Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  The news he had read that morning had shocked him. He was astonished that, despite all that he and the world had endured in the past four years, he hadn’t lost the capacity to be shocked by the death of a single individual. General Sikorski’s plane had crashed in Gibraltar. Adam felt the death of the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish government-in-exile as a personal loss as well as a blow for Poland. Adam was convinced that General Sikorski would have been the ideal leader for the new Poland that would emerge after the war. There was no one of his vision or stature to replace him.

  The mirth over the barmaid’s rebuff had died down and the voices at the bar rose as the airmen discussed the crash in Gibraltar. They were a cynical lot, always looking for conspiracies, ulterior motives and underhand plots but for once Adam agreed with them. Although engine malfunction could have been responsible, he didn’t believe the crash was an accident. He saw the discovery of the bodies of the murdered Polish officers in Katyn, the allegation that the perpetrators were Russians, and Sikorski’s insistence on a Red Cross investigation, as a related chain of events that had culminated in his assassination. An inquiry would have exposed the Russians as the murderers of the Polish officers, diminishing their moral authority in their alliance with Britain and the United States.

  Adam had thought it strange at first that the British and American leaders hadn’t pressed for an inquiry themselves, and had even encouraged Sikorski to drop his demand, but suddenly he understood. The Allies had caved in because they were afraid of confronting Stalin, in case he made another pact with Hitler. He had done it in 1939 and he could do it again. He had only joined the Allies in 1941 because Hitler had invaded Russia, but there was nothing to stop him from deserting them and changing sides again. If he did that, the alliance would be in tatters, and so would their hope of winning the war.

  The more Adam thought about this scenario, the more depressed he became about the future of his country. Who knew what promises had been made and what secret deals had been negotiated behind closed doors when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had got together, and which countries would become the disposable pawns in their global chess game? From what he’d heard about Stalin, he had no doubt that under the benevolent avuncular façade he was as cunning as a fox, a devious poker player who could out-bluff his gullible allies and win the game, even if he held the weakest hand. When the stakes were so high, and alliances were built on shifting sand, how significant would the fate of Poland seem, and how staunchly would Churchill uphold its rights and keep his promises to uphold the sovereignty of Poland?

  The carousing villagers were halfway through their boozy rendition of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ when a man with a red face veneered with sweat staggered to his feet, raised his foaming glass of Guinness in the direction of the airmen at the bar and shouted in a slurred voice, ‘I’d like to propose a toast to the gallant Polish gentlemen who fly our planes and steal our women.’

  The middle-aged woman beside him tugged at his sleeve to make him sit down. She was glaring at her husband but some of the other men slapped him on the back and nodded agreement.

  A couple of the airmen were already pushing their way past the crowded tables with tense jaws that indicated their intention to settle the issue with their fists. They headed for the speaker who, along with two of his cronies, had already picked up chairs, ready to lash out.

  Adam kicked away his chair and stepped between them. ‘Piss off,’ he told the airmen, signalling them to back away. Turning to the belligerent locals, he said, enunciating each word slowly and carefully, ‘If you want to fight, join the air force and fight the Germans, not us.’

  The uncertain lull that followed was enough to calm the combatants, who gave each other dirty looks but resumed their seats, fists clenched.

  ‘Hey, Adam, I’m shouting you a scotch for restoring peace,’ Tomasz called out. As Adam slipped onto a stool beside him, Romek half turned and muttered, ‘Ungrateful peasants. We’re getting our arses shot off defending their country and all those buggers can think about is that we’re screwing their women.’

  The others were nodding, and, sensing an imminent escalation of anger, Olek broke in.

  ‘Can someone explain this to me? We’ve been dropping cookies on German cities, bridges and industrial areas for over a year now, losing men and bombers, but the Jerries still haven’t surrendered. How long is Harris going to keep up this so-called Operation Millennium?’

  ‘At least you’re taking part in it and not just sitting around like me,’ Adam said bitterly.

