POLISH TRAGEDY—SECOND-HAND

AS I wandered through the lobby of the drab little hotel on the main street of Cernauti—a Roumanian town two miles from the Polish frontier—I thought how many terrible stories could be written about the people in that one room alone.

For three days Polish refugees had come streaming across the frontier before the massacre of the German tanks and planes. Some had come on foot with knapsacks over their backs; some in carts and wagons; some in battered motor-cars with the few possessions they had been able to save piled on top. The narrow Roumanian streets ran with mud and the police, detailed to avoid congestion, spent most of their time cursing at the donkey-carts of the local inhabitants, invariably stuck in the middle of the road. The Roumanian peasants seemed bewildered by the war thunderbolt that had suddenly transformed their quiet town; groups of them collected around the battered Polish cars, peering at the registration plates with morbid curiosity.

The small hotel on the main street had become a tragic “Grand Hotel”. It was so crowded people were sleeping on the floor of the lobby—not only were there refugees, but foreign journalists, diplomats and military attachés, who had crossed the frontiers a few hours before. But it wasn’t hard to pick out the Poles. You could tell them by their mud-stained clothes and the dazed looks in their faces. In one corner of the lobby a Polish woman, with a fine head and long slender hands, sat alone, crying. She didn’t make any sound but sat quite motionless, hour after hour, the tears streaming down her face.

All around you, you felt the tragedy of smashed lives. Every now and then an incident caught your eye, like a fragment of a broken picture, and your imagination flared up as you wondered what story lay behind the scene. I remember the two neatly-dressed little Polish boys who came into the lobby clutching tin aeroplanes and explaining to the desk clerk, proudly: “Mon père est un pilote”—and the look on their mother’s face as though she had been struck when they spoke the words; the man who had been wandering listlessly round the lobby, staring at a girl who came through the door as though he had seen a ghost, then running up and flinging his arms about her and both of them laughing hysterically; the three children sitting on suitcases propped up in the corner of the hall waiting for the parents they had become separated from, and the desk clerk telling us he didn’t know how to explain to them the frontier had been closed for several hours and now there was little chance of their coming.

That was Tuesday, September 19th, exactly two weeks and four days after the German attack had begun. The Russian Army had crossed the frontier forty-eight hours before and Poland’s two powerful neighbours were squeezing in on her like a giant nutcracker. The last border—the Roumanian—had slammed shut, and now the country was sealed up, isolated, and awaiting its doom.

I had never imagined that Poland could be destroyed so quickly there wouldn’t even be time to get to it. The day after Great Britain and France declared war I had decided to go to Warsaw. The only route open was London to Bergen (Norway) by boat; Bergen to Oslo (Norway) by train; Oslo to Stockholm (Sweden) by train; Stockholm to Helsinki (Finland) by aeroplane; Helsinki to Riga (Latvia) by aeroplane; Riga to Kovno (Lithuania) by train; Kovno to Warsaw by train.

It took me five days to get the proper visas. When at last I had them, Mr. Rogers of Cook’s Travel Bureau rang up to say the frontier between Lithuania and Poland had been closed and now my only chance was via Roumania, which meant travelling through France, Switzerland, Italy and Yugoslavia. The new visas took another five days, and by the time I was ready to leave the German onslaught had moved so fast it was already doubtful whether even the Roumanian frontier would stay open.

That trip across a darkened Europe, at war for the second time in twenty-one years, was a strange experience. It stands out in my mind now as a series of impressions: crossing the channel at night on a boat that took a fourteen-hour zig-zag course to escape a German U-boat; the nine-hour train trip to Paris with its interminable stops and the stage porter who kept shrugging his shoulders and repeating the old cliché, “C’est la guerre”; the deserted, unfamiliar look of Paris with its shop-fronts boarded up and its men at the front; the Simplon express from Paris to Rome with its shaded lights, obsequious waiters and luxurious dining-car—the only train in France with sleepers and a restaurant as all the others had been requisitioned as hospital trains; the rigid inspection of the Swiss frontier officials by order of a government determined not to have the country turned into the same spy centre it was in the last war: and the hysterical scene created by three Italians, unfamiliar with the new visa regulations, who were put off, bag and baggage, in the middle of the night; and, finally, Rome with the street lights blazing and the peaceful clatter of carriages along the cobble-stones.

I discovered that lights were one of the few luxuries the capital could boast, for Italy, neutral though she was, was already undergoing more hardships than the belligerent countries. There was no petrol and no coffee. This last, to a nation that spends half its days in the cafés, wasn’t a deprivation to be taken lightly. I arrived in Rome late at night and left by plane for Bucharest early the next morning, so I didn’t have a chance to see any friends; but at the Hotel Excelsior the porters and waiters pressed me with questions about France and England, expressing eloquent sympathy for the Poles and a firm resolve to keep their end of the Axis out of the war.

The moment I arrived in Bucharest I felt myself jerked back into an atmosphere of crisis. With Soviet troops massing on the Roumanian frontier and rumours that Germany was concentrating her forces in Hungary, tension was at a fever pitch. In the crowded restaurants, when loud-speakers began broadcasting the news bulletins, people put down their knives and forks and conversation stopped; everyone listened with painful intensity.

I didn’t know that the Polish frontier had been closed, and as soon as I reached the hotel looked up the trains for Cernauti There was one leaving that night, but the porter told me there was so much delay no one could guarantee how long the trip would take. But I went to see a friend at the British Legation and had the good luck to run into Lord Forbes, a young man I had met in London, who had just been appointed Air Attaché. He was flying to Cernauti in the morning in his own plane and offered to take me with him.

When we arrived at the Bucharest aerodrome in the morning we were greeted by a strange scene. Twenty-four hours earlier the Polish High Command had ordered its aviators to fly into Roumania to prevent their planes from falling into German hands. Nearly three hundred planes—forty twin-engined bombers and over two hundred fighters—had arrived at the aerodrome. Over a hundred pilots, exhausted and unshaven, were sleeping on the floor of the waiting-room; their uniforms were torn and dirty and many of them had bandaged hands and faces.

One of the officers had brought a plane in with sixteen bullet-holes in it after a fight with the Russians. He was a tall, slender man, with a medal on his ragged brown jacket on which were the words: “Virtuti Militari.” He told us he had won it in 1921, when the Poles had succeeded in driving the Bolsheviks from Warsaw. “This time,” he said bitterly, “they have succeeded.”

Although he had not eaten for more than twenty-four hours and seemed close to exhaustion, he refused to accept any money from us. He drew himself up proudly, shaking his head, and saying over and over again, “Non, merci, I am an officer, a colonel in the Polish Army.”

This same indomitable pride existed among all the officers with whom we talked. There was no plea for pity, no request for help of any kind; only a passionate determination to escape from Roumania, to join up in the French Air Force. One of the pilots came from a town in the Polish corridor. His family had been killed in the bombardment, and his two brothers, both aviators, shot down in air battles a few days before. “What are they going to do with us?” he kept asking Lord Forbes over and over again. “They can’t shut us up. We must go on.”