Poland: A Novel Part 2

This was a bold, sharp answer, and pencils scribbled rapidly. Both the j.a.panese and American television men asked if Buk would repeat his three points for their cameras and he said yes, but before doing so he asked that Bukowski appear with him: 'Because we're not fighting, you know. We're talking.'

So the two Poles with such similar backgrounds and such contrasting positions stood side by side to face the cameras, and after Buk had repeated what he had just said, Bukowski smiled thinly and added his comment: 'We're exploring every avenue to relax the present crisis.'

'Even a farmers' union?' the Berlin man shouted, and the two Poles merely smiled.

But in their afternoon session both sides began cautiously to explore exactly that question, and Bukowski tried to stamp out the first tentative proposals: 'Unions have always been for workers in cities. You can't find a major nation in the world which amounts to anything that allows agricultural unions.'

'Maybe it's time,' Buk said, and the debate was joined.

Bukowski had been warned by his superiors in Warsaw, who had been warned by their superiors in Moscow: 'You can make almost any reasonable concession you wish. Prices, schedules, priorities, spare parts, lower rates for agricultural gasoline ... But under no circ.u.mstance should you even discuss a farmers' union. That would imperil the state.'

'A rural union,' he said with attempted finality, 'would be untidy. Difficult to administer. Open to all sorts of fraud. It simply isn't needed.'

'But when all us farmers face the same problems, we're going to take the same action whether we have a union or not.'

'That's the socialist way,' Bukowski said eagerly, 'without a union.'

'But if we did have a union, our responses would be more sensible, more productive.'

'You would gain nothing by a union,' Bukowski said with near-contempt.

A Warsaw official who had not yet spoken now did so: 'What you would gain, Buk, would be the power to control this nation's food supply, and that cannot be tolerated.'

Buk sat with hands folded in front of him on the table. Leaning forward until his chest almost touched his hands, he said: 'We will control the food supply whether we have a union or not. You can never make us sow and reap at the rate we did when we were free to find our own markets. You know that's why Russia is starving. With all the power they command, they can't get their farmers to produce two-thirds of what they produced in the old days. And we Poles in 1981 aren't producing two-thirds of what our grandfathers produced, either. And if you allow things to get worse, the food supply will get worse.' Leaving his hands folded resolutely on the table, as if they represented his answer, he leaned back.

The fierce confrontation continued all that afternoon, farmers with their backs to the wall defending themselves against a bureaucracy with its back to several walls. But gradually certain definitions did emerge: the government would not allow a union; the farmers demanded one with powers equal to those obtained by factory workers. On that there was a stalemate. But certain concessions were agreed to: the government would make a concentrated drive to find spare parts; the farmers promised not to diminish any further their normal schedules of planting and husbandry.

And then Janko Buk dropped his bombsh.e.l.l. When it had been agreed that he and Bukowski would go before the cameras again and stress the agreements, not the differences, Bukowski said: 'We'll resume our discussions tomorrow,' and Buk said: 'We would like to involve the Bishop of Gorka.'

Bukowski stopped dead. His head jerked back and he stared at the farmers. 'Yes,' they agreed. 'We'd like to have the Bishop of Gorka take part.'

'He has no concern in this!' Bukowski exploded. 'This is an economic problem. This is food and money and oil and machinery.'

'It's the welfare of Poland,' Buk said stubbornly. 'And the church is a third part of Poland. We want the bishop here.'

The appearance before the television cameras had to be delayed while Bukowski went to the telephone to consult with Warsaw: 'We had everything going smoothly when the clever little b.a.s.t.a.r.d threw a hand grenade at us. He wants to involve the Catholic church.'

There was a loud rumble in the phone, to which he replied: 'That's exactly what I told him. But he still wants to bring in the bishop.'

This simple proposal apparently caused as much turmoil in Warsaw as it had in Bukowo, for during five minutes Bukowski did nothing but listen. Then he said meekly: 'I think your suggestion is very wise. Yes, yes. Four weeks. Yes.'

When he left the phone he rea.s.sembled both parties and announced grimly: 'The talks will be recessed for four weeks.' Everyone wanted to know why, but he stonewalled: 'I'll announce it to the press. We'll resume here in four weeks.' And when he went before the cameras this time he did not ask Buk to stand beside him. In cold, crisp, bureaucratic tones he delivered an ultimatum: 'Our talks have progressed amiably, but both sides feel the need for further study. We'll resume in four weeks.' He would say no more and permitted Buk to add nothing, so the world press was free to interpret the impa.s.se as it wished. No reporter came even close to guessing the reason for the break.

