Excerpt from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

John Gilkes

The next morning, September 1, Witold saw the first waves of German Heinkel, Dornier, and Junker bombers appear on the horizon, their fuselages glinting in the morning light. Most of the planes stayed high, bound for Warsaw, but one took a pass over the road and drew fire. A lucky shot sent it crashing into a nearby field with a muffled roar, briefly raising spirits. But come evening the men were still marching, and the next day too. They were starting to look as bedraggled as the refugees they passed on the road. They finally rested on the evening of September 4—more than a week since mobilization—in woods near Piotrków Trybunalski. There was little solid news of the front, but plenty of rumors abounded that the Germans were advancing rapidly. The ground vibrated with the tremor of distant artillery.

Witold's commanding officer, Major Mieczysław Gawryłkiewicz, showed up the next morning in his open-top Fiat jeep to order the troops into position south of the town. Gawryłkiewicz told Witold to stick to marching on the roads, instead of the woods. They'd be open targets, Witold realized, but he followed orders. They'd hardly set off when a German fighter buzzed over them, only to return a few minutes later with half a dozen bombers that proceeded to attack the column. Witold's unit scrambled off the road, and pulled their horses down into the ditch as the bombs fell. The aircraft returned to strafe them with machine guns, then soared away. No one was hurt, but they had tasted what was to come.

***

Witold watched the inferno consuming the center of Piotrków Trybunalski as he passed by with his men that evening. He set up camp a few miles away on a low rise facing west toward Germany and then took eight of his troopers on a scouting patrol. From the woods, he caught his first glimpse of the Germans: an armored reconnaissance unit deployed in a village across a narrow stream. He rode back, set a guard, and then watched the flames of the burning city light the sky. The fighting would begin tomorrow. His men, knowing this might be their final night, talked of families or loved ones at home. One by one they settled down to rest.

What Witold couldn't know was that his detachment had been positioned directly in the front of the main thrust of the German First and Fourth Panzer divisions toward Warsaw. The force had already punched through Polish lines on the border at Kłobuck and advanced more than sixty miles in the first few days of fighting. The Poles had no means of countering the Germans' new Blitzkrieg tactic of massive tank concentrations with Stuka dive bombers flying in close support. Barreling toward the men from Lida were more than six hundred Panzers moving faster than their horses could gallop.

At first light orders came for Witold to fall back to the woods near Proszenie, a tiny hamlet about six miles northeast of Piotrków Trybunalski where the division had set up its headquarters and baggage train. A short while later the German attack began. Artillery hit them in the forest, shattering the trees and blasting spears of wood into men and horses. The bombing was worse to the east, where a single regiment had been left to guard the approach to the city. They hunkered down as best they could, but then word spread that the Panzers had broken through, and the headquarters began an urgent retreat along the main road to Warsaw. Witold brought up the rear with the baggage train as it retreated. They had gone only a few miles when they got stuck in traffic trying to cross a narrow bridge in the small town of Wołbórz. At least with the darkness, the bombers had lain off.

Just after 8 P.M. they heard the sudden rumble of tank tracks, and before they had time to react, the Panzers barreled into them with such force that those at the back were thrown from their mounts, and the rest were quickly mowed down in a hail of cannon fire. Witold's horse, Bajka, crumpled beneath him, riddled with bullets. He pulled himself free and rolled into a ditch, lying beside the still-shuddering horse as the tanks' 7.92 mm guns tore through bodies and strafed the cottages along the road.

Excerpted from The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather. Copyright © 2019 by Jack Fairweather. Excerpted by permission of Custom House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.