JACEK WOŹNIAKOWSKI – Not Every Bullet Hits

“Apocrypha” no. 15 in “TP” no. 39/1999

After high school, I went straight to officer cadet school. It could have been postponed, of course, but I wanted to complete military training before going to university. I’m glad I made that decision because otherwise, I wouldn’t have completed the training at all – the war broke out just as I finished officer cadet school.

After the ceremonial promotion, we all went to exercises. We were assigned to different regiments. I dreamed of joining the 2nd Uhlan Regiment in Suwałki because I had many acquaintances there, and the unit had a good reputation. But since war was already looming, people were assigned according to their place of residence so they could report to the barracks faster in case of mobilization. So, I was assigned to the 8th Uhlan Regiment in Krakow and joined a very peculiar squadron somewhere near Alwernia. It was commanded at the time probably not even by a captain, but by a lieutenant who was a terrible drunkard. Alcoholics were not lacking in the army, especially in the cavalry, but he must have exceeded all norms because there were rumors that he was punitively assigned to the Border Protection Corps to sober up a bit. I don’t know if the BPC was indeed a good rehabilitation center, but in any case, this commander was a pleasant and quite amusing person, at least if he hadn’t had too much to drink.

On Sundays, we all properly went to church. Once, the parish priest asked if there was anyone among us who could play the organ since the organist was on vacation. One of my colleagues volunteered – to my surprise, because as far as I knew from his piano performances at some private quarters during maneuvers, he could only play “Dark Eyes.” During the Mass, he began playing “Dark Eyes” at an extraordinarily slow and dignified pace – in very church-like registers because he pulled out some stops. Our commander realized it was his favorite melody and, sitting in the front row of chairs, turned towards the organ and began to nod his hand kindly, indicating that he recognized what was being played.

These exercises indeed passed under the sign of significant alcohol consumption thanks to the squadron commander and a few other officers, but also in interesting company. We were quartered, for example, near the manor in Rybna, which once belonged to the Rostworowski family (and later returned to them, and Matyś Rostworowski, or Emanuel, a distinguished historian, actually spent the last years of his life there). At that time, it was the property of the Jednowski family, I believe. There was a prominent actor, Jednowski, whose daughter (or daughter-in-law?) was probably the owner of the manor then. She liked to play cards, so she organized evening bridge games on the porch covered with wine. And since they lacked a fourth player, they invited me as “that officer cadet who ‘supposedly might’ play bridge.” To my surprise, I found myself at a table with General Mond – a significant figure and probably one of the few high-ranking officers of Jewish origin. The fact that an officer cadet could sit with a general for bridge was quite unusual, but what wouldn’t you do when a fourth player is missing. Besides, officer cadets from cavalry regiments were still a separate category of military, although in the last years before the war, all such distinctions and styles were very much being erased.

From those evenings, I remember Mond’s predictions about the war. Unlike many other officers, the general had no illusions about the imminent outbreak of conflict. It was probably he who said – because I also met another officer, a military historian Smoleński, who also wisely saw the future – that in the first stage, we would definitely lose this war because when the entire German onslaught hits us, no English guarantees will help, but in the end, victory will be on our side – it will just take time. Few at the time could foresee that the war would have to drag on for a long time and that victory would be possible partly because America would get involved. These two gentlemen, Mond and Smoleński, struck me with their insight, which slightly clouded our carefree exercises and bridge games on the porch of the manor in Rybna. I had the foolish feeling that maybe the war wouldn’t happen after all.

*

Old staff officers are said to always fight the battles of the past war: they ponder how it might have been. The youth at the time treated war as a legend because the memory of 1920 was still alive. But imagining a future war – that wasn’t really within our competencies, nor within the reach of our imagination, nor in the vision of the world we had. We imagined the world as developing towards something better and better because we ourselves were developing and growing up. Probably not entirely consciously, one treated one’s own fate and the world’s in parallel, not imagining all the horrors that were to come. Even during the September campaign, we didn’t consider what was happening to us, what we had the opportunity to see, as horrors, but as a normal defensive war where we could showcase our military skills and patriotism. Only defeat made us realize that it wasn’t like that at all. We didn’t lose our fighting spirit, of course, because – whoever could – after the capitulation of General Piskor’s army near Tomaszów Lubelski, we decided to go to Hungary with the intention of continuing the war. We were a generation raised in patriotism that didn’t balance losses and gains. The only thing everyone dreamed of was earning the Virtuti Militari.

