A Broken Land rtw-2

by Jack Ludlow

  Out on the street, the malacca cane was elegantly used, its ferrule striking a steady tattoo as they made their way along busy pavements and streets rendered noisy by passing traffic. He said nothing until they were out onto the wide plaza where, separated from road noise and able to ensure he was not overheard, he passed on what he had been sent to impart.

  To a man not easy to shock, what he said was startling, so much so that Cal could not believe he was telling the truth as relayed to him by Drouhin — had there been some leak? Could this dandy really be saying to him that the best place to buy what was needed was from Nazi Germany?

  They traversed the plaza three times with much repetition, so that the unnamed dandy was sure Monsieur Maxim had all the names and contact details memorised — not easy, as one, a German-speaking Greek, went by the name of Manousos Constantou-Georgiadis. He owned an Athens company whose main shareholder was Rheinmetall-Borsig, and that German enterprise, which made armaments, was controlled by none other than the deputy Fuhrer, Hermann Goring.

  ‘The old gentleman of Monaco assures you that should you contact the Greek gentleman and make known what it is you need, he will take the matter to Goring, where he is sure you will receive a positive response, though he also advises the price you will be charged will be painful.’

  ‘He did not propose any alternative?’

  ‘Only some countries who might seek to take your money and avoid delivery.’

  ‘And the Germans will not?’ Cal asked, making no attempt to disguise the irony.

  ‘Greed will ensure they do not. Now, if you are clear in the details I have given you, I will depart.’

  Cal said goodbye to the old fellow, wondering if he should pinch himself, yet there was one task he had to carry out very quickly. In a code only he would understand he had to get down on paper the details he had been given before they slipped entirely from his mind. He would need to get to Valencia and see if he could convince the people with whom he was dealing that this was on the up and not some fiddle.

  But before that he was determined to go to Madrid and find Florencia.

  Miles away it was clear much of the city was ablaze, or had been; Madrid was covered in a blanket of smoke, with black plumes rising from places still on fire and, closer, the crump of artillery shells registered faintly for the first time, along with that strange feeling of the air around you moving. The only blessing was that the jams had ceased; everyone who was going had gone and what little traffic there was flowed freely in one direction: towards the battle.

  He was stopped on the outskirts by militiamen checking his papers, with deep suspicion very evident, which did not surprise him; one of the things he had heard on the radio was an early claim from General Mola, who was in command of the assault on the capital, that, as well as the four columns which had advanced on Madrid, he had what he called a ‘fifth column’ inside the city, creating a scare in which innocents risked being shot as suspected spies.

  Once in the city the noise of battle was constant, and as well as the whining sound of shells coming in, then the boom of them exploding, there was the distant rattle of gunnery, volley fire from small arms and the occasional staccato sound of a machine gun.

  Planes were in the air, but not many, and they were mostly Russian biplanes on patrol, but he had passed several bombed buildings and one street closed off, in which a downed Italian bomber lay wrecked and twisted. He could feel on his tongue the dust that permeated everything in an urban battle area and see in the faces of those he drove past that etched look of fear which comes from not knowing if the next bullet, shell or bomb is meant for you.

  With lots of time to think there was one thing Cal Jardine knew: if he was about to get involved in the fighting — very likely, given Florencia — he did not want to be part of anything structured, a member of a militia or some International Brigade. All he wanted was to find out where the anarchist forces were fighting, which was where she would be, and get alongside her.

  That way he might be able to keep her alive, for try as he had, he could think of no way to detach her from her cause; she had grown up with it and it had formed a large part of her life. In his heart he knew that as long as the battle went on she would want to be in the thick of it, and by extension, so would he. Buying arms, even if he doubted it was truly possible, could wait till the fate of Madrid was decided.

  With darkness falling he made straight for the Hotel Florida on the very good grounds that she might well be using it as a base. Besides that, if she was not, the war reporters would know as much about what was going on as anyone, and he trusted Tyler Alverson, as he had already, to keep tabs on her location if he could.

