Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 347: Anyone who wants war can have it next month. Today we do our jobs.
Early morning came flat and grey over the Mazovian plain.
Radio noise filled the divisional HQ, a schoolhouse taken over for maps and telephones.
The chalkboards held grids and call signs.
A portrait of a long-dead headmistress still watched from the far wall.
Colonel Nowak stood over the main map with a pencil. "Report," he said.
The signals officer lifted his headset.
"Skierniewice posts no change. Patrols report engine noise across the river in the night. Could be trucks on the German side. No eyes."
"Which sector?"
"North of Łowicz. And again near Kutno."
"Write it. Flag it," Nowak said. "No one moves yet."
A captain folded his arms. "Sir, the men say they can hear them when the wind shifts."
"Men hear what the wind lets them," Nowak said. "We wait for photographs, not breezes."
The door opened.
A runner came in with three envelopes.
He looked seventeen, wet from fog. "Radio office says Warsaw wants confirmation. Any unusual movements?"
"Answer, eome movement heard no visual confirmation our patrols remain in place," Nowak said. "No speculation. Use that word."
The runner nodded, then hesitated. "Sir, my brother is with the 30th near the border."
"And?"
"He asked if they should send their kit home."
"No," Nowak said. "They will need it."
He turned back to the map.
Three pins marked railheads.
Two marked bridges on the Bzura.
The bridges mattered more than the pins.
"Captain Zieliński," he said. "Your patrol yesterday. The farm road west of the highway. Tell it again. Slowly."
Zieliński leaned over the map.
His left hand trembled a little. "Tracks on the German side. Narrow, like motorcycles. Fresh. We heard a lorry. We saw nothing. The ditch near the boundary had footprints. Large. New boots. Not ours."
"Saboteurs?" the signals officer asked.
"Could be a border patrol," Zieliński said. "Could be boys running for beer. I’m not guessing."
"Good," Nowak said. "We don’t guess. We write. We sleep. We write again. We do not shoot first."
He looked around the room. "Anyone who wants war can have it next month. Today we do our jobs."
Unlike politicians who will give orders from sage distance. They will suffer the brunt of the first wave if it comes.
So sometimes they are willing to postpone it as long as possible.
The inevitable.
---
At a forward outpost near a sugar-beet field, Lieutenant Kulesza rubbed mist from his glasses with his sleeve.
His squad stood listless under their coats.
A farmer drove a cart along the track and nodded as he passed, as if this were a day like any other.
"Anything?" Kulesza asked.
Corporal Białek, short and brick-shouldered, lifted his chin toward the line of low trees. "Dogs barked after midnight. Twice. Then quiet. Heard an engine. Might have been the wind in the wires."
"The wind in the wires doesn’t smell like petrol," Private Lewandowski muttered.
Kulesza pretended not to hear. "Check the fence again. Every hundred meters. If you find a cut, mark it. Don’t step in it."
They set off along the boundary the old posts, the new ones, the bits of wire pulled tight where budgets had allowed.
In a shallow ditch Lewandowski crouched and dragged his fingers through the mud.
He held up a print.
"Boot sole," he said. "Not ours."
Białek crouched. "Heel is heavy. German army. Or a factory foreman with too much money."
"Direction?" Kulesza asked.
"Came up the ditch and went back. One set in, one set out. Maybe two men. Light," Białek said. "No cigarette ends. No paper. Careful."
They followed the prints to a culvert and lost them at gravel.
Kulesza exhaled through his teeth. "All right. Mark it. Send it back. No patrol after dark on foot. If they come, they can bring an engine. We’ll hear it."
He stared at the trees a long time.
They stared back.
---
Warsaw talked loudly to keep from whispering.
In the Ministry.
A typist handed a proof to a man with a green visor.
"Can you cut ’significant’?" the typist asked.
The man read the proof. "We can cut it when it’s true. Put ’limited.’"
A phone rang.
A junior clerk answered and listened, nodded, said "yes" three times, and hung up.
He looked at the deputy minister. "Reports of engine noise along Bydgoszcz line. No visual confirmation."
"Of course," the deputy minister said. "Engines often sound like engines."
A reporter from the evening paper stuck his head in the door. "Is it true we’re mobilizing again?"
"We are rehearsing," the deputy minister said. "As any sane nation would. We do not intend to alarm the public."
"The public is already alarmed."
"Then we will not add to it," the deputy minister said. "You may quote me."
In the telegraph office downstairs, a woman in a chin-length coat folded a parcel for her son. Socks, a bar of soap, a letter.
She slid the letter inside and tied the string.
She asked the clerk how long to the border.
"Two days usually," he said. "Three if the mail sacks are re-routed."
She nodded and put a coin on the counter.
She reached for the parcel and hesitated, then pushed it away again as if letting go slowly could change the speed of the world.
At General Inspectorate, the ceiling was high enough to make voices sound like they were trying to be brave.
General Józef Straszewski, white hair cut short, leaned on both hands at the table.
"We hold the corridor, we hold the bridges, we hold the line until we know where they mass," he said. "We are not the ones who start. We are the ones who stand."
General Andrzej Poniatowski, younger and keen, shook his head.
"If we do not begin to withdraw to the Vistula in stages, we will be sliced apart. They will cut north to south and meet east of us. That is what their exercises teach them."
The chief of staff lifted a hand. "Our alliance talks require time. If we pull back now, we send a message we do not intend."
"We intend to live," General Józef said.
