Brigade headquarters was in a farmhouse at the end of a rutted lane. Two ambulances and a dozen motorcycles were parked in the farmyard, which also contained a group of soldiers washing their clothes at a cattle trough, a. small boy plucking a chicken, and the wreckage of an aeroplane.
'Jarama,' Luis announced.
'Horrifying,' said Townsend, picking his way between the puddles and the cowdung. 'Inconceivably dreadful. Look: dead chickens everywhere. My God, will this bloody war never end?'
'Inside they can tell us,' Luis told him.
'That I take leave to doubt," Barker said. Luis looked at him uncertainly, but Baker did not seem displeased, and so Luis went over to the sentry on duty at the farmhouse door.
'Correspondentes,' he announced. 'Muy importantes correspondentes.'
The man stopped trimming his fingernails with a clasp-knife and looked the visitors over. He had thick black stubble and bad teeth. He gave a grunt which could have meant anything.
'Show him identification,' Luis suggested. 'Anything, it does not matter. This is just an ignorant peasant.'
'Not true,' the sentry said. 'Ignorant, yes. Peasant, no. Beneath this dirty shirt there beats an indelibly bourgeois heart, I'm sorry to say.' He put the knife away. 'I know you,' he said to Barker. 'We were at school together. Templeton.'
'Were we?' Barker tried to stare beyond the stubble and the grime. 'Wait a minute. You're not Charles Templeton? The cricketer?'
'None other.'
'Good God.'
'Ah, now there I can't agree with you.' Templeton gave a rueful grin. His teeth were not bad; just dirty.
'Listen: can you let us in?' Townsend asked. 'We want to find out what's happening in this damn war.'
'Well, you won't learn anything here,' Templeton said. 'They're holding a brigade conference. It's like the Chelsea Arts Ball gone wrong. Still, you can go in if you like.'
He led them into the farmhouse. 'Weren't you an artist? A painter?' Barker asked.
'I still am an artist,' Templeton said with conviction. 'But here in Spain I can fight for truth as well as paint it. Mind your head.' He opened a door and they ducked into a long, dim room in which forty or fifty soldiers were engaged in half a dozen arguments.
The correspondents stood against the wall while their eyes and ears adjusted to the gloomy uproar. They could see a whole theatrical wardrobe of uniforms, ranging from khaki overalls to black flying jackets, and from red cavalry cloaks to blue tunics. They could hear most of the languages of Europe. Everyone seemed to be talking, no one seemed to be listening. They all had two things in common: fervour and sidearms. Every man present was wearing a large automatic or a revolver on his gunbelt.
'This is a conference?' said Barker. 'It sounds more like a difference.'
'Oh well, everybody is free to give his point of view, in the International Brigade,' Templeton said. 'We are, after all, fighting for democracy.'
'What happens when they don't agree?' Townsend asked.
'It depends. Sometimes the Brigade commander orders lunch. Sometimes the enemy attacks. Something always happens.'
'Doesn't sound very organised.'
Luis felt that the conversation was lacking spark. 'Sir, how many fascists have you killed?' he inquired.
'Oh, hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Perhaps as many as three. Of course, some may have been dead already.'
Luis flushed. He thought that Templeton was mocking him. 'Perhaps it is so easy to kill fascists that you cannot remember?' he said.
'I can remember killing,' Templeton said, looking openly and easily into Luis's stiff face, 'but thank God I can't remember counting while I did it.'
Barker's pencil skidded wildly off his notebook as the door swung open and banged his arm. A tall and very fat man with angry eyes and a shaggy, mistrustful moustache strode into the room, picked up a stool and hammered it thunderously against a table-top. He wore' tunic and trousers of workingmen's blue, with a giant pistol tugging down his belt, a flaring red kerchief, and an absurdly large black beret, so big that it fell over one ear, almost to the collar. Even before his table-battering had created silence, he was shouting. The language was French, but the style was universal. The fat man was hysterical with rage. His jowls wobbled, his nostrils flared, his voice and his gestures ripped the air.
This hulking, howling harangue went on for several minutes, while the atmosphere grew unhappier. Townsend nudged Dru and Barker. They backed out, Templeton following, and shut the door.
