Not Just a Soldier’s War

by Not Just a Soldier's War (retail) (epub)

  The offensive strategy was, as David Hatton had told Archie Archer, essential to give the Republic a much needed boost to its morale, but no matter what season had been chosen for the fight to retake the town of Teruel, conditions would still have been bad for both sides. Teruel is situated at an altitude of 915 metres. It has hot, dry summers, and extremely cold winters.

  * * *

  Captain Ken Wilmott, his ears plugged with bits of chewed paper against the constant bombardment, made his way from blasted building to blasted building. Like a bloody ant, he thought, as he recalled the stop-go and zig-zag route an ant takes to reach its goal. One of 40,000 Popular Front ants. Rumour had it that there were less than half that number trying to hold on to the provincial capital. The street-fighting was bitter, fiercer than any Ken Wilmott had ever experienced, and the sub-zero temperatures were even harder to take than the sun. At least in Teruel there was no thirst to drive men mad enough to suck filthy mud; here in Teruel your own breath could freeze on your eyebrows. Here in the streets of Teruel, snow fell fast and thick and lay deep and treacherous.

  With his platoon close behind him, using a ruined building for cover, Ken Wilmott waited for the next opportunity to advance another street length. What the hell am I supposed to do? He had gained officer rank by virtue of being next in line when others were killed or injured. If I get out of this, I’m going to get officer training, or give it up. Having tasted leadership, he liked its flavour.

  ‘I thought this was supposed to be a walk-over,’ a voice called from behind him.

  The captain grinned. ‘Still alive aren’t you, Grimble?’

  ‘Can’t rightly say at the moment, Captain. I think I’ve got brass monkey trouble.’

  Somebody else shouted: ‘Stick a glove on it.’

  ‘What, and have my fingers drop off?’

  ‘Trust Grimble to make the intelligent choice, you can’t fire a rifle with your prick.’

  A voice with an American accent joined in. ‘Can’t you Limeys do anything about your sense of humour?’

  ‘Nah, Yank, if we wasn’t all idiots we’d be back home putting up the holly and mistletoe.’

  ‘OK, my lot. Here we go again, “Out in the cold, cold snow-ow-ow…”’

  Along with a burst of machine-gun fire came the blast and crump of a bomb or an artillery shell. Ken Wilmott was in no position to know which, for the roof of the burnt-out ruin he and six others had been using as a vantage point fell in on him. Had he not been the leader and already racing to the next bit of cover, he too might have been buried beneath many feet of rubble. As it was, he was blown clear.

  Ken lay in the bitter snow for, it seemed to him, a very long time. At last, dazed and chilled to the point of strangeness, he was helped to a first-aid station set up in a shattered school some way back from the fighting. Scavenged wood was alight in an iron stove giving out a fierce heat from its sides. The walking wounded clustered around it, their faces burning, their backs freezing. From time to time they would rotate themselves like meat on a spit and roast the other side.

  Ken Wilmott eased off his boots and socks, looked at the toes of his left foot and knew that this was frost-bite. He had already seen dozens of cases. A contingent of Republican troops had been sent directly from fighting in a warmer sector and were still kitted out in summer clothing. As he was trying to pull on a sock, a man, his left hand wrapped in a bloody field dressing, said, ‘I say, old man, like to have a couple of these footie things? My grandmother sends me them. You wear them next to the skin, socks on top.’

  ‘Thanks, they look all right.’

  ‘They are, warm as toast. She makes them herself, buys skiver leathers and keeps her men-folk supplied. She recommends them for grouse shoots on the Scottish moors.’ His laugh was strained and a bit unnatural. ‘Grouse shooting. All that damned waste of shot, bloody birds never did any harm. I come from a long line of bird-shooters. The family’s name’s Gore. Gore bloody Gore, rotten to the core.’ His laugh ended in on an hysterical cackle.

  Ken Wilmott was intent only on his own state of mind as he pulled on the soft, chamois sock, followed by the two woollen ones. Two of his toes still felt dead, but at least he might not lose any more while he was waiting to get the bad ones seen to. ‘That’s better. Thank your gran when you write to her.’ They touched fingers in lieu of a handshake. ‘Ken Wilmott, acting Captain, Fifteenth Brigade.’