  Not that it was easy: he kept getting stopped at checkpoints and his papers were getting tattered from being so often examined. As well as that, many of the streets were being used as sheep and cattle pens and those he suspected owned the animals had set up shelters in which to live. By the time he got to the hotel it was clear, by the diminishing noise level, that, as darkness fell, the fighting was slacking off.

  The room, when he got to it, was empty, with no evidence that she had been back since he left, and that was a worry, yet he had to avoid the temptation to just go looking. With his limited Spanish and obvious foreignness, even if he did have papers, he was safer at the Florida until he knew what was going on. Albeit under a fine layer of dust and a skeleton staff, the hotel was still functioning, but there was scant evidence of any of the reporters.

  Yet there was food in the kitchens, no doubt bought from the streets he had passed through, and, of course, wine in the cellars. He treated himself to some Castilian lamb and a good bottle from the best Spanish region and bodega he knew, a Vega Sicilia Unico from Ribera del Duero. If he was going to get involved in this war it would be a long time before he would get anything as good.

  He was in the bar when the first of the reporters began to troop back in from a day of observation, which got him many a dusty look from grimy hacks who were both hungry and thirsty, one of whom was Tyler Alverson who, grubby as he was, shouted for a beer and flopped down on a chair next to Cal.

  ‘Don’t ask till I’ve had a drink.’

  ‘Bad?’

  Alverson just shook his head and picked up the cold beer, drinking deeply, paused for one breath, then emptied the glass. Cal immediately ordered another.

  ‘The Foreign Legion took the San Fernando Bridge this morning and got into the University district, though by Christ it cost them plenty.’

  ‘Worth it,’ Cal replied, his heart sinking; he was wondering how, when the commanders must have known the river bridges had to be held whatever the cost, they had allowed one to be lost. ‘Florencia?’

  ‘She’s some dame,’ Alverson added. ‘A dinamitera.’

  ‘We had those in Barcelona.’

  ‘She throws a mean grenade.’

  ‘I need to get to her, Tyler. Is she still in the Casa de Campo?’

  ‘The bit they still hold, which ain’t going to be much. That’s the other place the Regulares attacked. I’ll take you there in the morning.’

  ‘Not now?’

  Alverson shook his head as though the suggestion was absurd. ‘You don’t go far after dark, and certainly not towards the front. There are too many trigger-happy guys out there just itching to shoot at anything that moves.’ He looked at Jardine keenly. ‘You haven’t heard about the Model Prison?’

  ‘No. I’ve been out of touch with news, on the road.’

  ‘This one won’t be on the radio, unless the Nationalists get hold of it. Some of our finest went to the Model Prison, evacuated the inmates to some place further east and massacred them as potential spies. They say there are hundreds of bodies in a mass grave.’

  ‘How could they be spies when they were in prison?’

  ‘Blame that stupid bastard Mola, him and his goddam fifth column.’ Alverson called for another beer. ‘He’s got everybody looking at everybody else like they’re traitors.’

/>   ‘He has to have some friends in the city.’

  ‘They’ve either gone or are in hiding. I gotta eat something. You?’

  ‘Been there, but I’ll join you and you can bring me up to date.’

  What Cal Jardine heard was a sorry tale; the militias were suffering badly and, as he suspected, tanks, artillery and heavy weapons were often not committed, though Alverson insisted it was because of scarcity more than politics.

  ‘No, brother, the soldiers and airmen are doing their best. The politics are here in the city centre and it runs right to the top. Caballero tried to get the POUM into his government after the anarchists joined, but the Soviet ambassador vetoed that idea, no doubt on orders from Moscow. If Joe Stalin hates anything it’s a Trotskyite, so it was no POUM or no more weapons.’

  Talking as he ate, it did not get any better; the communists had taken over security, the Civil Guard had been purged and the Assault Guard sent to Valencia, while suspected opponents were being rounded up by NKVD-led patrols. Yet in amongst the gloom, Alverson had positives, not least the way the madrilenos had responded to the threat to their city.

