by Joan Sales
And recently I’d been feeling as weary and disillusioned as that grey, surly crowd. The disappearance of Soleràs, soon to be followed by Lluís’ had made me feel so alone, so alone in the brigade without them – my God, how lonely I felt!
Soleràs had disappeared all of a sudden towards the end of October. One fine day we heard no more news of him, as if the earth had swallowed him up. From then on, Lluís was a changed man and always in a vile mood that we put down to the disappearance of his lifelong close friend. And then in the course of the last bloody skirmishes he too disappeared. Some assumed he was dead, others that he’d been taken prisoner. As for Soleràs, we assumed he’d gone over to our rivals, the flatfooted brigade, but we’d just learned that the flat feet had no news of his whereabouts either.
Without Lluís and Soleràs, I felt the brigade had no meaning. We were now aware, with chapter and verse and no room for doubt, of the many horrors that had been perpetrated in the rear while we were at the front; the church burning and priest murdering had stopped months ago, but they’d left bad memories that could only be erased by the re-establishment of public worship. The months slipped by and the hope began to fade that had kept us going in our worst moments of anarchist madness: a hope that the lack of order was transitory, that the autonomous government would reassert its authority and give the war the only meaning that could make it worthwhile in our eyes: the defence of what united us, of what could have united us against all the odds – the threat to our land. The months slipped by and the “strange cries” from the beginning of the war were replaced by other strange cries. We were at a loss, understood nothing, exhausted and disillusioned. What was the point of so much toil, sacrifice and spilt blood? What were we defending? Why hadn’t the freedom to worship our Catholic religion – the religion of the majority of Catalans? – been re-established? There were times when one felt remorse or at least doubts about belonging to the republican side; I’d felt this keenly from the moment I was so alone, without Lluís or Soleràs.
Without them I’d sunk into depression and nothing could lighten my mood. Worse, the war was going downhill for us as one debacle followed another. Our grenadiers and infantry had to launch attacks on enemy trenches without any protection from tanks or the air as they edged forwards, and were lucky to receive occasional support from our artillery. They’d find barbed wire intact and had to cut it with pruning shears under crossfire from enemy machine guns. Some were shot to shreds and left hanging on the thorns of the wire to dry out in the sun and icy winds of the Aragonese steppes.
Even so there was a lull I particularly remember because of certain cabins I’ll describe in a moment: a lull that was short-lived. We believed the front had stabilised after so much coming and going and that we would spend the winter in the lines we had finally occupied.
Autumn was advancing apace and brought one downpour after another. The parched landscape we had experienced for months now turned into a quagmire in which men and mules found it more and more difficult to get purchase. The mules sank to their girths in the low gullies along the floors of ravines where streams flowed full to their banks. If the downpours continued – and everything pointed in that direction as the clouds gathered thicker and darker – the mud would make it impossible to carry out operations in the area: orders went out to the battalions to camp down as best they could and prepare to winter there.
The soldiers in the brigade’s four companies began to organise cabin-building competitions. Now the challenge was not to improvise shacks, as in the summer or when we thought we’d only need them for a few days, but shelter to protect us from the great rainstorms that had begun and from the snow and ice that might catch us in the future. The votes went to two cabins that were as different as the regions in our country. Six soldiers in the 1st Company, all from the Segarra, built a dry-stone vaulted hut so skilfully, given we had no mortar, that you’d have thought it was a stone vault – the last trace of a medieval building – had it not been for its modest proportions. They’d used clay to fashion the arch into exactly the right shape and fit; once the vault was closed, they removed the clay and used it as thick rain-proof covering for the outside. They erected more dry-stone walls at the end of each opening in what was a kind of tunnel, leaving a gap in one to serve as door, window and chimney. We were astonished by how quickly they’d erected such a solid refuge which looked like it could withstand rain, snow and ice, and even mortar shells and shrapnel bombs if it ever came to that.
This construction won votes because it was so solid, while the other attracted votes because it was so ingeniously light. It was put up by seven soldiers from the 3rd Company, who were from the Cerdanya, in the style of shelters erected by charcoal burners in the Pyrenees when they had to spend weeks in the woods keeping an eye on their stacks of green holm oak. They dug twelve trunks in deep; these supported each other like flying buttresses, six against six, after they had cut holes in one set where the others could slot. They put a mass of tangled branches over this frame, on top of which in turn was placed layer after layer of leafy pine branches with cones that were linked like roof tiles; the leaves sloped downwards to drain away water, even in torrential downpours.
Captain Picó’s self-esteem was challenged and he wanted to build one too: “It would be quite wrong if the captain weren’t as handy as his troops.” Impartiality forces me to confess that if the construction he imagined and built was much grander and more comfortable than the others, it was all down to tricks of the trade; it had none of the elegant simplicity that we admired in the creations of the men from the Segarra and the Cerdanya.
