So it was that I came to see probably the last cavalry charge in modern warfare. We had left the horses in charge of four patrolmen in the outer fringe of some woods and had crawled to a hillock topped by a clump of small trees from which we had a clear view down the main Piastov road, intercepted about a hundred yards from us by a four-road junction. There was a gaily-painted roadhouse in the angle of the main road and one of the side roads. It was untenanted now, but there was still a large multi-coloured umbrella over an outside table. Then we saw two German patrols cautiously probing the area on each side of the main road. One patrol passed between us and our horses. We froze quite still and kept our eyes on the two miles of clear main road ahead.
Not long afterwards we saw the reason for the scouting parties. Away in the distance swinging along with rifles slung over their shoulders came a platoon of German soldiers, followed by about half-a-dozen officers on horseback. Behind them was a company of infantry and then some horse-drawn guns. The column was half-a-mile from the crossroads when I heard horses on the road behind me. Emerging from the woods on to the road was a force of about 150 fully-equipped Polish Cavalry — I learned later they were the 12th Uhlans.
The cavalry formed up immediately and were thundering down the road, swords flashing, before the marching Germans knew what was happening. The horses smashed through the whole column with hardly a shot fired against them. As the frightened artillery horses reared, the guns slewed across the road and there were Polish casualties as riders were unhorsed against the guns. They formed up again and charged back to complete the havoc. They swung off along one of the side roads and it was all over. We crept away and found our horses, mounted and returned to report. The date was either the 15th or 16th of September. Warsaw capitulated soon afterwards.
The problem posed by the little Jewish shopkeeper just could not be answered, I decided. Germans or Russians? For the Pole in my position in 1939 there was little choice. There were plenty more like me on this train, who had thought that fighting the Nazis might be a passport to Soviet clemency.
The days of comfortless tedium went dragging by. We dozed in numb misery, we dreamed racking nightmares which stayed with us as we woke again to realization that we were still in this awful train and there seemed no end to the grinding of the wheels. We talked of wives and families. Some of the men would describe their babies in loving detail. We railed against the Russians and we cursed Hitler and his Germans. We lived through long hours in which no man spoke as we huddled together against intense cold. Sometimes we were locked in for thirty-six hours on end. That was when men moaned with the abject frustration of it all and called down searing curses on the architects of our degradation.
But we were moving, moving all the time. Men died and their names were written off, but the long snake of sixty or more cattle trucks went on eating up a staggering total of miles. The vastness of Russia is appalling. We reached and identified the important Siberian centre of Novo Sibirsk, eighteen hundred miles from our starting point outside Moscow, and still the train went on. We had covered over two thousand miles eastwards in an almost straight line when we passed slowly through Krasnoyarsk and saw grain piled high in the open, deteriorating and throwing out green shoots because there was either no labour or no transport to move it. A big place, this Krasnoyarsk, seen through the spyholes in our wooden cells. A place of huge granaries and red brick buildings and the activity normally associated with a busy rail junction.
About eight miles beyond Krasnoyarsk we pulled up at a long siding well out of sight and sound of the town. A brisk, well-wrapped team of wheel-tappers wielded their hammers down the length of the train. These wheel-tappers must be among the most assiduous of the world’s railway workers. At every possible opportunity during the long ride they banged away at the wheels. They were obviously workers of the greatest importance. A breakdown on one of the stretches of snowy wilderness between towns would have been disastrous. This time they found defects in some of the wagons and we spent the hours from mid-morning to dusk in the open trying to keep circulation moving while repairs were carried out from materials taken from a couple of brick shacks at the side of the line. There was, by now, one slight improvement in our condition. Following the example of one unknown minor genius, we had made trouser-fasteners from twigs threaded through the waist bands. Now we had both hands free. Now we could flail our arms about to stop freezing.
