Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  He was no longer bothering to keep his voice down, as if he hadn’t noticed I was there. Lluís said something I didn’t catch and he quickly retorted: “The cow? So it definitely had diphtheria? You can’t really blame me, my son; how could I ever imagine you would pinch it, or that you had Ramonet with you . . . No, better forget all about it; let Daisy rest in peace. After all, what can one expect from a cow? On the other hand, she will go far; her life starts now! This kind of lass doesn’t get going until she’s well past the fifty mark.”

  “Past the fifty mark? You’re way off target.”

  “Is it beyond you to get the age of these charmers right? A few weeks ago I asked her for her baptismal certificate with the excuse that I would need it if the business of her marriage in articulo mortis was to be of use if the situation changed. She was born in 1888, that’s a date easily remembered; do your sums, use your fingers if it’s the only way you know. And you’ll get a round fifty and almost to the day because she was born on 1 March. Fifty – the golden age for these charmers! She’ll be thunder and lightning – everything’s falling into place for her! It’s not easy to be widowed by a martyr . . . some husbands aren’t up to it, they need a little push on the sly. Llibert is another who will go far. There are no flies on him! Our brilliant comrade! What’s that? What did you ask? Of course! Him too! If I never said anything it was because I thought you must have had some idea . . . Yes, of course! What did you think? You refuse to believe me? Have you ever believed me, my son? . . . 1888 is a date easily remembered: the First International Exhibition in Barcelona! The big attraction at the time was the captive balloon: everyone was queuing up to climb aboard . . . What? You’ll never believe that the lady of the castle was born in the days of Rius i Taulet? Well, my boy, I swear it is true: I saw her baptismal certificate! It’s hardly my fault if you always refuse to believe me. Alright then, I’ll repeat my prophecy so you’ll remember it one day: these are the people who’ll be dividing up the cake. You and I won’t! We’ve swallowed too much dirt; we’ve smelt too much burnt flesh; we’ve scratched too many itches; the trenches leave a mark that never fades; everybody will avoid us. On the other hand, our brilliant comrade Llibert . . . and if I were to tell you that, already . . . You’ve never believed in my prophecies; time will make you change your mind. When you see the shop windows in Sant Antoni full of Queen Isabel furniture . . . yes, I’ve made this prophecy several times: after the end of the war, the Queen Isabel style will be back in fashion. What does that have to do with the war? How should I know? I prophesy, full stop. Queen Isabel furniture and the complete works of Eugeni d’Ors! Yes, once the war is at an end, you’ll see the complete works of Eugeni d’Ors everywhere! You’ll find them in your soup! Why are you pulling such a face? Have you never heard of one Eugeni d’Ors? Does he have nothing in common with diphtheria? But, my dear, we can’t spend our lives talking about diphtheria; now I’m talking about Eugeni d’Ors, that scumbag . . .”

  •

  Back in Santa Espina, Lluís closeted himself with Picó. Then I helped him pack his bags. Trini sobbed uncontrollably.

  “They’ll act as if they saw nothing,” said Picó, who’d just made a call on the field telephone. “We’ll report you as missing. But you need to look lively.”

  Carrying the boy swaddled in her arms, Trini climbed into the brougham; Lluís hugged Picó.

  “You know how much . . .” He didn’t finish his sentence, perhaps for fear he might add something trite. He jumped into the brougham and gripped the reins. Picó and I had walked out to the cart track, but Lluís said nothing. He didn’t even give us a glance. Nor did Trini, wrapped in a large blanket with the boy pressed against her bosom. The brougham rattled furiously downhill and disappeared out of sight round the first bend.

  I slept the night in Santa Espina.

  A hellish din woke me in the morning just before the first light of dawn. It was 9 March 1938.

  Enemy artillery had opened fire across the whole of the dead front that was occupied by our brigade and the brigades to our north and south. At least that’s what it roughly looked like from one of our observation posts; Picó had hardly slept that night, preparing the ground and telephoning battalion headquarters; he’d loaded the machine guns onto our mules and taken up positions with the entire company along the ridge. He’d instructed me to sleep, then headed to Villar at dawn and joined my lieutenant, but rather than take the track to Villar I’d taken the track to their positions.

  I found Picó on one of the crags they called observation posts from where we could see a string of explosions along the curling front line of republican troops, far to the north and south; the artillery shelling was heaviest to the south and was supported by small squadrons of aeroplanes that flew back and forth in growing numbers as daylight broke.

  “That lot is hitting the flatfooted brigade,” he said in an unfamiliar voice; he wasn’t wearing his dentures.

  An hour later the commander arrived and trained his big binoculars on the massive bombing raids attacking the flatfooted brigade; he was soon joined by the doctor and sergeants and soldiers belonging to the general staff. For the moment not a single shrapnel bomb had fallen on our battalion’s trenches, as if they’d been forgotten; we watched the line of dust and smoke curl and heard the blasts as if they didn’t affect us.

