Nuns and Soldiers Read Online Free Page A

admitted of hope. As it was there was something almost allegorically sad about her detachment from the misery that surrounded her. The Count stood aside to let her in, then raised a hand to Guy and departed. The door closed. Gertrude, who had not entered with the nurse, had already gone back to the drawing-room.
     
     
    The Count, it should be explained, was not a real count. His life had been a conceptual muddle, a mistake. So had his father’s life. Of remoter ancestors he knew nothing, except that his paternal grandfather, who was killed in the first war, had been a professional soldier. His parents and his elder brother Jozef, then a baby, had come to England from Poland before the second war. His father, his name was Bogdan Szczepanski, was a Marxist. His mother was a Catholic. (Her name was Maria.) The marriage was not a success.
    The father’s Marxism was of a peculiarly Polish variety. He grew to consciousness in a wrecked post-war Poland, drunk with independence and with having asserted its nationhood in the best possible way by smashing a Russian army outside Warsaw in 1920. Bogdan was politically precocious, a follower of Dmowski, but an admirer of Pilsudski. His patriotism was intense, narrow and anti-Semitic. He left his mother and a house full of sisters at an early age. He thought of becoming a lawyer, and was briefly a student at Warsaw University, but was soon involved in politics. (Possibly he worked as a clerk.) His hatred of Rosa Luxemburg was only second to his hatred of Bismarck. (He hated a great many people, past and present.) An early memory was of his mother saying that Rosa Luxemburg deserved to be murdered because she wanted to give Poland to the Russians. (His father, whom he could scarcely remember, had of course performed a first paternal duty by telling him that all Russians were devils.) Yet, though he never stopped hating Rosa Luxemburg (and was mildly cheered up when she eventually was murdered), some hard absolutist streak in his nature led him towards Marxism. He felt himself destined by fate to be the creator of a pure Polish Marxism. He had a cousin who was a member of the small illegal Polish Communist Party, and with whom he had fierce arguments. Although the party was not only pro-Russian but also full of beastly Jews, the youthful Bogdan was curiously drawn to it. There was an intensity, an absolute, in Marxism which attracted him. It was a ‘short path’. It was idealistic, anti-materialistic, violent, and did not promise ease. Surely Poland demanded no less than such a total dedication. Yet, as he later told his son, his particular patriotism did not allow him to become a communist. He remained a furious isolated idiosyncratic Marxist, the only man who had really understood what Marxism meant to Poland.
    He got married in 1936. Then Stalin intervened in his life. The Polish Communist Party had never been more than a puny inefficient instrument in the hands of the great Russian leader. Polish communists would be displeased by a Russo-German rapprochement. Besides, they were infected by the virus of patriotism, and could play no role in Stalin’s plans for Poland which could not be better played by the Red Army. So, with that calm purposive clear-headed ruthlessness, so characteristic of his policies and of their success, Stalin quietly had the Polish Communist Party liquidated. Bogdan’s cousin disappeared. Bogdan himself, a self-confessed maverick Marxist, an intellectual, a typical trouble-maker, was now in danger. In 1938 he arrived in England with his wife and son. In the summer of 1939 he decided to return to Poland. However events had moved too fast for him and he was incarcerated in England, to be the frenzied and miserable spectator of the subsequent fate of his country, and to be tormented ever after by the terrible guilt of not having fought on Polish soil.
    The Count was born just before the war and his first awareness was that he had had a brother, but the brother