It was the end of the third week and some thought that Krasnoyarsk might be the end of the line for us. At dusk, however, we were loaded aboard, locked in and sealed again. The wheels turned and thudded into the old rhythm. There were six more nights of travel, six days or parts of days in the open, stamping around to stay alive. Then, incredibly, one month and over 3,000 miles after the start, we reached the end of the train journey. The place was Irkutsk, near the southern tip of the great Baikal Lake.
The soldiers walked down the train removing the seals and unbarring the trucks and ordering, ‘All out. The trip’s over.’
We stumbled out and a shrieking, whipping wind, and a sub-zero temperature made us gulp and gasp and cling to the small shelter afforded by the trucks. In a few minutes ears became icy cold, noses purple-red and eyes streamed tears. We shivered, all of us, uncontrollably. It was the second week in December and Siberia was already fast bound in winter. We met it still clad only in a pair of trousers, canvas shoes and a thin cotton blouse. The soldiers inspected each wagon to make sure it had been cleared. Some men, seized with cramp or worse, had to be lifted down. There was some milling about, a shouting of orders, repeated again down the line to each group and we formed into a long, untidy column — a crowd of perhaps four thousand prisoners, headed, tailed and flanked by soldiers. We shambled off, heads bent against the wind, trousers soaked to the knees in the snow and slush churned up by those ahead.
The march took us five miles across country, out of sight and sound of the railway. It was typical of the whole enterprise that our resting-place was to be no haven for drooping travellers. We stopped and broke out of ranks in a vast, wind-swept potato field. Nowhere, as far as the eye could see in any direction, was there a building of any sort. The field lay under two feet of crisp snow. A few wood-burning kolhoz lorries stood around. There was a single mobile field kitchen which seemed grossly inadequate for the needs of such a mass of prisoners. The wind had jagged teeth that made me feel quite naked to its attack. Men stood in the snow and looked bleakly at one another. All the tears were not caused by the cutting wind.
The period of aimless standing around did not last long. It was urgently necessary to do something to get out of the paralysing blast of the wind. One group near me started to scrape heaped snow into a windbreak. The idea spread rapidly. Soon there was feverish toiling to make little snow-ringed compounds. Men scraped and scratched away with numb fingers down to the rock-hard black earth and when their work was done crouched down behind the windbreak.
Outside the barbed wire, about a quarter of a mile away from the edge of the field, were some woods. When the transport commandant, that apostle of Soviet culture, walked round later in the day, spokesmen from some of the groups asked him if we could be allowed to gather branches to cover the freezing ground. He gave permission. The prisoners had automatically held together in their truck communities. A few volunteers from each group were formed up and under armed escort made several trips to the woods, returning with armfuls of small twigs and branches which were carefully spread out on the ground. Men were then able to stretch out below the level of the snow heaps and escape the full impact of the wind. Even so, it was only a barely tolerable position as we huddled tightly together. Food was doled out, about one pound of bread per man per day, and, remarkably, the food kitchen managed to produce two steaming tin mugs of unsweetened ersatz coffee a day for each man.
We spent three days in the potato field, in the course of which batches of hundreds more prisoners joined us. Some of these were Finns. Now and later they were unmistakable. They al
ways clung tenaciously together in a solid racial group. When the assembly had been completed there were not fewer than five thousand men in the field, all wondering what was going to happen next and fearfully speculating on what might be in store. Events were to justify the worst of our fears.
On our camp followers, the lice which had lived on and with us from the prisons of Western Russia, the potato field inflicted heavy casualties. Their warm hiding-places on our bodies exposed to the lash of that all-pervading blast, they dropped off or were easily picked off, and died. We did not mourn them. We were in little shape to act as hosts. They might have fared better if they could have stuck it out until the third day — a memorable day indeed.
The kolhoz lorries, with their wood-fuelled gas-generator engines, drove in on that third day and the soldiers ran round. We felt something unusual was about to happen but we could never in our most hopeful dreams have guessed what it was. The word rippled out from those closest to the lorries, ‘Clothes! New clothes.’