  “La loca” was the nickname our soldiers had given to the latest ultra-rapid field gun the enemy was beginning to deploy; it wasn’t heavy calibre, but shot at a rhythm similar to a machine gun. Needless to say, after demolishing the barbed-wire defences and parapets of the flatfooted brigade, “la loca” and their aircraft came to devastate ours. Bombs and shells pummelled our trenches, which collapsed in places as the survivors, splattered with mud, fled them. The enemy aeroplanes flew very low – we had no anti-aircraft guns – cluster-bombing and shelling our barbed wire fences and sandbags to bits. They’d finished the job before noon.

  Our fortifications had been totally destroyed: parapets devastated, machine-gun nests blown up by mortar fire and bombs. Our men were still holding up on the ground, protecting themselves behind what little cover they could find: tree trunks, rocks, scattered sandbags. They thought that when the infernal artillery fire stopped and the enemy infantry finally appeared, they’d be able to fight them off with hand grenades. They’d fought them off so often in the past, before they’d encountered these new elements.

  Now the fire from “la loca” and the squadrons of bombers shifted north; bombs and shells suddenly stopped raining down on us. It was the silence that preceded the enemy infantry attack; we took advantage of the lull to collect our wounded. The doctor, stretcher bearers and I were engaged in this when the enemy appeared.

  Their tanks came first. A mass of small mountain tanks supported the advancing infantry, surprising us completely: at the time we didn’t even know of tanks so light that they could scale mountains.

  And the rout . . .

  I ran as fast as the next man. There was a heady smell of dense forest, sweat and gunpowder. Groups of fusiliers were fleeing in utter disorder. Someone next to me shouted: “A mortar shell blew his head off,” another said, “Did you see those tanks?” I’d lost sight of the doctor; I’d lost my way and didn’t know where the doctor, stretcher bearers and wounded were. It was a ghastly shambles, a senseless endless nightmare. I sat down, suddenly wanting to weep, because I was thinking of one of the wounded we’d had to abandon, calling out to his mother.

  A tiny tank suddenly appeared in front of me, perhaps one of those small ones that had advanced quicker than the others and lost its way in the woods. It moved along the small ridge in my line of vision, slowly, like a caterpillar on a precarious branch; I looked at it as if bewitched. It seemed so peculiar against that landscape, as surprising as a tram might have been. It was then I realised that I was alone – just me and the armoured vehicle. To my right a tall almond tree in blossom was a splash of bright white on a small patch of earth; the tank’s toy cannon rel
eased a shell that sped above the ground, uprooted a bush of rosemary by my feet and exploded in the distance. The tank was less than fifty metres away. I broke into a run.

  I ran and ran, until I was out of breath. Then I collapsed on the grass.

  “See how they run,” said someone behind me. “Their tanks have sown panic. Why are they such a big deal? They’re only machines! If we’d kept our cool we could have turned them over, if we’d put bombs under their transmissions. If we’d had a bit more culture . . .”

  Without his dentures, his face wore the expression of a sardonic old farmer; he was quietly filling his pipe. Then I spotted the mules at the bottom of a ravine, the machine guns already mounted on their saddles.

  “There’s not a soul left on the ridge,” he added after a few puffs of pipe smoke. “Only corpses. The fusiliers didn’t give us any cover. They beat it in total disorder. Every man for himself! We must establish contact with the commander, supposing he . . .”

  Then we saw the armoured vehicles once again; six or seven had just appeared, silhouetted against the sky. They opened fire against the column of mules; it was time to retreat.

  Finding the commander was no easy matter. It was as if the earth had swallowed up the routed battalion. Men and mules, we walked for hours and met no-one. Hour after hour after hour. Night was already falling when we heard mutterings in a cave near a village called Castelfort; it sounded like a community of monks at their rosary prayers.

  We found the commander inside. He was sitting on the ground, surrounded by the doctor and soldiers of the general staff; an oil lamp illuminated the weird scene. It was very weird, given that they were in fact at their rosary prayers while, in the distance, to the north, you could hear the dull, interminable thunder of cannon fire.

  “Do you know the ora pro nobis?” the commander asked by way of a welcome, and without waiting for our reply, he continued the loud litanies.

  Picó pushed me out of the cave. He said nothing, but you could see he was annoyed. He led me to the top of a small outcrop of rocks, from where we could see, in the distance, to our south, a line of dust about seven or eight kilometres long that wasn’t raised by cannon fire. In the last glimmer of twilight I managed with the help of my telescope to make out a motorised column inside that dust cloud being transformed into a magical halo by the dying light.

  It was an interminable convoy of troop-carrying trucks, like small toys in the distance. Toy trucks full of lead soldiers . . . They were crawling along.

  “This bold advance would cost them dear if our brigades were able to get their act together; it would be so easy to cut off their retreat! But you’ve seen the state they’re in, plastered out of their minds . . .”

  The commander shouted to us from the entrance to the cave: “Orders from the division, on to Lomillas!”

  The field telephone line was still working and we were managing contact with the division. Lomillas was a village far to our rear and we headed straight there.

  We’d just fallen asleep when we were rudely woken by reveille. Commander Rosich wanted to dig out a trench before dawn and he’d climbed up to the belfry of the village church to get some idea of the lie of the land; he was accompanied by the doctor and two of the clerks from the general staff. The four of them – the commander, doctor and two clerks – reeked of rum, talking and gesticulating excitedly.