  ‘Don’t worry, your turn will come,’ Tomasz said with a chuckle. ‘And when those bastards come at you in their Me 109s, and the flak turns your plane into a sieve, you’ll wish you were just sitting around!’

  Adam’s turn came sooner than he’d expected. As he entered the mustering hall the following day, the officer in charge, a jovial fellow with a veined bulbous nose nodded to him and said, ‘Welcome aboard!’ Then he turned to the others. ‘Off you all go, lads, and get yourselves sorted.’

  As they organised themselves into crews and collected their kits, Olek, their bombardier, pointed at Stewart. ‘You’d better watch this navigator,’ he warned Adam. ‘He attacks pilots!’

  Stewart grinned. ‘Only when they try and bail out while I’m still inside.’ He turned to Adam. ‘We got coned by their searchlights last time,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d had it, and cold sweat was pouring into my daks till I thought I’d pissed myself. Then the bloody pilot panicked and started reaching for his parachute and jabbering that he was going to bail out, so I tackled him and threw him on the floor. The other guy flew the plane till the pilot calmed down enough to take over again.’

  Adam was laughing. The Australian’s flattened vowels and strange expressions never failed to amuse him. ‘I give word of honour I’ll never jabber as you call it, about my parachute, as long as you don’t get us lost.’

  For once Stewart wasn’t smiling. ‘Listen, mate, it gets pretty hairy up there at times. You never know what you’ll do, fair dinkum.’

  Adam’s heart was racing as he walked into the briefing room and saw the map of Germany pinned to the wall. There was an air of taut expectancy and the only sound was the rustling of the airmen’s large celluloid pads. Watson-Smythe sprang onto the dais and tapped his pointer on the map.

  ‘The plan is on,’ he said in his clipped way. ‘This is the night. Your target is Germany’s third largest city, Cologne, and you’re going to bomb the bejesus out of them.’

  As he spoke, Watson-Smythe’s gaze rested on Adam, who sensed a mocking light in his pale blue eyes. He looked down at his pad. Without realising it, he’d scrawled the word ‘Cologne’ on his pad and underneath he’d sketched a cathedral with two spires. He’d passed through the city as a student and had admired the Gothic spires soaring above the large Platz.

  After the weatherman had given his report — full moon, good cloud cover — the intelligence officer estimated how much heavy artillery, how many ack-ack guns, and how many searchlights they might encounter, and explained that a new system of flares used by pathfinders would mark out their targets.

  ‘Air Vice-Marshal Harris believes that a concentrated bomber stream is the best way to win this war,’ Watson-Smythe concluded. ‘So stay close together, lads, and good luck.’

  Lurching in the lorry ferrying them over to the airfield, Adam lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply to control the butterflies in his stomach. It was twilight, and the sight of the lumbering Lancasters stationed on the tarmac made his heart pound. This was it. He tossed his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and looked up. The pale moon hung low in the silent sky that would soon throb with the sound of hundreds of aeroplane engines. Adam climbed into the cockpit and, as he adjusted his goggles with shaking hands, Tomasz touched his packet of Polish soil for luck, while the others kissed the crosses their mothers or sweethearts had given them to keep them safe. Stewart pulled on a wide-brimmed khaki hat with one side turned up, which lo
oked so comical above the goggles that, despite the tension, the others laughed.

  ‘I never fly without it,’ he said. ‘Dad’s digger hat from Gallipoli. It brought him luck, so I reckon it’ll bring me luck, too.’ Seeing Adam’s horrified expression, he added, ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ll take it off as soon as we’re in the air. Just like to keep it close by.’

  Adam’s hand tightened around the cigarette case. That would be his talisman. Sitting high above the tarmac, he switched on the powerful engines of the Lancaster, thankful that it could fly faster, higher and further than the other bombers.

  Behind him, squadrons of Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings were about to lift off. He felt proud to be participating in the biggest concentration of air power in history and, as the huge plane vibrated, he recalled the pioneer aviator he’d hero-worshipped as a boy, and couldn’t wait to get started.

