WORLD WAR I BLOODLINE : PRISONER OF THE CZAR

Unique photograph of Wilhelm as a Murmansk prisoner. He is holding the horse's leg.

We left young Wilhelm Salzmann of the 18th Prussian Infantry as he was being carried off the Tannenberg battlefield by the Russians with a machine-gun bullet through his thigh bone. Presumably, he was cared for well enough to be taken to a POW camp after a few weeks. In stark contrast to Hitler's 1941-45 war against Russia, both sides made an effort to adhere to the Geneva Conventions in World War I. However, his destination, inside the Arctic Circle, guaranteed levels of deprivation and suffering that made these Conventions seem irrelevant. The Czar had decided to connect his only ice-free northern port, Murmansk, to the capital at St Petersburg in order to facilitate the movement of vital war supplies from his allies. He was having a railway built up there and was running out of manpower. He therefore permitted the use of German and Austrian prisoners for this task. It would become an Arctic precursor of the Japanese Burma Railway, as well as a prototype for the Soviet GULAGs. Wilhelm settled into his log barracks as winter, with temperatures of minus-30 degrees, gradually approached. He would have arrived in his Prussian summer uniform, but, as time passed, extra clothing could always be taken from the dead.

With the first snowfall, Willi tried to escape. Whether he hoped to reach Finland or stow away on a ship in Murmansk, he hadn't a hope in hell. A Cossack horseman followed his footprints for a few hundred yards and whipped him all the way back to the camp. In the morning he was laying tracks again. They say there is a prisoner's corpse under every sleeper. Freezing temperatures alternated with swarms of mosquitoes and malaria in the hot months. The huts crawled with lice, which is often a recipe for typhus. The rations of thin soup and black bread did not contain enough calories for the strenuous labour. The men wasted away. They were kept hard at it, under the whip, because the rail link was urgently needed. Although planned in 1905, the Japanese war had intervened. After that disaster, the Czar did not expect another major conflict to follow so soon.
Occasionally, prisoners resorted to drinking paraffin from the barracks' lamps, which must have made them more ill than drunk. My grandfather told me that he managed to get himself transferred to the camp orchestra, which, he said, saved his life. He could stand there playing merry tunes while the others broke their backs. Somehow, he acquired a violin. This made a great difference, relieving the boredom and raising the spirits of his comrades, especially since he could play their favourite tunes on request without sheet music. Singing together became an important survival strategy for the weary, homesick men. Once, almost unbelievably, he was rewarded for his efforts with that most exotic of delicacies, a banana. On which ship it had reached the remote, icy outpost is anyone's guess.
While Willy made himself as comfortable as he could in a hostile environment, he must have imagined all sorts of worst-case scenarios. At this stage, Russia still hurled gigantic armies at Germany and Austria. It would be years before the Germans played their luckiest card and launched the deadly human missile, Lenin, at St Petersburg in a sealed train. Willi went to sleep in his verminous blankets while the Czar alternated between playing soldiers and resting in the luxurious surroundings of his palatial retreats. It would never have crossed my grandfather's mind that he would live to a ripe old age, while Czar Nicholas II would soon be rotting at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft near Ekaterinburg, riddled with bullets, surrounded by the corpses of his massacred family. However, Nicholas completed at least one project before he abdicated. The Murmansk railway became operational in 1917, just when he had no further need for it. After his abdication, Nicholas too became a prisoner, with a Red sword of Damocles hanging over his head. Now, the vast country began to tear itself apart in an orgy of bloodletting from Poland to the Pacific Ocean.

An Austrian prisoners' hut on the Murmansk line. Picture by the pioneer of colour photography, Produkin-Gorski