  ‘Rich Hatton, British Battalion, but God only knows which bit of it. We keep re-forming.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘La Granja. Brunete. Belchite. Now Teruel.’

  ‘It looks as though we’ve been following one another around. Were you at “Mosquito Hill”?’

  ‘What brigader wasn’t at “Mosquito Hill”? God, the stink! I thought I’d never get it out of my nostrils. If I had the talent I’d paint a huge canvas and call it “Still Life with Maggots”.’

  ‘I got used to corpses years ago, part of the job before I came to Spain. Worst thing for me on “Mosquito Hill” was the thirst.’ With the care of an old soldier, Ken smoothed out the creases in his socks.

  ‘Why corpses? Were you a coroner, doctor or something?’

  ‘No, nothing posh, I’m a time-served undertaker. I never got to be able to ignore that smell, but after the first couple of weeks it never turned my stomach. There were times when we would get a really bad one, a run-away from a mental home died in hiding, you know, that wasn’t too sweet. When I was old enough to do pall-bearing, I could never hear that bit about “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” without it going through my mind that before it ever gets to dust it’s got some pretty foul stages of decomposition to go through first.’

  ‘First undertaker I’ve ever met. Interesting. Not for me, though. Poacher turned gamekeeper, is that it? Or the other way round.’ He grinned, almost a grimace. ‘Sorry, thought I was about to say something witty about your association with the dead. Not funny. Sorry.’

  ‘It might be funny when you think about it. What did you do prior to joining the Internationals?’

  ‘Photographer and film-maker. Factual stuff, not Hollywood.’

  ‘I know another chap who does that, came across him a couple of times. Last time was when I was having a wound treated in Madrid, this chap was doing some photos for Picture Post. I asked him to send one to my brother. It was the Madrileño women coming back from the front line.’

  ‘Hatton. David Hatton. That’s who it would be.’

  ‘You’re right, it was.’

  ‘I’m his older brother, by fifteen minutes.’

  ‘You’re twins?’

  Richard Hatton frowned. ‘You don’t own a mirror, I suppose, Captain?’

  ‘Just a bit of polished steel. My stuff’s been blown up so many times, there isn’t much I do have these days. Want to borrow it?’

  Richard Hatton studied his reflection for about thirty seconds. ‘Well, and no wonder. Davey and I aren’t identical, but there’s never been any mistaking that we’re twins.’ He handed back the little polished plate and grinned. ‘You married or anything, old son?’

  ‘No. Just as well when you see.’

  ‘I’ve got a… she’s… if you’ve got a Spanish girl who… you can’t imagine what they do to dissident women. They keep them around for a while before they execute them.’ He held up his wounded hand. ‘That’s my fucking trigger-finger gone. No more grouse shoots for Hatton Senior.’ Tears were trickling down his face. He swiped them away with the dressing which left a gory smear right across his face. ‘When they execute the women, they rape them first. The Republic’s done for. You know that. I know that. Every man jack of us knows that. Even pregnant women… the Moors… the bloody Moors. You know what they do? They’ll execute white women and rape them after. Every man jack of us knows…’

  ‘On your feet, Private Hatton. Come on, man. Up! Up!’

  Heads turned, but none of the walking wounded huddled around the fire could raise any real curiosity. Richard Hatton
stood, his wounded hand held inside his coat. The captain picked up his own and the other’s belongings and led the way outside. Ken had seen this before. It was one of the signs of breaking down. They called it shellshock in the last war: men at the end of their tether, men who had looked over the edge and into the abyss. Often they didn’t try to draw away.

  He spoke briskly as he helped the distraught brigader. ‘I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t report you. Talk like that is treason. Do you want to end up dead by one of our own bullets? We are going to help these people hang on to their bloody country if it kills us.’ It had only taken a minute standing in the blizzard for them to become snow-covered. His feet half-afire, half-numb, made him stumble, but he put a kindly arm around Richard Hatton’s neck. ‘Oh, come on, man, you look fit to drop. You’ve probably lost more blood than you realize. You’re talking such crap. Come on, I’ll see if I can get somebody to take a look at you.’

