The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Welcome, comrade!’ he cried. ‘You won’t be here long. As soon as we collect a convoy together we pass you away. In the meantime you have training, political education, fraternal discussion, much to do. Study victory. See a doctor. Dismiss!’

  He spoke with a curious accent. It could have been Catalan or French. He kicked my bags back towards me and turned away. I picked them up and went out into the courtyard.

  It was now about noon, with the sun at its low winter strength, and across the northern horizon the mountains caught it like broken glass, each peak flashing with blue and white light. Away to the south the land sank in frozen waves, while to the east lay the violet sea. After my two weeks underground the light burned my eyes, and it took some while to get used to the view, focus on its range and open distances, which were immense and exhilarating. The Castle and its courtyard seemed lifted in pure blue air and pressed close to a cold clear sky. I ceased to wonder how I had got here at last. It was simply a moment of magical arrival.

  The Castle courtyard was bounded by a bare white-washed wall along the top of which stood pots of crumpled geraniums. Some thirty or forty men lounged round the base of the wall, talking and smoking or eating lumps of bread. A ragged lot, dressed in an odd medley of clothes – some in civvies (as I was), others in long capes like Berbers, or in flashy jackets like white African hunters, while some had their heads thrust through jagged holes cut from the middle of military blankets.

  I sat down on the edge of a little group, and was addressed in English by a chap who called himself Danny. Danny was a bone-thin Londoner, all nose and chin, with a small bent body and red wrinkled hands. He was twenty-two, an unemployed docker from Bermondsey, undernourished and frail; when he moved, his limbs seemed to flap and flutter like wallpaper on an abandoned house.

  ‘’Ere we are then, eh?’ he kept saying with a kind of sneezing giggle. Over and over again. Peering at me, then at the great mountain landscape, and clasping his bony knees with his hands. ‘Said I’d never make it – the lads. The old woman too. What they call this then? I got ’ere, didn’t I?’

  He’d clench up his tiny hands and look round him with a trembling squint. A shaking hiss came out of his thin sad mouth. ‘We’re ’ere then, ain’t we? . . . Eh, Doug? Eh?’ He turned to a man squatting beside him. ‘An’ ’ere’s another one, eh?’ he said, pointing a finger at me. ‘They’re coming over in bleedin’ droves.’

  The Scot looked at me bleakly, as though he doubted I’d be much of a reinforcement. They’d been at the Barracks a week, they said, and both showed a mixture of bravado and bewilderment, though the Scot also seemed to have a profane contempt for most of the others around him.

  ‘Look at this bugga’,’ he said, jerking a finger at Danny. ‘’E dunno a gun fra’ a stick a’ rock. If we canna’ do better’n tha’, Guid ’elp us.’

  Danny stiffened and gave him a shrivelled look.

  ‘But we’re ’ere then, ennit?’ he said.

  It was true – and we were. Danny pointed out the others gathered in the courtyard, sitting and standing in their little groups, some playing cards, or just whistling, or staring into the distance, some fast asleep with the daylight exhaustion of waiting. Everybody was here, said Danny: Dutch, Germans and Poles. Exiles from Paris, a sprinkling of thugs on the run from Marseilles, a few Welshmen from the valleys, some Durham miners, Catalans, Canadians, Americans, Czechs, and half a dozen pale and speechless Russians.

  The Welsh, in their huddles, were talking Welsh. The Durham miners were protesting about the food. The Scot, who seemed to have found some brandy from somewhere, was rising on the peak of spluttering Olympian disdain.

  ‘We gotta anni-hi-late the lot of ’em,’ he growled. ‘Teach ’em political authority. Or wipe ’em all out. Thas what we gotta do.’

  ‘’E’s so drunk,’ said Danny, ‘’e don’t know which side ’e’s on yet – do ya, you ’eathen bastard?’

  Two young men, in dark suits, were playing chess on the ground, using stones in scratched squares in the sand. They were solemn, concerned, and cast disapproving glances at Doug. They talked together formally, in the accents of clerks.

  This, again, was not quite what I’d expected. In this special army I’d imagined a shoulder-to-shoulder brotherhood, a brave camaraderie joined in one purpose, not this fragmentation of national groups scattered around the courtyard talking wanly only to each other. Indeed, they seemed to share a mutual air of unease and watchfulness, of distrust and even dislike.