*

During the September campaign, I was a machine gun commander, then of two machine guns, which was practically half a platoon. It involved considerable responsibility: responsibility fell on us much, much earlier (I was 19) than it typically does on young people. I was assigned to a line platoon of the 8th Uhlan Regiment. I followed the combat path of the regiment, but only partially, because the regiment eventually split: one squadron joined the Krakow cavalry brigade, and three squadrons went another way. I was with my machine guns in the squadron that joined the brigade, meaning the 5th Mounted Rifle Regiment and the 3rd Mounted Rifle Regiment, because the brigade – if I remember correctly – consisted of three cavalry regiments.

Our route was average. It started near Woźniki near Częstochowa, where we encountered the first German units and the first large-scale shooting. And then it was constant retreating, digging in, retreating, attempts to counterattack, retreating again, and so it all lasted until General Piskor (commander of the Krakow Army) surrendered near Tomaszów Lubelski. Then entire groups of soldiers, especially cavalry, decided not to respect the capitulation but to go to Hungary and from there further to continue the fight. I belonged to a group that headed towards Hungary and was only shot at the border. It was September 27, already at the end of the campaign. We were already walking through these mountains. It was snowing.

A bullet from a Ukrainian partisan’s rifle hit me. Ukrainian partisans in 1939 were supported on one side by the Germans, on the other by the Russians, and they were sadly deluded that these two allies would bring independence to Ukraine. During the journey to Hungary, we had a few skirmishes with them. Behind the retreating German units came Soviet units, and these partisans were preparing triumphal arches to bid farewell to one and welcome the other. I think I saw the person who shot me and was very surprised that he hit me and in the face at that. Here is a psychologically interesting moment because as I was falling after being hit, I remembered reading, perhaps in “The Trilogy,” that if a person is mortally wounded, they fall on their back, and if they are only seriously wounded, they fall forward. And all my effort at the moment of falling was put into falling forward.

We were on ethnically Ukrainian territory, but somehow, Polish peasants, a kind of minor nobility, very connected to Poland, found and took care of me. They saved my life, bandaged me (with bread kneaded with cobwebs – again “The Trilogy”!), and took me by cart to the hospital. The hospital was already under Soviet occupation, so I experienced a plebiscite there on whether we wanted to join the Soviet Union or not. It was a beautiful ceremony because the patients were generally illiterate peasants – I was probably the only intellectual in the room. So when the Ukrainian agitator came in and started explaining that we had to definitely answer in the plebiscite that we wanted to join the Soviet Union, I asked him a few troublesome questions, and he looked at me penetratingly and said: you know, we’ll discuss this later. When I was leaving the hospital, I ran into him, but luckily, either he didn’t recognize me, or he didn’t want to continue the discussion. It was completely pointless because we all knew, at least the literate people, that each of us wrote that we didn’t want to join, and then we were told that only one vote was against. So everyone could attribute that one vote to themselves.

There was absolutely nothing to eat in the hospital. The doctors did what they could, but they didn’t give me a blood transfusion or even stitch up the wound because there was nothing to do it with. I was simply lying there, basically doomed to either survive or not. However, after two or three weeks of lying there, when I saw that I was somehow getting through it, I started to feel terribly hungry, so I wrote to the nuns who were nurses, a menu in French with extremely complicated names of dishes I was inventing to add even more flavor. Naturally, they didn’t understand the joke, and I kept getting semolina in water, the only available food. Nerves sometimes give way in such a situation, and I remember that I poured bitter tears over one of those semolinas: I dreamed of finally eating something, and there was nothing – at least nothing in a semi-liquid state, as only in that form could I take anything into my mouth.

Finally, through various acquaintances who suddenly appeared in this Turka near Stryj, where the hospital was – acquaintances of acquaintances, improbable coincidences – I let my cousins in Lviv know that I was there. My cousin came for me and took me to Lviv because I had no strength for anything after five weeks of lying down. In the hospital, I heard words of comfort from a peasant who was visiting his very sick son lying next to me. He leaned over me and said: you will probably live, but you will always have an ugly face. When I finally left the hospital, water would squirt from my cheek when rinsing my mouth, so the effect was circus-like.

*

Another thing is that not every bullet hits. Once, we were on a patrol, maybe there were seven or eight of us, at night, across a field where the grain had long been harvested. Suddenly, I heard, but literally as if someone had said it in my ear, very calmly and quietly, in German: pass auf (watch out). Then two machine guns started firing, flares went up, and it became as bright as day because you could sharply see the shadows of our horses and ourselves. And those machine guns were firing at us from very close range. We, of course, had nothing better to do than turn around and gallop back in the direction we had come from. There was no chance of attacking those surely well-entrenched machine guns, in the darkness when the flares were also not helping us but those shooters. They fired at us for quite a while until we were out of their range. And nothing. Firing from two machine guns, they didn’t hit any of us: they lightly wounded one horse, just grazed it, and that was it. So that’s a bit of consolation just in case: not every bullet hits.

Listened by Joanna Gromek