  The captain, hefting all the bags and moving unsteadily on his frozen feet, led the way to where the field-hospital was set up. A nurse, her white apron hanging below an army greatcoat, was just disappearing through a canvas hanging. Ken called after her in his halting Spanish.

  She turned, her Red Cross scarf, white against her black skin, sprouted incongruously from beneath a knitted cap. ‘It’s OK, Captain, I speak English real good.’ When she smiled, it seemed to the captain that her large, dark eyes glowed warm enough to unfreeze him.

  ‘He’s a bit off his rocker,’ Ken explained.

  ‘An emergency? Yeah, you both look all-in. You want to let me take a look at that hand?’ She threw the blanket she had been carrying around Richard Hatton’s shoulders and then looked briefly at his blood-soaked dressing. ‘OK, what say you come through to… just lean on me and we’ll get one of the doctors. Like to sit and wait there, Captain? I’ll be back in a couple a’ shakes. Don’t put your feet close to the stove.’ Again that same smile of warmth and confidence.

  The smell of death hadn’t reached here yet, but the smells that preceded it – ether, carbolic and blood running, dripping and oozing away – pervaded the cold air. Ken Wilmott sat on the bags and wondered about his toes. If they were too far gone, they’d have to come off. If they came off, then he’d be out of the war, though not necessarily, unlike the other bloke whose trigger-finger was probably not there. There was always the field-kitchen. I wouldn’t want to be behind the lines. Better the hole in the ground in Aragon, or the frozen trench he’d just vacated than the cook-house. This was not the first time that his subconscious mind had sneaked in the question: Are you getting addicted to rifles and ammunition?

  The nurse came back. ‘Is he one of your men?’

  ‘No, we just happened to be seated together over there, you know, where the walking wounded are waiting. I just know his name. I think he’s with the Fifteenth Battalion. Is he badly hurt?’

  ‘He should be OK, depends. Did he say when it happened?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It looks a day or two old to me, could be infected. Dr Vogel is attending to it.’

  ‘How bad? Will he have to go back home?’

  ‘Two fingers are already gone, the thumb doesn’t look too good, he’s lost a great deal of blood, but there are supplies of whole blood at the hospital. We’ll get him there as soon as we can. Does some of that stuff belong to him? Guess I’d better get somebody to put it on his stretcher.’

  ‘Right. Thanks, nurse. I hope he’ll be all right.’

  ‘At least he has another hand, that isn’t always the case.’ She made another note. ‘Say, what about you, didn’t you say you were over in the waiting-room?’

  Ken Wilmott smiled. ‘You mean the one without the roof and no windows?’

  She smiled back. ‘The one with the central heating. You waiting for treatment?’

  He shrugged. ‘Probably. Not urgent, I think I got frost-bite.’

  He noticed that she wore a shiny new ring on her wedding finger. The gold band wavered and went out of focus. He might have guessed, they were always married, the ones who attracted him most. Maria Sanchez – not married, but betrothed, promised. Such a repressive and archaic practice in a country that was living its own revolution, that was giving women freedom. ‘I am promised to Jose. Jose is gone to the front.’ Perhaps he should have behaved with less decency and more passion. He had known hardly any black women; there was Lizzie Naylor who had been in the girls’ part of the school. Frizzy Lizzie. A hundred years ago he had been at school with Frizzy Lizzie Naylor. Queer not ever thinking of Lizzie as being black, just as having all that hair.

  For the second time in twenty-four hours, Ken Wilmott became unconscious.

  Eleven

  Eve Anders peered through the blizzard, the heavy windscreen-wipers battling against the build-up of frozen snow, so that every few minutes she had to lean out of the side window and scrape some of it away with her fingers clad in thick driving gloves. She wore a heavy skirt that met the tops of her solid lace-up boots two sizes too large to allow for the wearing of seaman’s thigh-length socks. These she had recently received from home along with a much-delayed letter in which her brother Ray had written rapturously about the baby. She smiled. As if there was only one baby in the world. To Ray and Bar there probably was.

