Song of the Legions (24 page)

With Birnbaum and two of his comrades, who had also survived, there were now six of us riding, and not three. The three Jewish soldiers had recovered what the Cossacks had taken from them, and any of the Cossack weapons as were serviceable. Behind us we had a good few horses, both Cossack ponies and the thoroughbreds we had taken from the Targowicans. It is well said that they that go out for wool, often find themselves shorn!

In this way, across the nation, whole brigades of insurgents were gathering into companies and battalions and regiments. One day, we knew, into an army. Poland was not dead, not while we lived, at any rate.

Birnbaum now wore the enormous Cossack scimitar at his belt, black furs on his back, and a fur cap on his head. He was a striking-looking fellow, was Birnbaum, with his dark eyes and scowling brow.

“Damn it!” he laughed, as we rode through a terrified village, “these peasants think I’m a Cossack!” This Birnbaum had a fine sense of humour, and was a learned, bookish sort, and we found his society a pleasant change from banging our three heads together and being howled at by wolves.

“Tell us about the Beardlings,” we said, for it was a subject that interested us all greatly. When the Commander had armed these Jewish volunteers, it had excited deep passions and prejudices amongst us Poles. Still, we had been desperate, and all hands were needed at the plough.

“Tanski here,” I teased, “is, as you know, our superior officer, and he holds the esteemed rank of Lieutenant, from which he is hoping to be promoted to boot-licker or shit-collector.”

“Go to hell, Blumer,” Tanski exhorted me.

“Tanski is very keen to know about the history of his new Jewish legion,” I continued, “for we see Tanski as a sort of Moses, leading his people out of the wilderness. Give him half a chance and he’ll take away your golden calf, fetch you down ten commandments from that hill yonder, and part the waters of the Vistula with his farts.”

“What the Devil do you mean by that –
his people
? I’m no Jew!” Tanski snapped, rising to the bait. He began ranting and raving about the times he had eaten pork, and the fact he had no beard, and so forth, until we fell about hooting with laughter. Eventually he shut up, his face crimson with rage, for by then even he saw the jest, and shrugged hopelessly. For if one commands, one must have skin thicker than a pig’s, be it kosher or not.

Birnbaum told his story as we rode.

“I was a student in Wroclaw. After the Second Partition, Wroclaw fell into Prussian hands, as you know. Well, one day my tutor called me in and said that he was very sorry, but the Germans would not allow me to attend the university any longer, for I was a Jew, and therefore needed no learning but as could allow me to read the Talmud and to count money.”

We threw up our hands and protested at this petty injustice, so typical of the Prussians.

“Now I was mighty put out by this, as you may imagine. For I was all set to make my way in the world as a fine lawyer or a doctor, or some such profession as tickled my fancy, and wear wigs and ride in a carriage and never have to labour for a living or want for a thing. That door to advancement being barred to me, I returned home to my father’s business – he was a silk merchant – to put my shoulder to the wheel of honest commerce.

“My father was a hard working man, and he inherited his business from his father, and his father’s father. We Birnbaums have been in Wroclaw since Sobieski’s day, when our family sought sanctuary in Poland under the protection of the Polish kings. Polish kings have always been friends to the Jews – even when their subjects have not,” he said, archly. “Anyway, our silks have always flourished, for we work hard, and we have the knack of turning a grosz into a zloty. We are a thrifty family, and we never waste a tynf.

“Yet our persecution did not end there. After the Partition, we found that a thousand new petty taxes and regulations had been inflicted upon us by our new overlords. It was bad indeed, for it was a hundred times worse than the torments inflicted upon us by our Polish masters. Truly, it is better the devil you know! For decades we had prayed for deliverance from Polish tyranny – if you fine officers will excuse me for saying so – and now we found ourselves delivered alright. Delivered right out of the frying pan, and into the fire!”

“Aye,” I agreed, “be careful what you ask God for, in case you get it.”

“So it goes!” Birnbaum laughed. “Anyway, between the customs house and the taxes and the fines levied on Jews, and the bribes that we had to pay just to open our shop in the morning, we were driven to the wall in short order, and to penury. A good business that had flourished since Sobieski’s day, ground under the Prussian jackboot in less than six months. We watched as our creditors took our silks, our warehouse, and every stick of furniture in the house. Then the bailiffs gave us a good hiding with their truncheons into the bargain. They should have turned us out and packed us off to the ghetto, too, but for the fact that we already resided there. ‘Well,’ my old father said, as we dusted ourselves down and nursed our wounds, ‘now we may have nothing, but at least we still have our good name.’”

“Your father was right,” I said, “one’s good name is the only possession that matters to a gentleman.”

