Codeword Golden Fleece (29 page)

‘If I did and were found out I would lose my job.’

‘There is not the least reason to suppose that you would be found out,’ de Richleau said, now speaking with the utmost seriousness. ‘I promise to destroy the passports immediately we are over the Rumanian frontier. Even if they fell into someone else’s hands before that it is most unlikely that they would be traced back to you, as the issuing officer. If they were you could always say that I had forced you to give them to me at the point of my pistol. Much stranger and more terrible things are happening in Warsaw now, every day. Both of us may lose not only our jobs but our lives in the next raid. I would not ask it of you in normal times; but will you not please help me to get an injured man and a beautiful young woman out of this hell to which poor Poland has been reduced?’

‘Yes,’ replied the Esthonian, without further hesitation, ‘I will. I don’t know who the devil you are, but you’re a better diplomat than any I’ve ever met. And you’ve convined me absolutely. Esthonia is a little country, and I dread for it the fate that has overtaken Poland. All we ask is the right to live in peace and friendship with all other peoples, but now that the Great Powers have decided to fight it out I doubt whether we shall keep our freedom for more than a few months longer. Anyhow, while Esthonian passports still have the power to save decent human beings from the horror that Hitler has brought upon the world, they should be issued to anyone who wants them.’

De Richleau did a very unusual thing for him. He silently extended his hand, and Monsieur Fincks clasped it firmly.

Half an hour later the Duke had in his pocket three old passports selected from a pile sent in for cancellation as being the most suitable on account of their descriptions. He also had an invitation to a reception at the Esthonian Legation held the previous month on which Monsieur Fincks had written the name on the passport which he had chosen, and a number of letters that he was supposed to be taking on to one of Fincks’ colleagues who had actually been killed by a bomb; while, under his arm, he carried a flat brown-paper parcel containing the
Corps Diplomatique
plates.

As they were about to part the Esthonian produced the bracelet, saying: ‘I don’t think I ought to take this. It is worth several hundred pounds, and in any case at such a time decent people should help one another without thought of payment.’

After a second’s hesitation the Duke took it back. ‘If it were my own property I should insist on your keeping it, but as things are I can hardly refuse your generous gesture. However,’ he added, producing the brooch, ‘this is of considerably less value. Please accept it for your wife with our best wishes for her recovery. I am sure the lady to whom the jewels belong would wish you to retain some souvenir of us.’

‘If you put it like that I should be very pleased to have it. Perhaps all too soon our safety may also depend on the few things of value which we could trade in an emergency.’

‘You really fear then that Esthonia may soon become involved?’

‘Yes. Now that Stalin has invaded Poland the Germans and the Russians may be fighting for her carcase within a week. In a Russo-German war the three Baltic States make such a perfect jumping-off ground for a direct Nazi attack on the Soviet that Hitler is almost certain to seize all our ports, unless Stalin forestalls him. In either case, poor Esthonia will lose her freedom.’

De Richleau nodded. ‘I fear you may be right. But if the worst happens the name in the Polish document I showed you is my real one, and I am not without friends in England. Should you seek refuge there do not hestitate to enquire for me, and we will do everything in our power to make your exile as pleasant as possible.’

They shook hands once more, and the Duke set out on his long walk back to the northern outskirts of the city.

He reached his destination just before seven, to find that Madame Wojciechowski had returned and was now busy preparing supper for her unexpected guests. She was almost as thin as her brother Borki was fat and proved to be a silent, uncommunicative woman, who appeared interested in little except the running of her own house. Her husband, a grey-haired, thickset man, joined them soon afterwards, and they all sat down to a good meal which Marie Lou had insisted on supplementing from the baskets that the visitors had brought with them. Richard had had a sleep during the afternoon, but his meal was carried out to him, as it was thought wiser not to move him from his makeshift bed in the brake unless it became absolutely essential to do so.

