Lord of All the Dead
Page 20
The decision turned out to be right. The Rifle Companies approached the sanctuary by following the trail of the valley, crossed the river, and spread out in combat formation: the machine guns and mortars of Manuel Mena’s company joined the machine gun that had been firing for a while from the village, while the riflemen of the other company spilled out like a strange swarming stain rising up the hillside. A very widely circulated legend has it that the confrontation that then unfolded was epic, that it lasted for hours and resulted in numerous casualties; the reality, however, is that there was barely a confrontation, because the Rifle Companies vastly outstripped the Republicans in men and weaponry and because the Republicans fled as soon as they realised the Francoists were preparing to surround them; the reality is that there were just three deaths, all Republicans. This means that the skirmish held limited risk for Manuel Mena; it did not have real importance, but it did have symbolic importance: nobody could have known at the time, but that was the farthest point to which the Republicans would manage to penetrate during the entire Battle of the Ebro.
The episode at the shrine of Sant Josep de Bot was over by midday. Towards nightfall the two units of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen that had taken the sanctuary that morning arrived in Gandesa, joined the rest of the 13th Division, and, grouped with the 74th under the sole command of General Barrón, they enlisted in the defence of the capital of Terra Alta, entering the line north of the road from Gandesa to Pinell de Brai. During the days that followed the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen fought day and night in the battles to defend Gandesa. On August 1, one week after the launch of the great offensive, the front began to quiet down and it now seemed clear to all that the Republicans would not enter the town; aware of their failure, as well as the fact that their men had lost the initial impetus and no longer benefited from the element of surprise, on the 2nd the Republican command’s orders were to cease the attack, adopt defensive positions, and cede the initiative to the enemy. That was when, with the front stabilised, with the fields strewn with unburied corpses and the air saturated with the smell of rotting flesh, with the troops of both armies settled into a daily routine of ferocious attacks from dawn to dusk in delirious temperatures and ferocious nocturnal blind counterattacks, the battle changed tack; that was when it completely lost its precarious initial sense, especially for the Francoists. Nobody explained it better than Manuel Tagüeña, a twenty-five-year-old communist physicist who at that time was in command of the XV Republican Army Corps with the incredible rank of lieutenant colonel. Tagüeña reasons in his memoirs that, once across the Ebro and having taken an important strip of terrain on the opposite side of the river, the Republicans were tied hand and foot to their positions, and the most sensible and simple thing for the Francoists would have been to leave them there, corralled against the river, and launch an attack on Barcelona without letting up the pressure in order to prevent them from moving and getting help from their reserves. “The way for the occupation of Catalonia was free,” concluded Tagüeña, “and the Army of the Ebro, if it didn’t retreat quickly, would have ended up surrounded and captive.” It did not happen like that. The reason is that Franco was the victim of an archaic, criminal, incompetent, obstinate, and pathological conception of the art of war, which his own generals and allies often couldn’t understand: as had been proved earlier that year in Teruel, that conception obliged him to fight where the enemy proposed the fight and not to cede the slightest amount of terrain without immediately diverting forces to recover it; but most of all it obliged him never to settle for defeating his enemies: he needed to exterminate them. This explains why at that moment an exhausting battle of depletion began at the Ebro (“a clash of rams,” as one of Franco’s generals described it years later) on a piece of land with no strategic value and at an exorbitant price: to sacrifice whole divisions in vain, launching them over the following weeks, in a series of six nonsensical counteroffensives, against an enemy of inferior number and means but resolved to sell their skins at a very high price, much more able at defensive than offensive combat and fiercely entrenched in the most advantageous heights of the region.
The result can only be described as indescribable carnage. Perhaps we will never know the exact number of victims those apocalyptic weeks claimed. Many, beginning with the combatants themselves, have exaggerated the figures. It is not necessary to exaggerate; the truth is already exaggerated in and of itself. There were not, from the beginning to the end of the battle, fewer than one hundred and ten thousand casualties: sixty thousand Republicans and fifty thousand Francoists; there were no fewer than twenty-five thousand dead: fifteen thousand Republicans and ten thousand Francoists. Among those twenty-five thousand victims—a minuscule drop in an immense sea of dead men, many of them anonymous—was Manuel Mena.
