• • •
After eight days of marching, we reach a larger, more prosperous village, and we stand for two hours in light, swirling snow, waiting to be billeted. The four of us are directed with a group going to a sawmill just outside the village.
“Home from home,” remarks Bill looking around. “Just like the sawmill at Mankendorf.”
He hurries us across the icy yard to the building adjacent to the offices, where there might be a stove. The tall guard, Hans, tells us tomorrow is Sunday, and we’ll be there for the whole day, with a chance to rest. He sounds relieved himself.
Bill and Ralph prop our sledge in a corner, and Bill begins to gather up wood shavings and sawdust.
“We can make a bed. That’ll lift us off the floor,” he says.
We take turns to stay with our sledge in the corner we’ve staked out, or to help gather armloads of shavings and sawdust, which we spread in an area big enough for the four of us to lie down.
Ralph unstraps the last two parcels from the sledge and puts them under the head end of our sawdust bed as lumpy pillows.
I lie between Bill and Ralph, looking at a wood shaving, at the beauty of its curling shape, and I inhale the warm smell of it.
In the morning we are given a loaf to share among six, and it tastes as if it isn’t only the bed that’s been made of sawdust. This time some men we hardly know cut the bread, and they don’t give us first choice of the pieces. Max complains that one of their pieces is bigger, and one of the other man squares up to him.
“And if it is, what are you going to do about it?” he sneers.
Bill pulls Max away, and Max doesn’t shrug him off.
Later in the day, the guards drive up on a truck and unload a bucket of soup. It’s gone cold on the journey from the cookhouse, but it has some real pieces of potato in it. We spend the day sleeping and resting, and the tall guard lets us out into the yard. We gather snow to make drinks and to try to wash ourselves. It’s too cold to remove many clothes, but I dip a rag in the snow and hurriedly scrub my face and reach in under my clothes. Ralph and Bill heat a little water and rub a sliver of soap through their beards and scrape them off so my beardlessness won’t look so strange. Max’s beard is growing black and curly. He says it’s full of lice, but gives him some warmth.
Ralph carefully removes his boots and socks. His toes are like patchwork: pink, swollen and shiny or white like frost itself. I inhale in horror as I see that the little toe on his left foot is starting to turn black.
“You should get those looked at,” says Max.
“By who?” snaps Ralph. “I’m probably the nearest thing to a doctor for fifty miles, God help us. It’s frostbite, not cancer.”
We heat a little water, and I try to warm the deadened skin, and rub in the last of the cream. I wonder how he can stand the pain.
Several hours of the day are spent trying to kill some of the lice. We light a cigarette and run it up the seams of our coats and battle dress, to sizzle them.
Bill takes the opportunity to make some improvements to his sledge. Someone offers him a thousand reichmarks for it. I’m amazed that anyone can have amassed so much money, but Ralph tells me he’s the man who used to run the secret “casino” at Lamsdorf.
And then we’re back on the road, stopping overnight and setting off again each morning. For hour after hour the scenery is identical. Sometimes a small flock of sparrows circles over us and wheels away. Sometimes there are power lines, and the telegraph poles show up blackly in the snow. Sometimes the road is raised above the fields. Sometimes there are no trees lining the road and fences have been erected to stop snowdrifts from blocking the carriageway.
Then fir forests become closer and closer to the road on our left, until they are so near that I wonder whether we could simply slip away into the woods. Far ahead of us I hear a gunshot and wonder if someone else tried it.
From time to time we see a man who’s just sat down by the side of the road and given up, from cold and exhaustion. The army chaplain is going up and down the line, exhorting these men to get to their feet, to continue. I hear him use language I wouldn’t have expected from a priest.
After three more days, we have another rest day, and there’s soup again, of indeterminate flavor. Bill, Ralph and Max constantly count and recount the items left in our food parcels. Our little stock is running out. A guard tells us we’re headed for Görlitz POW camp and that there might be fresh Red Cross parcels there. The guard says Görlitz might be four days’ walk away. He asks, embarrassedly, if we’ve got any cigarettes, and we say only if he can get us extra food. He disappears.
Ralph says, “Let’s divide what’s left into four days, then. Or five maybe.” And the others agree. It’s even less than we were having before, and when I put my hands on my hips, it feels like my body isn’t where I expect it to be. The time for my monthlies comes, but there’s no blood.
I hide one square of chocolate at the bottom of my kit bag. It comforts me just to know it’s there. I eat my last prune and suck the stone for hours. When I finally drop it into the snow, I hope it will grow in the spring.
For days we’ve been walking across almost flat land, but now it’s becoming hilly. The snow is thicker, deep to the edge of the forest, and we heave the sledge up a long, steep hill. As we come over the top, shaking and breathless from the effort, we see rolling snow-covered hills to both sides and purple mountains up ahead.
We shuffle slowly past a castle on a hill. The snow has stopped falling at last, and clods of settled snow begin to drop from the deciduous trees, though it stays and freezes on the fir branches. The cattle we glimpse here are hairy, as though they are wearing long fur coats.
I name the things we pass, in Czech, to keep my words alive: the redbrick chimney of a factory, birch woods, a tattered advertising poster for glassblowing, a pigeon loft. And still we are climbing. On the road now, there are even more civilian refugees, who stand aside to let us pass, or walk doggedly on as we thread past them in single file. At a railway station we watch German soldiers disembark from cattle trucks. They’re filthy and almost as ragged as us, with long, unkempt beards. They are wounded, sick, terrified, young. One of our guards says they’ve come from the Eastern front, fighting the Russians.
Every day Ralph’s feet get worse. Skin that was swollen and pink has bleached white, the toes that were white begin to turn green and then black. He hobbles more and more painfully, until a day comes when he admits he can no longer walk. There’s a wagon for the injured, and the tall guard lets us drop back to lift him onto it. The wagon’s pulled by prisoners with friends on board, who are given an extra bread ration—though not enough to make up for the calories they’re using up on pulling a heavy wooden vehicle, laden with the sick and injured, over the icy slush. Bill and Max take their turns, but Bill refuses to let me. “I need you to stay strong enough to walk.”
We heap all our blankets onto Ralph, but lying still on the wagon, he shivers uncontrollably. At night we lift him down and bring him to sleep with us, trying to warm him with our own bodies. I try to use a little water and some rags to warm the frozen skin of his feet, though the cream is long gone. He pushes his lips together in a thin line so as not to let any groan escape. When the pain diminishes a little, he says, “You lot’d be better off without me. You should just look after yourselves.”