Free The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier Page B

long journey 750 miles. …
    “That’s all, dear. More next week.
    “My love to you, and a special hug for Jenny.
    MARK
    “P.s. Frau Schmidt had the cheek to wake me up in the night to tell me some of her silver was missing, and she accused those Polish children. I couldn’t have cared less. They could have walked off with half the house for all I minded. Really, these Germans! They spend five years looting Europe and then come crying to you in the middle of the night because someone’s pinched a jam spoon.
    “We found the missing silver in the letter-box next morning. I bet my bottom dollar it was Jan who pinched it — you never saw such a mischievous face — and Ruth who made him take it back. She’s got as firm a hold over that family as Jan had over the chimp.”

Chapter 16
Through the Russian Zone
    “Take the Potsdam road and follow your noses,” the family were told, and off they went, singing a gay song, with their heads in the air. If they had gone due west towards Belgium, they might have travelled more quickly, for this was the general direction of the traffic. Fewer refugees were moving south, so lifts were scarce and they were on their feet most of the time.
    They crossed the Elbe near Rosslau by a bridge that had not been too badly damaged for the Russians to repair. Here they were held up for half a day by a spearhead of the Russian army bound (so rumour had it) for Prague, to drive the Germans out of Czechoslovakia.
    Never before had Ruth seen so many soldiers. First came the tanks to clear the way. Next, column after column of marching soldiers, tired and dirty in their ragged uniforms. They came from the Ukraine and the Tartar republics, from the Ural mountains and the Caucasus, from the countries of the Baltic, from Siberia, Mongolia. Over the bridge they poured in their thousands, while everyone else stood by to let them pass.
    “I know that song,” cried Bronia, as she caught a snatch of a Cossack song from a group of soldiers. “Father taught it to us. Do you remember?”
    “Yes, I remember,” said Ruth. “It was the summer we spent by the Dunajec River. We were on a raft, floating downstream between the wooded peaks.”
    She sighed, and the tune was lost in another burst of singing. Standing there, they heard many songs, some of them bright and jolly, some of them slow and poignantly sad.
    The family squeezed over the bridge behind the last of the marching columns.
    They were hardly across when screaming horns announced the arrival of the staff cars, most of them Mercedes and Horchs which had been taken from the Nazis. Next, cars with secretaries; cars with war booty — fur coats, textiles, carpets, looted china; lorries with furniture, radios, refrigerators; food lorries with tons and tons of Russian delicacies — caviar, sturgeon, vodka, Crimean wine; lorries bearing proud posters — WE WELCOME THE LIBERATING ARMY.
    More marching columns.
    Columns of women and girls in grey-green uniform, with tight blouses and high boots. They had come to do the cooking and washing, to help in the hospitals and look after the sick. Tagged on to them were clusters of small boys picked up from the woods and burnt-out villages. They had come because they were hungry and the Red Army was ready to feed them.
    “The whole world’s gone by today. Surely there can’t be any more people left?” said Bronia, as the dust began to subside.
    But there was still the rearguard to come, and soon the dust was flying again under the wheels of hundreds of small light carts drawn by low Cossack horses.
    “Now for a lift!” cried Jan, as a grey old man, whip in hand, came rattling by in a cart with a canvas roof. And before Ruth could stop him, he had hauled himself up over the tailboard.
    “We’ll never catch him up — the carts are all full,” cried Ruth.
    But soon an open cart, with nothing in the back but a heap of straw, some fodder and a leg of smoked pork, picked up the three of them. It was an