First he used a spade to dig out the ground floor of his building, which he had conceived as circular in shape. Helped by a soldier and a machine gunner he dug a metre-deep hollow. He used a chisel and string attached to a stake in the ground to ensure the floor was completely circular; once they finished digging he looked for the dead centre, “because,” he added, “things have to be done properly: that’s why we are irrational beings.” My secondary-school geometry was still fresh in my mind so I gave him a helping hand, a display of culture that enhanced me in his eyes. He planted a trunk in that mathematical centre; as I’ve no reason to hide the fact after all these years, I must add that this trunk wasn’t cut in the woods. Whether it was to save time, or because he wanted them to match, all the trunks he used were posts from the telephone line to the nearby village, which was empty after the recent offensives and counteroffensives, so the line to it was out of order. He planted ten around the circumference and embedded an equal number of rafters between the trunks, with one in the middle, like so many spokes in a wheel; they were in fact rafters taken from ruined village houses. He put a layer of reed matting over the rafters he’d also stolen from those houses. Finally, he covered it all with a proper tiled roof. As he said, “I get the tiles for free.”
I used to visit on occasion and have to confess that the soldiers’ cabins blended into the landscape, whereas Picó’s peculiar construction simply jarred and, to tell the truth, even made you feel sick. It was far too high even though the posts were fixed in a hollow: he made walls by nailing old doors, beams and other wood scavenged from the ruins in between the posts. Perhaps the machine-gun captain’s outstanding qualities didn’t include aesthetic taste, though I never said as much to his face. He furnished the inside using all his wiles; old ammunition boxes supplied material for a table and even a bed he stuffed with straw – people strongly suspected the mattresses in the village were lice-infested as they’d apparently been used by enemy infantry before we seized it. The central post, bristling with hooks, acted as a clothes hanger and between it and the surrounding posts he placed a ring of stones on the floor where he lit his wood fire. That was the reason he’d wanted it to be so high: the smoke collected in the ceiling and slowly made its way out through a hole between the tiles. Even so, it was best to sit, or rather lie down, if you wanted to breathe tolerably unsmoky air; the moment you stood up, you got one hell
of a cough. Picó was worried by this drawback and didn’t rest until he’d found the solution in a sufficiently long, centimetres-wide pipe among the rubble, probably from some system of water pipes. He used wire to suspend the pipe from the ceiling, with one end over the hearth and the other poking out of a hole in the wooden wall. He didn’t set it vertically, as any of us might have thought necessary, but almost horizontally; we were filled with admiration when we saw the pipe draw the smoke and puff it out in big clouds like the chimney of a steam train.
He’d offer me breakfast if I got there at the right time. We were beginning to run very short of powdered milk; our breakfasts were usually black coffee that Supplies still managed to provide, though it was disgusting. He’d put a pan with a little egg on the embers and fry breadcrumbs, which he’d put on his tin plate and pour boiling coffee over. His red-hot soup of coffee and egg-fried breadcrumbs was very tasty, I will vouch for that: it had been his usual breakfast in his heyday as a foreign legionary in Africa, or so he said.
All these cabins had been built close to the trenches in muddy, rainy weather because it was thought best to avoid long walks between guard duty and relief. I can’t remember if I ever said that our machine-gun captain had huge corns, which meant he struggled to walk when it was wet, and he reckoned his corns could forecast the weather better than any barometer. I finally managed to tackle them at the beginning of that exceptionally wet autumn; until then all my suggestions had foundered on his stubborn decision to hang on to them. One day it was agreed that I’d bring the necessary tools the following morning; I would be the one to remove them. “If Dr Puig tries to touch me,” he’d threatened, “I’ll turn the company’s machine guns on him.”
When I appeared that morning, they told me he was in the trench. Unusually, the sun was shining and I found him chattering excitedly to two machine-gunners, not right inside the quagmire of the trench but sitting on the parapet sandbags. It was lovely sunbathing in that mellow autumnal light; with binoculars you could see the enemy trench three kilometres away. It was a good long way and the front was perfectly calm at the time. We decided to proceed to the operation there and then, and not in the muddy trench. I sat Picó down on an ammunitions box; the parapet broadened out at that point because it was where the machine-gun nest was positioned. He jokingly asked the two soldiers to stand up behind him and grip his shoulders tightly, “this is the first fucking operation I’ve ever had and I’m not sure how my reflexes will react.” I knelt down in front of him and very carefully began to eradicate the hardest of his extraordinary calluses. I heard him say: “Don’t be upset if I chuck you as far as the enemy trenches; it will only be a reflex action, nothing personal.” And then something happened that none of us were expecting.
A tremendous explosion blew up Picó’s cabin – it was, as I said, close to the trenches, like the others – and sent telephone posts, doors, planks and tiles flying. Shrapnel bombs devastated the other cabins, which were similarly blown to smithereens, and began to explode on the parapets, destroying them and bursting the sacks of earth. The expansion wave from one of these shrapnel bombs blasted the four of us into the bottom of the trench.
