The Red Army came to Warsaw in August, and what came with it was the specific quality of a thing that has been moving for a long time and has accumulated momentum that simple resistance cannot stop — not an army exactly, or not only an army, but the weight of an ideology that believed its own arrival was inevitable and was not entirely wrong about that belief, having arrived at the gates of a city that represented, if it fell, the end of the thing that Poland had only just become.
I had been fighting retreats for six weeks by the time we reached Warsaw's outskirts, which was the kind of fighting that grinds in a different way from advancing — the constant calculation of what can be held for how long against what strength, the giving of ground that has been paid for and the paying for it again when the line finally stabilises somewhere further back. The mage battalion had gone during the retreat. Not all at once — nothing in a fighting retreat goes all at once, it goes piece by piece, which is what makes fighting retreats the specific kind of exhausting they are.
Lieutenant Górski's section of the mage battalion went first, at a river crossing east of Warsaw where the Red forces had positioned their own air capability above the crossing and what had been a covering action became something else when the Soviet mages engaged the Polish constructs directly. I watched it from the ground, which was the mage battle's ground-level experience — not the engagement itself but its consequences, the constructs going down one by one, some dissolving cleanly into aether and some less cleanly, the men inside them making the journey from altitude to ground in the ways that journeys from altitude to ground conclude when the construct is no longer capable of managing the descent.
The rest of the battalion went over the following two weeks in similar ways — picked apart by Soviet air capability that had been specifically organised to address the Polish mages, the Red command having apparently learned from the Great War the specific vulnerability of mage constructs to concentrated anti-air and having prepared accordingly. By the time we reached Warsaw's defensive line there were no mages left above us, which meant the sky belonged to whoever the Soviets had put in it, and what they had put in it was enough.
We dug in on the line south of Warsaw and we waited.
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The artillery started before dawn.
Both sides' artillery, which was the specific horror of the Warsaw position — the Red guns finding our line with the accuracy of forces that had spent two weeks observing the retreat and mapping the positions, and our own guns answering from inside the city in the way that artillery answers when it is firing in defence of something and understands what losing the thing means. The shells came from both directions and the ground between our line and the city became a space that nothing could cross without crossing through what both artilleries were doing to it.
I was in a forward trench with what remained of my section — five men, from the seven who had come out of Kiev and the various additional men who had joined us during the retreat and the various subtractions the retreat had made from the additions. Sergeant Grabowski, who had been with me since the beginning of the campaign and who had the quality of a man whose continued survival had become an article of faith for the men around him. Private Lewandowski, who was sixteen and had lied about his age in the recruitment office and whom I had known was lying and had not reported because sixteen-year-olds who want to fight cannot generally be stopped from fighting and can only be aimed at something that will make the fighting useful. Private Dąbrowski, Private Szymański, Private Wojciechowski — men whose names I knew and whose faces I knew and who were alive at dawn and whom I was watching with the specific attention of a man who understands that the dawn is the last easy moment available.
The Red Army's advance began at first light.
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They came across the open ground east of our position in waves, which was the tactic that the Great War had rendered obsolete and which the Soviets were using anyway because the tactic that replaces waves in open ground requires resources they had committed elsewhere and could not withdraw in time. Wave after wave — not the suicidal rigidity of 1914's walking charges but something more adapted, using whatever cover the ground provided, moving in rushes and pausing and moving again, the specific infantry technique of men who have learned from a war how to cross ground that is trying to kill them.
Our artillery found the first wave at four hundred metres and the first wave became a problem for the ground rather than a problem for our line, the shells walking through it with the mathematical indifference of artillery doing what artillery does at sufficient density. But the second wave came behind the first and the artillery could not walk fast enough to stay ahead of both, and the third came behind the second, and by the time the fourth wave was crossing the ground our artillery had redistributed enough of itself toward the city that our forward position was receiving less support from behind and more direct attention from in front.
Grabowski, who had been on the parapet with a rifle and a precision that four years of various wars had installed in him, took a round through the shoulder at the moment the fourth wave was at two hundred metres. Not a killing wound — he had the specific annoyed expression of a man whose concentration has been interrupted rather than a man who is dying — but a wound that moved his shooting arm to a different category of usefulness and dropped him from the parapet to the trench floor, where he sat with his back against the wall and his remaining hand pressed to his shoulder and continued to give useful observations about the fourth wave's approach in terms that I will not reproduce verbatim but which communicated his assessment clearly.
Private Lewandowski, sixteen years old from Łódź, who had lied about his age and who I had known was lying and who had been a better soldier than most men twice his age for the entirety of the campaign, took a burst from a Soviet light machine gun that had been brought forward with the fourth wave and positioned to provide suppressive fire against our parapet. The burst caught him in the face and the upper chest simultaneously, which resolved the question of his survival before his body had fully registered the question was being asked, and he went down in the trench without the expression of surprise that most deaths in this book have produced because the round that took his face did not leave the face in a condition to carry an expression.
I fired. I worked the bolt. I fired. Private Dąbrowski was firing beside me and Private Szymański on the other side, and the fourth wave was at one hundred metres and coming, and the fifth wave was visible beyond it, and I was calculating the specific arithmetic of what we had available against what was coming and the arithmetic was producing results I did not like.
The Red forces reached our wire at eighty metres and the wire slowed them the way wire slows things — not stopping them, just making the crossing expensive, the men in the front of the wave going down on the wire or through it with the momentum of men who had been running toward it for four hundred metres and had committed to the crossing regardless of the cost. Three of them went through a gap and were in the open ground between the wire and our parapet, and I put a round into the first and Dąbrowski took the second and the third made it to the parapet before Szymański resolved the question with a bayonet thrust that went into the man's chest with the sound I had learned to recognise across two wars and which had not become more familiar with repetition.