Long after the lumbering press bus had started back to Warsaw and the private cars of the lesser Communists had followed, Szymon Bukowski quietly accompanied Janko Buk to the latter's cottage, where he knew he would meet Buk's young wife and an older woman he had known with pa.s.sionate intensity forty years earlier, not in the way of love-making but in the brutal warfare of life and death. In the early winter of 1941 he had come to this cottage, to this woman and her husband, pleading for help.

When Buk pushed open the door, indicating that Bukowski should enter, he noticed that the commissar was trembling, but then his wife saw them and hurried forward to greet their visitor and he took her hand. Buk's mother stayed behind, hands folded across her ap.r.o.n, standing very still and erect, for she, too, was remembering those distant fateful nights.

Then Bukowski saw her, and he left the younger Buks to stride across the kitchen he had once known so well, and he saw that clean hard face with the dreadful welt from left eye to chin, and he held out his hands, grasped hers and drew her toward him in a long embrace.

'It is many years since you stood in this kitchen at midnight,' she said. Then, pulling away, she looked at him admiringly. 'You've done wonderful things with your life, Mr. Minister.'

'The name is Szymon,' he said. 'The name was always Szymon.'

'You were just a boy when I first knew you,' she said.

'Think of it,' he said to the younger Buks as he took a chair at the kitchen table. 'At seventeen I was in that forest ... head of a commando ... had already killed my first n.a.z.i ... the one who had hanged my grandmother.'

He liked what he saw of young Pani Buk: Kazimiera was of that stalwart breed which had always kept the farms of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia functioning. She was prepared to serve as wife, mother, cook, seamstress, ox when the plow had to be pulled, and always as the sharp verbal critic. It was to her that he now spoke, as if acknowledging that inside the cottage she was mistress.

'Pani, when I left Warsaw at dawn this morning the women in my building asked me-'

'I know,' she said abruptly. 'They hoped you could bring home some meat.'

'And vegetables.' Quickly he added: 'I have the zlotys, you know.'

Buk's mother broke in: 'Zlotys are of no use any more. We can't buy anything with them.'

'But I'd leave them anyway. To demonstrate my good will.'

'Good will we know you have. I knew your mother, I knew your grandmother. And women like that do not produce poor sons.'

They talked for a while of the old days, and tough Biruta began to weep when she recalled that special night when Bukowski had come to this cottage to talk her and her husband into joining his underground unit, then operating out of the Forest of Szczek. 'They were heroic days,' she said.

'These are heroic days, Biruta.'

'How have you managed to mess up this country so abominably?'

'We're not free in Warsaw, you know.' And that was all he would concede. 'You will let me have some food?'

'Of course. You came here before, begging for food, and we gave it then, didn't we?'

'What can I give you in return?'

'Not zlotys. Szymon, zlotys are no longer worth a d.a.m.n. But we would like some books about farming ... for Janko and our young ones.'

'Books you shall have,' he said. Then he left the cottage and whistled for the driver to bring the government car closer so that its trunk could be packed with items of food no longer obtainable in Warsaw.

II.

From the East

In A.D. 1204, Genghis Khan, scourge of Asia, reached a straightforward decision. For a score of years he had been trying to discipline the Tatars, that small difficult group of hors.e.m.e.n who lived at the edge of the desert, and sallied forth at unpredictable intervals to upset the Great Khan's plans. Most often they raided grazing lands occupied by the enemies of Genghis, but when such meadows provided unattractive targets, they were just as willing to raid his Mongolia.

Small in number, they were also small in size; even their ponies were smaller than those of the Mongols, but they were an unruly lot, and what they won in rigorous battle they often lost in riotous celebration. They liked to come cascading into an area like the floods of a spring freshet bursting down from snow-capped mountains, sweep everything before them, kill every shepherd or horseman encountered, and drag back to slavery the women and children. They were a devastating force, and when Genghis first encountered them he had said: 'These can be the greatest of the lot.'

And they would have been had they submitted themselves to his leaders.h.i.+p. He was, in these early years of the thirteenth century, incomparably the greatest general in Asia and probably in the world. He was a cruel genius whose simple rule was: 'Leave no conquered leader behind who might rally his hors.e.m.e.n.' When he subdued an area he killed off all leaders, distributed survivors over vast and differing districts, then galloped off with his booty to the next challenge. Like the Tatars, he destroyed existing orders; unlike them, he established new systems which would endure for centuries.