  We have named her Bonnie. She has dark eyes, long eyelashes and thick black curling hair just like her Mummy’s. Apart from the baby, we’ve been so busy moving to Wickham. It’s coming up to Christmas, so we shall take baby Bonnie over to see her Granny and Grandpa Barney. Duke came up to the farm one day. I was on duty and he was gone before I got home. Bar reckons he’s really in the money. Got some horses at stud apparently, and also got a training stable and looks after racing horses for rich owners, most of them Indians and the like who only come to England for the big meetings. You can guess how Aunt May is, you would think that there wasn’t another baby in the world like Bonnie – well of course there isn’t. We talk about you a lot. Bar doesn’t say too much about it, you know her, she always looks on the bright side. She says it’s good that you are leading the life you chose for yourself, but I know she misses you. We talk about our Ken too. We were sent a photo of him. Ted has bought it a frame to put on the mantelshelf. Nobody would recognize him. We were only saying, he looks so different that even though you are both out there, you could easy pass him in the street and not know he was our Ken.

  The tyres of her heavy vehicle lost their grip on the icy surface for a second, sending her heart racing and forcing her to forget the lovely letter that held Ray’s voice in every line.

  Letters from Ken were sporadic and came without any reference to where he was. Over the last few weeks she had seen a lot of casualties, men and women who would never walk again, talk again or have children or be able to think straight. It would be so easy to lose heart. Too often now she would awaken in the early hours feeling low in spirits. Then she would tell herself what a wet she was and push herself into another day.

  When she was being realistic, Eve could see that what had appeared to be such an idealistic and noble cause had become a muddle in which people’s lives were tossed away. And yet, there was no way to stop the fascists taking over what was left of the democratic Spanish Republic except by fighting back. She hated the impossibility of the situation. It was in her nature – as her family used to say – to go off like a fire-cracker in all directions, but that had been when problems came singly and it was in her power to do something about them.

  People like me won’t make an atom of difference between winning and losing. So why stay? Perhaps what mattered was the presence of outside support to boost the morale of the Spanish people. Why not? I love it when I meet Italians of the Garibaldi regiment. It makes my day to be with Americans of the Abraham Lincoln.

  The roads were treacherous and busy with every sort of military vehicle. The battle for Teruel was different, she had felt the optimism everywhere she went. At Teruel the Republic had taken the offensive.
Tanks had recently arrived from Russia, raising the spirits of everyone who saw them roaring towards the front.

  She no longer hankered after an ambulance or mobile hospital. The one she had been driving until recently had been hit by a shell and hauled back to Albacete. Now she was on almost permanent call, driving one of the big trucks she loved. There was never enough time, enough food, enough sleep; she was for ever being de-loused and had cut her hair again; she had chilblains and she was so thin and her diet so unbalanced that her periods had almost stopped and her skin often erupted. She did a regular run to some places, so that her truck with its crudely painted ¡No pasarán! along the sides was easily recognizable.

  People greeted her with warmth and enthusiasm. If, as they said, it made their day to see her arrive with much-needed supplies, it certainly made Eve’s; she had never felt so fulfilled in her young life.

  As she peered out through the ever-reducing clear area of windscreen, she saw a name-board and direction arrow.

  Thank God. In spite of the blizzard and dreadful road conditions, she had made good time. As she drove into the makeshift vehicle compound, a line of ambulances was leaving. She never quite knew how to take that sight – a lot of casualties, or a lot of saved lives? It was the other trucks she hated, the ones taking away the dead. Nobody had yet given her that task. She hoped they wouldn’t, but if they did then that is what she would do.

  As she opened the cab door, she heard sounds of gunfire and shelling coming from the direction of Teruel. At least the loyalists were on the attack this time, and an attack was a good sign. The Russian tanks on the road, and the battle being taken to the Nationalists were good signs.

  The strangest things could change one’s mood.