The officer in charge, Captain Alexander de Milja, was professionally a cartographer; first a mapmaker, later assistant director of the bureau’s Geographical Section. But Poland was at war—no, Poland had lost her war, and it was clear to the captain that nobody was going to be assistant director of anything for a long time to come.
Still, you couldn’t just stop fighting. Captain de Milja stood at the open window; the night air, cool and damp, felt especially good on his hands. Idiot! He’d grabbed the overheated barrel of the machine gun to change it during the attack, and now he had red stripes on his palms that hurt like hell.
4:20 a.m. He swept the façade of the hotel with his binoculars, tried— based on the proprietor’s intelligence—counting up floors to focus on certain rooms, but the Germans had the windows shut and all he could see was black glass. In Sowacki Square, a burned-out trolley, and the body of a Wehrmacht trooper, like a bundle of rags accidentally left in a doorway, weapon and ammunition long gone. To somebody’s attic. De Milja let the binoculars hang on their strap and stared out into the city.
A refinery had been set on fire; a tower of heavy smoke rolled majestically into the sky and the clouds glowed a faint orange. A machine gun tapped in the distance, a plane droned overhead, artillery rumbled across the river. War—fire and smoke—had made autumn come early, dead leaves rattled along the cobblestones and caught in the iron drain covers.
Captain de Milja was a soldier, he knew he didn’t have long to live. And, in truth, he didn’t care. He was not in love with life. One or two things had to be taken care of, then matters could run their course.
The director’s telephone was, naturally, of the very latest style; black, shiny, Bakelite plastic. De Milja dialed the military operator he had installed in the basement.
“Sir?”
“Sergeant, have you tried Tarnopol again?”
“Can’t get through, sir. I’ve been up to Wilno, and down to Zakopane, just about every routing there is, but the whole region’s down. We’re pretty sure the lines have been cut, sir.”
“You’ll keep trying.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
He replaced the receiver carefully on its cradle. He had wanted to
say good-bye to his wife.
The Wehrmacht assault team got its air support at dawn; three Focke-Wulf 189s diving out of the clouds, engines screaming, cannon firing. But there was more drama than destruction; the 189 carried only one bomb. On the fifth floor of the telephone exchange, Lieutenant Karlinski swept the Breda across the sky and hammered off belt after belt of 7.35 ammunition. Grand streams of tracer, pale in the early light, showered up into the clouds, while hot casings ejected onto the director’s Persian carpet and the office smelled like smoldering wool—until a bullet fired from the ballroom of the Hotel Franconia hit Karlinski in the collarbone and he collapsed back onto the floor and died of shock.
The lieutenant from the cryptographic service took over, while Captain de Milja steadied the tripod with his burning hands and the Russian bureaucracy expert fed belts into the gun. But by then the Focke-Wulfs had run dry of ammunition and headed back to Germany. At which point the telephone rang and somebody on the first floor, voice flat and controlled, informed de Milja that the building was on fire.
For a moment he went blank, the solution much too obvious. Then he said, “Call the fire department.” Which they did and which, on 12 September, worked quite well because the city’s water mains hadn’t yet been destroyed. The firemen ran their hoses into the building on the side away from the fighting and pumped high-pressure streams on the flames, putting out the fire and, as water sluiced down into the switching stations, shutting down every telephone in Warsaw.
The Wehrmacht attack, from doorway to doorway up Sowacki Street, faltered, then collapsed. The support fire, machine-gun and mortar, from the roof of the hotel lasted less than a minute, then the positions were abandoned. Just before dawn de Milja had sent sniper teams to the roofs of adjacent buildings, and when the fighting started they’d knocked down first a mortar man, then an officer. It was improvised— the snipers were armed with hunting weapons and policemen’s automatic pistols—but it worked.
De Milja watched through binoculars as an analyst from the economic intelligence section—the captain thought he specialized in feed grains—a man in his fifties wearing suspenders and a shirt turned up at the sleeves, suddenly appeared at a parapet on the roof of an apartment building and fired both barrels of an old shotgun, the sort of thing one found in the back halls of country houses, along with leather game bags and warped tennis rackets.
The sniper broke the shotgun and withdrew the empty cartridges. Smoke seeped from the barrels as he thrust new shells into the breech. Get down, the captain thought. He saw two German troopers at an upper window, bringing their rifles to bear. Down. The sniper lurched backward, his face showed a moment of pain. But he kept his balance, braced one foot against the parapet and fired both barrels. His shoulder jerked with the recoil, then he fell to his knees, shaking his head grimly at whatever was going on inside him.
The Wehrmacht units retreated minutes later, trying to break through to German lines after dark. Most never made it, victims of small bands of soldiers, farmers, teenagers—Poles. And those who got as far as the Jablonka Bridge found that, on the second try, demolition had been complete. The ones who couldn’t swim were found on the bank the following morning.
16 September, 5:40 p.m. Military Intelligence headquarters, Savka barracks. Order 3135-c: With exception of special documents identified by department directors, all files to be destroyed by 1800 hours.
Captain de Milja watched, motionless, one foot on a chair, as this work was done, as the department clerks burned eight thousand maps. Watched, apparently, without feeling. Perhaps he didn’t care, or cared too much, or had gone off wherever he went when life was too cruel or too stupid. Whatever the truth, his eyes were cold, he could not be read.
The clerks had built a pinewood fire in the great hall, in a fireplace of heroic proportions with the date 1736 carved in the capstone, a fireplace built to roast spitted boar for a cavalry squadron. But this was a clerks’ fire, it smoked and sputtered, and the maps, printed on linen and mounted on wooden rollers, did not burn well.
The office wit had always claimed that the department’s chief clerk suffered from Talpidia, mole-face, a condition encountered in particularly subterranean bureaucracies. The man had been, certainly, a fierce obstructionist—everything had to be signed, and signed, and signed some more. Now, as his clerks ran by him with armloads of maps, he just seemed lost, poked dispiritedly at the ashes with a broom handle, the flames’ reflections flickering on his eyeglasses.
Drawer 4088: Istanbul by street. Istanbul harbor with wharf and warehouse numbers. Surveyor’s elevations of Üsküdar with shore batteries in scale. Bosphorus with depths indicated. Black Sea coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads. Sea of Marmara coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads.
In the fire.
Drawer 4098: Timber company surveys, 1935–1938; streams, logging paths, old and new growth trees, drainage, road access, river access. For forests in Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.
“That series aside, please,” de Milja said.
The clerk, startled, whirled and stared, then did as he was ordered. The timber surveys were stacked neatly atop maps, drawn in fine detail, of the Polish railway system.
16 September, 7:15 p.m. A message was brought by a young ensign, who saluted and stood stiffly at attention while the captain read it. Colonel Anton Vyborg requested his presence, in fifteen minutes, at the guardhouse by the east gate; another officer had been sent to supervise the destruction of the files. The captain initialed the message carefully, then made sure he was on time.