Poland’s forces were all but immobile, armorless and antiquated, her arsenal better suited to war five decades earlier. Sustained by raw courage, Poland asked the horse to fight the tank.
German land forces ran double and triple envelopments, executed picture-book tactics; massacred, trapped, overwhelmed, sliced, overpowered the near-defenseless but proud enemy. The new book called for the disregard of even the token humanities customarily observed in the organized art of murder known as war.
Death spewed from the skies.
Within hours of the German border violations, the Polish air force, tiny and outdated, was shot to pieces on the ground. Within hours, rail lines were ripped up and supply dumps smoked skyward and hot bridges sizzled as they buckled into rivers. Cities and villages without so much as a gun to fire were leveled into smoldering rubble heaps.
The Luftwaffe, which had learned to violate open cities in Spain, turned all of Poland into one big turkey shoot. It shot down Polish troops fleeing for cover and Polish peasants working in the fields and Polish children in the schoolyards and Polish women nursing in maternity hospitals and Polish nuns at Mass.
Through the Carpathians from Czechoslovakia, List shoved his armor through the mountain passes and turned the Krakow flank at that place where the Gleiwitz radio station hoax was perpetrated. In the center, Reichenau was given the honor of unleashing the greatest mass of iron-treaded monsters, and on his left Blaskowitz enveloped a pocket on the flatlands near the industrial heart of Poznan. And Von Bock and Von Küchler lashed out from northern flanking positions in Prussia and Pomerania and there was no more pesky Polish Corridor.
Indeed, the book had been rewritten. It was the ultimate in mechanical and technical murder. The butchery of Poland—the slaughter of two hundred thousand of her army and scores of thousands of her civilians and the rape of her land—was a new German masterpiece.
Captain Andrei Androfski was knocked senseless by his first sergeant and dragged from the scene of the flaming death of Company A. With a half dozen survivors, they found horses and managed to get back to the Grudziadz base, where an even greater catastrophe had befallen the Ulanys. At Grudziadz, one third of Poland’s forces had been foolishly concentrated for a counterattack which was never delivered. The Germans enveloped them with ridiculous ease and, having trapped them, chopped them to bits. The large Westerplatte Saliant was formed by a double envelopment trapping the Polish marines. Soon, the last of Poland’s cavalry charges was made. With the Polish eagle still waving in defiance, a foolhardy attack tried to break the ring of iron around them. The Germans ungallantly ripped the Ulanys to shreds. The Westerplatte Saliant collapsed. The remaining Ulanys staggered back from Grudziadz to Torun. And ... a last weak gasp, one more charge at Wloclawek, and they were done.
There was no rest, for the German monster clamped its jaws tighter and the saber teeth pressed toward Warsaw at the end of only a week.
Captain Andrei Androfski had four horses shot out from under him in seven days. He was gored with arm and leg wounds and his body covered with bruises and filth. He and First Sergeant Styka were two of a handful of survivors when the brigade finally surrendered after Wloclawek.
On the night of September 7, before the Germans could fully organize prisoner compounds and complete the disarming of the Poles. Andrei, Styka, and four others broke out of their area and under cover of darkness gambled they could swim the treacherous upper Vistula River.
Two of them drowned. The remaining four hid in a forest the next day and at night crawled along the ditches of roads filled with German patrols.
At dawn on September 9 the four found refuge in a peasant’s hut on the outskirts of Plock, a third of the distance back to Warsaw. Beyond normal exhaustion, hunger, thirst, and close to death from his festering wounds, Captain Andrei Androfski allowed himself the luxury of collapsing.
Styka sent the other two men into Plock to fetch a doctor. He hovered over Andrei, who was terribly still and a chalky yellow shade. Andrei had spent the last ounce of reserve strength pulling Styka across the swift river. The soldier’s muddled mind remembered snatches of the past week since dragging Andrei from the burning forest. He saw the vision of his captain leading charge after charge and fighting on even after the end had occurred. He had never seen such anger in a man’s eyes as when they were put into the prisoner compound even though Andrei was barely able to stand. “We’re swimming the river, Styka, as soon as it turns dark.”
The peasant brought Styka bread and lentil soup. The soldier was too weak to lift the spoon or bite through the bread. He lay his head on Andrei’s chest. Yes, there were still heartbeats. His eyes began to shut. Must not sleep until the doctor comes ... must not sleep ...
“Who is he?” the doctor asked.
“My captain,” Styka answered through thick lips. His mind was fuzzy. An ignorant man, Styka was almost illiterate and too exhausted to put into words the horror he had seen in the past week. Only when the doctor promised to remain with Andrei did he fall on the floor by Andrei’s bed and drop off to sleep.
When Andrei blinked his eyes open twenty hours later, Styka was hovering over him. Styka managed a small smile. The doctor from Plock had gone and returned. Andrei managed to rise up on his elbows, looked around the cottage, and flopped back on the bed.
“We were wondering if you were ever going to wakeup,” the doctor said.
“Sure he would! I knew it all along!” Styka roared.
The peasant’s wife crossed herself innumerable times and wailed that all her prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mother had been answered.
“What’s the scorecard on me?” Andrei asked.
“The wounds are under control. The assortment of cuts and bruises will vanish. Your state of exhaustion will require rest. You are as thoroughly beaten up as any man I have ever examined. You have the constitution of a bull. I don’t see how you ever swam the river in your condition.”
Styka and the doctor helped him sit up. He took a stiff drink of home-brewed vodka and stuffed a half a loaf of bread into his stomach. Despite everyone’s objections, he remained sitting.
“Where are we?”
“Plock.”
“What is happening?”
“The news is bad all over. We are being beaten everywhere,” the doctor said.
“What about Warsaw?”
“The Germans have not reached Warsaw yet Radio Polskie says Warsaw will fight.”
Andrei tried to stand. His legs buckled and he tottered. “Where are the other two, Styka? They got across the river with us—where are they? We must get back to Warsaw and fight.”
The doctor and Styka exchanged glances.
“Well, where are they?”
“They have surrendered.”
“Surrendered?”
“The Germans have crossed the river in strength. All roads to Warsaw have been cut. I stayed here only until I knew you were all right, Captain, but there is no chance of reaching Warsaw. Every hour we stay here we put these good people in danger. The Germans have been shooting everyone harboring an escaped soldier.”
“I am a Pole,” the peasant announced. “I will never close my door to a Polish soldier.”
“Your sergeant is right,” the doctor said. “Now that he knows you are alive, it would be best for him to turn himself in. As for you, I can find you a hiding place for a few days until you get a little of your strength back, and then you must surrender yourself too.”
Andrei looked at all four of them. The woman was crossing herself and praying again. “If you will be kind enough to spare me a loaf of bread, a canteen of water, and perhaps some cheese, I will be on my way. I am going to Warsaw.”
Styka flopped his arms about helplessly. “Captain, we can’t make it.”