  I left Danny and Doug and wandered casually around, pretending I’d been here for weeks. But the pattern of that first morning was to be repeated during the whole length of my stay. The French crooks crouched in corners, shrugging and scowling; the Poles sat in princely silence sunning their beautiful cheekbones. The Czechs scribbled pamphlets and passed them to each other for correction; while the Russians seemed to come and go mysteriously as by tricks of the light. The British played cards and swore.

  But we were a young and unclassifiable bunch on the whole, with mixed motives and humours, waiting to test our nerves in new fields of belief. The Castle and its courtyard was our starting-point – a square of pale sunlight surrounded by snow.

  How had we all got here? Some by boat, some by illegal train-shuttles from France, but most smuggled from Perpignan by lorry. I hadn’t known, in my solitary ignorance, that there was this well-organized traffic for volunteers running from London through Paris into Spain. Which was why I’d done the daft thing and come on my own, and even chosen winter to do it. Nevertheless, I heard later that my progress had not gone altogether unnoticed. I must have been watched through France, and all the way from Perpignan. Of that I was never entirely certain, but if it was true it probably saved my life.

  Figueras had once been a fine hill town, with ordered streets and pretty houses, and open spaces for walking in the evening. War had shrivelled and emptied it, covered it with a sort of grey hapless grime so that even the windows seemed to have no reflections. The gathering twilight also seemed to bring an unnatural silence, as if all life had gone into hiding.

  Down near the station, however, were a couple of low-roofed taverns, bare and cold, with streaming wet floors. Doug and Ulli led me first into one, and then into the other, where they were clearly already well known and where the stooping old women behind the bar threw up their hands at the sight of them.

  They were not the taverns I remembered – those with great sweating wine-casks and glistening bottles labelled with posturing bullfighters. Indeed, I could see no drink at all, so in the second bar I asked for some coffee, and was given a glass of hot brown silt tasting of leather and rust.

  ‘Leave all tha’,’ said Doug, ‘an’ come along wi’ us.’ We went down some steps into a dim-lit cellar whose walls were covered with anarchist posters – vivid stark images of fists and faces, mouths crying defiance, shouting blasts for freedom, guns and flags held high, banners billowing with slogans, all in bright, hard, primary colours.

  A thin old man in a corner quickly turned his back on us as we entered, bent low, and tried to hide something under his cloak. There was a brief flapping and squawking from between his legs as he furtively pushed a chicken into a sack.

  ‘All right, Josepe,’ said Ulli, poking round the littered cellar. ‘Where is it? Out with it, man.’

  ‘Ay – ay,’ wheezed the ancient. ‘Again the Frenchman, by God! Why don’t you go away to your country?’

  Ulli, in Spanish, and Doug, with black Scots oaths, began to bully and tease the old man till he folded and scrabbled across the room. Mumbling of foreign evils and the curses of war, he searched through some sacking and turned up a stained goatskin flask.

  We sat on the floor and passed it round between us. It was a country coñac, vitriolic and burning.

  Josepe kept the struggling chicken huddled under his cloak and watched us peevishly while we drank. The black hairy flask smelt richly of goat and resin, the coñac of bitter oils. But it stung,
and warmed us deep inside, just right for three men sitting on a cellar floor.

  ‘Bless this place,’ Doug grunted, wiping his mouth. ‘I never wanna leave it – never.’

  Danny came suddenly down the steps on his little web-like feet, noiseless, nose-poking, apologetic.

  ‘Well, ’oo’d a’ believed it?’ he giggled. ‘’Ere we are again then, eh? Got a drop left for me? No offence, a’ course.’

  Doug looked at him with distaste, but passed him the coñac. Danny nodded jerkily to each of us, and drank.

  Only a few days in Spain, ripe for Freedom and the Cause, and here we were, squatting in the cellar of a northern tavern, bullying a crazed old man and getting drunk.

  When we’d emptied a third leather flask, Josepe begged plaintively for payment, and Doug gave him a new hundred peseta note.

  ‘No, no!’ whimpered Josepe, waving it away.

  ‘Guid Goverrment money,’ said Doug, screwing it into his hand. ‘Take it mon – it’s a soldier’s wages.’

  The old man bunched up his knees and hissed and grizzled, pushing at Doug with his tiny fists.

