The Polish armies were falling back, fighting savagely as they gave ground. German tanks and armored cars were coming nearer and nearer Warsaw. The sky was filled with the roar of low-flying planes. The air was filled with smoke, the thunder of exploding bombs, the rattle of machine-gun fire, the screams of women and children.

In the office of the Finance Minister in Warsaw, Paul Dombrowski, a pale thin little man of thirty-five, sat at his desk. The phone rang, but he didn't hear it for many minutes. Then he picked up the receiver and held it idly in his hands — until words sounded in it, imperiously.

He listened. "Yes, Marshal," he said. "Yes, Marshal."

At first he thought, This is some monstrous joke. Why should the head of the whole Polish army take time out to call up a humble clerk in the Finance Ministry?

But there was no mistaking that voice. "We'll not be able to defend Warsaw," the Marshal said. "Take the gold out of the bank at once and deliver it to the Bank of France."

"In Paris, Marshal?"

"In Paris."

"Yes, Marshal."

Dombrowski held the silent receiver a long time. When he put it back on its cradle he noticed his hands were shaking. As he hurried out he prayed: "Dear God, the fate of Poland may rest in the possession of this gold. The fate of Poland may rest with me. I'm not a soldier. I've never done anything brave. I'm not very clever. Yet I must get this gold to Paris. God, help me!"

The gold bullion was stored in a vault sixty feet below the ground in the great stone Bank of Warsaw. It was in hundreds and hundreds of wooden boxes.

"I'll need fifty men," Dombrowski told the guards. "Get as many as you can — men you can trust. And hurry!"

Four of the guards went out to round up volunteers. The others remained at their posts. It was quiet in that subterranean sepulcher. Now and then the faint vroom! of a fallen bomb was perceptible. Now and then the building trembled slightly.

Only four fifths of the gold reserve was in this bank. The rest was in vaults of the Bank of Poland in Zamosc. The thing to do was to has-ten eastward to Brest-Litovsk, thence to Zamosc, and thence to the Rumanian frontier. The convoy must travel only by night.

The convoy? What convoy? All armored trucks and all automobiles and vans had been commandeered by the army. "Everything on wheels has been taken," Dombrowski moaned.

But suddenly he laughed aloud. "The buses!" he cried. He hurried to a telephone and called up two stanch friends, clever fellows, writers for a financial journal:

"Get me all the buses you can find. Don't ask questions. You'll find some in Praga and some in Warsaw. Bring them here to the bank after dark."

"Impossible," they told him. "The enemy have been bombing the bridges. Praga must be cut off."

"Try it," he said. "I must have the buses."

Before the sun had set, the first buses were crossing the bridge into Warsaw, unmindful of the German bombers, rushing through dense smoke clouds, streets choked with fugitives, with corpses, with debris.

There were five of these buses. Five more arrived presently. All were driven by volunteers. Down in the vault a small army had gathered: policemen, treasury clerks, schoolboys, bakers, cobblers, butchers, a professor of languages.

Dombrowski weeded them out. "I shall need only a few men for the convoy," he decided. "We have only such money as we have in our pockets. We may be weeks on the road. We must buy food and gasoline — or get it somehow. So it is better to travel with a few than with many."

He chose most of the bank guards, six of the policemen, the two newspapermen, and half a dozen clerks. Twenty men in all; two men to a bus. He chose ten men to drive the buses. "You other men," he said, "catch hold of these boxes and carry them out. Quickly!"

Hour after hour they worked, but by midnight only half the gold had been taken from the vaults.

The roads were filled with fugitives, with troops. It was impossible for buses to travel with any speed.

"That will have to do." Dombrowski said. "We can delay no longer. We will leave this load in Brest-Litovsk, and return for the rest of it tomorrow night. Pray God Warsaw holds out another twenty-four hours."

The roads were filled with fugitives, with wagons and carts, with troops hurrying to the relief of Warsaw. It was impossible for the buses to travel with any speed. They ran without lights. Sometimes, when they were forced to halt, pitiable women and children begged for a ride. The wounded cried out for help. Old women offered their wedding rings and their earrings for a lift. The drivers shook their heads.

Dawn found the convoy close to its destination — dawn of September. 5, the fifth day of the war. The buses were driven into the shelter of a clump of trees and camouflaged with branches and shrubs. Dombrowski made his way on foot into Brest-Litovsk, hoping to find more buses there. He could leave ten men to guard this bullion, he figured. The other ten could drive the new buses back to Warsaw.

"But how can I leave so much gold?" he asked himself. "And how do I know that Warsaw is not already taken?"

