The Winds of War

or keeping her out of his way. Mayor Starzynski arrived shortly in an old limousine, a thickset moustached man wearing a green knitted vest with his unpressed floppy black suit. His shoes

The city can be blown to atoms! Get Natalie and tell her she's to come here and stay here. Working in a belligerent's hospital is damned questionable anyway, and now-" Slote walked to the door, putting a fist holcung the pipe distractedly to his head. 'What a mess. So much to do." Byron yawned and rose. "But what's the rush? How far is the Russian border from here, two or three hundred kilometers? Their army can't possibly get to Warsaw for a week." Slote laughed. It had not occurred to him that the Russian armies needed several days to advance three hundred kilometers, but it was true, and very obvious. He took out his pouch and packed the pipe slowly to calm himself, saying, "Of course, but the point is, this development changes everything. There's never any predicting what the Russians or the Germans will do next. There may be dogfights over Warsaw today. The Germans may decide on half an hour's notice to let the neutrals out of here." "Well, I'll try to get her, but you know Natalie." "Please tell Natalie it's not a message from me," Slote said in a tight ragged tone, his hand on the doorknob, his head pounding, "but an official notice from the United States Government. We can no longer be responsible for the safety of anybody outside the four walls of this building. If we suddenly get packed out of here under a flag of truce-and it can happen any time-and she isn't around, I can't delay five minutes. We'll go, and she'll be the only foreigner left in Warsaw, and if by some freak she survives the bombs and the Nazis she can write a book. Tell her that, will you?" He closed the door hard. By now Byron knew the route to the hospital well. It went through a part of the town which the Germans had been pounding hard. Sooty heaps of rubble pockmarked the way; there were craters in the streets, broken sewer pipes, torn cable conduits, downed telephone poles, uprooted trees, and endless piles of broken glass, masonry, wood, and rubbish. Children played on the heaps and in the ruined buildings. Women were washing clothes in the open, or cooking over pale fires of splintered wood in the bright sunshine. Work gangs were digging in the fallen houses, clearing twisted wires from the street, and shovelling and bulldozing debris. Almost everybody appeared cheerful and matter-of-fact; that was the remarkable thing, though Byron was getting used to it. He passed no funerals or other traces of the dead. Leaping, climbing, laughing in the destroyed houses, the children seemed to be finding war an amusing novelty, and school was evidently out. Here and there black-shawled women sat withbowed heads on chairs or stones. Some bared breasts to sucking babies. Many people with blank faces wandered amid the rubble and stared, or fumbled to find things. No fires were burning. The destruction was capricious. One block would be undamaged; the next half razed, as though an airplane had dumped all its bombs at once. Over jagged slanting half-walls, rooms like stage settings hung in the air, their different wallpapers or paint colorfully and pathetically exposed. Byron saw a broken piano hanging half out of one room. He made his way through the entrance hall of the hospital. Here Warsaw's surprisingly cheerful air gave way to a pitiful and disgusting scene. Wounded people were piled and crowded helter-skelter along the marble floor awaiting help; mostly in rags, all dirty, green-pale, groaning or crying or in a faint, men and women, Poles and Jews, blood-smeared, unbandaged, with clothing ripped, with faces torn open, with arms and legs gashed, with an occasional red stump of limb blown away and terrible white bone showing. The children were piled separately in a big anteroom, where a sad chorus of wailing and screaming rose, mingled with some incongruous laughter. Byron hurried past the open door and down the curving stone staircase, into a long low basement area much