I came home from the work site with mortar dust in my hair and the specific ache of a man who has been doing physical labour since before the light was good enough to see it clearly, and when I opened the door Justyna was already at the table with the newspaper open and her hands flat on it in the way she put her hands on things when she had decided what she thought about them and was waiting to see what I thought.
I knew, before I read it, what the newspaper said. You could tell from the way she had her hands on it.
I sat down across from her and I read it.
The Polish army was calling for volunteers. Not conscripts — volunteers, which was a distinction the announcement was careful to make, though both she and I understood that the distinction between volunteering and being conscripted narrows considerably when the thing you are being asked to volunteer for is the defence of the country you live in against an army advancing toward it. The communist forces in Ukraine were moving west. The Soviet Republic, having absorbed the chaos of the Russian Revolution and the civil war into something with organisation and momentum, was pressing toward Polish territory with the specific energy of an ideology that believed its own expansion was both inevitable and correct.
Poland needed men who knew how to fight. The announcement said so in the language that announcements use when they mean something more urgent than the language directly conveys.
Justyna looked at me across the newspaper.
"I know," I said.
"You promised," she said. Not an accusation. A statement of a fact she wanted to ensure was present in the room before anything else was said.
"I know," I said again.
We sat with the newspaper between us for a while. The children were asleep upstairs. The house had the specific quiet of a house that has children in it who are asleep, which is a different quiet from a house with no children, fuller and more provisional.
"Tell me what you're thinking," she said.
"I'm thinking about Konin," I said. "I'm thinking about the camp in Bavaria. I'm thinking about Wojcik and the crossroads and what it cost and what it bought." I paused. "I'm thinking that the thing I came back from Bavaria to do — the thing we agreed I would do, the small local thing, just this corner, just this patch — I don't think that thing stays small and local if the army coming from the east reaches it."
She looked at her hands on the newspaper.
"You said I ask, you come home," she said.
"You're not asking me to go," I said. "I know the difference."
She was quiet for a long time. The house held its provisional quiet around us.
"The second promise," she said finally. "Same terms as the first. You come back when I ask. Not when the war is finished. Not when the cause is satisfied. When I ask."
"Same terms," I said.
She got up from the table and she came around it and she put her arms around me from behind, her face against the side of my neck, and she held on with the specific quality of someone who has held on before and knows what holding on costs and is doing it anyway because the alternative is not holding on, which is worse.
I put my hands over hers.
"I'll come back," I said.
I believed it. I want to record that I believed it, because the believing mattered, because a man who makes a promise he does not believe is making a different kind of promise from a man who believes it and I was the second kind.
Whether the believing was sufficient was a question the road to Kiev was going to answer.
---
I volunteered the following morning at the recruitment office on the main street, which had the same quality it had had in 1914 — the queue, the desk, the stamp, the specific administrative conversion of a man into a soldier that takes less time than it should given what it commits the man to. The difference from 1914 was that I went through it without the uncertainty of a man who does not know what he is signing. I knew exactly what I was signing. The knowing made it slower to walk through the door and faster once I was through it, the decision having been made in Justyna's kitchen the previous evening with my hands over hers.
They looked at my record. A corporal's record from the Russian front, from Konin, from the labour camp, from the resistance actions with Wojcik's group.
They made me a sergeant, which I accepted without argument because arguing about rank when there is a war to be attended to is the kind of argument that costs time nobody has.
---
The division moved east in the spring of 1920, which was a different kind of spring from the springs I had known in Bavaria — warmer, with the specific quality of Polish spring that arrives like a statement after a winter that has been making a different kind of statement for too long. The countryside east of Warsaw had the familiar look of land I had marched through before, in a different direction, for a different army, in a different year. The farms, the rivers, the particular flatness of the Polish plain that goes on past the point where the eye expects it to stop and keeps going.
We were a different army from the one I had been part of before. Not in the essential nature of what armies are — men with weapons moving toward other men with weapons, the collision between them being the work — but in the specific composition of this one. Polish soldiers, fighting for a Poland that now existed in a form it had not existed in for over a century, with the specific quality of people fighting for a thing they have recently been given and are not willing to have taken back.
And mages. Poland had its own mage battalion now, which was one of the things the peace settlement had not prohibited — the prohibition on mage battalions had applied specifically to the successor states of the Germano-Hungry Empire, and Poland, having been a territory rather than a participant, had been exempted from the specific terms that applied to the empire's remnants. The Polish mage battalion was small, newer than any of the imperial formations, trained by men who had served in various armies during the Great War and had brought their knowledge home with them. They flew in formation above the column when we moved, their constructs catching the spring light in the way that constructs caught light, and the men in the column watched them the way soldiers always watched mages — with a mixture of gratitude and unease that did not resolve into either.