  He rolled the plane to the end of the runway, waited for the green light to flash, and lifted off, marvelling that such a huge machine could rise so smoothly. As they climbed into the sky, Adam looked down and caught his breath as he saw lakes of blood. It was the crimson glow of the setting sun reflected on the clouds but the apocalyptic vision seemed an omen. A moment later, the unnerving sight dissolved into luminous castles and golden mountains, a world of ethereal beauty of clouds above the earth.

  They were flying high over the North Sea and the air had become so thin that they were all using their oxygen masks. Adam had an exhilarating sense that time was standing still when, in the darkness, he saw showers of sparks, as though thousands of lighters were flickering in the sky. The sparks crackled. ‘Flak ahead,’ he said. Instantly the atmosphere inside the Lancaster changed from relaxed camaraderie to taut watchfulness. In a way he couldn’t explain, Adam felt that the crew had instantly drawn closer together, as though they were no longer individuals but parts of one body.

  Around them, he saw the greenish vapour trails of other Lancasters. Focused on the same goal, it felt as though they were all part of one gigantic organism. In the distance he heard volleys of ack-ack fire. The thick dark clouds that had covered them until that moment had turned white and Adam knew that the Lancaster would now be a black sitting duck moving across a white screen, an easy target for the searchlights.

  Suddenly they were flying into hell. The whole sky was lit up by vivid fighter flares, yellow, red and green, like a lethal fireworks display. Every few seconds, one of their planes became engulfed in orange flames and plummeted from the sky. Adam tried to keep the plane steady as they flew through a hail of tracer fire, heading for the centre of the pyrotechnic show. Flak guns spat great lumps of shrapnel and steel that thumped into the fuselage, and the acrid smell of cordite filled his nostrils as they were buffeted about.

  A Lancaster on their starboard beam was caught in a cone of searchlight. A moment later, an eerie white light flooded their plane and Adam’s voice, dead calm, spoke through the intercom.

  ‘We’ve been coned. Hold tight.’

  With all his strength, he pushed the control column forward and to the left, went into a steep descent, then, with a violent lurch, dived, twisted and corkscrewed up again, away from the deadly searchlights, flinging them around like a shuttlecock in a gale. Stewart’s voice broke the silence. ‘Good job I didn’t have much for dinner. I’ve got to find the bloody target.’

  He lay on his belly to line up the target ready for bombing. ‘Four minutes to target,’ he said. Adam knew he had to fly straight and level until the drop. His knuckles ached with the tension because they were at their most vulnerable in this flight position.

  He heard sharp pinging sounds as flak shells struck the fuselage and he gripped the wheel so tightly that his hands seemed welded to it. He wondered whether they’d make it.

  ‘Can’t you drop the fucking thing?’ he hissed at Stewart, who merely replied, ‘Two minutes to target.’ Adam shot an appreciative glance at his navigator. Underneath all that light-hearted bantering, Stewart had nerves of steel.

  ‘Steady, steady, left, left, right,’ he said, directing Adam to the target. It was hard to hear the words above the roar of the engines, the explosions and the bursts of fire all around them, and Adam had to strain to make out what Stewart was saying. Every six seconds, the bomber dropped payload and four-thousand-pound explosives burst like evil stars, their white fires spreading and joining up in the burning city below them.

  When Adam looked down at the blazing city and saw the spires of Cologne Cathedral, something stuck in his throat and he had to clear it several times. He wanted to say the Lord’s Prayer, but although he had lisped the words from the moment he could speak, hands clasped together as he’d knelt at the foot of his bed every night, this time his mind was numb and no words came.

  ‘Cookies gone,’ the gunner announced, and, with a sigh of relief, Stewart called out the new course that would take them home. Suddenly they were flying into a hailstorm of metal. Another succession of thumps rocked the plane. Shells. They held their breath waiting for the explosion. Another shell pierced the fuselage and missed Stewart’s seat by inches.

