Nuns and Soldiers Read Online Free Page B

was dead. The brother had been wonderful. The Count, though lesser, must be a comfort, a substitute for his exiled parents. With the dawn of consciousness the fact of exile came too. The Count’s first perception was of a red and white flag. The wonderful brother had been killed in an air raid. Warsaw had been destroyed. These were the Count’s first data, clearer to him almost than his parents were. Bogdan, cheated of his return home, and now, again quite illogically, an ardent admirer of Sikorski, had joined the Polish Air Force, now being formed in England under the aegis of the government-in-exile. He wanted to get into the Parachute Brigade, and dreamt of returning home from the sky as a liberator, soon to become a leading statesman in the independent post-war Poland. However he never left the ground, since a stupid training accident returned him early to civilian life. He took employment (again probably as a clerk) with the Polish government in London. Here he consumed his heart and his time in hatred of Russia (hatred of Germany was taken for granted, that was scarcely an occupation) and in vain attempts to penetrate the high-level scheming which obsessed his more powerful compatriots. He (of course) offered his services as a courier to the underground Home Army in Poland, but was refused. (The Count never doubted that his father was a very brave man who would eagerly have given his life in the service of his country.) He was able to follow in some detail (and later often rehearsed to the Count who as a child was maddeningly indifferent to the fate of the Pripet Marshes) the agonizing diplomacy whereby, after Sikorski’s death, Mikolajczyk attempted to please Britain by placating Stalin, without giving away Eastern Poland to Russia.
    The Red Army had of course entered Poland in September 1939, as agreed with the Germans. The news that the Russians had then secretly murdered fifteen thousand Polish officers was one of the shocks which Bogdan’s consciousness had to withstand and his ability for hatred to digest in the earlier part of the war. By this time too there were tales of how the Germans were managing their part of Poland. In the words of the German governor, ‘the very concept Polak will be erased for centuries to come, no form of Polish state will ever be reborn, Poland will be a colony and Poles will be slaves in the German empire’. Rage, hate, humiliation, passionate love, mortally wounded pride so contended in Bogdan’s soul that it sometimes seemed he might die of sheer emotion. When young the Count (forced to relive these horrors and determined not to be damaged by them) marvelled at his father’s lack of realism. Could he not see how helpless and unimportant Poland was? How could Churchill and Roosevelt have been expected to care about the Polish frontier? Obviously history intended, and had always intended, Poland to be subservient to Russia. In fact Poland had not done too badly out of the war as far as territory was concerned. Later, about all these things, the Count felt differently. Bogdan’s war, and in some ways perhaps his life, ended on October 3, 1944. The Warsaw Rising, the great insurrection for which all Poles had been waiting, began on August 1, when the guns of the Red Army were rattling the windows in the city. The Poles in Warsaw began to fight the Germans. The Russian advance paused. The Red Army did not cross the Vistula. The Russians withdrew. The Soviet Air Force disappeared from the skies. Unhindered German bombers skimmed the city roof tops. Meagre supplies of arms were dropped by the British and Americans. Desperate appeals for help, to Moscow, to London, went unheeded. The Polish Underground Army fought the Germans alone for nine weeks. Then they surrendered. Two hundred thousand Poles were killed. The departing Germans blew up what was left of Warsaw.
     
     
    As a child the Count did not want to hear of these things. He was early aware of himself as a disappointment and