The Demi-Monde: Winter (53 page)

With a shrug the Baron marched his ragtag crew off towards the internment camp. It took them fifteen minutes to get to the camp and, just as he had promised, Crockett’s little army was there waiting for them.

The Baron thought it indicative of how a totalitarian regime like the ForthRight so ruthlessly eliminated any spark of initiative in its soldiers that when he strode up to the camp’s gatehouse no one questioned his demand to see the camp commandant. Men in uniform presenting themselves at strange hours and issuing nonsensical orders were part and parcel of military life in the ForthRight: it was better to obey orders than to question them.

The commandant, his mind doused with Spring Eve good will and Solution, attended the Baron five minutes later, his eyes heavy and his shirt hanging out of his trousers. ‘Comrade Commissar?’ began the bewildered man. ‘I had heard …’

The camp commandant stopped in mid-sentence. By the Baron’s reckoning he was so befuddled by booze and blood that he probably couldn’t quite remember what he had heard. The last thing he wanted to do was insult a senior member of the Party by repeating the slanderous rumour that the Comrade
Commissar had been pronounced a nonNix and an Enemy of the People.

‘All a misunderstanding,’ said the Baron, waving away the commandant’s suspicions. ‘I have been reappointed by the Leader as the man responsible for the operation of the rail line. There has been a subsidence on one of the embankments and we desperately need men to help shore it up before the arrival of the first of the military expresses.’

‘How many men do you need, Comrade Commissar?’

‘I would be grateful if you would parade all the Polish workers,’ ordered the Baron.

‘All of them?’ There was real concern in the camp commandant’s voice. ‘There’re almost five thousand of the bastards, Comrade Commissar, and it being Spring Eve I’ve only got twenty men on duty. These Poles are desperate men and twenty guards aren’t nearly enough to control them. Perhaps it would be best to parade them in chains?’

‘That won’t be necessary.’ The Baron gave the commandant a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry, Comrade Commandant, I have brought twenty of my own men with me to supplement your guards.’

The Baron nodded towards Crockett, who came to attention and saluted smartly when the commandant’s gaze alighted on him. ‘Comrade Captain Crockett at your service, Sir, late of Wellington’s Wranglers. My men are able soldiers, Sir: they won’t let you down.’

The Poles – grumbling and bad-tempered – were paraded just twenty minutes later. Running an eye over the shuffling, complaining ranks, the Baron decided that the commandant had a right to be worried: they certainly looked a mutinous mob. The Militia guards eyed them warily and kept their M4s pointed in their direction.

‘I would like to address the workers,’ announced the Baron.

The commandant looked at the Baron with surprise. Nobody addressed the Polaks: you screamed at them and you kicked them, but you didn’t address them.

Even as the commandant was turning this oddity over in his Solution-muddled mind, the Baron moved to stand directly in front of the bedraggled and decidedly unhappy workers. ‘Polish men,’ he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘as I speak to you, the forces of the ForthRight are moving to crush the last of the Warsaw Free Army.’

There were growls of anger from the ranks. The camp commandant drew his Mauser and cocked it. It was obvious from the look on his face that in his opinion the sooner all Poles were crushed the better.

‘Only a few thousand brave soldiers of the Warsaw Free Army stand against the thugs of the SS and the evil of Reinhard Heydrich,’ the Baron continued. ‘I have pledged myself to help Warsaw to survive.’

There was stunned silence around the parade ground as everybody tried to work out what the Baron was saying. The commandant’s hazy thought processes struggled with the conundrum of how the Baron came to be using words like ‘thugs’ and ‘evil’ when describing the SS and the Great Leader.

‘Now is the time to throw off the shackles of slavery!’ shouted the Baron.

With a look of bemusement on his face the camp commandant turned to the Baron: his bamboozled mind had at last managed to make two and two equal four. Unfortunately this mathematical insight came too late to save him. The Baron smiled at him and put a bullet through his head, and as Crockett’s men dispatched the other guards in similar fashion,
the Polish prisoners just stood immobile on the parade ground, stunned by the turn of events.

‘Polish soldiers,’ began the Baron in a loud voice, ‘as I speak to you, men of the Royalist Defence League are seizing a train laden with guns and ammunition – enough to arm every one of you.’ The Baron looked up and down the ranks of the dirty and bemused Poles. ‘I ask you to join me in attacking the SS in Warsaw and helping our brave WFA comrades in their fight against tyranny.’

And to the Baron’s astonishment, the men started cheering.

The train was early. Cassidy had only just set the bomb – he hadn’t been able to remember whether the Baron had told him he needed two hundred kilos of explosive or four hundred kilos, so to be on the safe side, he’d opted for the latter – and run the fuse behind the shed they were using as protection from the blast when he heard the whistle announcing the train’s imminent arrival. Of course, the Baron had also got him confused about the direction the train was to come at him from, but, thankfully, once he’d realised it was arriving from the Rodina side of the bridge, he’d managed to nip out and re-lay the bomb in time. A minute later, when he saw the train’s lanterns, he scratched a match on the side of the shed, lit the fuse and prayed that he hadn’t cut it too long. If the bomb exploded after the train had passed, the Baron would be mighty ticked off.

The bomb exploded exactly where Cassidy had intended: under the engine, directly beneath the boiler. Unfortunately, as he decided later, he should have used only two hundred kilos – maybe that should have been two hundred pounds – of explosive. At four hundred kilos the bomb didn’t so much derail the train as pick it up and toss it disdainfully aside. There was a huge, ear-shredding scream of steel on steel, the train seemed
to pause for a moment as though gathering its breath and then it jumped the tracks and plunged down the earth embankment, dragging the line of seven carriages it was hauling with it.

Fuck!