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On August 1, after a week of combat during which the men of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen did not know a minute of respite, Manuel Mena’s unit was relieved from the front line of the Gandesa front; but after a couple of days of rest in the watchful comfort of the reserves they returned to the front. In the middle of the same month he participates with the whole 13th Division in the third Francoist counteroffensive by way of a demonstrative attack that would allow them to advance over Corbera d’Ebre while the 74th Division breaks through the front farther north, before Villa dels Arcs. The first days of September, during the fourth counteroffensive, are again frenetic. On September 3 they storm the positions defended by the Republican 27th Division in Usatorre and occupy Hills 349 and 355, the latter after four hours of artillery preparation. On the 4th they continue their advance to the north and east of Tossal de la Ponsa. On the 5th they repel several Republican counterattacks from Hill 360, with the 4th Navarra Division. On the 7th the resistance to their advance toughens, and on the 8th the Republicans finally manage to halt their offensive. That day (or the previous one) Manuel Mena is wounded. It is probable that this is his fourth time injured in combat, although, of all the wounds he received, so far we have the documentary evidence of only two of them; we barely know anything about this one: not where it came from, nor the exact circumstances of it, nor what kind of injury it was. We know only that the next day Manuel Mena is admitted to the Costa military hospital, in Zaragoza. We also know that his injury cannot be serious, because nine days later, at most, he finds himself back in the front line of battle, in charge of his company.
It is now September 18 and there are only forty-eight hours until Manuel Mena is wounded for the final time. That morning the 13th Division, which for almost a week has been bearing the burden of the fifth Francoist counteroffensive, receives the order to break the Republican front and take Hills 484, 426, and 496 to establish on them a line of defence. Barrón’s men initiate the advance, but again and again they crash into a ferocious resistance, until the commander orders the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen and the 4th Bandera of the Legion to look for a less exposed and more practicable way to penetrate Republican lines; after hours of reconnaissance, they find one in the Vimenoses or Bremoñosa Ravine. From there, struggling for every inch of terrain and dislodging the enemy from each trench with hand grenades and hand-to-hand combat, the next day they take Hills 426 and 460, and at dusk they arrive at the foot of Hill 496, known as the Cucut.
There death is waiting for Manuel Mena. It is a decisive position, a fundamental strategic point in a line of hills separated by the ravines of Valavert and Els Massos. That’s why it has been bombed by artillery and aircraft since the previous day. And that’s why it has been conscientiously fortified for weeks by the 12th Garibaldi Brigade, the unit of the 45th Division defending it (maybe alongside men of 14th Marseilles Brigade): using the abundant dry rocks on the ground, the International Brigades have constructed four successive lines of trenches among the Aleppo pines on the very pronounced slope, if they are expelled from one of them, they can retreat to the next and defend themselves from the next, and then th
e next and the next, up to the summit; also, to protect themselves from Francoist aircraft and artillery fire, they have excavated a series of shelters in the counterslope of the hill where they hide until the torment of the bombings ceases and they can return once more to the trenches and carry on fighting. All this explains why the Cucut is an almost impregnable hill, as the officers of the four companies of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen and 4th Bandera of the Legion who have been put in charge of taking it realise when they conscientiously study the terrain. Directing the operation is Iniesta Cano, natural leader of the two companies of Legionnaires; command of the two Rifle Companies is held by Captain Justo Nájera, and that of the machine-gunners company by Manuel Mena. Along with the rest of the officers of the units chosen, it is also these three who understand, after discussing the various options, that the only way to attack that hill is to storm it head-on in a direct assault.
There was no crueller battle in the Battle of the Ebro. Everything began at dawn. Towards 6:00 or 6:30 the longest and most destructive artillery preparation the Francoist command ever inflicted on any Republican position got under way, as Manuel Tagüeña wrote years later. The Legionnaires and the Rifle Companies had been chosen to carry out the mission because, apart from being accustomed to participating in extremely risky operations, they complemented each other, which explains why they often fought together. So towards 9:30, when Francoist aircraft and artillery had been pulverising the Republicans for an hour, after having adjusted their aim during the previous two, they set out. The Rifle Companies began to climb the escarpment, crawling carefully, staying low to the ground and making their way inch by inch between the smashed rocks and charred tree trunks, branches, and shrubs, through a very thick cloud of smoke and dust and deafening noise, while the International Brigade fired everything it had at them from above and the Legionnaires lay in wait behind them. The bombardment of the hill did not let up while they pressed up the slope, and on various occasions the Rifle Companies and Legionnaires were hit by friendly fire and had to request by radio that their gunners correct their aim. We don’t know exactly when the first line of the Republican trenches was attacked, but without doubt it was carried out or at least initiated by the Legionnaires; it was their specialty: launching themselves head-on at enemy positions from about a hundred feet away to finish off any resistance expeditiously. By eleven-thirty they announced the conquest of the hill. It was, however, a premature announcement, because the fact is the combat lasted for another two and a half hours all over the slopes and summit of the Cucut, in the successive lines of trenches, with an end-of-the-world ferocity. It was not until 2:00 in the afternoon that they finally managed to dominate the whole hill, transformed by then into a smoking devastation of dust, ashes, and rubble where not a single tree was left standing.
