Uncertain Glory

by Joan Sales

  “What’s so funny, you idiot?”

  For all Picó’s disapproval, he couldn’t stop convulsing; he barely managed to mouth these words: “Vintage 1902.”

  Picó looked at me and pointed a finger at his forehead.

  “Vintage 1902? What nonsense is that?”

  “Sauternes, captain! Vintage 1902 Sauternes! I swear! As he’d used up his bullets . . . he kept bawling ‘From the top of these pyramids forty centuries of history are looking down upon us,’ until he fell down with his hands clutching his belly.”

  Picó glanced at me silently once again.

  “What about the doctor?”

  “I haven’t a clue; he stayed up there. He and the commander had downed a bottle of rum for breakfast between them; a shell burst among the bells, as the other clerk and I crawled down the spiral stairs to the sacristy; concealed in the cupboard among the communion wafers we found —”

  “No more nonsense.”

  Night after night the remnants of the 4th Battalion beat a retreat through deserted village after deserted village following the machine-gun captain. We had no sense of the situation in general; we didn’t know where the other forces of our brigade, of our division might be; it was possible for us to conclude that the entire republican army had evaporated and that the hundred men following us were all that was left. We did know it must have been a sudden, general rout across the entire front; for example, we found bridges that were intact. Unless it was a case of incredible carelessness, there could be only one explanation: the sappers had had no time to blow them up – our lines must have melted away in a moment.

  We guessed that a large-scale disaster had broken the Catalan– Aragonese front at its weakest points; the dead fronts had been numbed by long hibernation; we guessed that, but wandered like a handful of ants lost in an interminable desert and nowhere did we find a trace of the other forces in our army. We walked by night, slept by day. One morning we camped dead tired outside a hamlet, as deserted as they all were, near an ancient bridge with many arches. Dawn broke and we wanted to sleep on for a few hours among the poplars on the river bank, we were so exhausted. We’d barely nodded off when Picó called for a blast on the bugle.

  “Just a hunch,” he whispered to me.

  We walked uphill for almost half an hour to a vantage point among the pines from where we could see the hamlet, bridge and riverside poplars. The sun’s slanting rays illumined the whole scene: the red stone castle and collegiate church stood out against the intense blue of the western sky, spotlit by the rising sun. We had only just lain down among the pine trees when we heard a distant hum that drew ever nearer. We didn’t see them, we only heard them; they must now have been overhead.

  Suddenly, a column of black dust rose silently from the bridge, towering high above poplars, hamlet, castle and church. Then we heard thunderous explosions. Fresh columns of smoke, fresh explosions: now we could see neither hamlet nor bridge nor poplars. Everything was immersed in a repugnant, dense black haze.

  “They’re shitting right where we were sleeping,” was Picó’s only comment before he went back to sleep.

  At dawn the next day we were walking along a high, bare plateau, searching for camouflage before the sun was too high in the sky, when a snitcher – the name soldiers gave the reconnaissance aircraft – appeared and circled above us. “We must find a wood before the fighters get here,” said the captain. They came quicker than expected. Three all told: more than enough to despatch a hundred straggling soldiers if their machine guns strafed us. At that very moment a sea breeze blew up and covered the plateau in mist; we walked for a long time, perhaps hours, in a mist that made us invisible and soaked us like cold drizzle. Not a single man lost his way.

  For food we collected everything we found in deserted villages. We were sometimes lucky and stumbled upon a communal bakery packed with dry bread, the last batch that the inhabitants had been forced to abandon in a rush. The houses were always empty; everyone had fled taking everything they could carry. There was also the last harvest of olives we found heaped under the trees on burlap sacks, or half sacked. They were large black bitter-tasting olives, and very nutritious.

  Then we came to the steppe. First we’d left the mountains, then the woods and finally the olive groves; we were now on vast, barren monotonous plains, the only vegetation as far as the eye could see being scant, spindly bushes of gorse and thyme. During the day we stayed as still as we could under the few shadows the treeless flatlands had to offer. Enemy aeroplanes passed to and fro overhead but never spotted us, we were such camouflage experts, and they never would have if it hadn’t been for the mules.