“Ha!” Birnbaum laughed, “My mother saw it differently. She scolded him for a fool, and said that in that case we had nothing but our lives, and like as not the Cossacks would be at our door for those presently. For we had all heard of the pogroms, of course. Then it took a turn for the worse, which I had scarcely considered conceivable. I woke up the next morning from this nightmare to find some Prussian gendarmes on my doorstep. They handed us a writ, or some such, and told us to present ourselves at the town hall on the morrow. There we were to be assigned a new name, and also to sign over our coat of arms, which was now null and void, nonesuch being permitted to be held by Jews. Now we really would have nothing – not even our good name!”

At this point, Birnbaum drew out a beautiful silk handkerchief, very large, embroidered with an elaborate heraldic design. This he tied to his lance and held aloft.

“Behold, the Birnbaum crest!” Birnbaum snorted with laughter. “Well, by now I’d had my fill of this. All of Poland was alight with rebellion. I resolved to join The Uprising. If all other occupations were barred to me, there was at least the profession of arms. We Jews all knew of a Jewish merchant named Colonel Joselewicz, from Kretina, who had raised a rallying cry in Yiddish against the invaders. This Joselewicz had worked as a financier for one of the magnates, and he had travelled to Paris, where he had learned French. Caught up in the revolution, with its spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was something of a Jewish Jacobin, and he found in the Commander a kindred spirit, and was made a Colonel.”

“A Jewish Jacobin!” Tanski snorted, “saints preserve us!” Tanski, as you will know, was not fond of Jacobins, nor indeed of Jews, although he was always perfectly civil to our new comrades, except when in temper. Birnbaum continued his story.

“Well, in September last year the Colonel raised his own regiment of Jews, which I joined, named ‘the Beardlings’.” He pointed at his black beard. “It was so-called for we had been allowed to keep our beards, and eat kosher foods, and even to abstain from fighting on the Sabbath, when circumstances permitted. We were all volunteers, and most of us had been tradesmen or artisans, like my two comrades here that you also saved from the Cossacks. There we were, alongside the militia and the scythemen, when the Commander read the Act of Insurrection in Krakow Square.”

“God’s wounds, the Uprising!” we sighed, hearing the bells of the churches again, smelling the incense of the altars again, tasting Pepi’s champagne on our lips. Krakow, and freedom.

It is a common slander that Poles hate the Jews. That may be so. Yet I never saw, nor fought against, nor even heard of, a regiment of Jewish volunteers under arms for any other nation. Not in twenty years of war. No Tsar, Kaiser, or Hapsburg ever had such a regiment as the Beardlings under their flag. But the Republic did. And it would have one again, in Italy, in our Polish Legion.

“There we stood with all free Poland,” Birnbaum reminisced, “five hundred of us, the first regiment of Jewish warriors since the days of Masada!”

I laughed at this. “You Jews certainly know how to pick a fight! The odds we faced in The Uprising weren’t much better than you Jews faced at Masada in Biblical times – standing against ten Roman legions!” The Jews of Masada, of course, committed suicide rather than submit to slavery.

“Alas,” Birnbaum said ruefully, “you are right. We were cornered by the Cossacks at Praga. That must have occasioned those bastards great satisfaction, for their age-old hatred of us is unquenchable. As you see, a few of us Beardlings escaped, including the Colonel. We went into hiding in the ghettoes and synagogues, for our people sheltered us. We were making our way for Lwow, when a few of us were separated from the others, and the Cossacks caught up with us, and that is where my tongue catches up with my horse, so to speak.”

“Why to Lwow?” we inquired, suspiciously.

“That is where the Legions are gathering,” Birnbaum said cannily, “as everyone knows, and where you are bound yourselves.”

“Soon enough, Birnbaum,” I said, “but we have a rendezvous first.”

With that, we all grinned, and spurred our horses.

Pulawy is south-east of Warsaw, not far from Maciejowice. We stayed well clear of that accursed spot where the Commander had his horse shot from under him, and was taken prisoner by the Russians. It took us until late summer, for the roads were thick with spies and soldiers. The harvest was already in and the skies were losing their lustre, like an old maid left on the shelf. In a few months’ time it would be light enough to see the hand in front of your face, but dark enough not to see the knife as it was stuck in your back.

Cyprian Godebski had praised Madame L’s beauty. He eulogised the tenderest and most beautiful eyes that nature had ever formed. Godebski would have appreciated her fine dress, her hat, her jewels, her glowing eyes. But they were also the cold, calculating eyes of a general, appraising newly arrived cannon fodder.

“Where the Devil have you been?” exclaimed Madame angrily, hands on hips, when we finally arrived. We vaulted from our horses and tied them up in the shade of a great round stone temple.

Madame was the lynchpin of our espionage network. She was a tigress. This lady did not lose heart now that we had been defeated. On the contrary, she had redoubled her efforts.

“All roads lead to Rome, my lady,” I said, sweeping off my hat and bowing to kiss her hand. I had never dared before, but after our hard journey I was emboldened to kiss this beautiful gorgon. She stared back at me with the eyes of medusa.

