We knelt down along the edge of the dry moat and looked across to the loom of the first tall wooden fence as Kolemenos slithered in and braced himself against the steep-sloping near side. We used him as a human stepping stone, and as we clambered over him he took our feet in his linked and cupped hands and heaved us one by one on to the ledge at the base of the twelve-foot palisade. More vital minutes were lost in pulling Kolemenos out of the ditch. By standing on his shoulders and reaching out at full stretch, we were able to haul ourselves over the top, and standing on the lateral securing timber on the other side, lean over and help up the later arrivals.
Anchor-man Kolemenos again posed us a problem. Straddling the top of the fence, our legs held firm, Makowski and I leaned head downwards and arms outstretched to haul at him, one arm each. Three times we got his fingers to within inches of the top and three times we had to lower him down again. We paused, trembling with exertion and near-despair, and tried again. His fingers scrabbled for a hold on the top, gripped. To our straining he began to add his own tremendous strength. He came up, up and over.
To beat the coiled wire at the foot of the fence we threw ourselves outwards, landing in a heap in the deep snow. One or two failed to leap quite clear and were scratched as they pulled themselves away. We were in the patrol alley now between the two fences and time was running out. If I had heard the sound of the sledge dogs announcing the start of a patrol now, I think I might have been physically sick.
We ran the few yards to the outer fence and this time shoved Kolemenos up first. We were probably making little noise, but it seemed to me the commotion was deafening. This time I was last up and it was Kolemenos who swung me up and over. In a final mad scramble we leapt and tumbled over the last lot of barbed wire at the foot of the outer fence, picked ourselves up, breathlessly inquired if everyone was all right, and, with one accord, started to run. Round my waist was tied the old sheepskin jacket. I tugged it free, dropped it and heard it slithering along behind me attached to the thong looped on my wrist.
We gasped and choked and wheezed, but we ran and kept running, into the great forest among the looming, white-clothed trees. We ran south, with the camp at our backs. One and then another stumbled, fell and were helped to their feet. The first headlong rush slowed to a steady, racking lope. We jogged along for hours, into the dawn and beyond it to another snow-filled day, our packs bumping and pounding our backs as we went. When we stopped to draw air into labouring lungs, I made them start again. And I made them struggle on until about 11 a.m. when hardly one of us could have moved another pace. I picked up the old sheepskin and held it under my arm. We looked round at one another. Paluchowicz was bent over double with his hands on his knees, his shoulders heaving, fighting to get his breath back. Two of the others were squatting on their haunches in the snow. All of us were open-mouthed with wagging tongues like spent animals.
This place was a shallow, bowl-like depression where the trees grew more widely spaced. We had stumbled down into it and could not, without a rest, have attempted the slight climb out of it. We stood there for about ten minutes, too breathless to speak and in a lather of sweat in spite of the subzero temperature. The snow still came down, thinning a little now, and there was a moaning wind through the trees that made the gaunt branches shake and creak miserably. Like hunted animals we were all straining our ears for sounds of the chase. In all our minds was the thought of the dogs. But there was only the wind, the falling snow and the stirring trees.
Up the slope to our left the trees grew more closely together. ‘We will get up there,’ I said, finally. ‘There is more shelter and we shall be better hidden.’ There were groans of protest. Smith joined in, ‘Rawicz is right.’ So we laboured our way out of the hollow and picked on the broad base of a great tree as the location of our shelter. We scooped the snow away down to the tree roots and cleared a space a couple of yards square. We built up the snow around into a solid low wall. Kolemenos cut branches with his axe and we laid them on top in a close mesh, piling on more snow to complete the roof. It was a lesson we had learned the hard way in Siberia: Get out of the wind, because the wind is the killer. The old Ostyak had told me, ‘Snow? Who worries about snow? Just wrap it around you and you’ll sleep warm as though you were in a feather bed.’
