this moment, the only horses I had known were the thick-set, plodding creatures who pulled the carts in our village. These horses were totally different. They were all fire and glory, and they almost floated above the ground, their paces were so smooth and balletic. It was as if, with each stride, they were held suspended in mid-air. I was mesmerised by their gracefulness.
Seeing that the horses were about to collide with our party, one of the men on horseback began shouting out orders to his men, and they rode swiftly forward to bring their own horses in front of the stampeding ones, turning about-face to create a blockade. Confronted with the men on horseback, the wild herd came to a standstill. Just like that, a hundred wild horses were brought to a halt, corralled right there in front of us on the road.
“Pavel?” The man who had given the orders now turned to us. He’d recognised my father and my father knew him too.
“Vaclav.” My father shook his hand. “It is good to see you, my friend.”
“Why are you turning back?” Vaclav asked.
“The Russians,” my father explained. “They’re advancing. For all we know, they’re already at the river.”
Vaclav shook his head ruefully. “So we are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. If we turn back, the Nazis will certainly seize our horses.”
“Yes, but, sir,” one of his men shot back at him, “if we encounter the Russians, it will be worse! They will eat them!”
As the men were debating what to do, I was admiring the horses. There was one particular colt that caught my attention. He was dark steel-grey, with sooty black stockings that ran up all four of his legs and a white snip on his muzzle. He was so beautiful! It wasn’t just his looks that captivated me, though – it was the way he carried himself. He moved constantly, fretting and stomping, as if he had hot coals beneath his hooves. With his neck arched and his tail aloft, he pawed and pirouetted, flicking his noble head up and down in consternation. I remember that day – how all the other horses seemed to melt away, and at that moment there was only that grey colt right there in front of me.
One of the men on horseback, a young groom, noticed me staring at the colt.
“He’s beautiful, yes?” he said.
“Yes.” I nodded. “He’s my favourite.”
“You have a good eye!” the young groom said. “The Janów Estate breeds the best Arabians in the whole of Europe. And Prince is without a doubt the very finest of them all. He’s worth a lot of money.”
“Is that his name? I asked. “Prince?”
“Prince of Poland is his full name,” the young groom corrected me. And then he untied a rope from his saddle and handed it to me. “Put this on him if you want, and you can lead him back. He’s quite the escape artist this one – always bolting off away from the herd. It would help us if you led him on the journey back, since it appears we are now going home again.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Sure,” the groom said. He tied the rope to the shank of the colt’s halter and then he passed the end to me. I took hold of it, like I was grasping the tail of a snake.
The young groom laughed at me. “No. You must get in close. Hold the colt tight, right up at the shank of the rope. You are safer being close to him – he cannot take a hoof to you if you are right beside him.”
“A hoof?” I squeaked.
The young groom nodded. “Prince is pretty handy with his front hooves. I was leading him back to the stables the other day and he rose up on his hindquarters and struck me across the back of the head. Knocked me out.” He saw the look of fear on my face. “He was just playing. He’s spirited, that’s all – not a bad horse, just a hothead. You can do this. Just keep your eyes on him and stay at his shoulder and move with him whenever he moves. Yes, there! You’re doing much better already. You see how you can use your body to block him and keep him in line? That’s it …”
Looking back, it was crazy to give me such an unpredictable horse to handle. I was only nine! But it certainly took my mind off the Russians. I had my eyes glued to Prince as he danced and fretted. I should have been afraid, I suppose, with all the talk of deadly flying hooves and this half-wild horse dancing wildly at my side. But there was so much else to fear that day that the horse slipped down the list of things that I needed to be afraid of. And, after a while, it seemed to me to be second nature to have him bouncing and prancing along beside me.
That groom needn’t have bothered to tell me to watch Prince, because at that moment I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was so beautiful the way his sinew and muscle rippled beneath grey steel. The black stockings that marked his elegant ballerina legs, and the gossamer silver of his silken mane. The proportions of his face were so perfect they were almost unreal, from the deep curve of his concave profile to the taper and flare of his sooty velvet muzzle. And his ears. He had such small, delicate ears, curved in a little and short and sharp. They swivelled about to catch my words as I spoke to him. This horse was smart, and he was listening intently to everything I said. Horses do not talk, of course, but they are good listeners.
As we walked down the road that day, with the sun setting, I talked and talked with Prince beside me, his ears swivelling the whole time. I told him all about my life and my family. I knew nothing of his own family at that point, of course. It was only later that I would find out that Prince’s own parents, like mine, were here on the road with us. In fact, Prince’s sire, his father, was that impressive, powerful white stallion the head groom himself was riding. Prince’s mother was with us too, running with the mares. She was a dark bay with limpid brown eyes. I wish I’d realised who they were, because I would so have liked to have gazed at them, just that once. After this day was over, I would never get the chance again.
We were on the road and I was just thinking it must almost be time to set up camp for the night, when the planes came. There was the roar of engines and then the black shapes silhouetted in the sky above the trees. Three aircraft, coming from the south-west. There could be no doubt that they were German Luftwaffe, the airborne attacking force, and a moment after they came into sight, the planes directly opened fire!
There was screaming and suddenly everyone was running everywhere. The horses were completely forgotten – all anyone cared about was getting to cover as the planes flew closer and closer, all the while firing on us relentlessly. I saw a horse fall in a hail of machinegun fire, and at that moment I knew this was all too real.
“Don’t they see we aren’t soldiers?” my father was shouting. “There are women and children here!”
Bu the Germans didn’t seem to care. They were firing at us.
I wish I could say that I held my nerve enough to keep hold of Prince, but that would not be true. What happened next was not because I held him. It was my own nervous habit that bound us together. As we’d been walking, I’d been fiddling with the rope, looping it round my wrist. I didn’t realise how dangerous this could be or that, the instant the gunfire began and Prince startled and bolted, the rope would jerk into a tight knot and I would be literally dragged off my feet and into the forest behind the runaway colt.
I remember being flung about on the ground as if I were a sack of hay, and then the roughness of the bracken against my skin as Prince dragged me off the road and into the trees. And then I must have hit something with my head, because when I woke up, everything was woozy and I felt a lump on my skull almost as big as
