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. 
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.