  Picó had decided to save the mules whatever the cost – they were vital for transporting machine guns and boxes of ammunition – as if his honour depended on it. One day at noon when the sun was almost at its zenith, aeroplanes appeared unexpectedly; we hadn’t heard the approaching drone and by the time we had noticed they were already overhead. I curled up into a ball as best I could under a solitary hawthorn bush. No part of me lay outside its shadow, while the machine gunners forced the mules to lie down and stay still under other scant shadows the landscape provided. Frightened by the whirring engines, one animal got to its feet and started to trot towards my hiding place; it stopped next to me. In the full light of the sun that animal caught a pilot’s eye; he started “telling the time”, as we called it, and was followed by the others. They zoomed down level with the ground and sprayed us with machine-gun fire, then immediately climbed back towards the horizon, described a circle, and returned – time and again – until they ran out of ammunition. On that occasion they “told the time” for a couple of hours that felt like centuries to me.

  However much their airpower chased us, we’d lost contact with the enemy on the ground days previously as much as we had with our own soldiers. Without the constant buzz of Junkers and fighters we’d have imagined we were the universe’s sole survivors. The steppe was never-ending; we didn’t march in a straight line but zigzagged wildly, following Picó’s inspired hunches. We walked – always at night – six hours to the north for example, then four to the east. The day after, when night fell, we resumed our march and would go five hours to the south, and another five eastwards. Sometimes we even turned back and headed west, never once fathoming what drove Picó’s topsy-turvy orienteering. If I asked him, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said “hunches”. All I can say is that his instinct never erred. He always managed to prevent his band of a hundred men being encircled and exterminated, men who trusted and followed him like a father; we forded rivers far from well-trodden paths and bridges that Picó avoided as much as he could. We’d sometimes see an intact bridge in the distance. Now and then we’d find piles of abandoned material, random items such as heliographs, angle gauges and other items we didn’t recognise at all; and often heaps of intact fragmentation grenades, their pins gleaming in the sun; and one day a huge, solitary 15.5 cannon in the middle of the bare plain.

  We skirted this jetsam from the vast shipwreck; it left us cold and we clearly couldn’t salvage it. Bits of human bodies would be quietly drying in the sun, scattered around that cannon, some a considerable distance away, apparently the bones of those mounting the gun that a bomb from an aeroplane had blown to pieces. Soon after, we came across a pile of bundles tightly wrapped in paraffin waxed paper we could easily have mistaken for bars of luxury soap. Picó picked one up: “TNT,” he said. “This is the stuff those bastard sappers should have used to blow the bridges up before they scarpered, but there you have it, cast aside like so many lumps of shit!”

  And lo and behold, a few days after we found the TNT our path was blocked by one of the widest rivers in Aragon; it was too deep to ford and Picó sent scouts upstream and downstream to look for a bridge. They returned to report that there was a wonderful bridge about four kilometres away and that they’d even found a contingent of sappers.

  “They told us to get a move on. They’ve been working o
n it for three days and expect to blow it up today.”

  It really was a magnificent modern bridge, and intact like all those we’d come across so far. Twenty or so men were working on it up to their waists in water under the orders of a lieutenant engineer. A couple of kilometres on the other side of the river we could see a hill covered in spindly juniper and pine, the only trees in that grey expanse stretching out before us. After talking to the lieutenant Picó told me to take our troops to that small wood we’d seen while he and five veterans stayed behind and helped the sappers with their taxing work. In fact the sappers had no need of assistance, as he knew very well, but he was dying to see how one blew up a big bridge from close up. He’d not have missed that show for anything in the world.

  The dawn light began to glow on the horizon to our east: from that isolated peak the surrounding plain seemed endless, the peace profound and the solitude absolute. Picó had instructed me to scrutinise the horizon to the west with my telescope as it was much more powerful than his binoculars. I could only see a stretch of land grey and monotonous as our despair, crossed by the deserted road. Suddenly I thought I heard a very distant rumble. Daylight was still too dim for me to make out any precise details through my telescope of what was happening twenty-five or thirty kilometres from my vantage point. I didn’t want to prompt Picó’s sarcasm by alerting him to what was mere anxiety on my part – anxiety that nevertheless I felt was gathering strength.