The Ukrainian Soviet forces we encountered in the first weeks were not the devastating force the newspapers had made them sound like. They were fighting men, capable fighting men, with conviction and adequate equipment, but they were fighting men who were also fighting a war in three other directions simultaneously, the Soviet Republic's ambitions having exceeded its current capacity to fully resource all of them at once. We pushed east and they fell back and regrouped and pushed back and we fell back and regrouped and pushed again, the rhythm of it familiar to me in the way that the rhythms of war become familiar when you have been inside them long enough.
Men died in the familiar ways. I will not catalogue each one because the catalogue would be long and the familiarity would make the catalogue feel routine, which these men were not. But they died, and I noted them and moved forward because moving forward was what the situation required, and the noting was the only thing I had available to offer them.
---
Kiev appeared on the horizon on a morning in early summer, the city's spires and rooftops visible from the rise where the division had halted to consolidate before the final approach. It was a larger city than I had expected — I had known its size from maps but maps are abstractions and the reality of a city is always larger than its abstraction, the way the reality of everything is always larger than its abstraction.
The Soviet forces in the city had decided, with the specific logic of a command that understands it cannot hold a thing and has decided to ensure that the thing cannot be used after it is taken, to burn it.
The fires had started before we reached the outskirts. We could see them from the rise — specific towers of black smoke rising from multiple points within the city simultaneously, the deliberate pattern of fires that have been set rather than fires that have started, the spacing and the simultaneity telling anyone who understood fires that these were not accidents. The Soviet forces were burning Kiev the way retreating forces have always burned the things they cannot keep from the people coming to take them, the logic being that a city on fire is harder to use as a base than a city intact.
The logic was correct. What it failed to account for was that burning Kiev did not stop us from entering it — it simply meant that we entered it while it was on fire.
---
Urban fighting in a burning city is a specific category of experience that I had not encountered before and which I will describe as honestly as I can.
The heat was the first thing. Not the ambient heat of a summer day but the specific directed heat of burning buildings on both sides of a street, radiating into the space between them with an intensity that made the air itself feel hostile, that dried the eyes and the mouth and the throat simultaneously and turned sweat to nothing before it could serve its purpose. The smoke was everywhere — not the clean smoke of open fires but the dense, particulate smoke of buildings burning, carrying within it the various materials of which buildings are made and which produce, when burned, various specific toxins that the lungs register without being able to process.
The Soviet forces had not simply set fires and left. They had set fires and established positions behind the fires, in the buildings that were not yet burning and in the rubble of buildings that had already burned, using the fires as barriers and the smoke as cover and the confusion as a force multiplier in the way that defenders always use what the environment provides when they have insufficient numbers to use conventional means.
We entered the city on Khreshchatyk, the main boulevard, and the fighting started within the first block.
Machine gun, set up in the shell of a burned building, firing through a gap in the rubble that gave it a field of fire across the full width of the boulevard. The first burst caught the men at the front of our section before anyone had located the position — Private Adamczyk, who had been two steps ahead of me, took the initial burst across his chest and midsection, the rounds hitting in a sequence that I saw more clearly than I wished to, each impact producing a visible effect on his body before the sequence was complete — the first round entering his chest, the second lower, the third and fourth opening his abdomen in a way that spilled what the abdomen contained into the street while he was still standing, still in the process of registering the first round, his hands going to his stomach in the reflex of a man trying to hold something in that is no longer interested in being held in, and he went down in the Khreshchatyk dust with his hands still pressed to himself and the look on his face of a man who has been told something he did not expect and has not yet decided what to do with the information.
Lance Corporal Wiśniewski was behind him and to the left, and the burst that found him found him differently — a single round through the head, entering at the temple and exiting through the opposite side of the skull, and he was dead before his body had communicated the fact of death to his legs, the body continuing its forward stride for one more step that the head was no longer part of before the coordination failed and he went down all at once, the way bodies go down when the decision has been made at the highest level.
I was behind a doorframe that the machine gun could not find at its current angle, which was the specific luck of being in the right position at the wrong moment, and I had my rifle up and was locating the gap in the rubble that the gun was firing from, the specific direction of the tracer rounds giving me the line and the rubble giving me the terminal point of the line.
I put three rounds through the gap in the sequence that the angle permitted and the gun stopped.
We moved forward.
---
This was the pattern of Kiev — block by block, position by position, the Soviet forces using the city's geography the way defenders always use geography when they understand the city and the attacker does not. Each street was its own problem. Each intersection was its own negotiation. The burned buildings provided cover for both sides without preference, the rubble impartial in whose shelter it offered.
A Soviet position behind a barricade of furniture and sandbags on Volodymyrska Street had three machine guns and a crew that knew what they were doing and were prepared to do it for as long as they had ammunition. We found this out when the section ahead of us attempted to clear the barricade directly, which cost them eleven men in the time it takes to describe spending eleven men on a barricade.
