We found no organization for defence and when, after carrying out some transfer of stores from military quarters in Praga across the Vistula to the old Warsaw cadet school, I heard there was an organized defence force in the outer suburbs on the Warsaw-Piastov road, I saddled up, provisioned myself, and rode out. I was welcomed. I became leader of an eight-man cavalry patrol.
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
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 always 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.