He had no radio then. There was no telephone or telegraph communication with Warsaw. There were no buses to be found in Brest-Litovsk, no conveyance of any kind. Worse, all the roads were so congested that his convoy, once it had entered the town, might never be able to leave.

"We must return to Warsaw tonight," he concluded "nack the rest of the gold, and go to the frontier by a different route. But — is it safe to return?"

A Polish plane, shot down, gave him some hope. If that ship could be patched up, it could be sent to Warsaw as a scout. He started running toward the spot where the plane had landed. But a crowd of peasants armed with clubs and scythes were rushing toward the pilot who stood by the plane. They were crying, "Kill him, kill him!"

"Communists!" Dombrowski thought. "Polish peasants turned Communists! Trying to kill a Polish hero!"

He started to run again, thinking he might somehow save the pilot. But the pilot saved himself. He had a beautiful of hand grenades. He jerked one out and threw it. It fell in the midst of the crowd and exploded.

The finance clerk, fell and closed his eyes. When he rose, the aviator was alone, staring at a heap of mangled bodies. He saw Dombrowski and came toward him, grenade in hand.

"I am a friend," Dombrowski cried, jumping up, "and Poland has need of your plane, if it can fly!"

The aviator, a big black-haired man who limped as though wounded, thrust the grenade back into his belt.

"Poor people!" he said. "God rest them. I don't know who they were. Maybe they were Communists. Maybe they were good Polish peasants who thought I was a German. You know, some of the Germans painted the wings of their planes to resemble ours. I don't blame those people, whatever they were. They are better off than I am." Asked about the plane, he said, "Oh, it's a wreck. It'll never fly again."

"But I must get news of Warsaw," said Dombrowski.

"Well," the pilot said, "there's an aviation school near here. If it's still standing, we may be able to do something. Get me two mechanics and some gas."

All day long three men worked in the deserted aviation school. All day long Dombrowski and eighteen of his men went about Brest-Litovsk in search of gasoline. Before twilight the plane was ready — a queer job, assembled out of parts that had been gathering dust in the school for years. Dombrowski gazed at it in anxiety.

"It will really fly?" he asked.

"If it has enough fuel and the tanks don't leak."

There was enough fuel. It had been obtained in pints, in quarts, in half gallons, by Dombrowski and his men and a horde of ragged boys and girls. The tanks were filled. The plane was led out of the exhibition room. The pilot got into it and eventually it took off.

The clerk watched it, then turned to his men. "Now we must have gasoline for the buses," he said. "Go get it. Buy it, if you have any money — but get it."

"Can we go too?" the boys and girls asked.

He regarded their eager faces. "If you steal it," he said, "you steal for Poland. There are many wrecked cars in and around the city. Some of them probably have gasoline. But if not, there are other cars."

As the light was dying the aviator returned. He circled and threw out a shiny tin can. It contained only a few words: "Warsaw is still ours."

Dombrowski raised his voice: "Gentlemen, we'll be on our way as soon as it is dark enough. Get some sleep now. You'll need it."

The buses made good time that night. The congested roads were lit up over great stretches by the glare from burning homes and hospitals and schools and churches. The balance of the gold in Warsaw was loaded by midnight, and at dawn the buses were forty miles away.

For four nights they traveled thus. Every once in a while some tire was punctured. There were no spare tires. Inner tubes were stuffed with grass and mud and gravel. There were no extra parts and but few tools. Frequently wheels sank up to the hubs in the soil, and all twenty-one men worked feverishly to get them out.

They went through villages reduced to smoke and ashes, through cities untouched by war. "And always," Dombrowski reported, "the German intelligence followed us. There were spies all along our route. Many times, listening to our radio, we heard some German announcer talking about the gold convoy. Usually we were a few hours ahead of where he thought we were. Shortly after we heard his voice, locating us in the dark, we'd hear the bombs crash on a village we'd just left."

On the morning of September 8, miles beyond the city of Luck, Dombrowski found a light automobile, abandoned but intact. This he used as a scout car. That evening or the next, driving a few miles ahead of the leading bus, he dared to switch on his headlights. This, says Liberty's informant, was the providence of God, for in their glare he saw a woman staggering along with a baby in her arms. He stopped the car and asked if he could help her.

"I am not sure if it was on the 8th or the 9th of September," Liberty's informant said. "Nor have I the least idea where the convoy was, nor what the woman's name was. But the story is true and can be verified. This woman, well born, beautiful, and rich, had given birth to her first child, a girl. Three hours after the baby was born the hospital was bombed. The young mother put on a dressing gown, a coat, and shoes, wrapped her child in a blanket, and made her way out to safety. She was walking home when Dombrowski picked her up. She had been walking for twenty-four hours. One thing struck Dombrowski forcibly. That was, while the woman's clothes were damp, the baby's blanket was dry."

