The roads were bad, pot-holes and ridges jolting the car to the point of damage whenever we were tempted to put on speed. Most of the villages we passed seemed empty and deserted but here and there peasants were to be seen scavenging for overlooked remains of bygone crops. As if in sentry boxes, roadside Holy Virgins stood guard in their wooden shrines, and often rows of dented tins held floral tribute to them.

We headed northeast to the region of the Masurian Lakes. It is a bleak province that nostalgic Germans like to call East Prussia. This low-lying comer of Poland would border on the Baltic Sea, except that the Russians had seized a slice of coast surrounding what once was called Königsberg, to create for themselves a curious little enclave with no other purpose than giving the Baltic Fleet a headquarters, a shipyard and a base for two Soviet air divisions.

The Masurian district, 'the land of a thousand lakes,' is a photographer's paradise. Its takes, forests and primitive villages are charming, the sunrises idyllic, the sunsets sublime. But the camera does not adequately record the hordes of flies, the bites of the mosquitoes, the fetid marshland and dark decaying forests, the smelly squalor of the villages or the icy cold that whitened the land.

For his war against Russia, Hitler built an extensive military headquarters in huts and bunkers here near Ketrzyn in Masuria. Ketrzyn was called Rastenburg in those days, but Hitler preferred to call it 'the Wolfs Lair' and decreed that a monument should be created there to mark the place where he'd created a New World Order. Hitler departed, the monument created itself and real wolves came to live in it. The eight-meter-thick walls are now just chunks of broken masonry, the wooden huts are rotting firewood, the barbed wire has rusted to red powder and a few still-active minefields lurk along the perimeter.

'What a place to be in the middle of winter,' said Dicky suddenly, as if he'd been thinking about it.

'In summer it's worse,' I said.

'Not another road check.'

We were halted on the road, not once but three times. The first time it was cops. Six bored policemen occupying a roadblock, checking everyone's identity and giving special attention to car papers. They inspected our rented Fiat as if they'd never seen one before. I suppose there wasn't a great deal of traffic on that road.

Twenty-five miles onwards we were stopped by three soldiers in combat dress. They were Polish military police standing in the snow outside a large property that in long-ago capitalist days had been a roadside inn. One of them, a senior NCO, was armed with an AK-47, its butt and metal parts shiny with wear. It remained slung over his shoulder while he questioned us. Our foreign passports seemed to satisfy him, although they made us get out of the car and held us for half an hour while the NCO made telephone calls and a procession of horse-drawn carts trundled past, their occupants staring at us with polite curiosity.

A short distance further on we came to the beginning of miles of tall chain-link fencing. Our road ran alongside the fence past a dozen doleful-looking Soviet soldiers guarding six large signs that said 'no photography' in Polish, German and Russian. It was a Soviet army base extending five miles along the road. The wooden barrack huts were unheated, judging by the patches of snow that had collected on the roofs and the men going in and out of them, all of whom were bundled into overcoats and scarfs. Behind the huts I could see long rows of armored personnel carriers, some fitted with bulldozer blades and others with 'barricade remover' grills on the front. There were two tracked missile-launchers and sixteen elderly tanks, some of which were being repaired and maintained by soldiers in greasy black coveralls.

Perhaps, further back in the tank hangars, and out of sight, there were air-launched tactical missiles, attack helicopters or other vehicles and equipment suited for a combat-ready brigade charged to dash westwards through Germany and engage the NATO forces in battle. But I couldn't see any sign of it. And the way in which this amount of antiriot equipment was parked, and arranged so that it could be seen from the road, made me think that these Russian occupiers were troops relegated to internal security operations, and that their presence served no other purpose than being a tacit reminder to the Poles that the brotherly patience of the Soviet Union and its fraternal Leninist rulers should not be tested too hard.

We followed the road and passed the grandiose main entrance of the compound. There was a cinder block guard hut with sentry boxes and sentries in ill-fitting uniforms and moth-eaten fur caps. The main gate was surmounted by an elaborate ceremonial arch, topped with a golden hammer and sickle. Lovingly emblazoned on the arch there were the badges of two Guards and three Pioneer regiments, and lists of their battle honors. But the red paint had faded to a dull pink, and the gold had tarnished to brown. The hammer's paint had cracked and chipped to reveal a green undercoat, the sickle had lost its sharp tip and the crack regiments were no longer living here. Instead the youthful sentries lolling against the fencing were unmistakably draftees, stocky little village boys with spotty faces and wide eyes, with elderly senior NCOs to breathe vodka fumes over them, and not an officer in sight anywhere. I waved at them and they stared back at me with not a flicker of recognition or emotion of any kind.

'It will be dark soon,' said Dicky. 'Perhaps we should look for somewhere to spend the night.'

'Marriott or Hyatt or Holiday Inn?' I asked.

'There must be somewhere.'

'There's that place where we saw the men selling sugar beet.'

Dicky bit his lip and looked worried.

'We'll find the Kosinski place before dark,' I said, more in order to relieve Dicky's evident anxiety than because there was any reason to believe it.

We reached a T-junction devoid of any direction signs. Rather than consult with Dicky, a process which would have made him even more despondent, I swung to the left as if I knew where I was going. Very low on the flat horizon I suddenly saw a blood-red splinter of the dying sun. Then, from below the horizon, it spread blood and gore across the clouds, and the trees veined an ever darkening overcast. The road deteriorated until there was little sign of anything more than a few deep-rutted cart tracks frozen hard enough to jolt us from side to side. It was darker now that the sun had gone and the shadowy spruce and beech joined to become a murky wall.

It was at this time that Dicky broke a long pensive silence. 'I have a feeling,' said Dicky. 'I have a feeling we're very near to the Kosinski place.'

My heart sank. 'That's good, Dicky,' I said.

'They said there was a forest,' said Dicky.

'That's good,' I said again, rather than point out that half the Polish hinterland was forest. As sundown brought a lowering of temperature, icy rain began, speeding up so that it was hitting the windscreen where the wipers whisked it into slush and threw it from one side to the other.

Twice that afternoon we had taken a wrong turning to follow roads that became trails, and then tracks and finally petered out altogether. This path promised to be leading to another such fiasco, with all the worry of turning the car round without getting bogged down and ensnared in tree roots, potholes or ditches.

'Careful. There are men in the road,' said Dicky. In Warsaw we'd been warned that after dark sentries opened fire on vehicles that were slow to respond to halt commands. 'Another road-block.'

This time it was half a dozen civilians who blocked the narrow road in front of our car. There was no avoiding them, the forest was too dense to drive round them. A Volkswagen van was parked under the trees, and more men stood there.