He had begun by subduing and disseminating all the enemy tribes in Mongolia. He faced little capable opposition when he rampaged through northern China, and by the year 1199 he was supreme in an area reaching from the Pacific Ocean to the Ural Mountains, and then he ran into the Tatars.

The first time he encountered their fierce little hors.e.m.e.n he defeated them, but in the last moments of battle, when they were thoroughly beaten, they somehow slipped away. In the second big battle he thrashed them outrageously, but in the end they managed to regroup. Realizing that he was up against something special, a desert breed that could not be controlled, he sought to make allies of them, and in a series of wild, triumphant battles the Mongol-Tatar forces raged westward to Turkey, slaying, burning, laying waste even the deserts.

But Genghis could never rely upon his Tatars, for at the moment of victory they were likely to go thundering off to sack a city that did not pertain to the major goal, causing the Great Khan to lose an objective which he understood but which they did not. He talked with them, cajoled them, promised them rewards greater than those offered any of his other allies, and in the end they turned against him, not once but three times. The Tatars of central Asia were a force that not even Genghis Khan could hammer into civilized form.

In 1204 he made up his mind. Summoning all the known Tatars in the world to a convocation west of the Gobi and north of the Himalayas, he ordered a line of desert carts to be brought forward and his warriors to apply a simple test: 'Any Tatar who stands higher than the axle of that cart is to be slain.'

Rigorously the rule was applied. Men, women, girls, lads were stood against the carts, and if the crowns of their heads inched above the hub, they were slaughtered. A few recalcitrants might have remained hidden in gullies and so escaped, but most of the adult Tatars were eliminated, never again to challenge Genghis in battle or disappoint him in peace.

Among the little ones who witnessed the slaughter and survived was a dwarfish fellow named Vuldai, whose age, had it been revealed, would have automatically caused him to be slain but whose shortened stature kept him below the hub, and the reeducation which the Mongols forced upon the Tatar children caused great bitterness in his savage heart. 'There never was a Tatar kingdom,' the teachers said. 'The Tatars never existed. You are Mongols subservient to the Great Khan. You will fight the way he teaches you and only when he commands, and after the battles are over, you will behave the way he decides.'

Vuldai and the other little ones were taught new words, new G.o.ds, new systems, and in fifteen years the boys became the foremost hors.e.m.e.n in Asia, the girls the ablest women of the steppes. They did learn the new rules; they did obey the precepts of Genghis; and when he turned these young battalions loose they accomplished immense conquests. They were the light cavalry of the Mongol horde, men and women unafraid to dash forward on their small horses, carrying only some strips of dried meat and a handful of dried beans to sustain their charge for fifteen or twenty days without returning to camp.

Vuldai and his men did not enc.u.mber themselves with the heavy machines of war which Genghis had learned to use so effectively in the siege and subjugation of cities: the mangonels, the movable towers, the flamethrowers and the heavy gear for digging tunnels under fortifications. The Tatars rejected even the arbalests which sped arrows so piercingly; their galloping hors.e.m.e.n were content with spear and saber and short dagger, and with them they were well-nigh irresistible.

There was one new device which Vuldai did appreciate; it came, some said, from China; others claimed, from Turkey; but regardless of derivation, it was most effective when fifteen hundred Tatars had to defeat seven thousand enemy. It consisted of small kegs of black powder-not gunpowder-which emitted a sickening, poisonous gas that could be ignited only when the wind was so directed that it carried the fumes into the faces of the enemy. It did not kill, but it did ruin battle plans, for while the confused infantry were gasping and vomiting, Vuldai's cavalry chopped the flanks to pieces, turning the battle into a rout.

When Genghis died in 1227 his restructured Tatars were the most formidable fighting force in the world, subsisting on almost nothing, capable of sweeping forward forty or fifty miles a day, conquering all that intervened, yet rigorously trained in subordinating their wild forays to the general plan of battle. They were never, under the Khan's specific orders, used at the center of any attack, only on the flanks, and by habit they customarily found themselves on the right flank, which meant that since most of the Mongol advances were from east to west, the Tatars instinctively drove toward the northwest.