  ‘No, no!’ he wailed. ‘It is not to be borne! Carmelita! Eulalia! Come!’

  A slim gliding figure, as light as a greyhound, moved softly down the cellar steps. The man reached out a shaking hand and gripped the girl by the shoulder while the chicken broke from his cloak and flew into the wall.

  ‘Where’ve you been, whore?’ he growled, pinching the girl viciously. ‘Why did you leave me again to the Frenchmen?’

  She turned her head towards us.

  ‘Give him something,’ she whispered. ‘Belt, scarf, cigarettes – anything. But quickly; he’s going mad.’

  The girl wore the tight black dress of the villages, and had long Spanish-Indian eyes. She pushed the old man up the stairs and told him to go to bed. Doug, Ulli and Danny followed behind him, singing brokenly and urging him on.

  A winter sunset glow shone through a high grille in the wall, and I was aware, behind the sharp smell of coñac, of something softer and muskier. The young girl, crouching low in the shadows, had loosened her dress and was pouring brandy over her bare bruised shoulder.

  She rubbed the liquor into her flesh with long brown fingers and watched me warily as she did so. Her eyes were like slivers of painted glass, glinting in the setting sun. I heard the boys upstairs stamping and singing to the breathy music of an old accordion. But I couldn’t join them. I was trapped down here, in this place, this cellar, to the smell of coñac and this sleek animal girl.

  She was stroking, almost licking, her upper arms, like a cat, her neck arched, her dark head bowed. She raised her eyes again, and we just stared at each other before I sat down beside her. Without a word, she handed me the flask of coñac, turned her bare shoulder towards me, and waited. Her skin was mottled by small purple bruises that ran backwards under her dress. I poured some drops of coñac into the palm of my hand and began to rub it awkwardly over her damp hot flesh. The girl sighed and stiffened, then swayed against me, leading me into a rhythm of her own.

  The frayed black dress was now loose at the edges and gave way jerkily to my clumsy fingers. The girl’s eyes were fixed on mine with a kind of rapt impatience. With a slight swerve of her shoulders she offered more flesh for healing. I rubbed more coñac into the palms of my hands. Slowly, as my touch followed her, she lay back on the sacking. The boys upstairs were singing ‘Home on the Range’.

  Apart from the quick stopping and starting of her breath, the girl was silent. The red blanket of sunset moved over her. Her thin dancer’s body was now almost bare to the waist and revealed all the wispy fineness of a Persian print. It seemed that in some perverse way she wished to show both her beauty and its blemishes. Or perhaps she didn’t care. She held my hands still for a moment.

  ‘Frenchman,’ she said thickly.

  ‘English,’ I said woodenly.

  She shrugged, and whispered a light bubbling profanity – not Catalan but pure Andaluz. Her finger and thumb closed on my wrist like a manacle. Her body met mine with the quick twist of a snake.

  When the square of sunset had at last moved away and died, we lay panting gently, and desert dry. I took a swig from the goatskin and offered it to her. She shook her head, but lay close as though to keep me warm. A short while ago she had been a thing of panicky gasps and whimpers. Now she looked into my eyes like a mother.

  ‘My little blond man,’ she said tenderly. ‘Young, so young.’

  ‘How old are you, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifteen . . . sixteen – who knows?’ She sat up suddenly, still only half-dressed, her delicate bruised shoulders arched proudly.

  ‘I kill him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The old one. The grandfather. He maltreats . . . Thank God for the war.’

  The chicken, huddled fluffily against the wall in the corner, seemed now to be asleep. The girl turned and tidied me briskly, then tidied herself, settling her clothes around her sweet small limbs. Then she lifted her long loose hair and fastened it into a shining bun. The stamping and singing upstairs had stopped.

  I was astonished that this hour had been so simple yet secret, the opening and closing of velvet doors. Eulalia was not the sort of Spanish girl I’d known in the past – the noisy steel-edged virgins flirting from the safety of upstairs windows, or loud arm-in-arm with other girls in the paseo, sensual, cheeky, confident of their powers, but scared to be alone with a man.

  Eulalia, with her beautiful neck and shoulders, also had a quiet dignity and grace. A wantonness, too, so sudden and unexpected, I felt it was a wantonness given against her will. Or at least, if not given willingly, it was now part of her nature, the result of imposed habit and tutoring.