I watched it from the corner of the previous block and I saw what the direct approach produced, which was the eleven men and the barricade still intact, and I took what remained of our section down the side street that ran parallel to Volodymyrska and through the building that backed onto the barricade's position and I came through the building's rear door behind the barricade with the section behind me and the Soviet crew's attention entirely occupied by what was still moving toward them from the front.
Close range. The space behind the barricade was small and we were in it with them before the reorientation was possible and what followed in the space behind the barricade I will describe only in its essentials, which were that it was brief and total and cost us two men in the process and cost the Soviet crew everything.
Sergeant Nowak lost his left hand in the first exchange — a blade finding his wrist at the angle that removed the hand and left the arm, and he looked at the end of his arm with the expression of Brauer on the pontoon bridge, the expression of a man whose mind is filing what his eyes are showing it under a category that does not yet exist, and then he sat down with his remaining hand clasped around the wrist and I put a tourniquet on it and left him because the position was not yet fully resolved and I could not resolve it while attending to Nowak simultaneously.
Private Kowalczyk, eighteen, from Poznań, who had told me he wanted to study medicine after the war, was stabbed through the chest by a Soviet soldier who had been behind a piece of the barricade that I had not cleared and who resolved the situation of his own position and Kowalczyk's in a single thrust that went in at the sternum and emerged from the back, and Kowalczyk looked at the blade in him with the specific bewilderment of someone who has been informed of something they did not know was a possibility and sat down slowly, the blade withdrawing as the Soviet soldier stepped back, and the withdrawal was its own event entirely — a wet, tearing sound as the steel came out of the meat and the cavity it left behind filled with the air and blood that the chest cavity was not supposed to contain simultaneously.
Kowalczyk sat against the barricade with both hands on his chest and looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both understood what the looking meant, and I finished clearing the position and I came back to him and I sat with him for the two minutes that the two minutes lasted, which was all I had and all he needed.
The position was cleared. We moved to the next one.
---
The mage battalion came in on the third day of the street fighting, when the Soviet machine gun positions had been mapped sufficiently to give the mages specific targets and the urban geography had been understood well enough to reduce the risk of friendly fire to a level that the commanders had apparently decided was acceptable.
I watched them work from a position on Institutska Street, crouched behind a half-collapsed wall with the section around me, watching the constructs move above the city in the way that constructs moved — silent, fluid, wrong in the way that all mage constructs were wrong in the specific sense of moving through air with a logic that was not the logic of physical objects.
The enchanted rounds found the Soviet machine gun nest on the building across from us and what they found it with, in the specific sense of what happened to the nest when the round arrived, was total. The nest had been behind reinforced masonry — heavy blocks that the Soviet forces had clearly positioned specifically to resist rifle fire and light artillery, the kind of fortification that would take significant conventional ordnance to reduce. The enchanted round went through the masonry as if the masonry were a question rather than an obstacle and detonated inside the nest with the specific internal yield of enchanted ordnance, and what the masonry had contained was redistributed outward through what remained of the openings in a way that told me clearly what had been in the nest without requiring me to examine it in detail.
Three more positions on the street went the same way in the following ten minutes — the mages working methodically, the enchanted rounds finding positions through walls that should have protected them, detonating inside with the same internal violence that turned fortified positions into the kind of thing that could no longer be called a position.
The Soviet defence on Institutska Street broke after the fourth position went. The surviving defenders pulled back through the buildings behind their line, moving east, and we moved forward into the street they had been holding and we held it, and the city block was ours.
---
Kiev fell by pieces over four days of fighting, each piece costing something, the cost accumulating in the way that urban combat costs accumulate — not dramatically, not in single catastrophic moments, but in the steady arithmetic of men lost per block, per street, per position, until the arithmetic has added up to a number that represents a city taken and the men it took to take it.
On the fourth evening I stood in a square near the city centre with what remained of my section — seven men from the fourteen who had entered the city on the first morning — and I looked at Kiev around me, which was partly burning and partly not, the fires the Soviet forces had set having been addressed by various means including the simple arithmetic of what burns having eventually burned.
The city smelled of smoke and the other things cities smell of after four days of being fought through, which I will not enumerate because the enumeration is not necessary and the smell is sufficiently described by the fact of what had produced it.
I found a wall to sit against that was still structurally opinionated about remaining a wall, and I sat against it, and I thought about Justyna.
I thought about the kitchen in Słupca and her hands flat on the newspaper and the second promise made with the same terms as the first — you come back when I ask, not when the war is finished. I thought about the children upstairs in the specific provisional quiet of a house with sleeping children in it, which was a quiet I had been carrying with me through four days of Kiev the way you carry things that are worth carrying even when the carrying is difficult.
I was alive. I was sitting against a wall in a city that had just been taken at a cost I had been counting as I went and which I would not stop counting until I was somewhere that did not require the counting.
I was alive.
The second promise was still operational.
I thought about home.