Here it was that we had our first real look at the contents of our packs. Each man had a flat baked loaf, a little flour, about five pounds of pearl barley, some salt, four or five ounces of
There was, this relatively short distance from the camp, no question of lighting a fire, so we wolfed some of our bread. And in so doing we made a discovery about Sergeant-of-Cavalry Paluchowicz. He had not a tooth in his head. Eating this hard bread was agony to him. The only way he could cope with it was by soaking it — in this case, where there was no water, by painstakingly kneading it with snow.
‘I had a nice set of dentures when they took me prisoner near Belystok,’ he explained. ‘Then those bastard N.K.V.D. fellows knocked them out of my mouth and they smashed on the floor. They laughed at that trick but it was no bloody joke to me, trying to get my gums round that prison bread, I can tell you. First thing I do when we get to where we are going will be to treat myself to another set of teeth.’
‘And have them gold-plated. You’ll deserve them.’ This from Zaro. We laughed, and Paluchowicz joined in, too.
We slept through the remaining few hours of daylight, only one man remaining awake at a time to keep a listening guard near the small opening. Kolemenos went off like a tired child and snored gently and musically. No one had the heart to stir him for guard duty. The Lithuanian Marchinkovas roused us as the light outside began to fade. We ate some more bread, smoked one cigarette each and crawled out. The snowfall had diminished to light flurries and the wind was getting up. It was very cold and we were stiff and sore.
All seven of us knew it was imperative that we should get clear out of the camp area as soon as possible. All through that second night we alternately ran and walked. The stiffness began to leave me after about an hour but I acquired new aches as the bumping pack chafed my back. I swung it round at intervals and held it against my chest. Kolemenos found the axe in his waistband was rubbing him raw, took it out and jogged on with it under his arm. It never seemed to be completely dark but the going was nevertheless difficult through two and three feet of crisp snow, the undulations of the ground masked by close-growing trees. Near morning we crossed a frozen stream, steeply banked on the other side, and when we scrambled up and got away from it into the continuing forest, we made our camp.
For the first four or five days we stuck to this night movement and daylight holing up. There was no sign of pursuit. Hopefully we decided that, our tracks having been well covered by the first night’s snow, the hunt had probably been organized eastward as being the shortest and most feasible escape route. Cautiously we congratulated ourselves on the choice of the flight to the south. We started to travel by day, advancing roughly abreast in a spread-out formation and making up to thirty miles a day. Watching the occasional watery sun, reading the sign of the moss growing on the sheltered side of the trees, we held to an approximate course south. Several more ice-bound streams were negotiated and I judged they were all flowing southwards to drain into the great Lena River. It was a time of hardship, of a constant battle against cold and fatigue, but our spirits were high. Most of all at this time we wanted to be able to light a fire and we spurred ourselves on with the promise that we should have one as soon as we sighted the Lena.
After about a week of travel we began to sort ourselves out. The two regular soldiers, Makowski and Paluchowicz, kept close together. Marchinkovas, reserved and serious, but with an occasional unexpected dry wit, was befriended by Kolemenos. Smith, now completely accepted as a kind of elder counsellor of the party, was my own particular companion. The buoyant, funloving Zaro, was impartially friendly with everyone and moved happily from group to group. A rare fellow, this Zaro. I saw him, at the end of a gruelling day when we had to flog our aching muscles for the energy to build the night’s hide-out, mocking at his own and our weariness by squatting down in the snow, hands on hips, and giving us a lively version of a Russian dance until Kolemenos was bellowing with laughter, tears running down into his beard. Nothing could ever daunt Zaro. Of all the gallant jokers I had met, Zaro was undoubtedly the greatest. He taught us all that the grimmest twists of life were not entirely humourless.
On this race to the Lena we had our first and minor hunting success. We caught and killed a sable which was floundering in the snow. About the size and general appearance of a weasel, it made great efforts to get away as we ringed it, each of us armed with a birch club. It may have been injured. I don’t know. But one thud of