  The sun came out almost immediately, huge and red like a watermelon split down the middle, and I spotted something moving in the distance almost on the horizon.

  It was impossible to make out what it was; through my mariner’s glass – which I rested on a branch for stability – I could only discern small blobs moving forward very slowly: they brought to mind the almost invisible bacilli one can see under a microscope. I tried not to lose sight of them, but they disappeared for long periods as if they’d never existed. While I concentrated on seeing what I could, the twenty men in the contingent of sappers had emerged from under the bridge and were now calmly walking cross-country in small scattered groups. The affable lieutenant came to inform me that Picó and the five soldiers had stayed under the bridge: “They wanted to make sure the bridge was blown up at the right time,” he told me. “We’ve left everything ready – they only have to activate the electric wire to detonate the explosives.” “Isn’t that difficult?” “No, it’s easy,” he replied. “Very easy. And we must move on because we have work to do on the other side of the river.”

  I returned to my telescope and was surprised once again by the sight of those blobs I’d found so intriguing that were now still. So still I doubted they had ever moved; they were too far away for me to decide whether they were simply patches of tar on the asphalted road or shadows – but shadows of what on that bare steppe? While I was engrossed in my telescope, the five veteran machine gunners walked up; Picó was now alone under the bridge. He’d scribbled a message for me on a scrap of paper: “Stay there with the troops; don’t move; tell them to get some shut-eye. Keep looking out and let me know what you can see. With culture and patience, we’ll execute a most splendid action here.” They told me he was hiding in the rushes near the bank, two or three hundred metres from the stanchions of the bridge, and that the top of our little hill was all you could see from down there. I got very weary continually focussing on those blobs or shadows that refused to stir; they didn’t start to shift until after midday. There were about a dozen, but a dozen of what, exactly? They were in the far distance and continued to crawl along. They disappeared for a while in a great dip in the terrain and reappeared at about two o’clock.

  Then I saw what they were: ten or twelve ugly armoured trucks that seemed to be advancing at walking pace.

  I was struck as before by how much those vehicles seemed like toys in the distance: a column of ten or twelve toy armoured trucks advancing along the road, not taking any precautions whatsoever – who did they need to be wary of? And now I could see men who really did look like lead soldiers. Another couple of hours went by; I informed Picó via a messenger who kept coming and going; I trained my eye and telescope on the trucks. The messenger returned with very precise instructions: “When the first truck reaches the bridge, light a small fire of dry undergrowth so I can see the smoke.” They’d stopped again for a good half hour; then they resumed their lethargic procession. They were half trucks half assault vehicles and were big, ugly and probably antiquated: the contingents of men aboard relaxed without a care in the world, and were now very visible from the waist up on their nasty iron beasts. At the age of six or seven I’d had a model of that armoured truck, with soldiers seated on benches, the top half of whose bodies were visible; the benches had holes in them where you inserted the catch each soldier carried on his back . . . They suddenly disappeared into the grey undulating plain, then reappeared closer to the river. “Wait for me until nightfall,” Picó wrote on the last scrap of paper the messenger brought me. “If I’m not with you by the time it’s dark, go on with the troops and don’t wait for me any longer.”

  The dry half-rotting grass I heaped up and the smoke, thick and white then black and acrid, which made me cough, now seem like a dream, as do the men waking up and looking at me as if I’d gone mad – they didn’t know it was a sign agreed with the captain: they didn’t know what was happening; yes, as if I were mad. Who’d ever think to light a bonfire and betray our presence to possible aeroplanes? And their eyes suddenly opened wide in amazement when they saw the armoured trucks on the bridge – the first was about to roll off the other side while the last had just rolled on, as if that bridge had been tailor-made to accommodate an armoured column that size! It was late afternoon with the sun low in the sky when that cloud of thick black smoke rose silently from the arches of the bridge with bits of lead soldiers and scraps of metal and stone congealed in the air. All was silence, a few seconds of silence followed by a tremendous thunderclap and an extraordinary blast that shook our little hill and the branches on the pine trees.

