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In the north fell the forest town of Bialystok, where Polish bigwigs and their guests (often Hermann Goring) used to hunt the stag and wild boar. The fortress at Brest-Litovsk was captured, 600 prisoners taken. The retreat into Rumania became a mad stampede. Two beg red fire engines and a hook-&-ladder from Cracow roared through, clustered with refugees. Polish officers & men swam the Dniester to elude customs officers, escape internment. Polish planes, nearly 200 of them, piled into the little Rumanian airport at Cernauti, one landing on three others, wrecking all four.
The battlefront disappeared, and with it the illusion that there had ever been a battlefront. For this was no war of occupation, but a war of quick penetration and obliteration—Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Even with no opposition, armies had never moved so fast before. Theorists had always said that only infantry could take and hold positions. But these armies had not waited for the infantry. Swift columns of tanks and armored trucks had plunged through Poland while bombs raining from the sky heralded their coming. They had sawed off communications, destroyed stores, scattered civilians, spread terror. Working sometimes 30 miles ahead of infantry and artillery, they had broken down the Polish defenses before they had time to organize. Then, while the infantry mopped up, they had moved on, to strike again far behind what had been called the front. By week's end it mattered very little whether Warsaw stood or fell. The Republic of Poland, aged 20, was lost.
A German officer entered Warsaw under a flag of truce, delivered an ultimatum that the city must surrender in 24 hours or siege guns would be moved up. General Czuma refused to receive the message. Nazi airplanes then dropped leaflets repeating the ultimatum. General Czuma agreed to parley on evacuating all civilians and the Nazi high command ordered his spokesman to come out of the city in a car, at night, with truce flags specially spotlighted. All firing must cease.
Shortly after that news, the Polonaise was heard no more from Warsaw. A curtain of German propaganda fell.
Lord of the Lightning, which in less than three weeks had struck down a nation of 34,000,000 people, defended by an Army of 2,000,000, was a middleaged, middle-sized, good-looking soldier who was fighting his first war. As befitted the director of such forces as he commanded, he had no permanent headquarters, but was first in one place, then in another. He had supervised the advance of the East Prussian divisions which, in the first days of the war, drove straight for Warsaw, only to be held up momentarily at Pultusk and Plonsk. These obstacles overcome, he shifted to the scene of the next most stubborn resistance, Radom—and Radom fell. Three days later he was directing operations against Kutno, the only place west of Warsaw where the Poles were still holding out—and Kutno also fell. This week he was reported in the South, directing the swift drive through the Ukraine to Rumania that would tighten Poland's garrote and break its neck.