'Andrea Marty,' Dru said. 'Three hundred pounds of mouth. The moustache is camouflage. Low-flying aircraft mistake him for a horse's ass, and fly on.'
'Marty the Commissar?' Townsend asked. Next door, the ranting seemed to have gained in fury. 'I understood he was a horse's ass.'
'You didn't see anyone in there laughing. Marty is Chief Political Commissar of the International Brigades. You want my advice? Don't mess around with that particular horse's ass or he's liable to dump a load of horse's poo-poo all over you.'
'He sounds a bit mad,' Barker said.
'Oh, he's crackers,' Templeton told them.
'What was he raving about?' Townsend asked Dru.
'Treason. Traitors in the ranks. The revolution betrayed. Firing squads. Summary executions. All Trotskyite spies will be purged.'
'He's always on about that,' Templeton said. 'Never stops.'
Luis had been standing with his head bowed, looking very serious. Now he addressed Templeton.
'Sir, I offer my apology for what I said to you earlier. It was bad manners.'
'Oh, that's all right, chum.' Templeton was scratching his armpits, hard. 'Sorry, everybody. I'm afraid I'm a bit lousy.'
Luis was not ready to allow lice to distract him from his views on war. 'It is bad courtesy to criticise a soldier when one has not experienced the truth of war for oneself,' he declared.
'Please don't worry about it.' Templeton slapped his trousers. 'Sometimes violence seems to stun them, and other times it just wakes them up. One never knows what to do for the best.'
For a moment everyone stood around in slight embarrassment, listening to the strident bellow of the brigade conference.
'Well, we're not going to get anywhere here, are we?' Barker said. 'Why don't we trundle off and take a squint at the Front?'
'Show you the way, if you like,' Templeton offered.
As they walked up the hill, Milton Townsend took Luis aside. 'Listen, Luis,' he said. 'The stories I've been getting from Republican Army Headquarters are no damn good to me. Frankly, it's all bullshit propaganda. Now what I need, see, is a nice, simple, gung-ho bit of action. Keep your ears open, okay?'
'Okay.'
'I mean, this is war. Right? So there's got to be a chance for glory somewhere, you know what I mean? Some guy has got to save his wounded buddies, or capture a strongpoint singlehanded, or shoot down three fighter planes with four bullets, or something. I mean it happens, for Chrissake. We've just got to find it, that's all.'
'Sometimes these damned heroes get themselves killed, that is the difficulty,' Luis remarked.
'That doesn't necessarily matter. We just have to find a good witness. This fight for democracy and freedom and all that crap is fine, terrific, but we need action. You go to the movies? You like westerns?'
'Sure! Gary Cooper, Lone Ranger -- '
'Okay, you got it. Find me the Lone Ranger of the International Brigade. Dead or alive.'
They found the Front a mile and a half up the track, in trenches dug just short of the crest; and defending this stretch of the Front they found the 2nd English Battalion, now sober, dirty and glum.
Harry Summers came out to meet them. 'I take it you've got permission from Brigade H.Q. to be up here?' he asked.
'We just left there,' Dru said. 'Your lot didn't get much of a break, did they?'
'The men are quite refreshed. They voted to return, as a matter of fact, as soon as they heard we were preparing for a counter-attack.'
Townsend said: 'Preparing to make one or to meet one?'
'The former.'
'Terrific! Maybe you can show us the target?'
Summers took out a very used handkerchief. The fabric crackled as he pulled it unstuck. 'We fight for Spain,' he said. 'For the loyal, free and democratic republic. It is the fascist rebels who are seeking to capture targets. We fight for freedom, not for property.' He blew his nose.
There was a short silence. Luis looked uncertainly at Townsend, who rolled his eyes at him. 'Sir,' Luis said to Summers, 'where is the bloody enemy?' Everyone brightened up. Summers turned and led them forward.
The trenches were crumbling and filthy. Bits of food, rusting tins, broken rifles and stained clothing lay everywhere, and now that the sun was high the flies were loud: the trenches had been used as a latrine as well as a dustbin. The men of the 2nd Battalion were hard at work, cleaning out the mess and strengthening the walls; they pressed themselves against the mud to let the visitors pass; they looked tired and sad, and they said little. Dru caught one man's eye, and smiled. 'It's not the Ritz, is it?' he said.