Had it been raining, then, where she came from? the little clerk asked her. His own question excited him. Rain! Blessed rain! Blessed General Mud! If there was rain, Poland might yet be saved.

"No," the woman said. "I had to wade through a stream, holding the baby over my head."

"Was there no bridge?"

"It had been blown up."

"Mother of God!" Dombrowski cried. "The bridge is gone? The Germans are in front of us? You have saved us all! We could not have crossed that stream. We might have been captured."

He threw his coat about her shoulders and helped her into his car. She wept then, and held her baby so tightly to her that it cried. Far back on the road there was the vroom, vroom, vroom! of exploding bombs.

"I had to walk," she said. "There was no other way to get home. I walked and prayed, and when I could walk no longer I rested and fed the baby and sang to her."

Her house had not been bombed or burned. Light shone out of all its windows. She laughed, with a touch of hysteria in her voice.

"Now I am weak again," she said. "Now I cannot walk. Isn't that like a woman? You must carry me in."

Dombrowski bore her and the baby into a room crowded with people. There was a coffin there, the coffin of her husband, a lieutenant in the Polish army.

Before dawn September 10 the gold convoy reached Sniatyn, near the Rumanian border. While the Poles were camouflaging the buses, a number of Ruthenian peasants came to welcome them, bringing food, cigarettes, wine, warm clothes.

"We knew you were coming," one of them said. "We heard it on the radio. Ah, how angry the Germans will be to learn you have escaped with all the gold of Poland!"

"All the gold of Poland," Dombrowski answered; "and we are starving. But this gold is for the credit and security of Poland after the war. Even to save our lives, we wouldn't part with an ounce of it."

In Sniatyn he phoned the Polish Embassy at Bucharest and made arrangements for a special train to take the bullion through Rumania.

In the dead of night the buses were brought to the railroad freight yards — all but one that, though it had plenty of gas in its tanks, moved only a few feet and died. One of the newspapermen wrote with his forefinger on its dust-covered side the words: "Killed in action. R. I. P."

A dozen men worked all night transferring the gold, while the others stood guard. Planes up high dropped flares, but none fell near the yards.

The train arrived without incident at Constanza, on the Black Sea. There a tanker flying the British ensign was waiting. The skipper, a Donegal Irishman, greeted the Poles warmly but had bad news for them:

"My crew has left me. Every ruddy manjack of them skedaddled over the side the minute they were to carry gold. Devil a one of them submarines. But aisy does it, lads He pulled a balckjack out of his back pocket and fondled it. "There's more than one way of getting a crew."

They sailed with a full crew, despite radio intimations that German planes and submarines would surely find the ship and sink her. "The clumsy liars!" the skipper said. "Who'd be fool enough to bomb or torpedo a hundred million dollars' worth of gold?."

Nevertheless he kept the vessel dark and stayed in territorial waters. The tanker couldn't make more than eight or nine knots. It had no way of protecting itself. But the skipper wasn't alarmed, even when he observed two submarines following him. He made them out to be Russian, and that astonished him. Not until the tanker entered the harbor of Istanbul did anybody know that the Russians had invaded Poland and taken over part of it.

The vessel remained at anchor several days while Dombrowski was ashore trying to obtain safe passage for the gold through Turkey. If he could get it to Alexandretta, in Syria, it would be safe. A British warship would carry it through the Mediterranean to France. But railroad officials wanted $30,000 in cash before they would talk business.

At this time the Russian and Turkish governments were holding "conversations" in Moscow, and it seemed there would be some sort of pact between them. That might mean the interning or confiscation of the tanker and its cargo. The Turkish newspapers were filled with stories about the "gold ship." The German radio threatened every hour. Every day a yacht flying the swastika circled the tanker several times. The Irish captain shook his fists at it.

"Be dad," he swore, "I'll ram that hungry-looking snoop some night! He thinks he has us, or if not him, then his submarines in the Mediterranean. The back of me hand to him and his likes! They'll not get the gold, if I have to go to the bottom of the sea with it."

One night a dinghy came out from shore. A mysterious individual, described as "an American oil millionaire," handed Dombrowski $30,000 in United States currency. Who he was, or why he did this, Liberty's informant would not reveal. But he swears it happened.

At any rate, the money was paid to the railroad, the gold went through Turkey, was carried through the Mediterranean aboard a British man-o'-war, and eventually reached the Bank of France in Paris. There Dombrowski was given a receipt for the seventy-five tons of gold. He pocketed it and breathed a deep sigh of relief. He turned to his men and said: "Now let's find out where they're taking care of penniless, starving Polish refugees."

Publication Date: February 10, 1940