Then the last chance came.
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The order came from somewhere behind us — I did not see who gave it, only heard it relayed down the trench line in the way orders travel when the situation has passed the point where deliberation is available and what remains is only the doing.
"Charge. Now. Everything forward."
I looked at Grabowski, who looked back at me from the trench floor with the expression of a man who has processed the order and found it operationally sound and personally inconvenient.
"Go," he said. "I'll cover."
I went up the ladder. Dąbrowski and Szymański and Wojciechowski came with me. Behind us, across the whole extent of the line, I could hear the same thing happening — men coming up from their positions and going forward, the specific sound of a charge that has decided the only available direction is toward the thing coming at you rather than away from it.
The machine guns on our line opened when we went forward — not firing at us, firing over us, into the waves that were still coming from the east, the traversing arcs finding the density of the approaching Soviet forces in the way that machine guns find density and doing what machine guns do with what they find. I had seen this from the other side in 1914 at Konin, the machine guns cutting through advancing men with the mechanical patience of something that does not tire and does not feel and does not stop until it runs out of ammunition or is made to stop by other means.
The Soviet waves broke. Not all at once — the wave that had reached our wire was already committed and could not break, and we met it in the open ground between the wire and our parapet in the kind of fighting that does not require description because every chapter of this book has described some version of it and the version here was no different in its essentials. But the waves behind it, seeing the machine guns and the charge simultaneously, began the specific motion of men recalculating what they had been advancing toward, and the recalculation produced retreat, and the retreat became general in the way that retreats become general — one section pulling back producing the conditions for the next section to pull back, the momentum reversing.
The Red Army ran.
Not all of them. Not the ones already committed, not the ones in the wire or past it. But the mass of what had been coming east — the waves behind the waves, the reserves, the momentum of an army that had been advancing for six weeks and had arrived at a line it could not cross — turned and went back the way it had come, and the specific energy of a retreating army, which is different in quality from the energy of an advancing army in the way that fear is different from confidence while being made of the same material, carried the retreat faster than the advance had come.
I was in the open ground, thirty metres forward of our position, when the artillery shell landed.
I did not see it land. That is the nature of artillery — you do not see the shell that finds you. You see the shells that miss, the ones that land close enough to be present in your awareness as events. The one that finds you is simply the last thing and the next thing simultaneously, with no interval between them for any intermediate experience.
Private Dąbrowski, who had been three metres to my right, was outside the radius.
Sergeant Józef Kowalski, who had been a carpenter from Słupca and a soldier of the Russian Imperial Army and a prisoner of war in a Bavarian labour camp and a resistance fighter in an occupied Poland and a volunteer in the Polish Army and a husband and a father of children he had seen for too few of the days available, was not outside the radius.
The shell resolved the question of Józef Kowalski's location with the specific totality of direct artillery hits, which do not leave the kind of thing that can be buried with a ceremony appropriate to the person it had been. What the ground received was not Józef Kowalski in any meaningful sense of the name. It received what artillery makes of men when artillery finds them at that range, which is the last and most honest statement the war made about what it thought of the men inside it — that they were material subject to the same physical laws as everything else, and that those laws, at sufficient energy, did not distinguish between the material of men and the material of the ground the men were standing on.
The second promise was not kept.
Not because Józef Kowalski had not intended to keep it. He had intended to keep it in the way he had kept the first one — through the specific stubbornness of a man who has decided that surviving is something he owes the people waiting for him. The artillery did not negotiate with intentions.
Justyna would wait. She would wait in the way she had waited during the Bavarian camp — with the provisional patience of a woman who has learned that waiting is what you do when the alternative is not waiting, which is worse. She would wait until the waiting became something else, which is what waiting always becomes when the person you are waiting for is not coming back. She would know, eventually, with the specific certainty that wives know these things without being told, that the second promise had been made in good faith by a man who had meant every word of it.
That would not make it less broken.
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The Battle of Warsaw was won. The history books — the ones that would be written in the years that followed, by men who had not been in the open ground south of Warsaw when the artillery was walking through it — would call it a miracle, which was the word people used when the arithmetic had come out in a direction it should not have been able to come out in and they needed a word larger than coincidence to describe it.
Poland was independent. Genuinely, functionally independent — not the puppet independence of 1917, not the paper independence of a settlement that left garrisons in the streets, but the independence of a country that had fought for its own survival and won, which was a different category of independence entirely and one that nobody could plausibly argue was merely nominal.
It had cost what it had cost. The cost was not recorded in the history books with the same specificity as the victory, which was how history books generally handled the arithmetic — the victory in the headline, the cost in the footnotes, the specific men who had paid the cost in neither.
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In Berlin, in Vienna, in the various capitals of the successor states that had been carved from the Germano-Hungry Empire's remains, men in rooms were looking at maps. The Empire was gone but the people who had made it were not gone, and the debt the peace settlement had imposed on them was producing, in the population that was being asked to pay it, the specific quality of resentment that very large debts imposed on nations produce — not immediately dangerous, not yet organised into anything with a name, but present, building, looking for the form that would give it direction.
The successor states were rebuilding. The Polish army was rebuilding. The whole of the continent was in the process of becoming whatever it was going to become after what it had just been, and nobody in any of the rooms with any of the maps knew exactly what that was, only that the building of it was going to take a long time and that the thing being built was going to carry, in its foundations, everything the war had put there.
The massed troops on the Empire's eastern borders were not yet moving. They were not yet organised into the thing they would eventually become. They were simply there — present, watching the map, waiting for the form that would give the waiting a direction.
Poland rebuilt.
The world waited.