Free Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch

soldiers, glimpses upon the pillars the list of Polish battle honours, Madrid, Guadalajara, Ebro. Westerplatte, Kutno, Tomaszov. Narvik, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Arnhem. Bitwa o Anglie. Lenino, Warszawa, Gdansk. Rothenburg, Drezno, Berlin. Or is he back in London, beside the eagle-crowned column at Northolt, remembering the Polish airmen who died for Poland, who died for England? His father’s squadron 303 Kosciusko, best of all in the Polish air force. City of Lwow, city of Krakow, city of Warszawa. Battle of Britain, Battle of the Atlantic, Dieppe, Western Desert, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany. His father and his brother are putting on their helmets and their parachutes and climbing into their Spitfires. And the Count wants to go with them, only there are pillars and more pillars, broken pillars, shattered columns in a ruined city, and on each there is a list of battles, gallant battles, gallant defeats, and now he is seeing, stretching away into the distance, not the past but the future ...
    The Count was used to nightmares. He wooed them and they left little trace. It was the waking horrors that left him exhausted and afraid. It was as if, at such times, as he lay in his narrow bed in his small bedroom and gazed up at the darkened ceiling his father’s spirit came and stood beside him, eager to conduct the argument into which, while his parent lived, the Count had been so unwilling to enter. What went wrong? They were living in a dreamland. Eastern Poland ought to have been conceded to Stalin while there was still something to concede. They thought the Western troops would reach Warsaw first. The Count’s father had many times described the hour when he realized that the Russians would arrive first. So they were to see off the Germans and then resist the Russians! Were they mad ? What was the point of the Warsaw Rising anyway? To ‘stir the conscience of the world’? To assert Polish independence by possessing Warsaw before the Russians came? What a nemesis. They wanted their fight and the Russians left them to it. Why did they not wait until the Red Army was bombarding the city? Accidents, accidents, mistakes, mistakes. The men in London bemused by years of agonizing diplomacy, the men in Warsaw worn out by years of secret organization and nerve-destroying terror. The crucial hours it took to decode messages. The vain hopes of Moscow diplomacy, of Anglo-American help, of German collapse. Two men who were late at a meeting. A false intelligence report. Desire, desire, desire for the longed-for end, the crown of so much scheming and suffering. The inability to wait. Then the catastrophe, humiliation worse than anything dreamt of in their wildest fear. The Count could think of nothing like it in history except the Sicilian Expedition. (The comparison was his father’s.) It was a strange fact that his father had never talked to him about the fight in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 when the Jews of the city had risen in inspired courageous hopeless rage against their tormentors. They fought without hope or calculation like rats in a trap and forced their enemies to tear them to pieces. Like rats in a trap; rats in other traps had not fought. His father’s silence was not anti-Semitism, it was envy. He envied the absolute simplicity of that fight, the purity of its heroism. There was no doubt where the unsmirched flag of Poland was flying in those days of 1943.
    But why did the Red Army not cross the Vistula? The sleepless Count thus continued his argument with his father. Were the Russians really waiting cynically for the Germans to destroy their own prospective foes, the flower, the élite of a passionately independent Poland? When the Red Army entered Warsaw it was empty. Indeed it was scarcely there, the ruins were level with the ground. There was no sign of human habitation except for thousands and thousands of hasty new-made graves. His father had been unjust to the Russians, their lines of communication were