"I will do as thou orderest," Anselmo said.
"Yes. I order it thus," Robert Jordan said.
I'm glad I remembered to make it an order, he thought. That helps him out. That takes some of the curse off. I hope it does, anyway. Some of it. I had forgotten about what he told me that first day about the killing.
"It is thus I have ordered," he said. "Now go."
"Me voy," said Anselmo. "Until soon, Ingles."
"Until soon, old one," Robert Jordan said.
He remembered his father in the railway station and the wetness of that farewell and he did not say Salud nor good-by nor good luck nor anything like that.
"Hast wiped the oil from the bore of thy gun, old one?" he whispered. "So it will not throw wild?"
"In the cave," Anselmo said. "I cleaned them all with the pull-through."
"Then until soon," Robert Jordan said and the old man went off, noiseless on his rope-soled shoes, swinging wide through the trees.
Robert Jordan lay on the pine-needle floor of the forest and listened to the first stirring in the branches of the pines of the wind that would come with daylight. He took the clip out of the submachine gun and worked the lock back and forth. Then he turned the gun, with the lock open and in the dark he put the muzzle to his lips and blew through the barrel, the metal tasting greasy and oily as his tongue touched the edge of the bore. He laid the gun across his forearm, the action up so that no pine needles or rubbish could get in it, and shucked all the cartridges out of the clip with his thumb and onto a handkerchief he had spread in front of him. Then, feeling each cartridge in the dark and turning it in his fingers, he pressed and slid them one at a time back into the clip. Now the clip was heavy again in his hand and he slid it back into the submachine gun and felt it click home. He lay on his belly behind the pine trunk, the gun across his left forearm and watched the point of light below him. Sometimes he could not see it and then he knew that the man in the sentry box had moved in front of the brazier. Robert Jordan lay there and waited for daylight.
42
During the time that Pablo had ridden back from the hills to the cave and the time the band had dropped down to where they had left the horses Andres had made rapid progress toward Golz's headquarters. Where they came onto the main highroad to Navacerrada on which the trucks were rolling back from the mountain there was a control. But when Gomez showed the sentry at the control his safe-conduct from the Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda the sentry put the light from a flashlight on it, showed it to the other sentry with him, then handed it back and saluted.
"Siga," he said. "Continue. But without lights."
The motorcycle roared again and Andres was holding tight onto the forward seat and they were moving along the highway, Gomez riding carefully in the traffic. None of the trucks had lights and they were moving down the road in a long convoy. There were loaded trucks moving up the road too, and all of them raised a dust that Andres could not see in that dark but could only feel as a cloud that blew in his face and that he could bite between his teeth.
They were close behind the tailboard of a truck now, the motorcycle chugging, then Gomez speeded up and passed it and another, and another, and another with the other trucks roaring and rolling down past them on the left. There was a motorcar behind them now and it blasted into the truck noise and the dust with its klaxon again and again; then flashed on lights that showed the dust like a solid yellow cloud and surged past them in a whining rise of gears and a demanding, threatening, bludgeoning of klaxoning.
Then ahead all the trucks were stopped and riding on, working his way ahead past ambulances, staff cars, an armored car, another, and a third, all halted, like heavy, metal, gun-jutting turtles in the hot yet settled dust, they found another control where there had been a smash-up. A truck, halting, had not been seen by the truck which followed it and the following truck had run into it smashing the rear of the first truck in and scattering cases of small-arms ammunition over the road. One case had burst open on landing and as Gomez and Andres stopped and wheeled the motorcycle forward through the stalled vehicles to show their safe-conduct at the control Andres walked over the brass hulls of the thousand of cartridges scattered across the road in the dust. The second truck had its radiator completely smashed in. The truck behind it was touching its tail gate. A hundred more were piling up behind and an overbooted officer was running back along the road shouting to the drivers to back so that the smashed truck could be gotten off the road.
There were too many trucks for them to be able to back unless the officer reached the end of the ever mounting line and stopped it from increasing and Andres saw him running, stumbling, with his flashlight, shouting and cursing and, in the dark, the trucks kept coming up.
The man at the control would not give the safe-conduct back. There were two of them, with rifles slung on their backs and flashlights in their hands and they were shouting too. The one carrying the safe-conduct in his hand crossed the road to a truck going in the downhill direction to tell it to proceed to the next control and tell them there to hold all trucks until his jam was straightened out. The truck driver listened and went on. Then, still holding the safe-conduct, the control patrol came over, shouting, to the truck driver whose load was spilled.
"Leave it and get ahead for the love of God so we can clear this!" he shouted at the driver.
"My transmission is smashed," the driver, who was bent over by the rear of his truck, said.
"Obscene your transmission. Go ahead, I say."
"They do not go ahead when the differential is smashed," the driver told him and bent down again.
"Get thyself pulled then, get ahead so that we can get this other obscenity off the road."
The driver looked at him sullenly as the control man shone the electric torch on the smashed rear of the truck.
"Get ahead. Get ahead," the man shouted, still holding the safe-conduct pass in his hand.
"And my paper," Gomez spoke to him. "My safe-conduct. We are in a hurry."