But the battle had not reached its end; in reality, the worst was yet to come. The Riflemen and Legionnaires knew it, because the Republicans had rocked themselves to sleep in recent weeks with a watchword or motto they tried to apply rigorously—“Hill lost, hill retaken”—and they were sure this time would be no exception: after all, resigning themselves to defeat would be the equivalent of abandoning one of the dominant strongholds of the entire Battle of the Ebro. So, as soon as they took over the summit of the Cucut, the Riflemen and Legionnaires began to recycle at top speed anything left behind in the Republican trenches to defend themselves from the predictable enemy counterattack, raising improvised parapets on the counterslope of the hill out of stones and branches and anything they could find within reach. Reality fully confirmed their fears. The Republican counterattack began at dusk; it came from Hill 450, where the Republicans had sought shelter after their provisional defeat. From there they began to scale the back slope of the Cucut screaming, firing automatic weapons, and throwing grenades, covered by mortar shells and artillery fire, in a violent apotheosis of rage and desperation which the Francoists repelled with a violent apotheosis of rage and desperation. Uncountable numbers of men on both sides were killed or wounded. Many of them belonged to the two companies of Ifni Riflemen. A hand grenade split open Captain Nájera’s abdomen. Another comrade of Manuel Mena’s, Second Lieutenant Carlos Aymat, was also gravely wounded. Finally Manuel Mena himself fell, victim of a bullet that penetrated his hip, perforated the bone, and lodged in his abdomen.
What happened after that is confusing and our knowledge of it imperfect, because memories are even less reliable than documents and what we know of Manuel Mena’s final hours depends, much more than on documents, on Manuel Mena’s orderly’s memory (or, more precisely, on the memory that Manuel Mena’s orderly bequeathed to Manuel Mena’s mother and siblings and that Manuel Mena’s mother and siblings bequeathed to Manuel Mena’s nieces and nephews and that Manuel Mena’s nieces and nephews have bequeathed to us, so many decades after the events occurred). I will not ask what Manuel Mena’s reaction was when he noticed a bullet had hit him. Nor will I ask if, thanks to his multiple experiences of being wounded by enemy fire in battle, he understands immediately that this wound is fatal, or if it takes him a while to understand this, or if he does not understand it at all, at least while he lies wounded on Cucut. Nor, of course, will I ask if he feels panic, if he swears, if he tries to measure up and be equal to the task and bear in silence the unbearable pain of his wound or if, aware of the seriousness, he collapses and groans and calls for his mother between tears and screams of anguish. Nor will I wonder how long he was lying there, on the charred top of the hill, bleeding and writhing, painfully aware of reality while the thunder of battle intensifies around him. I will not ask these things because I cannot answer them, because I am not a literato and I am not authorised to fantasise, because I must confine myself to the facts that are certain, even if the story we can gather from them is blurry and insufficient. This one is. But it is also true. Be that as it may, I can go no further: at most I can venture a timid conjecture, a reasonable hypothesis. Nothing more. The rest is legend.