For a moment the train lay huffing and puffing on its side like some great wounded beast. Then all Hel broke loose. The boiler exploded and if the sound of Cassidy’s bomb detonating had been loud, this was positively earth-shaking. Shards of metal flew like so much shrapnel through the air, wrecking the wooden shed Cassidy was using for cover, a flying rivet almost taking his head off. This he decided was a damned sight more exciting – and dangerous – than tending to the gardens of Dashwood Manor.

He waited a few moments until he was reasonably confident that nothing else was going to go bang and then peeked out from behind the smoking ruin of the shed. The train’s firebox had been split open by the explosion, spewing burning coals all around, and by the light from the fires the coals had started he saw that the cargo carried by the trucks had been spilled along the line. Cassidy set off at a trot to see what the spoils of war were. Initially he was disappointed, all there seemed to be were boxes upon boxes of tinned meat, but at the third wagon he struck lucky, almost tripping over long wooden boxes containing automatic rifles.

With a whoop of triumph he waved to the boy who had command of the signal rocket and a second later a red flare was arching across the night sky.

Cassidy gave a satisfied smile: he had just pulled off the first robbery of a railway train in the history of the Demi-Monde. He would be famous. It might even be the first step on a very lucrative career. All he needed was more trains.

The Baron hadn’t appreciated how difficult it would be to fashion the Polish prisoners into an army. Once they had broken out of the camp, once they had got to the wrecked train, once they were armed, then all discipline seemed to desert them. All they were intent on was revenge; all they wanted to do was to kill people … any people. But the Baron knew they didn’t have time for revenge. Once day dawned there would be no hiding from the SS and they would be hunted down like dogs. By the Baron’s calculations they had, at most, ten hours, ten hours to decide the fate of what was left of the WFA and of Trixie.

It was Crockett and his gang who, by dint of much cursing and haranguing, managed to bring about half of the Poles into some semblance of order. It was this motley crew that marched to relieve Warsaw. They came within an ace of failing.

If the commander of the ForthRight forces stationed in Odessa had been more resolute and more decisive he could have moved to block the advance of the Baron’s improvised army. But he was a man of little initiative and, confused and perplexed by the strange messages he was receiving about a breakout by Polish prisoners, he kept most of his men safely in barracks and allowed the Baron’s army to pass through Odessa largely unopposed.

If there had been fewer veterans of the Troubles in the ranks of the Polish escapees – men used to action and to taking orders – then Crockett wouldn’t have been able to keep control and the army would have quickly disintegrated into a mob.

If their attack had taken place during the day, the Baron’s army would soon have become lost in the jumble of Odessa’s unfamiliar backstreets. But at night they had the glow of the fires sweeping through Warsaw to guide them and they could follow the trails of fairy lights formed as artillery shells arched
through the sky to fall with a crump on the Industrial Zone.

But most of all they were lucky that it was Spring Eve and half the ForthRight Army was drunk.

They attacked the Southgate entrance to the Ghetto. It wasn’t a coordinated or a well-managed assault but it was effective. The last thing the SS guards were expecting was to be attacked from outside of the Ghetto, and certainly not by thousands of well-armed and vengeful Poles. Resistance crumpled and in a matter of minutes the Poles were in Warsaw, but there was no time for them to rest on their laurels. The Baron and Crockett drove their men on, screaming at any who paused to pillage wagons or became involved in firefights, reminding them that the bigger prize had yet to be won.

The odd thing was that as they advanced through the ruined streets of Warsaw they met surprisingly little resistance. All the Baron could assume was that Clement had received word of their impending attack and, determined not to find himself fighting an enemy to the front and to the rear, had pulled his forces into a defensive line to the east of the Ghetto. With disturbing ease the Baron’s army smashed through the SS and made it to the barricades that marked the final line of the WFA’s defence.

Baron Dashwood barely recognised his daughter: he had to convince himself that this dirty, ragged girl with the hacked crop of hair was indeed his beloved Trixiebell. But it wasn’t just the change in her appearance that the Baron found difficult to accept: she had, in just a few weeks, metamorphosed into someone completely different from the skittish and unworldly Trixiebell he had known and loved. She had become harder and colder. Even the embrace she had given him seemed reluctant … almost embarrassed.

But he had to admit to being mightily impressed by the way she managed her army and her officers. She was decisive and she was respected and all of the battle-hardened WFA officers who made up her command team unquestioningly acknowledged her authority.

Maybe, the Baron decided, when all the fighting and the mayhem was over, he would see his Trixiebell again. But looking at the huge sergeant who loitered so protectively behind his daughter, the Baron had the feeling, as all fathers have at some point in their lives, that Trixiebell wasn’t his any more. He had been superseded in his daughter’s life by this brutal Sergeant Wysochi.

It was the Sergeant who his daughter turned to now. ‘Divide the fighters brought in by my father between our four regiments. The newcomers are to be integrated into the WFA.’

‘It might be better to allow my men a chance to rest for a moment, to get something to eat. They’ve been living on scraps …’

Trixie looked at her father with something approaching shock on her face. She was obviously not used to her orders being questioned.

‘Father,’ she said in a voice so low that only the Baron and Wysochi could hear her, ‘I command here. When I give an order it is to be carried out. This is not a debating chamber and I do not run my army as a democracy. Do you understand?’

The Baron was thunderstruck. ‘But all I was suggesting, Trixie …’

‘Father, please. When we are with others you will address me as Colonel or Sir.’ Trixie turned back to Wysochi. ‘Disperse the newcomers between the four regiments. It’s eleven o’clock now: I want the army ready to break out of the Ghetto at midnight. I want to attack while the SS is still off balance.’

‘There is a problem, Colonel,’ said Wysochi. ‘A number of the newcomers are – were – officers in the ForthRight army and have expressed a reluctance to take orders from WFA commanders.’