At half past eight they all went out to the garage, and, having said their farewells to the excellent Borki, who had proved such a stalwart friend to them, and to his relations, they started on their long and hazardous drive to the Rumanian frontier.

The Germans had now brought up heavy guns and were beginning their evening ‘hate’ on the doomed city. Although they had not yet completely invested it, large formations of the enemy had established themselves at many points on its circumference, and some of their armoured spearheads were now reported to be as much as a hundred miles to the east. The whole situation was so confused that no one had anything but the vaguest idea of the enemy dispositions, and, although the Duke said nothing about it, he regarded capture by the Germans as a far more potent danger than the possibility of their coming to grief through any endeavours Mack might be making to catch them.

To minimise the chance of running into detachments of the enemy he drove them out of the capital through its northeastern suburbs, then followed the bank of the Czarna river south-east to the little town of Okunew. During the short run of twenty miles they were challenged no less than eleven times. Any attempt to ignore these challenges in territory where German armoured cars and motor-cycle machine-gunners were known to be operating would have been the height of madness, and, as it was, on three occasions warning shots were fired over their heads.

Each time they were pulled up they waited in agonised suspense for their papers to be examined; but the production of their British passports and the
laisser-passers
that Mack had signed to go with each acted like a magic charm; so it was clear that in the widespread confusion it had proved quite impossible for him to circulate a general order for their arrest.

From Okunew they ran south through the night to Kotbiel, Garwolin and Deblin, all in the centre of Poland, but even then they were rarely out of earshot of artillery fire, and twice during this lap great flights of enemy bombers roared overhead on their way to devastate some unfortunate open town. Several times they saw the glow of burning villages on the horizon, where the Nazis had strafed Polish troops only a few hours earlier, and all the towns they passed through had had a share of the bombing.

There was not much traffic on the roads, yet throughout the night they were never free of people. Occasionally they met long files of Polish cavalry on the march or a battery of artillery, but
the wayfarers were mostly pedestrians, or little groups of country people trudging beside one or two farm wagons. They did not seem to be moving in any particular direction but were just the terrible flotsam of war; city-dwellers who had been bombed out and were trying to reach friends in the country, or poor peasants whose farms had been ravaged, making for the towns in the desperate hope of finding safety there.

Soon after dawn a flight of Nazi marauders came over and machine-gunned the road from two hundred feet. De Richleau drove the brake in under some trees, and the heroes of the Luftwaffe had roared out of sight in less than a minute, but they left an old cripple, two peasant women, one of whom was carrying a baby at the breast, and a man in a bowler hat, lying mutilated and bleeding in the road.

Having done what he could for them, the Duke pressed on, and just before eight o’clock they entered the city of Lublin. It had taken them over nine hours to cover less than a hundred miles, but as de Richleau drew the brake up in front of a still undamaged café in the practically ruined main square he was well satisfied. It was more than probable that during the night they had passed within a mile or so of several enemy detachments from which only the darkness had saved them, and by this time he felt confident that they were well out of Mack’s clutches.

The café was crowded with officers, but after a short wait they managed to get some hot coffee and sausage, which they eked out with their own provisions.

The eight hours that followed proved less exacting. They were passing through rich farmlands which the Germans were not yet attempting to occupy, and, to keep clear of their forces that were operating against the Polish industrial centres of the southwest, the Duke veered south-east, through Krasnystaw and Hrubieszow towards Brody. On crossing a bridge over the Styr, some ten miles to the north-west of Brody, the tollgate-keeper told them that he had heard from two people that the Russians were already in the city, so the Duke made a wide détour to the west by way of Krasroc with the intention of trying to reach Tarnopol for an early dinner.

But the distance proved too much for him. He had not yet fully recovered physically from the grievous strain he had been under the previous afternoon. It was now nearly forty hours since he had had any proper sleep, and although Marie Lou had relieved him at the wheel for several long spells during the
day, he was now all in. They pulled up on the grass at the side of a small lake a few miles outside Zloczow, and there, three hours later, just as dark was falling, the Russians found them.