"Take thy safe-conduct to hell," the man said and handing it to him ran across the road to halt a down-coming truck.
"Turn thyself at the crossroads and put thyself in position to pull this wreck forward," he said to the driver.
"My orders are----"
"Obscenity thy orders. Do as I say."
The driver let his truck into gear and rolled straight ahead down the road and was gone in the dust.
As Gomez started the motorcycle ahead onto the now clear right-hand side of the road past the wrecked truck, Andres, holding tight again, saw the control guard halting another truck and the driver leaning from the cab and listening to him.
Now they went fast, swooping along the road that mounted steadily toward the mountain. All forward traffic had been stalled at the control and there were only the descending trucks passing, passing and passing on their left as the motorcycle climbed fast and steadily now until it began to overtake the mounting traffic which had gone on ahead before the disaster at the control.
Still without lights they passed four more armored cars, then a long line of trucks loaded with troops. The troops were silent in the dark and at first Andres only felt their presence rising above him, bulking above the truck bodies through the dust as they passed. Then another staff came behind them blasting with its klaxon and flicking its lights off and on, and each time the lights shone Andres saw the troops, steel-helmeted, their rifles vertical, their machine guns pointed up against the dark sky, etched sharp against the night that they dropped into when the light flicked off. Once as he passed close to a troop truck and the lights flashed he saw their faces fixed and sad in the sudden light. In their steel helmets, riding in the trucks in the dark toward something that they only knew was an attack, their faces were drawn with each man's own problem in the dark and the light revealed them as they would not have looked in day, from shame to show it to each other, until the bombardment and the attack would commence, and no man would think about his face.
/> Andres now passing them truck after truck, Gomez still keeping successfully ahead of the following staff car, did not think any of this about their faces. He only thought, "What an army. What equipment. What a mechanization. Vaya gente! Look at such people. Here we have the army of the Republic. Look at them. Camion after camion. All uniformed alike. All with casques of steel on their heads. Look at the maquinas rising from the trucks against the coming of planes. Look at the army that has been builded!"
And as the motorcycle passed the high gray trucks full of troops, gray trucks with high square cabs and square ugly radiators, steadily mounting the road in the dust and the flicking lights of the pursuing staff car, the red star of the army showing in the light when it passed over the tail gates, showing when the light came onto the sides of the dusty truck bodies, as they passed, climbing steadily now, the air colder and the road starting to turn in bends and switchbacks now, the trucks laboring and grinding, some steaming in the light flashes, the motorcycle laboring now too, and Andres clinging tight to the front seat as they climbed, Andres thought this ride on a motorcycle was mucho, mucho. He had never been on a motorcycle before and now they were climbing a mountain in the midst of all the movement that was going to an attack and, as they climbed, he knew now there was no problem of ever being back in time for the assault on the posts. In this movement and confusion he would be lucky to get back by the next night. He had never seen an offensive or any of the preparations for one before and as they rode up the road he marvelled at the size and power of this army that the Republic had built.
Now they rode on a long slanting, rising stretch of road that ran across the face of the mountain and the grade was so steep as they neared the top that Gomez told him to get down and together they pushed the motorcycle up the last steep grade of the pass. At the left, just past the top, there was a loop of road where cars could turn and there were lights winking in front of a big stone building that bulked long and dark against the night sky.
"Let us go to ask there where the headquarters is," Gomez said to Andres and they wheeled the motorcycle over to where two sentries stood in front of the closed door of the great stone building. Gomez leaned the motorcycle against the wall as a motorcyclist in a leather suit, showing against the light from inside the building as the door opened, came out of the door with a dispatch case hung over his shoulder, a wooden-holstered Mauser pistol swung against his hip. As the light went off, he found his motorcycle in the dark by the door, pushed it until it sputtered and caught, then roared off up the road.
At the door Gomez spoke to one of the sentries. "Captain Gomez of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade," he said. "Can you tell me where to find the headquarters of General Golz commanding the Thirty-Fifth Division?"
"It isn't here," the sentry said.
"What is here?"
"The Comandancia."
"What comandancia?"
"Well, the Comandancia."
"The comandancia of what?"
"Who art thou to ask so many questions?" the sentry said to Gomez in the dark. Here on the top of the pass the sky was very clear with the stars out and Andres, out of the dust now, could see quite clearly in the dark. Below them, where the road turned to the right, he could see clearly the outline of the trucks and cars that passed against the sky line.
"I am Captain Rogelio Gomez of the first battalion of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade and I ask where is the headquarters of General Golz," Gomez said.
The sentry opened the door a little way. "Call the corporal of the guard," he shouted inside.
Just then a big staff car came up over the turn of the road and circled toward the big stone building where Andres and Gomez were standing waiting for the corporal of the guard. It came toward them and stopped outside the door.
A large man, old and heavy, in an oversized khaki beret, such as chasseurs a pied wear in the French Army, wearing an overcoat, carrying a map case and wearing a pistol strapped around his greatcoat, got out of the back of the car with two other men in the uniform of the International Brigades.
He spoke in French, which Andres did not understand and of which Gomez, who had been a barber, knew only a few words, to his chauffeur telling him to get the car away from the door and into shelter.
