high treason and punishable by death.’
‘The lady whom my master left in my care, and told me to protect with my life, vouches for them, Excellency; and that is enough for me,’ replied Borki quietly. For a moment he stood there, fingering his little beard, then he turned to the Duke.
‘One of the smaller cellars would-be the safest place, but if there is another air raid the other servants will rush down and perhaps find out that he is locked up there. Wait, though—I have it. We will put him in the tower room. It is not in truth a tower—just a cupola above the level of the roof—but there is a separate stair to it, a stout door, and its windows are only slits through which I could barely pass my arm.’
‘Is it ever occupied?’
‘No one has slept there for a long time now, but there is a bed in it which I could have made up. I could tell the housekeeper that His Excellency has asked for it particularly as the quietest room in the house, because he sleeps badly and wishes to be away from all noise. None of them will know that he has been locked in; and for such a distinguished guest—well, perhaps it is fitting that I should take his breakfast up myself.’
‘Borki, you are a man after my own heart!’ exclaimed the Duke. ‘Nothing could be better.’
When the huge barrel of a major-domo had left them to see about Mack’s room, Lucretia said anxiously: ‘I do hope Jan is all right. I’ve been worrying myself silly about him ever since that fiendish air raid started. If only I could telephone!’
‘I don’t think you need worry overmuch,’ de Richleau sought to reassure her. ‘I was in London during one of the worst raids of the last war, and although there was a great deal of noise, it was remarkable how comparatively few people were killed.’
‘Oh, the last war!’ Marie Lou shrugged. ‘Air fighting was in its infancy then, so I don’t see how you can compare it with the sort of horror that’s begun to happen now.’
‘On the contrary, Princess. For those who went through it 1914-18 will prove quite a useful yardstick. Naturally, if this conflict continues for any considerable time the devastation will be infinitely greater; because last time aerial bombardment started from scratch, whereas this time it starts as a well-developed weapon. But is is a great mistake to imagine that air raids in the last war consisted only of machines made of canvas and bamboo from which hand-grenades and little tin canisters were dropped. The Zeppelins carried bombs as big as anything that was used twenty years later in Spain, and British scientists were developing a one-ton bomb at the time of the Armistice.’
‘Sure,’ Rex agreed. ‘When I was a kid and first went into flying I just grabbed every book I could get on air fighting. By 1918 air battles were no mean engagements. Some of the ace pilots bagged as many as seventy enemy planes to their own guns, and when the shemozzle ended the old Royal Flying Corps had a strength of 22,000 aircraft. I don’t reckon those raids on London, Paris and Cologne can have been anything of a picnic.’
De Richleau nodded. ‘They definitely were not. But the point I was endeavouring to make was that, however terrifying an air raid may seem and however horrifying its results in the places where the bombs actually fall, if a great city is the target the consequent casulaties in any one raid can only be a very small percentage of the total population. For instance, Warsaw has a population of over a million, but the city covers an area of several square miles, and at least two-thirds of the bombs must have fallen on open spaces or commercial buildings which are unoccupied at night. From the number of bombs we heard fall I doubt very much if the casualties amounted to anything near a thousand; but if they did that is less than one tenth of one per cent of the population; so the odds in favour of Jan having escaped injury are terrific.’
‘You’re a terribly plausible person, Greyeyes,’ sighed Marie Lou. �
�I only hope you’re right, because I suppose Richard and Simon are somewhere in the city, too, locked up in a prison.’
‘He is right, darling,’ Lucretia supported the Duke quickly. I’ve been through lots of air raids during these last few years in Spain. I never got over that sickening feeling in the lower part of my tummy; but experience soon taught us that, if we kept under cover, very few of us ever got hurt. I often used to keep my courage up by telling myself that it was much more likely that I should be knocked over by a car next day. Still, one can’t help worrying about those we love in a raid, although I expect all of them are really all right.’
‘I’ll bet they are,’ said Rex. ‘The thing is now, how do we set about finding Richard and Simon?’
‘I don’t think we can do anything tonight,’ replied the Duke. ‘With the war having broken out only this morning and all the new emergency measures to enforce, and the air raid on top of that, the authorities must be up to their eyes in work, and we’d get very little satisfaction out of them. In the morning, though, I think His Excellency might be able to help us.’
Since Borki had left the room Mack had sat slumped in an armchair and followed the conversation without contributing a word to it. Now he stood up and said firmly:
‘You are all living in a fool’s paradise if you think you can get away with this. It must have been known hours ago at police headquarters that I was seen with three of you on the way back to Warsaw. By this time the Secret Police will be combing the capital for me.’
‘Not necessarily,’ replied the Duke. ‘Remember, the police patrols that challenged us on the road saw you in your own car, perfectly well and in full possession of your senses, and none of them made the remotest suggestion that you had been kidnapped. Evidently your personal staff have thought it wisest to keep that to themselves for fear that if they said too much the whole of your treacherous transactions with the Germans at Lubieszow would come out. They were mixed up in that business themselves, and I don’t suppose they have any more desire to be shot as traitors than you have. In fact, I should not be surprised if most of them have been hoping that you are dead.’
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