22 Britannia Road - Amanda Hodgkinson [11]
To pass the time he composed letters in his mind, serious ones to his father detailing the regiment he was joining. He ran through arguments about the possible outcome of the war and concluded that, given the strength of Poland’s armed forces, combined with the British and French aid promised, Germany would surely be forced to leave the Polish borders and Hitler would have to go home with his tail between his legs. Or at least that was what the newspapers were saying. Like everybody, he wanted to believe it.
As the hours passed and the flat landscape became gently hilly with rivers and forested areas, he thought of Silvana and imagined telling her about the town he was headed for. He knew it was an ancient place full of forts and flanked by mountains.
The train stopped at every town on the way, picking up more people, putting down others. As it rattled slowly towards his destination, Janusz wrote sonnets in his head to Silvana, counting the lines to make sure they were technically correct. He conjured up images and phrases and for a while he felt almost heroic. He looked at the other soldiers around him and wrote imaginary letters to them boasting about his wife. He described her red curls, the soft plumpness of her breasts, the warm width of her hips. ‘My wife is beautiful, shapely like the mermaid of Warsaw, our city’s symbol,’ he told himself, and wished he had a pen and paper to hand.
He sat down on his kit bag, drank tea and ate pickled eggs and bread rolls, handed out from the samovar trolley that passed by. Finally, the day slid into star-pierced blackness and the train stopped overnight in a small country station. Janusz made his kit bag into a pillow and wrapped his arms around his knees. He was tired beyond belief. Surrounded by snoring soldiers, all of them shouldered together tight as cattle, sweat steaming off them, Janusz closed his eyes and slept.
The following morning, which came with a cool breeze off the hills on the far horizon, he composed more letters in his head, ones to the priests at the secondary school in his hometown and letters in French to his old history teacher of whom he had been particularly fond. He was so lost in his own thoughts, puzzling over forgotten French grammar, that it was a few moments before he realized the train was pulling to a sudden halt in the middle of some fields. He looked up at the sky. In the distance, planes were flying towards them.
‘It’s the Luftwaffe!’ yelled a soldier, and pushed Janusz roughly out of the doorway. ‘Get the hell out of the way. They’ve got machine-gunners aimed at the train.’
‘But we’re not at war yet.’
The soldier pulled the carriage door open.
‘Tell that to the Germans.’
Around him, men swore and women and children shrieked and cried. Doors were flung open and people stumbled and pushed to get out, jumping onto the bramble-lined railway track, running into the surrounding fields to hide in ditches and woodland.
Janusz dropped down from the train and ran after a group of men into an open ditch. There he crawled into a clump of tall reeds and squatted on his haunches, breathing rapidly. His uniform was heavy and he could feel sweat running down his face, stinging his eyes. As the planes flew over, he covered his head with his arms. There was a feeling of heat across his back and a roar of engine noise, high-pitched and threatening. Then, when he felt as though the noise would deafen him completely, the planes passed overhead, rising higher in the sky and banking away towards the horizon.
‘They’re playing with us,’ said a man near him as the planes disappeared into the clouds.
‘Where have they gone?’
‘They’ll be back. You wait. They’ve been doing this for the last few weeks, air attacks like this. No bombs, just machine-guns opening fire on villages and train stations, picking off civilians. Scare tactics.’
Janusz looked over the edge of the ditch, trying to work out where the planes had gone. In a grassy meadow, far off, he saw a peasant girl. Something in the way she moved, a certain toughness, more like a