A horse had been left close to the house we seconded. The poor thing had been left
alone in a barn, too tired to work. Whomever
it had belonged, had left it with plenty of food but forgotten to leave it any
water. Although there was enough animal food
to last all winter, without water that horse would have died. The beast had been worked to exhaustion; it
looked delirious. It stumbled around the
small barn with wild eyes when I entered.
I was given the job of looking after the workhorse. I fetched water into the barn, groomed its
tired limbs whilst talking soothingly into its ear. I sang songs recalled from my childhood,
soothing cradle songs I’d listened to from my bed. They were my mother’s songs, the tunes she used
to entertain my younger siblings on long evenings. I did not sing loudly, I was careful not to
let the other fellows hear my voice. I
sang for the horse, to gain its trust as well as to ease its anguish.
Looking after that horse became my job by
default. The other men were all
town people. I can harness a
horse, I know how to care for one, the others do not which is why it became my new
job.
Along with the horse, there was a two-wheeled
cart. It was a two-wheeled trap and its
tyres still had plenty of wear in them. One
day a Field kitchen turned up at the house unexpectedly, it had arrived to feed
the front line troops. As I was the only
one to have befriended the horse, plus the only one who knew how to harness it to a
trap, I was assigned to the kitchen unit and tasked with taking soup out to the
fighters.
Along with German soldiers, many Latvian service men were wept
up in the chaos as the Eastern Front collapsed. In September 1944 the surviving elements of
the 15th Waffen SS division and the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division, were sent
by boat to Danzig, Poland. They fought
on the Pomeranian Wall defences before retreating through Pomerania and Germany
to Berlin.