When Genghis was buried, with sheepskins draped over the drums to m.u.f.fle their mournful beat, his vast empire, continental in size, pa.s.sed to his lecherous, wine-bibbing, incompetent son OG.o.dei, forty-two years old, who had the good luck to find in his nephew Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis, a military leader of some ability. OG.o.dei had wild, drunken visions, Batu the ability to realize them, and in the year 1239 these two learned from travelers who came east from Europe and from spies sent west by the Mongols that the entire continent of Europe, even down to Italy, was ripe for another of those vast explosions which from time to time had come out of Asia.

OG.o.dei outlined the strategy: 'We will attack on two ma.s.sive flanks. You and I, Batu, will smash into Hungary, which is undefended if we can believe what they tell us. We'll send the Tatars north to smash Poland. Our two arms will meet in Bohemia, then on to the other ocean.' Plans no more subtle than this had succeeded eight centuries earlier when Goths and Vandals surged all the way to Rome, and the Mongols were convinced that with their superior horsemans.h.i.+p and tactics, they would succeed again.

The Tatar contingent, on its customary dash to the northwest, would be required to cover enormous distances: campsite to the Caspian Sea a thousand miles, then another thousand crossing the Volga and the Don rivers to that formidable spot where much trouble was to be expected, the fortified city of Kiev on the Dnieper. If Kiev could be subdued-say, seven months of heavy a.s.sault-the Tatars would be free to gallop another four hundred miles to Lwow, Lublin and Sandomierz in Poland itself.

Then they would have before them a prize which would justify the manifold dangers of their wild invasion: Golden Krakow would stand awaiting them, with the most beautiful women in Europe to be ravaged, the richest churches to be looted and the finest shops to be emptied and then burned. Krakow was a magnet powerful enough to draw invaders more than two thousand miles, and Vuldai's dark eyes glowed when he visualized it.

At the final planning sessions the leaders of the Mongol horde which would invade Hungary informed two Tatar generals, the brothers Pajdar and Kajdu, that they were to command the thrust into Poland, and the young men bowed. 'G.o.d of the Great Distances,' the Tatars shouted as they mounted their horses, 'lead us to victory!' And in a clatter of lances and a swirl of dust they were off to the far adventure.

The Tatars organized their troops on a basis of tens: a unit of hors.e.m.e.n under a lieutenant, a company of a hundred under a captain, a battalion of a thousand under a colonel, and a tumen of ten thousand under a brigadier. As generals, each of the two young brothers commanded three tumen, that is, thirty thousand hors.e.m.e.n each, or sixty thousand in all, but not all were battle-ready troops, for an immense train followed the Tatar fighters. There were foragers, and horse-tenders, and women to make camp when the warriors regrouped, and children who begged to come along, and spare horses. Not one Tatar in the vast a.s.semblage was on foot. This was, unquestionably, the most mobile force in the world, and one of the most terrifying.

The warriors carried no armor or protection for their horses; defense depended upon evasion and speed. The Tatars appeared to be only an attacking force, but they knew every trick so far devised for protecting themselves and their horses. They liked to divide their force into three segments: the first would attack single file and run into obvious difficulty; in retreat, it would encourage the victorious enemy to thin itself out in swift pursuit, whereupon a hidden second unit would crash in upon the flanks; and when the confusion was at a peak, the third force would dash in to annihilate. The Tatars took few male prisoners.

The two major wings of this a.s.sault, the southern Mongols toward Hungary and the northern Tatars toward Poland, achieved larger successes than they had antic.i.p.ated, so that by the end of 1240 the southern p.r.o.ng was in position to attack the Carpathian Mountains guarding Hungary while the northern closed in upon Kiev, the well-defended fortress city that blocked the approaches to Poland. It seemed to the messengers who moved back and forth between the far-separated arms that the invasion had reached its halting spot and that a year or two might be required for regrouping and a careful a.s.sault upon formidable barriers.

'But there is real hope,' reported the leaders of the Tatar divisions, 'that if we can subdue Kiev within the year, we can gallop into Poland next year and into the heartlands of Europe the year after.' Batu Khan, reporting from the borders of Hungary, a.s.sured the Tatars that his troops would match that schedule or even improve upon it.

So the attack on Great Kiev, as it was called, began. On a November day the Tatar horde a.s.sembled on the left bank of the Dnieper, some ten miles distant from the city, and spies sent out from Kiev reported back: 'They resemble no army we have ever seen before. No armor, no machines, no panoply. Just rather small men on rather small horses.'

