I followed my calling as estate manager for only a few months. On 1 March 1939, I was called up under an order of ‘unofficial mobilization’. Just six months later, on 31 August, on the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, as I sat reading letters from my wife and my mother and was preparing to open the parcels they had sent me, a messenger rode into our cavalry camp near Ozharov to announce that the Germans were on the move. It was war.
My active service lasted just about three weeks but they were weeks packed with movement and incident. I went through again, in that rocking Russian railway van, my impressions of those days. I remembered ducking for cover with my horse as the Stukas screamed on their road-strafing missions, the blocked roads, the baulked horse-drawn Polish artillery toiling to get within gun range of the enemy. Often we were shelled and no one seemed to be quite sure where the Germans were. Near Kutno we found the main force of the Polish Cavalry, nearly ten thousand horses and their riders, their main retreat route to Modlan blocked by well-positioned and dug-in Germans.
Here, at least there was some kind of unified command. The order went down the lines that we were to break through. Between us and the Germans were woods about a mile and a half in depth. From unit to unit the bugles sounded the advance and we moved off. Men who were unhorsed in the first wave never got up again, horses went down squealing and the mounts behind jumped over them. As I broke cover I saw horses staked on the steel barbed-wire supporting stakes, horses disembowelled on the wire. A cavalry charge induces a form of madness. Riders and horses alike are infected. Its fury, its weight and its pounding impetus can only be stopped by the most awful and concentrated heavy gunfire. The Germans who stood up to surrender were mown down. The cavalry in a charge cannot take prisoners.
Harassed by dive-bombers, threading our way along the choked roads, we fell back on Warsaw to reorganize, as we were told, for the defence of the capital. Foot soldiers climbed on to our riderless horses and rode back with us — there was even a Polish sailor on horseback as we straggled into the outskirts of Warsaw. 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.