  As she pulled on her tattered slippers, she told me she would not stay long in Figueras. She’d come from the south, she said – she didn’t know where – and had been working here as a house-drudge since she was ten. Once she would have stayed on till body and mind were used up; the sexually abused slattern of some aged employer, sleeping under the stairs between calls to his room. Not any more, she was now free to do as she wished. Spain had changed, and the new country had braver uses for girls such as she. She need stay no longer with this brutal pig of an innkeeper. She would go to Madrid and be a soldier.

  It had grown dark and cold in the cellar. Suddenly she turned and embraced me, wrapping me urgently in her hot thin arms.

  ‘Frenchman!’ she whispered. ‘At last I have found my brother.’

  ‘Englishman,’ I said, as she slipped away.

  The next day, in the evening, a child brought me a message, and as soon as I was free I slipped down to the town. This time I went alone, but not immediately to Josepe’s, but first to an old wine bar up near the Plaza. The first man I saw was the giraffe-necked Frenchman from the Pyrenees who had guided me over the last peak of the mountains. He’d been taciturn, gruff: ‘Don’t do this for everyone,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t think we run conducted tours.’ Which was exactly what he was doing, as I could see now. Beret and leather jacket, long neck still lagged with a scarf, he stood in the centre of the bar talking to a group of hatless young men, each looking slightly bewildered and carrying little packages. Smoking with rapid puffs, eyes shifting and watchful, marshalling his charges with special care, he handed each one a French cigarette, then pushed them towards the door. His coat was new, and his shoes well polished, and clearly he had walked no mountain paths lately. Perhaps he’d brought this little group across the frontier by truck. As he left the room, he brushed against me, caught my eye for a moment and winked . . .

  I went down the street in the freezing rain and found Felipe’s bar closed and dark. Through a crack in the shutters I could see a glimmer of candles and some old women sitting by a black wooden box. Bunches of crape hung over the mirror behind the bar which was littered with broken bottles. I was wondering why, and from whom, the message had been sent up to the Barracks. It had certainly been laconic
enough. The boy had simply sidled in and asked me if I was ‘Lorenzo the Frenchman’, and then muttered, ‘You’ve got to go down to Felipe’s.’

  I knocked on the door and presently one of the old women let me in. She asked who I was and I told her. ‘Where’s Don Felipe?’ I said, and she showed her gums briefly, then said, ‘Bang! He’s gone to the angels.’ She stabbed a finger at the open box, and there he was, his face black and shining like a piece of coal. ‘Bang!’ said the old woman again, with a titter, then crossed herself. ‘God forgive him.’

  Where was Eulalia? I asked. ‘She went in a camion,’ she said. ‘An hour ago. Away over there . . .’ I could get no more from her, except that the old man had been shot and that, in her opinion, he was without shame and deserved it.

  Looking into the crone’s bright death-excited eyes, and smelling the hot pork-fat of the candles, I knew that this was not a wake, or even a mourning, but a celebration of something cleared from their lives. I also knew that Eulalia, my murderous little dancer, had called me to show me what she’d done, but called me too late, and had gone.

  André Malraux

  CRASH

  First published in 1937, André Malraux’s Days of Hope gives an optimistic account of the first months of the Spanish Civil War when with initial victories over the Fascists, everything seemed to be going well. Malraux, who had helped to organize an international air squadron to fight for the Republican cause, cast his experiences as a novel and here describes the tragic outcome of an unsuccessful air raid.

  ATTIGNIES WAS SEMBRANO’S bomber. The crews of the two planes had been mixed up: in his machine were Pol, the mechanic, and Attignies. Sembrano had brought his second pilot with him, a Basque named Reyes. At their southernmost aerodrome they had found some bombs that they had had to change, and a degree of confusion worthy of Toledo; nearing Malaga, the refugees one hundred and fifty thousand strong, streaming along the coast road; then, beyond, the Fascist cruisers trailing their smoke-clouds through the brilliant morning light as they made for Almeria; finally, the first of the combined Italian and Spanish motorized columns. Seen from the planes, it looked as if it must catch up the exodus within a few hours. Attignies and Sembrano had exchanged glances and come down as low as possible. Nothing more could be seen of the column.