It was cold when the Tatars started to move forward, sixty thousand wiry, eager hors.e.m.e.n coming like a firestorm out of the steppes. They wore thick jackets and had drooping mustaches. They carried lances and daggers. Each man had a small pouch tied to his saddle containing enough thin strips of dried meat to keep him alive for twenty days, but in some ways the most powerful weapon the Tatars carried with them as they rode was a hunger for the spoils they were about to garner and a l.u.s.t for the women they would soon embrace.

The attack on Kiev turned out to be one of the miracles of contemporary warfare: the Tatars approached at an easy canter, then spurred their horses and simply rode over the defenders. On and on came the terrible hors.e.m.e.n, not shouting or screaming to cause terror, but in irresistible force, s.h.a.ggy aliens from the heartland of Asia exploding into the mainland of Europe.

The two young generals, Pajdar on the left, Kajdu on the right, led the wild gallop into the city, encouraging the thundering ranks that followed, and before dusk the looting and the screaming began. A city that had considered itself impregnable had collapsed in one day.

The destruction of Kiev was pitiful to see. n.o.ble churches were burned. Streets were corrupted with hundreds of corpses. Any house that looked as if it might contain a single item of unusual value was gutted. And for three days the raping was incessant, and public, and frequently terminated by a score of stabbings with the dagger. Kiev was desolated, leaving the Tatars free to attack Poland a full year ahead of schedule. From the Carpathians, Batu Khan reported a similar unexpected success, and now the messengers between the two groups carried the exultant word that Europe lay defenseless.

In the last cold days of 1240 the Tatars, emboldened by their easy conquest of Kiev, embarked upon an enterprise of great daring. Said Pajdar: 'Let us a.s.semble those warriors with the swiftest horses and the fiercest manner and send them forward to invade as quickly as possible. Speed, speed.'

When his wiry little a.s.sistant Vuldai asked: 'How will the slower hors.e.m.e.n with our supplies catch up?' the daring general replied: 'They'll not leave Kiev. They stay here to rebuild the city the way we want it. We gallop on ahead without supplies. Then our men will have to fight, or starve. Every farm we sweep past will give us its pigs and chickens.'

'And the loot?'

'Whatever our men can carry.'

'And slaves?'

'At four stopping points we'll collect all our captives and send them back to Kiev. But we forge ahead.'

The light in Vuldai's eyes as he visualized the endless a.s.sault, the unlimited booty, so pleased Pajdar that he said: 'You shall lead the southern hors.e.m.e.n. Not many, but very swift. To draw attention while Kajdu and I take the greater ma.s.s through the north. We meet at Krakow, then on through what they call the German states.'

'My men must start to dry their beef,' Vuldai said in proud acknowledgment of his new command, and for six weeks the Tatars took all the beef they could command from the conquered peasants and cut it into strips, which they dried in what sun there was and in the harsh blowing wind. They made little b.a.l.l.s of hard cheese from whatever milk they found-cow's, mare's, goat's, ewe's-and by mixing a handful of parched wheat or barley they made a durable, nouris.h.i.+ng kind of food which only men with good teeth could manage.

They were particularly careful to salt whatever foodstuffs they dried, knowing that this delectable addition not only helped preserve the food for long periods but also added to its utility when a piece the size of a thumb might have to suffice for three days in the saddle. 'A little salt,' Vuldai told his men, 'is better than a banquet.'

By the middle of December the two arms of the a.s.sault on Poland were ready, with rude maps showing each the recommended route. Pajdar's men would sweep north through Zhitomir, Chelm and Lublin, crossing the Vistula near Sandomierz; Vuldai's would ravage the lands to the south: Berdichev, Lwow, and Przemysl, negotiating the Vistula well below Sandomierz. They would meet before the gates of Golden Krakow, and when it fell, the men would be awarded seven days for looting and raping.

It was a bold plan, and they knew that if at any point either the Ruthenians (later to be known as Ukrainians) or the Poles managed to mount an effective resistance, their Tatar cavalry, lacking any organized supply, would have to retreat; but if they could gallop from one farm village to the next, bypa.s.sing any troublesome cities, they had a fighting chance for success. Speed, savagery, foraging, plunder, the capture of slaves to be marched eastward, that was the daring strategy, and of all the fighting forces then operating throughout the world, the Tatar hors.e.m.e.n formed the one most likely to execute it properly.