'Soddin' French did this,' the man said. 'Bleedin' spotless, we left this place.'
They turned into a communication trench which led forward to an observation post: a walled pit with sandbagged slots looking down the steep and bare hillside to a flat valley, almost a thousand feet below. 'Down there you see the Jarama River,' Summers said, 'and beyond the Jarama you see the enemy.'
The soldier on duty stood back to make room for them at the slots. There was no difficulty in seeing the enemy, only in counting them. There were hundreds of troops, probably thousands, with cavalry and horse-drawn artillery in separate encampments. Their many small sounds travelled clearly up the windless air: a motorcycle's buzz, a man singing, the tiny clang of a hammer on steel, the nervous whinny of a horse. Smoke climbed from a dozen fires like softly unravelling wool.
'Who's in command down there?' Dru asked. 'Still General Mola?'
'Mola is the henchman of the fascist rebel Franco,' Summers said, Dru took this to be confirmation.
'How on earth did you manage to hold them off?' Barker asked. 'I mean, Mola's got a fully equipped professional army. Your chaps are just . . . well . . . volunteers.'
'Exactly. Every man in the International Brigade is fighting for a cause. The fascist mercenaries are merely fighting for pay. Another thing is our superior position. We forced the enemy to attack uphill, with no cover. But above all we succeeded because of our international solidarity. The English battalion fought alongside the Balkan battalion, the Franco-Beige battalion, the Lincoln battalion. Jarama was a political as much as a military victory.'
'I see what you mean about the hill,' Barker said. 'Damn steep.'
'Don't look out so far.' Barker jerked his head back. 'There are snipers in a farmhouse, halfway down the slope,' Summers warned.
'Are there really?' Barker said.
With a sharp and savage bang a sandbag erupted, and dirt sprayed everywhere. The visitors drew back, startled rather than frightened, for the sandbag itself had seemed to explode, without cause. It formed part of the slit where Barker had been looking out. 'I didn't do that,' he said stupidly.
Summers allowed himself a brief, bleak smile. 'No,, that was an enemy bullet. They go off with a loud bang when they hit.'
Townsend looked interested. 'I thought explosive bullets were outlawed,' he said.
Summers merely glanced at him. 'Now I think you have seen everything. There is probably lunch waiting for you at Brigade H.Q.'
As they filed out, the American lingered to examine the shattered sandbag. He scorched his fingers on a fragment of bullet, and cursed himself softly: 'Damn idiot.'
'You are, if you believe all that codswallop,' the soldier said. He was squatting in a corner, eyes half-shut, arms resting on knees, hands dangling.
'Is that so?' Townsend sucked his fingers and looked more closely. 'Wait a minute . . . You're the guy we talked to in the church, right? David ...'
'Davis.'
'Well, I was close. Anyway, you've changed somewhat since then. What hit you? A Pontiac or a Plymouth?'
Davis raised his face. One eye was a shiny red, half-hidden by swollen flesh as black and puffy as an old mushroom. There were cuts and scrapes all over his forehead and jawline. His upper lip was lopsidedly bloated, and his nose looked crooked. 'There's a war on,' he said. 'Haven't you seen a casualty before?'
'You didn't get that collection from General Mola.'
'No.' Davis took an empty sandbag and began scraping dirt into it, using an old saucepan as a shovel. 'No, I didn't. When we came back here I found a Frenchman with his trousers down, right where I made my dug-out. Talk about smell. They eat snails, you know.'
'So I hear.'
'It's true, I seen 'em do it. So I smashed his face in and his friends didn't like it. We got quite lively for a while. That's how I came to be out here. Bloody old Summers's doing.'
'Solitary confinement?' Townsend suggested.
'That and a bit more. He wants them to drop a shell on me, shut me up for good.' Davis dumped the sandbag on its base, packing the dirt down hard. 'My Jarama doesn't tally with his Party Line fairy tales.'
Townsend had his notebook open, 'Tell me about your Jarama.'
Davis gave it some thought while he scraped up more dirt with his saucepan. 'Ready?' he asked. Bloody shambles. Got that?'