The encounter proved far from a happy one, as the sergeant in charge of the Soviet tank, which had pulled up at the lake to renew its water supply, was both surly and illiterate. The
Corps Diplomatique
plates meant nothing to him, and he and his men were living on the land, so they promptly confiscated all the remaining provisions.

The Duke, who spoke Russian much better than he spoke Polish, argued and pleaded for some of the supplies to be left for his sick friend, in vain. Fortunately, however, another tank with an officer in it soon appeared on the scene. He was a small, bright-eyed man and looked as tough as they make them, but he was good-humoured and intelligent.

Having examined the Esthonian passports, he ordered the food to be given back, but his grin had a shade of cynicism in it as he returned the passports to the Duke, saying: ‘You won’t need these soon. You’ll have Soviet ones, and so will most of the other people in Europe.’

Having been roused from their sleep, they had an early supper as soon as the Russians had left them, then pushed on again. They were pulled up twice more on the road to Tarnopol, but in the city itself they were not interfered with, although they found it in full Russian occupation. It was still only a little after nine when they passed through the town, so, refreshed by his sleep, the Duke determined to do the remaining seventy odd miles to the frontier and endeavour to get across it that night. They were only halted once more and, as on the two previous occasions, directly the Russians had examined their papers they proved not unfriendly and extremely punctilious.

As they neared the little frontier town of Zaleszezyki on the Dniester the road became more congested, and it was clear that a great number of people from all parts of Poland were also attempting to seek safety in Rumania. The dusty and dishevelled state of many of them showed that they had been on the road for several days, but these refugees were not sufficiently numerous to impede the progress of the car seriously, and they reached the town with half an hour still to go to midnight.

In spite of the late hour the narrow streets and small square were crowded with both pedestrians and vehicles, so the Duke began to take a pessimistic view of their prospects of getting over
the frontier until the following day. But his
Corps Diplomatique
plates now proved of unexpected value to them. A stalwart Russian military police girl in a smart uniform, who was controlling the traffic in the square, spotted the plates immediately, held up the other traffic and smilingly directed him to the frontier post. For the girl the war had been on for less than thirty-six hours, and she was thoroughly enjoying this picnic campaign.

At the frontier post they met with equal politeness. Despite the number of people trying to get through and the fact that the Russian officials had only taken over that morning, they were handling the situation with efficiency and despatch.

Although de Richleau did not know it, many foreign diplomats accredited to the Polish Government had gone through during the past few hours, and, at present, the Russians had no quarrel with the smaller powers. He was directed to a special enclosure; only a cursory examination was made of the contents of the brake, and a smiling Russian waved them on without their having had to wait in the mile-long queue.

The Rumanian frontier guards were equally accommodating, as they, too, had passed many foreign diplomats through that day. To his amazement, soon after one in the morning de Richleau found himself twenty miles inside Rumania and just entering Cernauti, the capital of the Bukovina. Never did he remember having crossed a frontier so easily and so quickly.

But that they were now safe was their sole, if considerable, cause for congratulation. Czernowitz, as it used to be called, was crammed to capacity, and neither for love nor money could either food or a bed be found there. After half an hour of fruitless questing they decided that they had better make the best of things and both sup and sleep in the brake.

They were tired again from accumulated fatigue, but they still had ample provisions, and they opened the best bottle of wine that Borki had given them from Jan’s cellar. With it they celebrated their arrival in a still free country, which was so largely due to the Duke’s planning, and drank to the success of Operation—Golden Fleece’. Then, thoroughly tired out, in spite of their makeshift accommodation, they fell sound asleep.

The following morning they woke at a little after seven. They had parked the brake in a crescent of middle-class houses, but from their exploration late the night before they knew that every spare foot of floor space in them was occupied by Polish refugees. The possibility of securing a bath or breakfast in any of these
houses was zero, so they decided to eat their last sardines and remaining bread, then take the road for Bucharest.