  His face was white. ‘Strewth, this must be my lucky day,’ he said. ‘Good job I brought my digger’s hat.’

  The hits had made holes in the fuselage and almost immediately the aircraft felt like a freezer. ‘I do like a nice cool breeze on my back while I’m working,’ Stewart quipped.

  ‘Good job I’m flying this low,’ Adam muttered. ‘At least the shells aren’t set to explode at this altitude.’

  The plane shuddered. As he checked the instrument panel, he set his jaw. It was worse than he’d suspected. One engine was over-revving, another had had its propeller shorn off and the third had been struck and had lost oil. This left him with only one engine that worked, but if he used it for more than a few minutes at a time it would overheat.

  The controls were almost impossible to handle because the lines for the trim tabs for the ailerons had been cut. It was a pilot’s worst nightmare. Adam felt as if he were riding a wild bronco at a rodeo, expecting to be hurled off any second.

  The plane had dropped to five thousand feet and he sensed that they’d crash any moment. ‘I’m pressing on the control column as hard as I can, but it’s no good,’ he told the crew. ‘Get ready to bail out.’

  ‘Are you bailing out?’ Olek asked.

  Adam shook his head.

  ‘If you’re staying, so am I,’ Olek said and the others nodded in agreement.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re worrying about, mate,’ Stewart said. ‘We’ve got three dead engines, an unmanageable control column and no hydraulics, but apart from that we’re doing fine.’

  ‘Shut up and help me put more pressure on the control column,’ Adam snapped. Standing behind him, Stewart practically climbed onto his back, and their combined weight helped to move the controls.

  ‘Ditch everything fast to get rid of excess weight,’ Adam said. ‘Everything!’ he repeated as the men hesitated before tossing out oxygen cylinders and parachutes. The die was cast. They’d made their decision and would live or die with the plane.

  As soon as they saw the English coastline, their spirits surged. Almost home. But Adam knew that a crucial test remained. Somehow, he had to land this crippled machine.

  He called ‘Darkie, Darkie’ repeatedly until a wireless operator at an airfield in Kent responded. ‘You have to get to another airfield; you must,’ she insisted. ‘Our runway isn’t long enough for a Lanc.’

  ‘Can’t you understand? There’s no choice. I must land now!’ he shouted.

  He could hear muffled sounds and realised the girl was panic-stricken. Unable to use his flaps, he lowered the wheels. The Lancaster hit the ground with a sickening lurch that ripped the wings off. They bumped over some obstacles until they finally stopped.

  The men emerged from the broken aircraft, white-faced and shaken. Some of them were limping while others had blood streaming down their faces. The medic waiting on the tarmac looke
d at them as though he’d just seen Lazarus rise from the dead.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it! You’ve just taxied across a row of fuel tanks!’ he cried.

  Stewart, whose left arm was broken while his right hand was pressing against his broken clavicle, pointed to the digger’s hat with his good arm. Turning to Adam, he said, ‘Told you this’d bring me luck!’

  Adam reached into his shirt pocket for a handkerchief to wipe the blood streaming from a cut on his forehead and patted the cigarette case.

  Adam was writing his report about their mission a little later when Watson-Smythe strode into the briefing room.

  ‘I’ll thank you to bring the Lancs back in one piece in future, Czartoryski,’ he said. Adam was wondering whether this was a criticism or an example of dry English humour when his superior gave him a brief nod and said, ‘Well done.’

  Thirty-Seven

  As the months went by, Elzunia often saw her neighbour Marta hurrying from the building, always with the little basket that exuded the yeasty smell of freshly baked bread. Marta was a mystery. She couldn’t be going to work at such irregular hours, so where was she taking the bread, and how did she manage to support herself? Apart from her man friend, whose murmurs Elzunia sometimes heard late at night, Marta had no visitors. It was unusual for such an attractive young woman to lead such a solitary life, unless she came from the country and had few friends in the city, but, with her jaunty beret and belted trenchcoat, Marta looked far too sophisticated for a country girl.