The Polish Officer
by Alan Furst

  Transmission of 12 May. 1:25 A.M.

To Director. Source: Albert

Railway Bureau designates departures 21 May/26 May. 3rd class and livestock cars making up at Reims yards. Route: Reims/Metz/ Trier/Würzburg/Prague/Breslau/Cracow/Tarnow. Including: Artillery regiment 181, Fusilier Regiment 202 (Stettin), Grenadier Regiments 80, 107, 253 (Wiesbaden). Grenadier regiments 151, 162, and 176 (Wehrkreis X, Hamburg).

Of 21 Divisions in France as of 4/22/41, total of 9 (135,000 men) now moved east.

De Milja’s railroad clerk. Fussy little man, fierce patriot. Dead drop at the Église Sainte Thérèse—Albert to the six o’clock mass, de Milja at ten. The take from Wehrmacht rail scheduling made de Milja’s heart lift. Great numbers of troops—and their vehicles, weapons, files, and draft horses—on the move from conquered France and Belgium to conquered Poland. That meant Russia. And that meant the end. There was in Wilno a historical marker, alongside the Moscow road, that read “On 28 June, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with 450,000 men.” Then, on the other side, approached from the east, was a different message: “On 9 December, 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with 900 men.”

Could Adolf Hitler—shrewd, cunning—do such a foolish thing? Maybe not. De Milja had observed that the failed Operation Sealion had been undertaken without a feint, without deception. If the Germans were going to try again, June would be the time to lay a false trail, such as the shipment of men and arms to the east.

To find out, de Milja had Albert on the one hand, Vera on the other. The Comte de Rieu had been true to his word, Vera was hired as a clerk—“But in six months, we’ll see about something better”—by the Jeder Einmal in Paris organization. This was Goebbels at work, the phrase meant Paris for Everybody Once. A morale builder for the military, and a spy’s dream. Everybody meant just that—from privates to generals, two weeks’ leave in romantic, naughty Paris. The brothels and the nightclubs were fully staffed, the inflated Occupation Reichsmark would buy an astonishing mound of gifts for Momma and Poppa and the ever-faithful Helga.

The German empire now ran from Norway to North Africa, from Brest, France, to Brest Litovsk in Poland. Getting all those people in and out of Paris was a logistical nightmare, but not for the efficient Jeder organization, a vast travel agency coordinating hotels, barracks, and train reservations. They simply had to know—thus Vera had to know—where everybody was: the location of every unit in the German war machine. Where it was strong, and where it wasn’t.

French students still went to university—a privilege not enjoyed in Poland, where by Himmler’s order the slave population was to learn to count on its fingers and acknowledge orders with affirmative grunts. De Milja’s response was to hide one of his W/T operators in a tiny room in the student quarter of the fifth arrondissement. The agent seemed to belong there, with a beard tracing the outline of his jaw, a piercing student gaze, and hair he cut himself.

It was in the tiny room, with pictures of philosophers pinned to the walls, that de Milja learned, from a Sixth Bureau transmission on 17 May, that the operation in Vannes had to be completely reworked. The Pathfinder pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100 now drove their own cars to the airfield rather than going by bus.

And it was in the tiny room that de Milja learned, from a Sixth Bureau transmission of 19 May, that he’d been fired.

It wasn’t put that way—the word relieved was not used—but that was what it meant. De Milja’s reaction was first shock, then anguished disbelief. Why? How could this happen? What had he done wrong?

“Is this correct?” he asked the operator.

“I believe so,” the man said. He was embarrassed, did not meet de Milja’s eyes. “Of course I can request retransmission. Or clarification.”

But it was already quite clear. The reference to de Milja by his assigned cipher, rendezvous on a certain beach on a certain night, to be transported back to Sixth Bureau London headquarters for reassignment. Prepare all field agents and technical staff for a change of resident officer.

He did that. Vera didn’t like it. Albert nodded grimly, war was war. He could say nothing to Lisette Roubier, to Zimmer at the coal company, to the people who were simply there in his life as he was in theirs. The French placed great store by daily encounters, small friendships carried on a few minutes at a time, and he would have liked to have said good-bye.

Lost people, lost money. Huysmanns coal, probably the apartment on the avenue Hoche, gone. Abandoned. Intelligence services had to operate in that fashion, build and walk away, it was in the nature of their existence. But de Milja knew, in a hungry city, what that money would buy.

