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of Poland’s fighters as combatants, entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. In this they achieved some small measure of success. An officer of the Army Krajowa, Major Kazimierz Sztermal, confronted von dem Bach-Zelewski, Nazi high priest at Warsaw’s sacrifice: “You, the nation which gave your Goethe and Schiller to the world, have tried through terror to take the rights of freedom and existence from us.” The German shrugged: “This is war.” So indeed it was, in Hitler’s universe. The survivors—11,668 Polish combatants including 2,000 women, together with countless thousands of civilians—marched out in their columns of misery, to face imprisonment or mere destitution. Some shot themselves rather than accept captivity. After the insurgents had made their last broadcast from their own Radio Lightning, they smashed its transmitter with a sledgehammer. “We have been treated worse than Hitler’s allies in Romania, Italy and Finland,” declared the Polish Home Council of Ministers in its final statement on 3 October. “[Our] Rising is going under at a time when our armies abroad are helping to liberate France, Belgium and Holland . . . may the God of Justice pronounce a verdict on the terrible wrong, which the Polish nation has encountered, and may He punish the perpetrators.”

The Germans claimed to have lost 17,000 dead. The Rising was the ultimate heroic folly of the European Resistance movement nurtured by Churchill since 1940. For all the succour which Resistance gave to the soul of occupied Europe both during and after the Second World War, except in Yugoslavia its military achievements were negligible, and purchased at a grim price in blood. The Allied Chiefs of Staff would have done well to recall an observation of Wellington, derived from his experience of guerrilla warfare in the Iberian peninsula 140 years earlier: “I always had a horror of revolutionizing any country . . . I always said, if they rise of themselves, well and good, but do not stir them up; it is a fearful responsibility.”

There is just a grain of truth in Stalin’s self-serving remark: “These people [the Home Army] have exploited the good faith of the inhabitants of Warsaw, throwing many almost unarmed people against the German guns, tanks, and aircraft. A situation has arisen in which each new day serves, not the Poles . . . but the Hitlerites who are inhumanly shooting down the inhabitants of Warsaw.” The Warsaw Rising was of a piece with the Polish people’s long history of acts of passion, courage, misjudgement, succeeded by repression at the hands of forces beyond their power to resist. When Rokossovsky’s forces at last seized the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, the NKVD began rounding up the fighters of Army Krajowa with the same ruthlessness as the Germans. “Nazi and Soviet repressions were proceeding simultaneously in one and the same city,” observes Norman Davies. For the Western allies, the conduct of the war was overwhelmingly a military matter. For the Soviet Union, it never ceased to be also a political one.

“WE WERE DIFFERENT PEOPLE IN 1944”

MILOVAN DJILAS met a Soviet soldier on a road in Yugoslavia one day in October 1944. The Russian was driving a horse-drawn cart loaded with sacks, pots and bedspreads. He hailed the Yugoslav partisan and asked: “Is this the road to Berlin?” This was the only destination the man recognized, or had thought of since Stalingrad. The soldiers of the Red Army had seen too much destruction and misery in their own country to be shocked by what they found in eastern Europe. For days after Lieutenant Vasily Filimonenko crossed the Polish border in August 1944 with troops of 1st Belorussian Front, he did not see a single civilian. All had fled, save those too old to move. There were only burning buildings, and abandoned German vehicles and equipment. A few Russians recognized that something especially shocking had happened. “We knew that Warsaw was once the most beautiful capital in Europe,” said Alexandr Markov, a twenty-one-year-old Soviet bomber pilot. “Now, when we flew over it we saw huge palls of smoke,