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His orderly was not with Manuel Mena when he was shot on the Cucut, but he affirmed that Manuel Mena lay on the summit of the hill with a bullet in his guts until the Francoists quelled the Republican counterattack and his men could bring him down to the battalion’s first-aid post. That was where he joined him. And that was where the medics understood the gravity of the wound and sent them both immediately to a field hospital. It was not the closest hospital to the Cucut, which was in Batea, but the 13th Division’s hospital, set up in Bot; who knows: perhaps if they had sent him to Batea he might not have died, because it would not have taken the three eternal hours it took to travel—first on the back of a mule, then in an ambulance—the thirteen miles separating him from Bot. He arrived in the village at night, bleeding but conscious, and as he entered he had the strength to see the streets overflowing with ambulances and dead and wounded men lying on stretchers or on the ground. It had been a black day: the hospitals of Bot could not keep up with all the victims. Manuel Mena was admitted to one of them and left in a room with his orderly; perhaps they were alone, perhaps he shared the room with other wounded men. We don’t know how much time passed like this. At some point the orderly, exasperated by the wait and by Manuel Mena’s weakness, left the room and asked an auxiliary nurse when they were going to attend to his officer, and the auxiliary nurse answered that they had to wait until the medical team finished the surgery on a higher-ranking officer, perhaps she mentioned the name of Captain Nájera, wounded in the same Republican counterattack on Cucut. They waited, Manuel Mena lying in a rickety old bed with his uniform soaked in blood, gasping, his fine hair messed up and stuck to his scalp and his face blackened and damp with sweat and the shine in his possibly green eyes increasingly rigid; his orderly, sitting beside him. At another moment, pale as marble, Manuel Mena asked for water; the orderly gave it to him. Then he asked for water again and his orderly gave him some more. Then he said:
�
��I am going to die.”
After that Manuel Mena asked his orderly for two things: to keep the money he had on him and to give his personal effects to his mother. Then he died. It was in the early hours of the morning of September 21, 1938.
That same morning Manuel Mena’s body was transferred to Zaragoza by train; on that last trip he was accompanied by his orderly, who by then must have known that the previous night Captain Nájera had died as had another three of the 13th Division’s second lieutenants, among them Carlos Aymat. Manuel Mena was interred the following day in the Torrero cemetery, in a wooden coffin with mouldings and wrapped in the Francoist flag. A little while later an expedition of four family members, headed by Manuel Mena’s brothers Antonio and Andrés, arrived in Zaragoza. They had made a long and tortuous trip, avoiding the battlefronts across the interior of the rebel zone—from Trujillo to Salamanca, from Salamanca to Burgos, from Burgos to Zaragoza—with the aim of bringing the second lieutenant’s body back to his native village. The authorities greatly facilitated their mission. So, after disinterring the coffin, opening it, and confirming that it contained the lifeless body of Manuel Mena, they set out on the return journey in two cars accompanied by the orderly and with the coffin in a zinc-lined box.
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The arrival of Manuel Mena’s corpse in Ibahernando was an event that for decades endured in the village’s collective memory. Ibahernando is still overawed by that death: for the Francoist families, Manuel Mena was the model of the national hero, young, gallant, idealistic, hardworking, dashing, and killed in combat for the Fatherland; for all the families he was just a boy who hadn’t even grown old enough to earn anyone’s ill will. Many remembered the funeral procession appearing in the distance that day on the Trujillo road, solemnly travelling the short eucalyptus-lined track leading into the village, leaving the green waters of the lagoon behind on the left and turning towards Poza Arriba on the curve by the old cemetery to then head past the Civil Guard barracks and up the calle de Arriba towards Manuel Mena’s house, where people had been congregating for a very long time to await the arrival of the casket. Blanca Mena was not there: she had been confined by her family to her grandmother Gregoria’s house, to spare her, at barely seven, the flesh-and-blood horror of seeing her dead uncle. She wasn’t there, but she remembered the day very well, or some images of the day. She remembered herself at her grandmother Gregoria’s house, crying in sorrow at the death of her uncle and crying in fury at not being allowed to witness the arrival of her uncle’s body in the village. She remembered that her grandmother Gregoria’s servants patiently endured the bottomless grief of her tears and that finally their patience ran out and one of them was put in charge of taking her to her grandmother Carolina’s house. She remembered that, without stopping crying for a second or letting go of the maid’s hand, she walked the deserted streets until they emerged onto the calle de Arriba, flanked at that moment by Flechas and Balillas waiting in formation for the appearance of the hearse. She remembered that the two of them walked very quickly between the double row of children dressed in the blue shirts and black shorts of the Falange and recognised among them José Cercas, the father of Javier Cercas, and that they looked at each other (according to Javier Cercas, his father also remembered that exchange of looks for his whole life). And she remembered very well that she arrived at her grandmother Carolina’s house, on the calle de Las Cruces, just in time to witness a scene that was going to remain etched on her retina forever and on the retinas of everyone who was present.