That first leg of our journey eastwards soon developed into a nightmare. We stayed locked in throughout the first night and all through the following day. There were, of course, no toilet facilities of even the crudest kind and men relieved themselves standing up, unable to move. The smell was foul, the air stank. When the train drew up at a signal check, men would shout for food and water and the guards would race along the train hammering on the truck sides with their gun butts and ordering silence, promising the trucks would be opened soon. It was bitterly cold for the prisoners around the truck walls. Even if those towards the middle would have changed position it was impossible to move. Twelve hours or so after my first meal on the train, I wormed my hand into my blouse and slowly ate the remainder of the bread and fish.
Those of us who had first joined the train had been locked in for nearly twenty-four hours when the train finally drew up on an isolated section of branch line and the truck doors were at last slid back. It was late afternoon and all we could see around was undulating, snow-covered country, with clumps of trees near the line and others dotted around in the distance. Some of my companions were too stiff from the long standing to get down unaided. All of us stretched and yawned and rubbed at our aching limbs to restore circulation. An old grenade wound in my ankle had started to open and the back of my right hand, on which the Lubyanka specialists had dropped hot tar, was puffed up and sore. There were ex-soldiers with much more serious untreated wounds than mine. I could only admire their courage. We could do nothing for them and the Russian first-aiders contributed not even an aspirin for their relief.
A knifing east wind whistled around the train. The snow had stopped falling and the wind seemed all the colder as a result. Russian soldiers were strategically placed in a flat arc around the open side of the train and there were patrolling guards on the blind side.
The first move was for security. We were ordered to squat in front of our truck and then were issued with the familiar lump of black bread. There was also a water issue which tasted of steam and train oil. Afterwards we were allowed to walk in a carefully prescribed area and the request that a few men be allowed to walk a little farther afield to gather branches to clean out the truck was granted — on condition it was understood that ‘Step to the right, step to the left’ would be treated as an attempt to escape. The wind outside cut through our flimsy clothes and there was no lack of volunteers for cleaning the truck. They worked awhile inside and then jumped down to gulp in the clean air. Standing against the truck door a little later I saw that the steel bar used to lock us in was itself finally secured with a loop of wire and a lead seal. Not only locked in, I thought, but sealed. A finishing touch of absolute security.
The pattern of the journey became clearer thereafter. The general plan was to move us stealthily through sleeping towns at night and to halt on some branch line out in the country during the day. Signal delays and long stretches of inhabited country meant over-running the schedule until well into the daylight of a following day. On those occasions there was near panic among the soldiers and train staff. I often wonder what civilian Russians standing on station platforms made of the low murmur of voices which came from the long line of cattle trucks almost stopping or slowly crawling past them during these out-of-schedule morning runs.
Towards the end of the first week our sixty men had organized itself with rough community rules. A rota system was started to enable everyone in turn to enjoy the close-packed body warmth of the middle of the truck. Everyone in turn experienced the numbing cold of the truck walls. It was getting colder and colder and those perimeter positions were grim. This meant, too, that the favoured daylight spot of observer at the cracks and knotholes in the truck sides also went round. A good, loud-voiced look-out with his eye to a hole in the wood helped greatly to relieve the general boredom. Some of them could turn in a really entertaining commentary.
Shut in this dark travelling-box it was difficult to get any clear idea of the actual course of the journey. From the disjointed reports of men who may or may not have known the route followed I formed the idea that we must have made a number of fairly substantial detours in the progress through Western Russia. These may have been necessitated by traffic conditions and the points chosen for picking up prisoner road convoys. During the second week, however, when we approached the Urals and a third engine was coupled into the train, it became clear we were on the Trans-Siberian Railway and there could be no doubt that our destination lay somewhere in the vast reaches of fabulous Siberia. We clanked through nearly all the big towns and rail junctions at night. We always knew the junctions by the break in running rhythm as the wheels crossed a succession of points and by the noise of other trains and shunting engines.
One incident sticks vividly in my mind, especially since it was daylight and I had my eye to one of the wider cracks in the truck side. The train had been moving for nearly a fortnight and this was one of the occasions when there had been a number of hold-ups and we had not reached our prearranged hiding-place when dawn came. It was a junction, a big place. The city beyond was remarkable only for the fact that all the buildings seemed to be in red brick. The train had been creeping tentatively at something like ten miles an hour. It shuddered to a heavily-braked halt. A minute or so later it jerked off again, barely moving. And then I saw, drawing slowly alongside, another train of trucks, just like ours, on the parallel track.
I called out. Others at vantage points called out. ‘A train like ours,’ I shouted. ‘The windows are not covered. There are people in it.’ Our train halted. The other was already stationary. ‘Women. Women. There are women in it. And children.’ I don’t know if it was my voice telling the news or some of the others. I think we were yelling against each other. There was pandemonium. The men in the middle surged towards the outside and we look-outs were pressed flat against the woodwork. We hardly noticed the additional discomfort. The women looked startled. They could see nothing but the big blank sides of the trucks. The noise from our train became a swelling roar. Someone screamed, ‘They are Polish women. They are our women,’ and the men went almost mad. Perhaps they were Poles, or Latvians, or Estonians. I don’t know. If they made any sound I could not hear it with the yelling of the mob all round me.
Russian soldiers ran distractedly from their quarters at each end of the train, thumping on the trucks and ordering quiet. It was hopeless. The whole train was in the grip of hysteria. I can only imagine how the engine-driver of the leading locomotive was being ordered to get going, signals or no signals. That stop lasted seven or eight minutes and men who did not know where their wives and families might be were sobbing as we got under way again. The disturbing influence of that one incident lasted for days. It was the worst piece of organization of the whole rail trip.
There was an ironic postscript. When we finally reached the secluded stretch of branch line that was our stopping-place for the day, the Russian train commandant — tall, smooth-faced and easily spoken — addressed us in batches on the need for obeying the rules of silence in transit. He wagged his head in grave admonition and told us, ‘The trouble with you is that you have no culture.’ He was quite serious, as far as I could see. Whenever he had occasion to warn us about breaches of rules he always reminded us of this cultural failing.