warmer than the floor above; here the stink of faultily burning oilstoves was even stronger than the smells of medicine. "Is he crazy?" Natalie exclaimed. "How can I leave? I just came on duty. Look!" She swept her arm around at the women in the jammedtogether beds, moaning and shrieking in Polish, at others sitting up dolefully on beds or low stools, with fat white breasts and brown nipples bared to infants, at the three pallid sweating doctors moving from bed to bed, at the hastening nurses, some in soiled bloodstained white dresses like herself, with hair bound in white cloths, some in dark gray nun's habits. "There are five of us down here and we counted eighty-two women this morning! it's the only maternity ward left in Warsaw now. The Germans bombed out Saint Catherine's last night. They say it was unspeakably horrible, pregnant women running around on fire, newborn babies burning u "The point is, Natalie, with the Russians coming-""I heard you! They're hundreds of miles away, aren't they? Go away, Briny, I have to work." A stoop-shouldered doctor with a big nose, a square red beard, and sad filmed eyes was walking past. He asked Natalie in German what the problem was, and she told him. "Go, by all means go," he said, in an exhausted voice. "Don't be foolish, you must leave with the other Americans. ll the embassy sends for you, you must obey." 'Oh, the embassy! Nobody says we're leaving yet. This young man can come and fetch me in five minutes if they do." 'No, no, that's a risk you can't take. You're not a Pole, you're not supposed to risk your life. And you're Jewish, you're Jewish." The doctor put his hand to her head and pulled off the white cloth. Her loose hair fell thick, curling, dark. 'You must go home." Tears ran out of Natalie's eyes and down her face. 'The woman with the twins ishemorrhaging. Did you see her yet? And the baby with the bad foot-' she gestured jerldly at a bed nearby. They're all on the list. Go back to the embassy right away. Thank You. You've helped us. Have a safe journey." The doctor shuffled away. She turned on Byron. "Leslie Slote is a selfish bastard. He just doesn't want to have me on his mind. One thing less to think about." Suddenly she raised her skirt to her hips. The gesture gave Byron a shocking little thrill, though in point of fact the heavy gray bloomers coming down to her knees were considerably less sexy than the white skirt. She must have gotten those gruesome bloomers from the nuns, he thought. 'Here," she said, pulling a thick wallet from her bloomers and dropping the skirt. "I'll go back to the goddamn embmv. But just in case, I want you to go and find Berel, and give him this. It's all my American money. Will you do that for me?" "Sure." "Tell me, Briny," Natalie said, 'are you still having fun?" He looked around at the noisy, crowded, evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. "More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Be careful going back to the embassy, win you? There's a big burning church on Franzuski, and they've got the street blocked off. Go around by the museum." 'All right. You'll probably find Berel in that gray building, you know, where the Jewish council works. He's on the food committee or something." "I guess I'll find him." Byron came out in a back alley where two men were loading dead people from the hospital onto a two-wheeled cart, much like the one he had bought to carry the water. Bodies lay on the cobblestones, and one man wearing a red-smeared white oilcloth apron was taking them up one by one in his arms and thrusting them at the other man, who stacked them in the cart-large rigid horrors with open mouths and fixed eyes-like dead fish in a market. The man tossed up the light body of a scrawny old woman, whose gray pubic hair showed through the pink rag still hanging on her. Hurrying down Marshal Pilsudski Boulevard toward the Jewish section he heard the thumping of heavy guns, and nearby explosions like the blasting at a building site. Byron muttered routine curses at the Germans. He had spent a week in Germany after defecting from the

