It’s midday. We only stopped for five hours. The long dark line of thousands of men stretches on ahead between rows of trees, a black band through the snow-covered open fields, showing the way we have to travel. Every half hour or so, there’s a house surrounded by a small patch of garden. A river runs close to the road, but its silence tells me it’s completely frozen.
Some men set up singing down the line, but most walk grimly on. The singing is defiant, but the men around me—even Bill—don’t sing and don’t speak, as though we are folding our energy reserves into the heart of our frozen, damp bodies. It’s as if my silence has passed like an infection to everyone else. I know how exhausted Bill must be if he isn’t humming or whistling, and my fear for him is like a stone I’ve swallowed. What if I’ve come all this way only to lose him now? Our sledge bumps along behind us. We walk and walk and walk. Every so often, I think, when I reach that tree, or when we pass that gate, and then I allow myself to nibble my small hunk of bread. It’s soon gone.
In another three hours, dusk is beginning to fall, and the line slows to a stop and moves to the side of the road. Civilian families pulling handcarts piled high with their belongings pass us. Mostly they are women, children and old people, with their faces set hard. The men who should be helping them are somewhere else, freezing in snowy trenches, shuffling like us in lines of prisoners, or dead.
A village or small town slowly emerges from its snow camouflage, buildings solidifying out of a mist.
Carefully holding my coat, I take the opportunity to pee in the slush beside the road, which is already yellow with urine. Groups of prisoners are counted off and directed to different buildings around the village, barns and halls. We are to sleep in the church. I cross myself when I enter, and someone behind me scoffs, “Pray hard, kid, and maybe a fuckin’ angel’ll flap you out of this.”
I tut. He shouldn’t say “fucking” in the church.
We choose pews in a side chapel, away from the night-soil buckets provided by a thoughtful verger. Again there are complaints about the space our sledge is taking up, and it seems even harder to lift and manhandle tonight. We are already getting weaker. It’s cold in the stone building, but at least we don’t have to sleep on the floor. I put my kit bag at one end of the pew for a pillow and long to wash my hands and face. Ralph shares a tin of processed cheese between the four of us. I suck my portion for as long as I can. Then he opens a can of strawberry jam. We don’t have anything to spread it on, but hand it around, taking a couple of finger’s full each before passing it on.
“It’s calories,” he says, “though not nearly enough.”
The smell of it is so thick and sweet that I inhale deeply before I eat, as though the smell alone will sustain me.
We don’t take off any clothes, but lay the damp blankets over us. The pew is hard and uncomfortable, but it feels good to stretch out properly. The sledge stands at the end of our pews. I wonder if men will dare to steal in a church. Some are already smoking here, which I think is wrong, but Ralph says smoking helps to keep the hunger at bay. Perhaps I should take it up.
The lice have begun to itch again, in my underarms, groin and hair. I take my hat off to scratch my head, and Bill and I try to flick the little devils out of the knitting before I put it back on. I’m sorry they’ve infiltrated the hat Bill made me.
When the church goes quiet, I pray for us all, for strength to endure, and my mind drifts to Scotty, to all he achieved in his life—how he saved his sister and her children, how he saved me. I give thanks for him.
Despite the hardness of the pew, the hunger that gnashes at my insides, the itching of the lice and the coldness of my damp clothes, I fall into a dreamless sleep. Perhaps that’s how my prayer is answered.
In the morning we are given another loaf of hard black bread among six. Ralph and Max discuss the logistics: how they are managing to bake and distribute such large quantities to hundreds of thousands of evacuated men, and how long it can continue.
Bill opens a tin of condensed milk and pours some onto his bread. I drink my three spoonfuls of the sweet, sticky cream, but keep my bread in my pocket to eke out throughout the day. As the afternoon passes, the white of the fields meets the white of the sky with no horizon line. Buzzards circle overhead, and I think we are walking carrion.
Over the next few nights, we sleep in different places—a village hall, a factory, a cowshed. One night Bill and I bed down with the pigs in their sty. It’s the warmest we’ve been for days.
In every village the local people come out to watch us pass. Prisoners barter cigarettes, soap and chocolate for bread or sausage. My companions decide we should keep our cigarettes and soap until our food parcels run out. They are more valuable currency than gold coins sewn into the hems of our clothes. The food from our parcels is rapidly diminishing. Even carefully rationed, it doesn’t go far among four.
When the snow starts to fall again, we walk with our heads down to stop the snow blowing into our eyes. Even with my neck bent, I can’t keep my eyes open properly. The guns sound more distant now, and all I can hear are the wind and the trudge of footsteps and beyond us the great uncaring silence of nature.
One house we pass has logs piled up outside it and smoke rising from a chimney. It’s almost unbelievable that on the other side of that wall are warmth, company, family, food. I wonder if the people look out at this line of straggling, starving wretches, or if they just keep the curtains closed and face the fire.
At Strehlen there’s a church with an onion dome, like in Vražné, where we were married so many hundreds of years ago. But no priest comes to help us.
On the sixth night, the tall guard tells us we won’t be locked in; we must bed down where we can. We cram into a drafty toolshed, but it’s so crowded, we have to sleep sitting up. Bill removes his boots to look at his blisters. His feet are raw and bleeding, and he decides to leave his boots off for the night. “The air might do my feet good,” he says doubtfully.
But after a few minutes, he sees the pinkness of his feet turning white and pulls his bloodstained socks back on. From his pack he takes a second pair, which he knitted himself and which are rather misshapen but still warm. As he yanks them over the first pair, I see another man eyeing the socks as if they’re gold nuggets.
“Give you a hundred cigs for those, mate,” he says, but Bill refuses, tucking the blanket around his feet to prevent the socks from being stolen as he sleeps. I sneak a look at the man’s feet and see he is only wearing fuss-lag and wooden clogs. Bill sees that too and ties his boots to his wrists by their laces.
It’s so cold in the shed that by the morning the wet leather of Bill’s boots has frozen like iron, and he can hardly force his feet back into them. It’s snowed again in the night, and I clutch Bill’s arm as I realize some prisoners were forced to sleep outside. Most of the mounds of snowy clothing don’t move.
Twenty-four
The endless line of men winds through open country where the wind has bent trees to strange shapes. We can see the snaking line of prisoners miles ahead of us—black shapes shuffling against the snow. Sometimes up ahead we see the dark silhouettes of buildings or church spires, and hope flickers for a few minutes. Perhaps we’ll be allowed to rest here. Perhaps there’ll be bread.