  ‘Every hand was put to the pump, Cal — women and kids carrying rocks for barricades, men digging trenches, not a factory that did not have its own militia unit. The pity is they do not have enough weapons, and then only small arms. But they don’t hold back, they attack even when they know they can’t win.’

  ‘That I have seen before.’

  ‘I don’t know whether to pity them or just admire them.’

  ‘Can they hold, Tyler?’

  ‘I’m no military man, Cal, but unless they get reinforcements I think it might be time to light out.’

  ‘Not without Florencia.’

  ‘That struck, eh? I wish you luck, brother.’ Just then there was a bellow, another American voice shouting for food and drink, which brought one unnecessary word from Alverson. ‘Ernie.’ Surprisingly he waved Hemingway over, then reacted to the look he got from his companion. ‘He might be a pain in the ass but he’s one hell of a reporter. Ask him if they can hold.’

  The man’s dark hair and moustache seemed full of the same kind of dust that lay everywhere, and when he sat down it was clear he was weary, and there was silence until he had a tall glass in front of him, whisky of some kind mixed with water, which he drank from deeply. Then he nodded to Cal.

  ‘You came back? Not many doin’ that.’

  ‘Not many stayed either, Ernie.’

  ‘Nope. As soon as the shit started flying most of our brave colleagues upped and left for safer climes, afraid of taking a dying, I reckon.’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘I’ve faced my demons in Italy in ’18.’

  ‘And,’ Tyler Alverson said, with heavy emphasis, ‘you have been trying to get yourself killed ever since.’

  ‘Charmed life, Tyler.’

  ‘Cal wants to know if the place will hold.’

  Hemingway sat forward then, in a way so forceful a lesser man might have felt threatened.

  ‘If it does not, there won’t be many of Franco’s boys still standing. These madrilenos will fight for every stone. I have never met folk so fearless. It’s like they welcome death.’

  There was a look in the American’s eye then, and it was remarkably like envy. Draining his glass, he hauled himself to his feet, waved a big hand, and left.

  Cal Jardine was about to ask Hemingway why someone so successful was here in a war zone, but it died in his throat — it was a question he could have posed to himself. But the subject did surface later as they had a drink in a nearby bar called Chicote’s, where what journos were left in Madrid went to do what they did everywhere in the world, get plastered.

  Big Ernie was a topic of conversation it was hard to avoid, so telling was his presence, and, it had to be admitted, there was a degree of envy for his success and reputation, though not from Tyler Alverson. He had come to Spain as soon as the war began with his latest woman and not his wife, another reporter called Martha, who was filing for Collier’s Weekly, though by all accounts it was a pretty stormy relationship in which they competed more than cooperated.

  ‘So where is she, this Martha?’ Cal asked, as the press corps started singing a filthy drinking song that would see one of them having to down something disgusting as a forfeit.

  ‘Time to go, Cal, this can only get worse. And Martha — covering somewhere else, which is what she does after every screaming match.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Having brought his map with him, Cal was able to bring it up to date, and it was not looking good despite Hemingway’s confidence. To the north, the Nationalists, having in fact secured two bridges, should have been able to push deep into the University Quarter, a place of little domestic occupation, large buildings and lots of wide open spaces, sweeping grassy areas, plazas and wide boulevards, perfect for an army intent on avoiding the heavily built-up areas.

  The key now was to first contain them there and hold the rest of the bridges to the south, then to counter-attack, though he had no idea if the Republic had the means — it would not have done his thought process much good to have known neither did the Madrid military commanders. He had no concept of the depth of the fog surrounding operations but it took little time to find out.