As he came into the door with the other two officers, Gomez saw his face clearly in the light and recognized him. He had seen him at political meetings and he had often read articles by him in Mundo Obrero translated from the French. He recognized his bushy eyebrows, his watery gray eyes, his chin and the double chin under it, and he knew him for one of France's great modern revolutionary figures who had led the mutiny of the French Navy in the Black Sea. Gomez knew this man's high political place in the International Brigades and he knew this man would know where Golz's headquarters were and be able to direct him there. He did not know what this man had become with time, disappointment, bitterness both domestic and political, and thwarted ambition and that to question him was one of the most dangerous things that any man could do. Knowing nothing of this he stepped forward into the path of this man, saluted with his clenched fist and said, "Comrade Marty, we are the bearers of a dispatch for General Golz. Can you direct us to his headquarters? It is urgent."
The tall, heavy old man looked at Gomez with his outthrust head and considered him carefully with his watery eyes. Even here at the front in the light of a bare electric bulb, he having just come in from driving in an open car on a brisk night, his gray face had a look of decay. His face looked as though it were modelled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion.
"You have what, Comrade?" he asked Gomez, speaking Spanish with a strong Catalan accent. His eyes glanced sideways at Andres, slid over him, and went back to Gomez.
"A dispatch for General Golz to be delivered at his headquarters, Comrade Marty."
"Where is it from, Comrade?"
"From behind the fascist lines," Gomez said.
Andre Marty extended his hand for the dispatch and the other papers. He glanced at them and put them in his pocket.
"Arrest them both," he said to the corporal of the guard. "Have them searched and bring them to me when I send for them."
With the dispatch in his pocket he strode on into the interior of the big stone house.
Outside in the guard room Gomez and Andres were being searched by the guard.
"What passes with that man?" Gomez said to one of the guards.
"Esta loco," the guard said. "He is crazy."
"No. He is a political figure of great importance," Gomez said. "He is the chief commissar of the International Brigades."
"Apesar de eso, esta loco," the corporal of the guard said. "All the same he's crazy. What do you behind the fascist lines?"
"This comrade is a guerilla from there," Gomez told him while the man searched him. "He brings a dispatch to General Golz. Guard well my papers. Be careful with that money and that bullet on the string. It is from my first wound at Guadarama."
"Don't worry," the corporal said. "Everything will be in this drawer. Why didn't you ask me where Golz was?"
"We tried to. I asked the sentry and he called you."
"But then came the crazy and you asked him. No one should ask him anything. He is crazy. Thy Golz is up the road three kilometers from here and to the right in the rocks of the forest."
"Can you not let us go to him now?"
"Nay. It would be my head. I must take thee to the crazy. Besides, he has thy dispatch."
"Can you not tell some one?"
"Yes," the corporal said. "I will tell the first responsible one I see. All know that he is crazy."
"I had always taken him for a great figure," Gomez said. "For one of the glories of France."
"He may be a glory and all," the corporal said and put his hand on Andres's shoulder. "But he is crazy as a bedbug. He has a mania for shooting people."
"Truly shooting them?"
"Como lo oyes," the corporal said. "That old one kills more than the bubonic plagu
e. Mata mas que la peste bubonica. But he doesn't kill fascists like we do. Que va. Not in joke. Mata bichos raros. He kills rare things. Trotzkyites. Divagationers. Any type of rare beasts."
Andres did not understand any of this.
"When we were at Escorial we shot I don't know how many for him," the corporal said. "We always furnish the firing party. The men of the Brigades would not shoot their own men. Especially the French. To avoid difficulties it is always us who do it. We shot French. We have shot Belgians. We have shot others of divers nationality. Of all types. Tiene mania de fusilar gente. Always for political things. He's crazy. Purifica mas que el Salvarsan. He purifies more than Salvarsan."
"But you will tell some one of this dispatch?"
"Yes, man. Surely. I know every one of these two Brigades. Every one comes through here. I know even up to and through the Russians, although only a few speak Spanish. We will keep this crazy from shooting Spaniards."
"But the dispatch."
"The dispatch, too. Do not worry, Comrade. We know how to deal with this crazy. He is only dangerous with his own people. We understand him now."
"Bring in the two prisoners," came the voice of Andre Marty.
"Quereis echar un trago?" the corporal asked. "Do you want a drink?"
"Why not?"
The corporal took a bottle of anis from a cupboard and both Gomez and Andres drank. So did the corporal. He wiped his mouth on his hand.
"Vamonos," he said.
They went out of the guard room with the swallowed burn of the anis warming their mouths, their bellies and their hearts and walked down the hall and entered the room where Marty sat behind a long table, his map spread in front of him, his red-and-blue pencil, with which he played at being a general officer, in his hand. To Andres it was only one more thing. There had been many tonight. There were always many. If your papers were in order and your heart was good you were in no danger. Eventually they turned you loose and you were on your way. But the Ingles had said to hurry. He knew now he could never get back for the bridge but they had a dispatch to deliver and this old man there at the table had put it in his pocket.
For Whom the Bell Tolls Page 44