“Sit down,” she said, and clicked her fingers. Her lackeys brought us water, for it was still hot. We sat down on a bench in the shadow of the great stone edifice and drank. All around us were great boulders overgrown with moss.

“What, if I may ask, is this?” Sierawski piped up, indicating the great stone tower, which had a dome on top and columns around it.

“It’s a tomb, you fool,” I said, and cocked my head at Madame, “but whose?”

“This is the Temple of the Sibyl,” Madame snapped, “and it is both a fortress, and a tomb. Inside the Temple we keep the flame burning. Here we will keep our culture, our language, and our history alive. It is a museum of our nation’s treasures, those very same treasures that I salvaged from Warsaw, despite the best efforts of you gentlemen to foul it up, by losing half of them along the way – including the damned flag!”

At this we began to protest. We set to blaming the weather, the Cossacks, and treachery, for the disaster that had befallen our mission.

“Silence!” Madame hissed. We obeyed. “I see that you blame everything except your own negligence! None of you has exactly covered yourselves in glory in my service!”

We sat, gloomily, and contemplated her words. Workmen passed to and from the great tower with bricks and beams, mortar and marble, wood and water, loam and lime. There were a great deal of workmen, and as we watched them, we saw that they had the unmistakable walk of soldiers. After a time we began to recognise old comrades.

“This is an armed camp, in the guise of a building site,” I said, doffing my threadbare czapka. “I applaud your ingenuity, Madame.”

“When I need your approval, I shall ask for it,” Madame snorted. “If circumstances were any different, I would dishonourably discharge the lot of you, or simply have you shot.”

We hung our heads in shame.

“However,” Madame went on, “I see that you have at least rescued these three good Jewish comrades, so perhaps you may redeem yourselves yet.” She pointed at Birnbaum and the other Beardlings. They sat beside us, wisely keeping their bearded heads down.

“Also, I am desperately short of men,” she admitted.

“Are things that bad?” I asked, quietly.

Her face was as grim as steel. “Indeed they are. The Commander is in a Russian gulag. A dozen of our generals are dead, including General Jasinski. Zayonczek is in an Austrian prison. Poniatowski has given up the fight – he drinks and gambles his days away in Warsaw.”

“Hell’s bells!” I swore, “Do all our leaders have feet of clay?”

“Not all, no,” Madame replied. “General Dabrowski is in exile in Paris, seeking help from the French.”

“With friends like the French, who needs enemies?” we asked, and began to laugh. For it had been discovered by now that a renegade Frenchman, spying for the English, had betrayed the plans of our Uprising to the Russians.

“So the Rottmeister really is our last hope?” Tanski cried, rolling his eyes. “Then we are indeed lost!” We fell to bickering. For Sierawski and I greatly esteemed Dabrowski, whilst Tanski did not. Madame silenced us with an imperious glance.

“Dabrowski has set up a Polish legion in exile. He has spent a year traipsing round the Courts of Europe, seeking sponsors. First, he went to the Prussians – a damn fool errand if you ask me, but then he is half-German by blood. As if those dogs would aid us after their treachery! No, they offered him a general’s hat in their army instead, as indeed did the Russians. But our dear Dabrowski is no traitor, so he went to Paris instead. At first he was ignored by the French, but then he found a patron at last – Bonaparte.”

“Bonaparte?” we asked blankly.

“Dabrowski has raised an army of Poles for the war in Italy against the Austrians, under the French General Bonaparte,” Madame told us.
By the end of the next year, that name would be on every pair of lips in Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte, the man of the age, who would shake the world like a wolf with a lamb.

“Then there is an army in exile? With the French!” we yelped, jubilant, capering about like children, “God bless this Bonaparte fellow! Hurrah for Dabrowski! When do we leave for Italy?” we asked, afire with new enthusiasm.

“You do not,” Madame said. “A second legion is gathering in Lwow. Dabrowski has a spy in Turkey, in Constantinople, who is providing money and arms. You will go to Lwow, and you will take this with you.” She called out to one of her lackeys, who hared off into the Temple at her command. A few moments later he returned, carrying Sobieski’s standard, wrapped in an oilskin. Somehow this formidable woman had recovered it. Madame unfurled it. We cheered the sight of it, our poor threadbare flag.

“Poland is not dead, as long as we live!”

The six of us drew our swords, and pledged them to her. Madame raised her hands to the heavens. “Soldiers! Here are your orders. Do not fail this time. Go to Lwow. Go to Cyprian. He still lives – for now, at least,” Madame said, her brow furrowed and careworn. “The Austrians have issued a warrant for his arrest.”

We took to our heels at once. “Lwow is a big city. How will we find Cyprian?” I asked, from the saddle of my horse.

“You’ll find him. All roads lead to Rome,” Madame replied.