And new clothes it was. It took hours to make the distribution, but when it was over each man had exchanged his flimsy rubashka for the Russian winter top garment, the fufaika, a thigh-length, buttoned-to-the-throat, kapok-padded jacket.
With the jackets came a pair of padded winter trousers and stout rubberised canvas boots, laced to a point a few inches above the ankle. The boots were available in three sizes only — small, medium and large. No attempt was made to give a man the size he needed. If he were lucky they fitted. If not, he exchanged his too-small or too-large boots with someone else who had the opposite kind of misfit. I was one of the lucky ones. My issue fitted. Our old blouses and trousers were all carefully collected. The excitement was wonderful. Men’s faces glowed. They hurried and fumbled to get into their handsome new jackets. They called out to one another, parading around. And those dear old jokers, who had been almost silent since we came to the potato field, gave us a mannequin display, hands on hips and beards flying in the wind. It is a laboured truism that all things and experiences are comparative. By all normal standards we were still abjectly dressed for a Siberian winter, but the additional warmth we felt from our fufaikas was extraordinary.
On the fourth day of our stay in the potato field, the issue of winter clothing was completed. We were each handed two pieces of linen which the soldiers explained were for wrapping up the feet inside our boots. A few of the men in our truck group knew about these ‘socks’ and how best to wind them, not too tightly, around the feet to stave off frostbite. There were little demonstrations all over the field.
Into the compound drove a whole convoy of some sixty powerful lorries, each with an Army driver accompanied in the cab by another soldier as driver’s mate. They were heavy duty vehicles requisitioned from the collective farms for hundreds of miles around and had painted on their sides the names of the various kolhozi. Just behind the cabin they carried tall, cylindrical gas generators, the fuel for which was eight-inch lengths of birch and ash, known to the Russians as churki. This wood, plentifully available throughout well-forested Siberia, was a cheap and efficient substitute for precious motor spirit and solved one of the many Russian transport and distribution problems. Clipped into brackets on the lorry sides was an assortment of spades and pickaxes. The load-carrying bodies were open to the weather. Apart from their odd-looking gas generators, they looked like the normal commercial Western three-tonner.
As we watched them bumping and rolling in, the orders started to fly and we knew that the last stage of our journey was about to begin. For many of those jostling around it would be the last stage of any journey they would know on this earth.
5. Chain Gang
ON THAT last day in the potato field there was an air of some big — and for the five thousand prisoners, ominous — event ahead, some major Russian transportation enterprise. The soldiers were in battalion strength, hooded in balaclavas, wearing warm sheepskin gloves and each carrying his distinctive khaki sack slung across the back and held in place by a piece of string. There were at least fifty lorries parked in a long, well-spaced line. They were open and mounted machine-gun platforms against the drivers’ cabins. If the issue of new warm clothing had not been enough warning, the presence of so many troops and vehicles removed any doubt that a fresh ordeal lay ahead.
The troops arrived about 11 a.m. after the morning issue of bread and coffee had been completed. They started work immediately re-checking the list of prisoners’ names. At times the checking became chaotic. Some names had to be shouted out several times before the men concerned recognized them in their mispronounced Russian form. As each batch of one hundred names were ticked off on the lists, the men were led away in a column towards the waiting lorries. Whether by design or not, the truck communities were split up. I found myself with an almost entirely different bunch of men as we moved away. We were led to the space between the sixth and seventh lorries and there we stood for some hours while the paper work and the marshalling went on throughout the afternoon in the field.
The light of a clear, cold, December day was fading as the preliminaries ended. The soldiers were detailed into sections of about twenty, each in charge of an N.C.O. or junior officer. Each section was disposed to guard one hundred prisoners, strung out two abreast behind each lorry. We watched the proceedings with interest, chilled and hoping there would soon be a move.
