After that, the guards avoided the main road and directed the line of prisoners down back roads instead. They spent their first night in an open field covered with snow in temperatures well below freezing. Not everyone survived.
* * *
Sam woke from a restless sleep to find it was morning — but he was in the same nightmare. The cold had reached into his bones during the night and every muscle and sinew felt taut and stiff in its fight to ward it off. Would they march to a station? he wondered. A crowded cattle wagon would be better than trudging through thick clawing snow. Surely the German guards didn’t expect them to march all the way to Berlin.
But the march continued. Days turned to weeks. The men sought shelter where they could find it — barns, derelict buildings, once even an abandoned fire station. The rough terrain, hidden beneath the thick white snow, was too much for their rudimentary sleds and, within days, they began to break up, casting planks of wood in their wake like broken bones in the snow. Difficult decisions had to be hurriedly made on what to leave behind. Warm clothing or food? Both could make the difference between life or death and weary arguments broke out.
Sam’s fellow prisoners were beginning to weaken. Those who fell by the wayside were left to die. The first death was heartbreaking; the twentieth death passed unmarked. By then they were each fighting, body and mind, to take the next step. Food stocks soon dwindled, lice and dysentery became rife, and frostbite and gangrene became their new silent enemy. As boots began to fail, there was a real fear they would be stolen should a man remove his boots at night to give blisters time to heal. And if they were not stolen, would they still fit onto their swollen feetin the morning? The risks were too high, so many slept in their wet boots that often froze stiff in the night.
As weeks threatened to turn into the first month, food supplies were so low that they were forced to beg or steal where they could. They scavenged the bodies they found by the wayside for clothing and provisions. Despite Sam’s encouragement, support and help, the daily ten-to-twenty-mile marches, with few precious rest days, were too much for Tubs’s knee. He was failing before his eyes, despite trying to hide the pain, and Sam knew there would come a point when he would have to make another choice that he would dread. Keep walking and leave Tubs behind, or do something else that would risk both their lives. The line of prisoners, which had stretched for miles along the back roads of Poland, was becoming shorter by the day.
‘I can’t go any further, Sam.’
Sam grabbed Tubs’s coat and forced him to stand. ‘They’ll shoot you if you stop. Come on, you can do it.’
Sam pulled his friend’s arm across his shoulders and half-dragged, half-walked him through the deepening snow. Each step challenged Sam’s balance and strength, made twice as difficult by the weak body by his side.
Tubs’s head hung forward loosely from exhaustion, his words barely audible in the blizzard. ‘It’s no good. I’m done for.’
Sam didn’t want to hear such words. ‘You don’t have a choice. I’ll carry you if I have to.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Someone give me a hand!’ he yelled back along the line.
One of the other prisoners stumbled through the drift to help and took Tubs’s weight from the other side. He exchanged glances with Sam, his silence speaking more than words could. He thought it was hopeless and Sam a fool for trying.
Tubs had always said it would be his knee that would hinder him, but in the end it was frostbite. The night before, he had removed his boots. It had been the first time in days and hisfrostbite had turned to weeping gangrene and was spreading and causing a fever that no man could survive. If Tubs had any will to live before, it had left when he had seen the state of his foot — Sam could tell from his expression. Yet if Tubs had given up on himself, Sam had not. If Tubs did not continue, he would be shot. If he continued, maybe, just maybe, they would reach a town and Sam could persuade the guards to take him to a hospital.
‘Ludicrous,’ a passing fellow prisoner had muttered under his breath when Sam had suggested it.
‘Ludicrous,’ repeated Tubs softly now under his breath, reminding him of the evening before.
Yet, somehow, Sam had persuaded him to continue on when dawn had broken and for a brief moment, while resting, they had enjoyed the view of the rising sun shining down on the fresh blanket of snow. It even brought a smile to Tubs’s fevered face. But within the hour of marching, yet another blizzard formed, swirling and beating the huddled, round-shouldered prisoners of war marching at gunpoint through the bleak countryside.
Tubs sagged between the men, his head hanging loosely as his legs gave out. Sam staggered and lost his footing, and they both went down. The prisoner who had come to help regretfully shook his head. He chose to live and walked on without them. Everyone knew that a man falling to the frozen ground risked becoming a corpse himself.
Hundreds of prisoners marched past them, surrounding them like a forest with no visible escape. Finally, their numbers began to dwindle. They were near the end of the line. Gunshots pierced the air as the sick and dying stragglers were put out of their misery by the German guards.
‘It will soon be over,’ whispered Sam into his friend’s ear as he watched a guard approach.
‘I’m glad,’ murmured Tubs as he rested his head against Sam’s shoulder.
The guard raised his rifle.
‘Don’t,’ Sam whispered. But there was no waiting, no bargaining, no compassion.
He stared blindly, even confused, as Tubs’s body went limp in his arms, then fell away into the snow. The guard turned the weapon on Sam.
‘Get up,’ the guard said in German. ‘March.’
Sam was still in silent shock as he was forced to walk on by the barrel of a gun. He looked around only once and immediately wished he hadn’t. The image of Tubs’s body, kneeling face down in the blizzard, would haunt his dreams for years to come.
* * *
Sam continued marching, too numb and grief-stricken to care where or when the torturous journey would end. He had seen many soldiers die in combat, or in trying to escape, but Tubs’s and his fellow prisoners’ deaths on this march were too inhuman to comprehend.
His shock slowly gave way to a building anger. Brave young men were dying like vermin and left to rot by the roadside. Across the Channel and here in Germany, men were sitting behind comfortable desks deciding those young men’s fates. He thought of all those at home who would never believe what was happening around him right now. He thought of Moira, who had so easily given up on him and moved on with her life while he starved and watched his friends die one by one. He wanted to tell her what he had suffered. He wanted to be with her. He wanted to make this hell go away. Amid hundreds of men, he felt quite alone.
Suddenly he broke away from the line and was running, running, running. He ran with no sense of the direction he was taking. All he knew was that he must not stop running until his lungs exploded and his body betrayed him. He would rather die free than endure this torture for another moment.
The gunshot was deafening, but he felt no pain.
