last hours--somewhat as follows--with bitter distress. The 
      picture is a composite one to which knowledge of the district, 
      the German broadcasts, experience of Russian methods and the 
      reports of visitors to the grave have all contributed, but it 
      is not so much an evidentially established description of events 
      as a reconstruction in the light of the evidence--sometimes partial 
      and obviously defective--of what may have happened. But it--or 
      something like it--is what most Poles believe to have happened, 
      and what I myself, in the light of all the evidence, such as 
      it is, incline to think happened. Many months or years may elapse 
      before the truth is known, but because in the meantime curiosity 
      is unsatisfied and judgment in suspense, we cannot, even if we 
      would--and much less can Poles-make our thoughts, and feelings 
      unresponsive to the dreadful probabilities of the case.
 
      
 
 
15. Smolensk lies some 20 kilom. from the spot where the common 
      graves were discovered, it has two stations and in or near the 
      town the main lines from Moscow to Warsaw and from Riga to Orel 
      cross and recross each other. Some 15 kilom, to the west of Smolensk 
      stands the unimportant station of Gniezdowo, and it is but a 
      short mile from Gniezdowo to a place known locally as Kozlinaya 
      Gore or "The Hill of Goats." The district of Katyn, 
      in which this little hill stands, is covered with primeval forest 
      which has been allowed to go to rack and ruin. The forest is 
      mostly coniferous, but the pine trees are interspersed here and 
      there with hardwoods and scrub. The month of April normally brings 
      spring to this part of the country, and by early May the trees 
      are green; but the winter of 1939-40 had been the hardest on 
      record, and when the first parties from Kozielsk arrived on the 
      8th April there would still have been occasional patches of snow 
      in deep shade and, of course, much mud on the rough road from 
      the station to the Hill of Goats. At Gniezdowo the prison vans 
      from Kozielsk, Starobieisk and Ostashkov discharged their passengers % 
      into a barbed-wire cage surrounded by a strong force of Russian 
      soldiers, and the preparations made here for their reception 
      must have filled most of the Polish officers with disquiet, and 
      some indeed with dismay who remembered that the forest of Katyn 
      had been used by the Bolsheviks in 1919 as a convenient place 
      for the killing of many Czarist officers. For such was the case, 
      and a Pole now in London, Janusz Laskowski, tells me that when 
      he was eleven years old he had to listen every evening to an 
      account of his day's work from one of the executioners, Afanaziev, 
      who was billeted in his mother's house. From the cage the prisoners 
      were taken in lorries along a country road to the Hill of Goats, 
      and it must have been when they were unloaded from the lorries 
      that their hands were bound and that dismay gave way to despair. 
      If a man struggled, it seems that the executioner threw his coat 
      over his head, tying it round his neck and leading him hooded 
      to the pit's edge, for in many cases a body was found to be thus 
      hooded and the coat to have been pierced by a bullet where it 
      covered the base of the skull. But those who went quietly to 
      their death must have seen monstrous sight, in the broad deep 
      pit their comrades lay, packed closely round the edge, head to 
      feet, like sardines in a tin, but in the middle of the grave 
      disposed less Orderly. Up and down on the bodies the executioners 
      tramped, hauling the dead bodies about and treading in the blood 
      like butchers in a stockyard. When it was all over and the last 
      shot had been fired and the last Polish head been punctured, 
      the butchers--perhaps trained in youth to husbandry--seem to 
      have turned their hands to one of the most innocent of occupations: 
      smoothing the clods and planting little conifers all over what 
      had been a shambles. It was, of course, rather late in the year 
      for transplanting young trees, but not too late; for the sap 
      was beginning to run in the young Scots pines when, three years 
      later, the Polish representatives visited the site.
 
      
 
 
16. The climate and the conifers are not without significance. 
      The climate of Smolensk accounts for the feet that, though the 
      Germans first got wind of the existence of the mass graves in 
      the autumn of 1942, it was only in April of 1943 that they published 
      to the world an account of what had been unearthed. The explanation 
      is surely this: not that the German propagandists had chosen 
      a politically opportune moment for their revelations, but that 
      during the winter the ground at Smolensk is frozen so hard that 
      it would have been impossible to uncover corpses without dynamite 
      or such other violent means as would have destroyed the possibility 
      of identifying dead bodies. The winter of 1942-43 was exceptionally 
      mild and the German authorities probably got to work as soon 
      as the soil was sufficiently soft. The little conifers also deserve 
      more attention than they have received. In the first place they 
      are presumptive evidence of Russian guilt; for, considering the 
      conditions under which the German army advanced through Smolensk 
      in July 1941 in full expectation of early and complete