A certain night in June, sweet and sad, he chased Madame Roubier around the bed with real conviction. “Oh my,” she said, and scowled with pleasure. Then it was time to go and he kissed her on the lips and she put her arms around him and squeezed him tight. Pulling back a little to have a look at him, her eyes were shiny in the peach light that made her pretty. She knew, she knew. What, exactly? Could you fool a woman you made love to? Well, of course you could, he thought. Well, of course you couldn’t.

The tears never quite came. A French woman understood love. Its beginning, and its ending. “Shall I see you tomorrow?”

“Not quite sure,” he said. “I’ll telephone in the afternoon.”

“If not, then some other time,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Au revoir.” I’ll see you again.

“Adieu,” she said. Not in this life.

Later he stood at the door of the apartment on the avenue Hoche. Dawn just breaking, the sky in the window a dozen shades of blue.

He had to ride the trains for long days across the springtime fields. He tried, again and again, to find a reason for what had happened, and was shocked at how broken his heart was. Over the months in Paris he had thought he hated what he did. Maybe not. Out the train window: spring earth, flowering apple trees, villages with bakeries and town halls. He had lost a lot of people, he realized. The obvious ones; Janina the telegraphist, Mademoiselle Herault, Veronique. And the not-so-obvious ones; Genya Beilis, and Fedin. Could someone else do better? Is that what the Sixth Bureau thought? You should be happy to be alive, he told himself savagely. But he wasn’t.

Four nights on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just north of the Spanish border, where the last Polish ship, the Batory, had departed in June of 1940, twelve months earlier. He pretended to be a tourist, a specter from another time, strolled down to the beach at night, then uncovered a hidden bicycle and worked his way north, to a deserted stretch of rocky shore miles from a road. There he sat amid the dune grass, waiting, as the ocean crashed against the beach, but no light signaled. He stayed at a boardinghouse run by a Portuguese couple who had lived in France for thirty years and barely acknowledged that a war was in progress. There were other guests, but they averted their eyes, and there were no conversations. Everybody on the run now, he thought, in every possible direction.

Then at last, on 28 May, a light.

A rubber boat gliding over a calm sea. Two sailors with their faces lamp-blacked, and a man he’d never seen before, perhaps his replacement, brought into shore. Older, heavyset, distinguished, with thick eyebrows. They shook hands and wished each other well.

The sailors worked hard, digging their paddles into the water. The land fell away, France disappeared into the darkness. De Milja knelt in the stern of the little boat. Above the sound of the waves lapping against the beach he could hear a dog barking somewhere on the shore. Two barks, deep and urgent, repeated over and over again.

In London, people seemed pale, cold and polite, bright-eyed with fatigue. They spent their days running a war, which meant questions with no answers and ferocious, bureaucratic infighting. Then at night the bombs whistled down and the city burned.

De Milja was quartered in a small hotel just north of Euston Station. He had braced himself for criticism, or chilly disapproval, even accusations, but none of that happened. Some of the British liaison staff seemed not entirely sure why he’d shown up. Colonel Vyborg was “away.” The Polish officers he reported to that May and early June he had never met before. The ZWZ, he realized, had grown up. Had become an institution, with a bottom, a middle and a top. Poles had found their way to England by every conceivable means, ordinary and miraculous. And they all wanted to shoot at somebody. But getting them to that point—fed, dressed, assigned, transported—took an extraordinary effort, a price paid in meetings and memoranda.

This was the war they wanted de Milja to fight. In the course of his debriefing he was told, in a very undramatic way, why he’d been relieved. Somebody somewhere, in the infrastructure that had grown up around the government-in-exile, had decided he’d lost too many people. The senior staff had taken his part, particularly Vyborg and his allies, but that battle had eventually been lost and there were others that had to be fought.

De Milja didn’t say a word. The people around the table looked down, cleared their throats, squared the papers in front of them. Of course he’d done well, they said, nobody disputed that. Perhaps he’d just been unlucky. Perhaps it had become accepted doctrine in some quarters that his stars were bad. De Milja was silent, his face was still. Somebody lit a cigarette. Somebody else polished his spectacles. Silence, silence. “What we need you to do now,” they said, “is help to run things.”

He tried. Sat behind a desk, read reports, wrote notes in the margins, and sent them away. Some came back. Others appeared. A very pleasant colonel, formerly a lawyer in Cracow, took him to an English pub and let him know, very politely, that he wasn’t doing all that well. Was something wrong? He tried harder. Then, one late afternoon, he looked up from A’s analysis of XYZ and there was Vyborg, framed in the doorway.