'Yes.'
'Well, that's what it was. Bloody shambles from start to finish.' Davis spat into the sandbag and closed its neck. His fingers were shaking as they tried to unknot a piece of string.
'How did it start?' Townsend asked gently.
'It started . . .' Davis sniffed, and blinked, and a tremendous weariness seemed to come over him. He stared, frowning at the muddle of footprints in the dusty dirt. 'It started without any breakfast,' he said. 'Imagine that. We'd spent all day in the train and all night in the truck, and it was cold, I'm telling you. You don't know what it's like to be cold till you've been tired out and starving at the same time. The cold soaks right into your guts, and your guts are empty, and you get to the state where your hand hasn't the strength to pick up a piece of bread.'
'This was when they brought your Battalion up to the Front,' Townsend said.
'Certainly!' Davis relaxed his hands, and began picking at the hard knots again. 'And about time too, or so we thought. First-class, fully trained, crack fighting men, we were. All in uniform made out of high-grade cheesecloth. Nothing fits, but that's democracy, isn't it? The main thing is, we're fully trained, we know exactly what to do.' He chewed on a knot and looked sideways at Townsend.
'What did they train you to do?'
'Attack,' Davis said. He walked his fingers down his thighs. 'Advance and defeat the enemy.'
'How?'
'Fire the rifle at him. We knew all about the rifle, we'd all fired it, once, on the range. Five rounds, Crack bloody marksmen, we were. Irresistible.'
'But what if the enemy resisted?'
'Then we threw the grenade at him, and he ran away, and we won. We were on the right side, see? We just had to attack and he would run away.' Davis beamed at Townsend, his bruised face distorting under the strain.
'Ahah! Senor Townsend!' Luis cried, bounding down the trench. 'The others sent me to -- '
'Sure, sure. Sit down and shut up.'
'But they want -- '
'The hell with them. You never found me. Okay, Davis, so you got here and no breakfast. This was what time? Dawn?'
Luis looked from Townsend's notebook to Davis's crooked grin, and suddenly realised: the American had found his Lone Ranger. He sat down and listened.
'It was daylight,' Davis said. 'There was some sort of food, bread, coffee, I don't know what, nobody could stay awake to eat. We all just got out of the trucks and fell asleep. Must've looked like a massacre: bodies everywhere.'
'What about the fighting?' Townsend asked him. 'Was there any fighting going on?'<
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Davis shook his head. 'That came later. They let us sleep for a couple of hours and then woke us up. Time to attack. The funny thing is, we all felt good. Couple of hours sleep, nice sunny morning, birds singing, and here was our chance to win the war. So, up the hill we went.'
Luis listened carefully. He deeply regretted his earlier criticism of Templeton. Then, he had spoken out of impatience and ignorance. Now was his chance to learn the truth about the gallantry of action, from this battle-scarred yet good-humoured veteran.
Townsend wanted to know how many went up the hill.
'The whole damn battalion, about six hundred. You could hear the bullets fizzing overhead as you got to the top of the hill. Everyone was grinning, we were all excited. Now and then we heard things going off bang, guns firing or shells landing, we didn't know and we didn't care. We just wanted to attack. We knew exactly what was going to happen. The enemy was going to run like hell!
Luis felt his blood pulse faster, and his thigh muscles were tense with excitement.
Townsend flipped a page. 'What about support? Where was your covering fire?'
'All arranged.' Davis pulled the string through his mouth to straighten the kinks. 'Brigade HQ was sending tanks and artillery and bombers. French artillery, Russian tanks, Spanish planes. Solidarity, see? The people versus the fascists. We couldn't go wrong, could we?'
'Okay,' Townsend murmured. He was wondering if Davis would get into action before that bastard Summers came back. 'Okay. What next?'
'We charged.' Davis leaned back and rested on his elbows.
'You charged.'
'We charged and we charged and we charged, not very fast because most of us weren't very fit, and the ground was a bit rough. Also we hadn't had much sleep and no breakfast. If you want the truth, we charged bloody slowly. More of a limp, if you know what I mean.' Davis hooked the string behind his head and glanced seriously at the American. Luis moved to where he could watch the soldier better.
The Eldorado Network Page 5