  I stayed with Picó, who was looking for a good spot to set up his machine guns. The sun was beginning to rise; there was a plain before us, its far boundary an advancing cloud of dust.

  “Their cavalry,” said Picó, looking through his binoculars. “If they give us time to set up our machine guns, we’ll mow them down – like clockwork!”

  He started giving out orders; it was already too late. The Moorish cavalry had begun their charge – they were Moors we could now see perfectly well without binoculars. Our men were in flight yet again; it was all screams, clouds of dust, confusion and contradictory orders. Groups of soldiers ran to and fro and we couldn’t tell whether they were ours or the enemy’s. I’d have run off like everyone else if it hadn’t been for the presence of Picó, whose calm demeanour steadied me. He ordered them to load the machine guns back on the mules as if he were solely worried about not losing a single weapon.

  Once again we hadn’t a clue where the commander was. Picó and I marched at the head of the column of mules and argued that we couldn’t believe he’d stayed in the belfry since he must have caught sight of the Moorish cavalry in plenty of time from up there. As calm and canny as ever, Picó let his instincts guide him: he found a deep narrow ravine where we slipped down and hastened away from Lomillas, “away from their line of sight and fire”. Scattered groups of fusiliers kept joining us; they shouted out incoherently and nervously: “They’ve killed the lieutenant”, or, “They cut us off”, or “Nobody lived to tell the tale”. Picó took it all calmly: “If they’d cut you off, you wouldn’t be here now.” He listened to the most catastrophic news those fugitives brought us as if he knew it all and it even formed part of his plans. He issued curt orders in a most deadpan voice and if you’d looked at him and heard him you’d have said he’d anticipated everything well in advance, that nothing ever took him by surprise. His sense of calm was contagious; the wandering, panic-stricken bands of men we found on our way soon became disciplined and self-confident simply by seeing and hearing him. They let him scold them like schoolchildren being nagged by their teacher and kept joining our column, which grew in number by the hour. A battalion stricken by panic is as chaotic as the delirium you’re in when your temperature reaches forty degrees: Picó gradually managed to bring a little coherence to that chaos. His instinct hadn’t played tricks on him and never did. The ravine turned out to be really long and not the impasse I’d dreaded: it was a genuine covered path, as he had predicted. When we reached a good spot he divided up the men following us – a hundred or so – and positioned the machine guns: “We badly need a rest. We’ve been on the hoof for twelve hours and didn’t sleep last night. But rest has first to be earned.”

  In effect, the enemy soon reared its ugly head, though it can only have been a scouting party: it only needed a brief skirmish, a short barrage from our machine guns to see them off and leave us in peace for a few hours.

  Picó wanted to continue our retreat as soon as dawn broke.

  “We’ll catch up with the commander in Malluelo,” he said. “That’s where they must have concentrated all the battalion’s remaining strength.”

  There wasn’t a single soul, military or civilian, alive in Malluelo. The middle of the street was strewn with a pile of random objects, including a huge, surprising electric pianola; the houses were empty and open to the world. While we searched them for any sign of food, heavy-calibre shells began to fall on the village; the poorly built houses collapsed around us. Picó gave the order to evacuate, though the soldiers protested – wracked by hunger, they wanted to continue raiding pantries.

  When we were leaving the outlying houses behind, a crazed man in tattered rags stumbled out of an animal pen and threw himself at Picó’s feet: “Captain, in God’s name!” he shouted. “Some faces I recognise at last! I was hiding in there under a pile of dung . . .”

  It was one of the clerks in the general staff who’d climbed up the belfry in Lomillas with the commander.

  “Where’s the commander?” Picó asked him.

  “Done for!”

  “What do you mean ‘done for’?”

  “Percolated!”

  He was frantically scratching himself, as if he’d caught a whole brigade of lice and ticks in the dung within that pen.

  “Percolated? Speak plainly for once! Who are you talking about?”

  “Him, the commander!”

  “Fuck off,” retorted Picó, who couldn’t stand clerks, particularly that character, a sergeant who had been, back in the day, a stalwart of the “republic of the baby’s bottle”; the man looked deranged, he had turned a bright red. His days�
�� old beard was black and prickly.

  “They trapped us; they surrounded the village,” he shouted nervously. “Lomillas, you know the village I mean. Their cavalry, you know which I mean, the Moorish cavalry, those bastards . . . We were up in the belfry . . . What a racket! What scum! The other clerk and I stretched out flat, but the commander poked his head through the arch and was firing his pistol; so was the doctor. The others responded from down in the square with their Mausers and the bullets ricocheted off the bells, which rang with festive chimes!”

  “What happened to the commander?”

  “He soon used up his ammunition.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He stood up on the ledge” – at that very moment the man managed to extract a fat tick from his hairy chest – “and climbed up holding onto the bell clapper and . . .”

  A frenzied burst of laughter stopped him dead; he was splitting his sides and tears were rolling down his cheeks . . .