Now at least he would have the truth, names and faces filled in. But it wasn’t so very different from what he’d been told. This was, he came to realize, not the same world he’d lived in. The Kampfgeschwader 100 operation, for instance, had been canceled. The RAF leadership felt that such guerrilla tactics would lead the Germans to brutalize downed and captured British airmen—the game wasn’t worth the candle.

“You’re lucky to be out of it,” Vyborg said one day at lunch. They ate in a military canteen in Bayswater Road. Women in hairnets served potatoes and cauliflower and canned sausage.

De Milja nodded. Yes, lucky.

Vyborg looked at him closely. “It takes time to get used to a new job.”

De Milja nodded again. “I hate it,” he said quietly.

Vyborg shrugged. Too bad. “Two things, Alexander. This is an army—we tell people what to do and they do it the best they know how. The other thing is that the good jobs are taken. You are not going to Madrid or to Geneva.”

Vyborg paused a moment, then continued. “The only person who’s hiring right now runs the eastern sector. We have four thousand panzer tanks on the border and prevailing opinion in the bureau says they will be leaving for Moscow on 21 June. Certainly there will be work in Russia, a great deal of work. Because those operatives will not survive. They will be replaced, then replaced again.”

“I know,” de Milja said.

 

 

THE

FOREST

ON 21 JUNE 1941, by the Koden bridge over the river Bug, Russian guards—of the Main Directorate of Border Troops under the NKVD—were ordered to execute a spy who had infiltrated Soviet territory three days earlier as part of a provocation intended to cause war. The man, a Wehrmacht trooper, had left German lines a few miles to the west, swum the river just after dark, and asked to see the officer in charge. Through an interpreter he explained he was from Munich, a worker and a lifelong communist. He wished to join the Soviet fighting forces, and he had important information: his unit had orders to attack the Soviet Union at 0300 hours on the morning of 22 June.

The Russian officer telephoned superiors, and the information rose quickly to very senior levels of the counterespionage apparat. Likely the Kremlin itself was consulted, likely at very high, the highest, levels. Meanwhile, the deserter was kept in a barracks jail on the Soviet side of the river. The guards tried to communicate with him—sign language, a few words of German. He was one of them, he let them know, and they shared their cigarettes with him and made sure he had a bowl of barley and fat at mealtime.

Late in the afternoon of 21 June, an answer came down from the top: the German deserter is a spy and his mission is provocation: shoot him. The officer in charge was surprised but the order was clear, and he’d been told confidentially that the British Secret Service had orchestrated similar incidents all along the Soviet/German border—formerly eastern Poland—to foster suspicion, and worse, between the two nations.

The sergeant assigned to take care of the business sighed when he came to collect the deserter. He’d felt some sympathy for the man, but, it seemed, he’d been tricked. Well, that was the world for you. “Podnimaisa zvieshchami,” he said to the German. This was formula, part of a ritual language that predated the Revolution and went back to czarist times. Get going, with things, it meant. You are going to be executed. If he’d said Get going, with overcoat, without things, for example, it would have meant the man was going to be deported, and his blanket and plate should be left behind.

The German didn’t understand the words, but he could read the sergeant’s expression and could easily enough interpret the significance of the Makarov pistol thrust in his belt. At least I tried, he thought. He’d known where this all might lead, now it had led there, now he had to make peace with his gods and say good-bye, and that was that.

They walked, with a guard of three soldiers, to the edge of the river. It was a warm evening, very still, thousands of crickets racketing away, flickers of summer lightning on the horizon. The deserter glanced back over his shoulder as they walked—anything possible? The sergeant just shook his head and gave him a fraternal little push in the back—be a man. The German took a deep breath, headed where the sergeant pointed and the sergeant shot him in the back of the head.

And again, a coup de grâce in the temple. Then the sergeant signaled to the troopers and they came and took the body away. The sergeant found a stub of cigarette deep in his pocket and lit it in cupped hands, staring across the river. What the hell were they doing over there? This was the third night in a row they’d fired up the panzer tank engines—a huge roar that drowned out the crickets—then changed positions, treads clanking away as the iron plates rolled over the dirt.

The sergeant finished his cigarette, then headed back to his barracks. Too bad about the German. That was fate, however, and there was no sense trying to get in its way. But the sergeant was in its way anyhow, some instinct—the rumbling of German tanks—may have been telling him that, and he himself had less than seven hours to live.