It was agreed that Vuldai would start his diversionary sweep to the south seven days ahead of the major force in order to attract the attention of spies. Now, as he rested sideways in his saddle, left leg hanging free, Vuldai was five feet one inch tall and weighed one hundred and eighteen pounds. His hair was close-cropped sides and back; his mustaches were big and drooping. He dressed himself in thick felted trousers, linen s.h.i.+rt and kaftan made from animal skins, and wore a conical fur cap. Tied to his saddle was a kind of thin cape that would be used to fend off rain or snow during storms and the cold when he slept on the bare earth. He carried four weapons, four pounds of dried food, no change of clothing, no medicines, no replenishments of any kind, yet he proposed to ride his horse, and others he would steal along the way, eight hundred miles through nations which should have been prepared to repulse him easily, except for two things: he moved with speed that bedazzled the enemy, and he was prepared to slay anything that threatened to impede him even momentarily. He and his men represented one of the most terrible forces ever let loose upon a civilized world, and he was prepared to devastate that world.

'We go!' he shouted one frosty morning, and his little hors.e.m.e.n headed west.

It was eighty miles from Kiev to Berdichev, and the galloping force covered this distance in two days, but they did not attack the well-fortified city; they swept around it, destroying every outlying settlement and acc.u.mulating stores which would carry them safely the two hundred-odd miles to Lwow, where they employed the same tactics.

Their strategy was seen at its best when they approached a small settlement called Polz, a farm village containing some sixty cottages, with an equivalent number of barns and lesser buildings. Two hundred and eighty people lived in or near Polz, cl.u.s.tered about the small, rude castle occupied by the younger son of the magnate who owned sixty other villages of similar size.

When the Tatars' six thousand hungry, excitable hors.e.m.e.n spotted Polz lying ahead, Vuldai ordered his men to ride forward at a slow trot so that their dust could be plainly seen in the village, warning the occupants of what faced them. He then dispatched three hors.e.m.e.n to ride ahead, asking that the villagers surrender all their goods immediately, but when the latter employed delaying tactics, hoping to salvage at least some of their possessions, the three Tatars grew angry and flashed a signal, whereupon the six thousand spurred their horses and came thundering down full force upon the village.

Everything was destroyed. All barns were burned, all houses leveled. Not a living animal escaped, not a pig, not one fowl. During the first mad rush all visible men were slain, some chopped down with swords, most run through with lances. A good many women died too, cut to pieces in the mad onslaught, but when the fury subsided the younger women and the girls were saved for two nights of sporting, then s.h.i.+pped eastward into slavery at what was now the Tatar capital of Kiev. About twenty younger men were saved to service the Tatar horses, but when this job was completed, they were killed one by one, until none was left. A few strong boys were preserved for playful and repulsive games, then marched eastward to join the slaves. And at the conclusion of the two days, there was only death and devastation where Polz and its two hundred eighty citizens had once existed.

But Vuldai and his men had acquired enough food and new horses to sustain them for their gallop to the next village, which would be treated in similar fas.h.i.+on. Cities, because of their walls, escaped these hors.e.m.e.n; no village did.

By 10 January 1241, less than three weeks after having departed from Kiev, Vuldai's men completed their dash across the steppes and realized that their first target, the Vistula River, lay less than a day's ride ahead, with their second target, Golden Krakow, only a short distance beyond. But crossing the river might prove difficult, so Vuldai reined in his rampaging hors.e.m.e.n and sent out two groups of scouts, one to the north to ascertain how Pajdar's army was doing, the other straight ahead to reconnoiter approaches to the river.

The latter moved cautiously, capturing a family of peasants, who informed them that directly ahead lay the huge Forest of Szczek whose far end opened directly on the river, and when the scouts had ridden some miles into the forest and seen the giant beech trees and the oaks, they realized that this would be a splendid hiding area in which to a.s.semble the hors.e.m.e.n. From here the avalanche would be launched to destroy any settlements guarding the river, throwing it open to an easy pa.s.sage.

Two scouts penetrated the entire depth of the forest, standing finally in a grove of large beech trees from which they could scout the specific obstacles they would face when the time came to cross the Vistula, and they reported back to Vuldai: 'A village like the others. Roofs easy to burn. A small castle, wood and stone of no consequence. Easy to burn. To the south, along the bank of the river, a larger castle of stone which can be invested. Wipe these out, and we have a safe pa.s.sage to the other side of the river, with enough time to build any boats we might need.'