Free The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz Page B

flagging, floundering older men
from the original train party were never helped, in spite of the advice given out by the guards frequently before the start of a day’s march to ‘call out if you are taken ill’. We
were reminded, too, that there were still with us specially-trained first-aid men, but I never saw them about their business.
    Back at the assembly point near Irkutsk the train prisoners had been joined by a small crowd of Russians. They seemed to be nearly all youngish men and I suspect they were not, like us,
political offenders but ordinary Soviet criminal types, consigned to Siberia to work out the expiation of their crimes. There were three or four of them on our chain and these were the only ones
who were helped along on their journey. The procedure when a man began to stumble and fall about and mumble in his misery was for his nearest colleagues on the chain to call one of the walking
guards. The name of the unfortunate was shouted ahead to the soldiers in the lorry. A list would be consulted. More often than not the sick man was out of luck. He was told to keep going and his
friends heaved and strained to keep him on his feet until the next halt. I saw men collapse into the snow and cry to be unchained and to be allowed to lie down and sleep. It would have been release
by death and they begged for it. But the soldiers pulled and kicked them to their feet and the awful struggle went on.
    We were surprised indeed at what happened the first time one of the newcomers keeled over, his hand dragging at the chain. There were the usual shouts between the walking guards and the soldiers
ahead. The list of names was brought out. The guards roughly hauled the man erect. There was a bit of heavy banter from one of the soldiers as the prisoner was unshackled. ‘You are a fine,
strapping young fellow,’ he said. ‘We’ll give you a little rest and then you’ll be able to do some work for us later.’ The man was taken off to the lorry and helped up
to join the soldiers. He rode with them for two hours or more and was then brought back to resume his place in the marching column. I suppose we should have been happy that one of our number had
had his burden lightened, but, remembering the men who died unaided, we hated him and bitterly distrusted him. We never had anything more to say to a prisoner who had received the favour of a lift
in the lorry. Our suspicions even went so far as to conjecture whether such men were planted among us as informers, although, in all reason, it would be difficult to imagine what reward could be
offered for their services which would compensate for a winter trip through Siberia. The only discrimination by the military escort might possibly have been on the grounds of age – a quite
practical expedient to bring through alive as many young men as possible – but I saw no Pole get a lift and we were not existing in conditions congenial to logical thinking anyway.
    The days dragged on in much the same pattern through January. More and more we looked forward to the nightly halt, the fires, the bread and the hot coffee. Some of the old hands among the
soldiers said we were lucky that this was not one of the worst Siberian winters, but it was as cruel and bleak as any weather I ever want to experience. The snowdrifts piling high along the track
slowed us down increasingly each day. The occasions when we had to help get the lorries out of difficulties became more frequent until we began to wonder how long any progress at all could be
maintained. The cold steel of the handcuff burned into my wrist. I was always cold, wet and wolfishly hungry. Stolid Grechinen plodded along beside me day after day. We said little but we derived
strength from each other, from our mutual determination to see it through alive. Grechinen would go for days in silence but occasionally he would smile through his beard at me and I would give my
own face-frozen smile back to him.
     
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