  Alverson took him out just before dawn, the time when any assaults planned overnight would be launched, and they joined a stream of fighters crossing the wide Segovia Bridge, passing through sandbagged emplacements equipped with heavy machine guns and mortars and, only just visible, a pair of heavily camouflaged T26 Russian tanks. Cal was very tempted to look them over out of professional interest, they being some of the best of their kind in the world and reputedly more than a match for the German Panzers, but there was no time.

  The signs of actual battle were not long in showing: trees shattered by artillery fire, shell craters and even deeper, wider depressions where the Casa de Campo had been heavily bombed, and, incongruously, little bunches of flowers, no doubt marking where some relative had fallen, their bodies carried back into the city along with those merely wounded. Then there was the smell, of burning and cordite mixed with the gassy odour of churned-up ground, the only one seemingly out of place the strong stink of petrol.

  Florencia, when they found her, looked haggard, her face not only grubby but having lost its total fullness, and with bags formed under her eyes. Nor did she possess her usual fountain of energy; the kiss she gave Cal Jardine was as weary as the clasp she managed with her arms, and that was not easy, she being festooned with grenades attached to her overalls with sewn-on thread. Tyler Alverson merely got a nod.

  ‘Who’s in command?’

  She just shrugged and waved a lazy arm, this as the first distinctive phut came of a discharged mortar. Habit made Jardine duck low, which got him a look of disdain from those around Florencia; he would find out later they had endured days of this. The shell passed overhead to land with a crump on the road that led to the bridge; hitting the metalled surface the explosion was made more deadly by the lack of absorption in the solid roadway.

  The screams that arose were mixed; some from those caught in the blast, others shouting to get into the trees. Several more landed with a small radius behind them and Cal knew instinctively what was coming. The mortar team were isolating those in the front line preparatory to an infantry assault, and overhead they could hear, too, the drones of approaching bombers. Reassuringly the higher pitch of fighter engines soon materialised as they tried to engage the bombers well away from the city centre.

  ‘Where’s the store of grenades?’ he asked; if that was what she was doing, he would work with her.

  ‘There are no more, querido. Me and my fellow dinamiteros are wearing the last of our supplies.’

  ‘Ammunition?’

  ‘Low,’ she sighed, ‘very low.’

  ‘Then you should withdraw across the bridge and get behind the machine guns.’

  Some of the fire he knew so we
ll resurfaced then, as she spat out, ‘Never.’

  The mortar fire had not ceased but the range was steadily dropping, and as it did so he saw some of the men present throw back a canvas cover to reveal lines of dark-green wine bottles, each with a bit of protruding rag.

  ‘Petrol bombs, Cal,’ murmured Alverson.

  Never having seen them used, Jardine was thinking that fuel would have been better used laying a trap for what was coming: a shallow trench into which it could have been poured, then set alight once the enemy was over it. There was no point in that now, for it was obvious these worker fighters were not going to wait to be attacked — they intended to go forward first.

  ‘Have the Regulares got automatic weapons, Florencia?’

  ‘A few, not many.’

  ‘Any spare rifles?’

  She called to someone, another young woman, dark-skinned and just as weary, who came towards him with a Mauser and five rounds; even he understood the Spanish for ‘that is all’. Tactical sense made what they were planning to do — not just stand and fight, but attack — utter madness.

  It was made worse by there seeming to be no directing brain; the decision to move seemed like one arrived at by some collective osmosis. No order was given, but a mass of fighters, hundreds in number, armed with what weapons they had and many of these unreliable petrol bombs, began to move, not with haste but with a palpable and steely determination, several lit torches flaring in the line, this while Alverson’s camera clicked.

  ‘Do you come forward, Tyler?’

  ‘No, Cal, this is as far as I go.’

  A lone, young, male voice began to sing the anarchist song ‘A las Barricadas’, which Cal had heard in Barcelona, and it was soon taken up by others, rising to fill the woods through which they moved until it was being bellowed as they moved out into a large clearing, at the opposite side of which was the enemy, who, clearly under orders, fired off a rifle salvo. That it was effective made no difference; with a wild scream the mixed-sex militia just rushed forward.