ry. He continued to trot, a little faster, through the emptying shell-pitted streets toward the embassy. People around him glanced at the sky and took shelter. The first waves were Stukas, diving down and spitting out black smoke, and Byron heard the irritated answering rattle of the weak rooftop machine guns of the Poles. One plane dove toward the street where he was running. He jumped into a doorway. Bullets went chattering down along the cobblestones, with a great whing-whang of ricochets. He watched the plane zoom away, then he trotted on, muttering the usual obscenities about the Germans. Byron was developing a sense of invulnerability to the worst the Germans could He was sure that the United States was going to rise in its wrath in short do. To him they were contemptible bungling butchers. order, cross the Atlantic and knock the hell out of them, if the British and the French really proved too decayed or too scared to do it. The events around him must be

nce a bomb had fallen on the building next door, killing ten Poles, Slote had been like that. Byron figured the responsibility was wearing the charge down. But now his face had color, his eyes were bright, and the very plume of blue smoke from As Byron go his pipe looked jaunty. t into the back seat, Natalie blurted to the ambassador, "Can I come along? Byron and I are travelling together." With an annoyed grimace, Slote shook his head. The ambassador looked her up and down, with masculin amusement. Natalie wore a green silk dress and an old pink sweater, an atrocious getup pulled from her suitcase without thought. It made her look vulgarly sexy. "Bat, my dear, wouldn't you be frightened?" "Of what?" "The sound of guns. We're going to inspect the safe-conduct exit route." The ambassador's slow British speech was almost perfect. His small pink hand, resting on the open window, was manicured to a gleam, siege or no siege. "We may come rather close to the front." "I've heard guns." The ambassador smiled at Byron. "Well, shall we have your friend along?" He moved to make room for her besid, him as he spoke. Slote said nothing, but gnawed his pipe in an annoyed way. The car started off on a rough, zigzag ride toward the river. Warsa'A, had been crumpling in the past four days. A strong wind was blowing away the smoke, and beautiful morning sunshine gave a mocking peaceful look to the streets. Butsmashed buildings met the eye everywhere. Thousands of windows had been blown out and patched with bright yellow plywood. Warsaw was becoming a place of smoke, broken masonry, and yellow patches. The sidew and gutters were broken and cratered, and spiky tank traps and barricades cluttered main intersections. Glowering nervous soldiers at these intersections stopped the car with raised machine guns, their fingers at the triggers. Few other people were in sight. Far off, cannon drummed and thumped. Each time that a soldier lowered his gun and waved them on, Slote laughed boisterously. "What I find so incredible," he said, as they came to a long stone bridge over the Vistula, crowded with carts, trucks, and bicycles, "is that this thing is still standing at all. Haven)t the Germans been bombarding it for two weeks?" "Well You see, they are just not quite as devastating as they would have us believe," the Swedish ambassador said. "Nor as accurate." The car drove out on the bridge, over the broad brown river serenely flowing between Warsaw and its eastern suburb, Praha, a place of low house' and green woods. Behind them in the sunshine, under a soft smoky blue sky, Warsaw at this distance looked surprisingly unharmed: a broad 'netrOPolis with wide avenues, baroque church domes, tall factory chimneys, and many climbing columns of black smoke. It might almost have, lo C been a manufacturing city on a busy day in peacetime, except r the Yellow fires billowing up here and there, the flashes like summer lightning all around the horizon"and the distant whumping of the artillery. Several busloads of singing and joking soldiers went past the car. Some waved at Natalie and shouted. Many soldiers were heading the same way on bicycles. "Where are they all going?" Natalie said. 'Why, to the front," said the ambassador. ,it's quite a war. They leave their guns and go home for lunch or dinner, or perhaps to sleep with their wives, and then they take a bus to the front again and shoot at the Germans. Madrid was rather like t

llent idea! We can go and return in ten or fifteen minutes, I'm sure." Slote opened the car door and got out. "Come on, Natalie. We'll wait in the one with the green blinds, Ambassador. I saw a woman at the windows." Natalie stayed in her seat, looking from Slote to the ambassador, her mouth pulled down unpleasantly. The ambassador said to her in a stiff European tone, "My dear, please do as you are told." jumping out, she slammed the door and ran toward the house. Slote hurried after her, shouting. The limousine shot forward in a rattle of pebbles. The bare ahead thinned as they drove into it. About half a mile further along they came upon the shrine, a luridly colored wooden Jesus on a gilt cross in a sheltering frame; and not far beyond that was the schoolhouse. Several soldiers, smoking and talking, lounged in front of it around a stone goose bordered with red flowers. Byron thought that if Leslie Slote could have held on only three or fou