There had been a low buzz of talk all the way down the great line of men. Suddenly it was stilled, cut short in shock and appalled surprise, as from each lorry was uncoiled a length of heavy steel chain of about one inch diameter. A soldier in my detachment walked between the two men at the head of my column, forcing them apart, and then walked through the middle cleaving us into two single lines. Other soldiers followed him, running out the chain. On shouted instructions, we picked up the chain with the hand nearest to it. I was about halfway along with my left side to the chain. I remember thinking I was lucky not to have to use my right hand, which was still open, raw and painful. The chain was brand new, still coated with some dark, sticky, anti-rust compound, and its coldness struck the hand almost like a burn. Then, fifty men a side, we were handcuffed to the chain by one wrist. Three guards took station on each side, spaced along the line, the section commander climbed into the cab alongside the driver and the remaining troops piled quickly into the back of the lorry. We were ready to start. The prisoners remained very silent.
Like some great, slowly-walking reptile, the long procession began to move, the lorry at the head setting the pace, a fair walking speed of about four miles an hour. The forward end of the chain was secured to a strong spring-closed hook, a fixture normally used for towing jobs. As our lorry moved and the chain took up the strain, we strode out, automatically falling into step. There was just enough room between the man ahead and the man behind for me to to step out without hindrance. When the leading lorry struck a deeper drift of snow, the whole convoy piled forward and then stopped, vehicle by vehicle, prisoner group by prisoner group, until the full marching speed was resumed.
We trudged non-stop through that first dark night at the beginning of the third week in December for twelve hours or more. The leading lorry lighted the way with the beam of bright lamps. We struggled on in the blackness, obeying the insistent pull of the chain, still wondering where we were going, fearful of how long we should have to march on in this killing cold. The road was obviously well known and I had no doubt that this first long drag by night was intended to take us clear of any inhabited places near Irkutsk, unseen by the Russian civilian population. In the following days the programme was one of day marches and night halts, but the route was chosen still to avoid places where we might be seen. So vast and thinly-populated are these stupendous areas of Siberia, that I saw not a single native in the length of Irkutsk province.
A halt was called about half-an-hour after dawn in a wooded depression between two hills. We were all stiff, weighed down with heavy-limbed fatigue, cold and hungry. In my group were men of all ages, fr
om lads of 17 to men of over 60, and from many different civilian backgrounds. Some of the older men were moaning already with misery. They were for the most part professional types, lawyers and architects and the like, who had reached that stage in life before the coming of the Russians when they drove in their cars from home to office and back again — men who had given up the physical caperings of youth and could look not too far ahead to a well-to-do, respected and comfortable retirement. They were skirmishing with death and they had such paltry weapons left for the fight. Then and later we younger men did what we could to help them along, but casualties among them were heavy indeed.
That first stop lasted only a couple of hours, long enough for the field kitchen which had accompanied us to brew up hot coffee and for the soldiers to distribute the bread ration. The heat of the coffee was like a breath of warm life, and we ate ravenously of our bread. We were not unshackled from the chain and in all too short a time we were on the move again, this time in daylight.
The six flanking guards were regularly changed every two hours. They jogged forward to the lorry, six reliefs jumped down, and a new turn of duty started without slowing the march of the winding, toiling column of prisoners. Over the exposed places on high ground the wind howled like a chorus of demons, our feet slipped in the churned up snow, tips of fingers, ears and noses felt the insidious attack of frostbite. And, even this early, the toll of death started. A shout, passed from a contingent well behind us, was relayed along by the walking sentries until it reached the transport commandant in the leading lorry. The leader stopped, the rest stopped. Some poor prisoner was unshackled, his body removed. The same method of disposal was followed as for the dead of the train. The clothes and boots were removed, the corpse was left behind under a mound of snow. This was the first of many. Taking my own section as typical, the death-rate was to reach between ten and fifteen per cent before the long trek was over.
The Long Walk Page 5