Then Minsk fell, then Smolensk, then Kiev—each Russian acknowledgment lagging a week or more behind the German crows of victory. Air raids started; the Luftwaffe had come into range. Nobody else in the embassy became as alarmed as Slote, because nobody else had counted much on the Russians. Moreover, nobody else had undergone the ordeal of Warsaw. Since May, the ambassador had been storing food, fuel, and supplies in a large house thirty miles from the city, to sit out the coming siege. A few of the Americans, rubbed raw by the Russians’ difficult ways, even looked forward to seeing the
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