Picó and I struggled to our feet, bruised and battered by our violent fall; the two soldiers were dead. Bombs occasionally fell on the surrounding rocks and, as they couldn’t sink into soft clay like the others, lumps of dry shrapnel hurtled into the distance, whistling over our heads. Some whizzed into the trench and scored the wall like a blunt knife blade. This flying shrapnel had hit the two soldiers in the face because they were standing up, while Picó and I had survived because we were closer to the ground. The shelling continued and we knew it was only a warm-up by their artillery. An infantry attack would inevitable follow, as it was unlikely the enemy would otherwise waste so much powder on salvoes.
For the first time in the entire war the lust for blood went to my head, as it did to the others’ – to everyone.
Rather than try to join Dr Puig and the stretcher bearers, I stayed in the trench with Picó, and through a gap in the sandbags we saw small contingents of the enemy crawling towards us through the brush as if they’d suddenly dropped down near our barbed-wire fences. I was fascinated by the expressions of amazement rather than hate on their faces. Our machine gunners mowed them down as they tried to cut the barbed wire and pull themselves through between the wooden stakes. Their tanks and aeroplanes must have been engaged at a more crucial spot on the front, so that was probably just a “diversion” as they say in military jargon; at the time it was unheard of to attack entrenched positions without the support of tanks. Two of the soldiers had managed to slip through the barbed wire and were now on their feet shouting: “Don’t shoot! We’re coming over to you! Long live Russia!”
That cry ought to have seemed highly suspect, as odd and ridiculous as it did to us, but one of our lieutenant fusiliers from the 1st Company, a veteran who should have known better, put his head above the parapet and greeted them with a message of peace. One of the two climbed up on the sandbags as if to embrace him. His colleague stayed between the parapet and fence, aimed his Mauser and shot the lieutenant, who fell flat on his face in the muddy depths of the trench, a dead man. The first soldier, still standing on the parapet, now threw hand grenades at us; he pulled them out of a big bag by his side, scattering them as if he were sowing a field, while he urged his side to climb up and make the most of our disarray.
I have only hazy memories of what happened next. Picó had sat down behind the machine gun and was firing serenely but he soon emptied its chamber, though we had replacement guns, excellent Mausers, and a large box of hand grenades. Only six of us were left in that corner of the trench; Picó and I had each taken a Mauser and when the barrels were red hot from so much firing we switched them to allow them to cool; now and then we threw grenades at the enemy: “This’ll make your day,” shouted a strangely content Picó with every one he chucked. Those I threw didn’t explode; he had to show me how to release the safety catch a few moments before hurling them. I didn’t have a clue. I don’t know how I managed to shoot the Mauser as I’d never shot one before. All I do know is that I felt an excitement you can’t compare to anything else in this world.
We repelled that attack, though not the others which followed later from tanks, aeroplanes and much larger numbers of infantry. The line of trenches where we thought we were going to spend the autumn, if not the winter, was obliterated. The rout came next.
This may now seem difficult to understand – and it is – but I tried to go over to the enemy immediately after these exploits. When I think back now I see how incongruous that was. Perhaps war and peace are like sleep and wakefulness; when we’re awake we can’t recognise the man who was asleep a few moments earlier. The man in peacetime doesn’t understand the man at war: all these years later I’m as ashamed that I shot at them as I am that I tried to go over to their side so soon after.
Ours was part of the biggest debacle of that autumn. Entire brigades and divisions had fallen apart and all manner of soldiers were mixed up in a motley gang of fugitives from the front. It was total panic, a nightmare. I was one more stray among groups of panic-stricken fugitives. I saw only strange faces. I heard talk of divisions that were news to me: the Durruti, the Líster, and God knows which others. Nobody could tell me where our division was – it was equally unfamiliar to them – let alone our battalion or brigade. I spent days trying to find my bearings and my colleagues. In that chaos it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
And then one evening a medical captain “reclaimed” me and attached me to his company. I don’t really remember what division it belonged to, only that they were anarchists. This doctor-captain was tiny, a dry stick sporting a pencil-thin moustache that gave him a Don Juanish air, a Don Juan from a shanty town. He blinked all the time and told an endless stream of racy stories, usually starring a priest.
Why on earth would I have wanted to continue in that division, where I felt a tot
al misfit? I couldn’t stand the diet of scabrous jokes – it never varied – a minute longer. One night, when the Don Juan anarchist of a medic was snoring, I slipped silently out of bed and left the shack. I was carrying my haversack with the portable telescope I hadn’t yet lost: that happened in the last weeks of the war.
I started walking in the opposite direction to the troops in flight, all alone. There was mayhem in the area, so anything was possible. I walked throughout the night and nobody asked me where I was going.
The first light of dawn caught me in a juniper wood. I spent the day curled up in some kind of animal lair. The silence was intense and threatening and the solitude so oppressive I found the occasional stray bullet that whistled by strangely comforting company. At the time several kilometres separated the two armies and I was almost in the middle. I had four crusts of bread and four cans of condensed milk I’d snaffled from the anarchist battalion before scarpering on the quiet – enough to keep me going for four days.