  I remember like a dream the jubilation we felt at the sight of those fragments blown in every direction by the expansion wave – what a bang! – those dreamlike bits that didn’t belong to lead soldiers but to men whose friend and comrade I might have been, whose friend and comrade I’d wanted to become and almost had become at a given, recent moment in my life. Yet I felt wildly elated when I saw them being blown to smithereens. “What a bang!” muttered the soldiers around me ecstatically. “What a big fucking bang!” And then I did have a strange hallucination, wide awake with my eyes wide open: everything suddenly disappeared, the blown-up bridge, the soldiers around me, shouting as if stunned in admiration: “What a big fucking bang!” the endless steppe and the setting sun. All I could see was the face of Dr Gallifa that seemed to fill the horizon.

  His sad smile was reproachful, but his face faded into the bright lights of sunset and all I could see was a dungeon; and that dungeon was dismally dark – and lo and behold the sun touched the horizon and there was that red watermelon again and he was at the back of the dungeon because it was that red blotch that was changing into a pitch-black dungeon at the back of which I could still see his face, now splattered with blood.

  And men were moving about in one corner of the dungeon like a pack of rats scurrying around a carcass, and I saw and recognised him among them, trying to pass unnoticed. Yes, I could see Lamoneda, his face half hidden under a red and black scarf; I could see him in such exact detail, I’d never ever seen anything so exact, and that was when Picó shook me and woke me from my dream: “Come on, that’s enough sleep; the sun’s set, forward march!”

  On another evening, during another glorious twilight on the endless steppe, we spotted a leafy bower, a desert oasis in the distance. After so many days on the road we were about to meet up with a civilian, a solitary civilian and such a peculiar one! Perhaps he was a lunatic, or a ghost. A large building was concealed among maple and laurel, magnolia and cypres
s trees, a park and building so unexpected we thought it must be a mirage. The civilian we met informed us that it was a spa: it possessed a famous mineral-water spring. We were amazed when we went in. It was a kind of huge Swiss chalet and everything was so neat and tidy as if they were expecting their usual clientele, though of course there were none; only that gentleman.

  That well-dressed middle-aged man, alone behind the bar in the dining room, didn’t seem at all surprised, in fact seemed to be expecting us: “Please do come in. Take a seat.”

  It was grand and welcoming; the tables were arranged and laid: best crockery, silver and glassware, like the tablecloths and napkins. It was a luxury spa that had once been famous and we exchanged astonished glances across that vista of order, cleanliness and luxury. Through a large window you could see dark overgrown gardens in the ebbing light. As that gentleman was so insistent, we sat down in groups of four or five per table. He switched on the lights; the bright electric glare seemed magical in the circumstances; he explained how the current was driven by a weir and went into detail about how the dynamo worked. Picó looked at the man and nodded at me and couldn’t stop himself bursting into laughter: “Home-produced electricity!” he exclaimed, though he then immediately shut up. We found it too sad to remember the commander and sat awkwardly in our rags and tatters in that elegant dining room, suddenly realising that our beards were long and dirty, our shirts torn and stiff with sweat, and our hair and armpits crawling with lice: suddenly realising we reeked of sweat many weeks old. But that gentleman noticed nothing: “Senyors, do please eat. Don’t stand on ceremony.”

  And he spoke in Catalan! A civilian who spoke Catalan heightened the sense of unreality in that whole scenario.

  “Eat,” he insisted. “The crockery is national and the menu republican.”

  That was the first time we’d heard the word “national” used rather then “fascist”. Naturally the menu never came, didn’t exist; that must be why the master of the spa said it was a “republican menu”. Picó signalled to us and we took out of our haversacks bread that was harder than stone and wrinkled olives and lo and behold! – the gentleman sat down at the table with Picó and myself and shared in our provisions. He wolfed his food down and rattled on incoherently, a tad pompously. We, the soldiers included, had emptied all our supplies on the tables, but that didn’t amount to much: the dry bread and olives we had left. And we were so astonished to be eating on such beautifully set tables that we silently devoured those hard crusts and those olives like goats’ droppings and stared at each other in amazement. A large shell exploded in the gardens and interrupted that peculiar dinner; another shell soon followed, and another, and another.