The Eldorado Network (6 page)

'Is that why they pulled you out of the line?' Townsend asked. 'Because you took such a beating?'

'On the contrary. The battalion is being re-equipped and brought up to strength. As you must have noticed, morale is excellent.'

Nicholas Barker said: 'Is it all right if we ask your chaps some questions?'

Summers hesitated. 'I can tell you everything you wish to know.'

'Tell us what it feels like to get hit by a bullet,' Dru said, looking at a man whose arm was bandaged.

'That's not . . .' Summers began; then he changed his mind. 'You must remember they are still feeling the effects of the fighting. Very intensive fighting.'

'Okay,' Dru said.

Summers led them over to the wounded soldier. Luis edged his way to the front. He wished very much to learn what it felt like to get hit by a bullet.

The man was sitting on the floor and examining his left foot, which was bare and black with dirt. It was so uniformly black that to Luis it looked like a negro foot, poking out of the ragged brown-corduroy trouser leg.

'What did you do at Jarama?' Dru asked.

The man got to his feet, stood lopsidedly, and gave the clenched-fist salute. He was about twenty-five, short and skinny, and he smiled cheerfully at everyone. 'No two ways about it,' he said.

'His name is Davis,' Summers told them. 'From Liverpool.'

'What do you remember about Jarama?' Nicholas Barker asked.

'Solidarity, comrades.' Davis saluted with the clenched fist again and gave a little, delighted laugh. Luis noticed that his head kept twitching, as if with eagerness.

'We heard you were very heavily outnumbered,' Barker told him. 'So where did the enemy go wrong?'

'They certainly did!' Davis exclaimed. He rested his left foot against his right leg and began to fall over. Luis grabbed him. 'See?' Davis said. 'Sol'dar'ty! See what I mean?'

Townsend came back, stuffing his notebook into his pocket. 'All pissed,' he announced.

'Oh Christ,' Dru groaned.

'You really mean all?' Barker asked.

'Every damn one, my friend. Tanked up and ready to fly to the moon. Pissed as assholes, the whole battalion.'

'Not really drunk,' Summers put in quickly. 'Just reaction after battle . . .' Nobody was listening. Luis saw the discontented faces and realised there was no story here. Davis laid his head on Luis's shoulder. His body jerked to a gentle belch, and Luis breathed the hot and fruity fumes of cheap red wine. 'We're gonna win,' Davis whispered. 'Gonna win 'cus we're right. Right?' Luis lowered him gently to the floor.

As they drove back to Madrid the correspondents argued about Jarama. Townsend argued that it must have been a victory for the Government because Franco's forces had failed to knock the International Brigade off the heights. Dru argued that any unit which lost two-thirds of its men was beaten, and it didn't matter a damn who held the heights anyway. Barker suggested that maybe Jarama might not turn out to be a victory for either side, but the others flatly rejected that. 'My paper wants a victory,' Townsend insisted. 'They didn't send me four thousand miles to report a lousy draw.' Luis listened, and learned.

Two days later the weather cleared, the sun came out, and the correspondents told him to drive them to Jarama.

The countryside was calm and pleasant, with gentle hills and wide views. There was no sign of war. Men and women working in the fields paused, half-bent, to watch the car dash by. Mule-carts and donkeys made up most of the traffic, and left a tang of fresh dung in the morning air. Luis felt good. He drove briskly, spinning the wheel and accelerating out of corners so that his tyres sprayed gravel against the drystone walls.

Brigade headquarters was in a farmhouse at the end of a rutted lane. Two ambulances and a dozen motorcycles were parked in the farmyard, which also contained a group of soldiers washing their clothes at a cattle trough, a. small boy plucking a chicken, and the wreckage of an aeroplane.

'Jarama,' Luis announced.

'Horrifying,' said Townsend, picking his way between the puddles and the cowdung. 'Inconceivably dreadful. Look: dead chickens everywhere. My God, will this bloody war never end?'

'Inside they can tell us,' Luis told him.

'That I take leave to doubt," Barker said. Luis looked at him uncertainly, but Baker did not seem displeased, and so Luis went over to the sentry on duty at the farmhouse door.

'Correspondentes,' he announced. 'Muy importantes correspondentes.'

The man stopped trimming his fingernails with a clasp-knife and looked the visitors over. He had thick black stubble and bad teeth. He gave a grunt which could have meant anything.

'Show him identification,' Luis suggested. 'Anything, it does not matter. This is just an ignorant peasant.'

'Not true,' the sentry said. 'Ignorant, yes. Peasant, no. Beneath this dirty shirt there beats an indelibly bourgeois heart, I'm sorry to say.' He put the knife away. 'I know you,' he said to Barker. 'We were at school together. Templeton.'

'Were we?' Barker tried to stare beyond the stubble and the grime. 'Wait a minute. You're not Charles Templeton? The cricketer?'

'None other.'

'Good God.'

'Ah, now there I can't agree with you.' Templeton gave a rueful grin. His teeth were not bad; just dirty.

'Listen: can you let us in?' Townsend asked. 'We want to find out what's happening in this damn war.'

'Well, you won't learn anything here,' Templeton said. 'They're holding a brigade conference. It's like the Chelsea Arts Ball gone wrong. Still, you can go in if you like.'

He led them into the farmhouse. 'Weren't you an artist? A painter?' Barker asked.

'I still am an artist,' Templeton said with conviction. 'But here in Spain I can fight for truth as well as paint it. Mind your head.' He opened a door and they ducked into a long, dim room in which forty or fifty soldiers were engaged in half a dozen arguments.

The correspondents stood against the wall while their eyes and ears adjusted to the gloomy uproar. They could see a whole theatrical wardrobe of uniforms, ranging from khaki overalls to black flying jackets, and from red cavalry cloaks to blue tunics. They could hear most of the languages of Europe. Everyone seemed to be talking, no one seemed to be listening. They all had two things in common: fervour and sidearms. Every man present was wearing a large automatic or a revolver on his gunbelt.

'This is a conference?' said Barker. 'It sounds more like a difference.'

'Oh well, everybody is free to give his point of view, in the International Brigade,' Templeton said. 'We are, after all, fighting for democracy.'

'What happens when they don't agree?' Townsend asked.

'It depends. Sometimes the Brigade commander orders lunch. Sometimes the enemy attacks. Something always happens.'

'Doesn't sound very organised.'

Luis felt that the conversation was lacking spark. 'Sir, how many fascists have you killed?' he inquired.

'Oh, hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Perhaps as many as three. Of course, some may have been dead already.'

Luis flushed. He thought that Templeton was mocking him. 'Perhaps it is so easy to kill fascists that you cannot remember?' he said.

'I can remember killing,' Templeton said, looking openly and easily into Luis's stiff face, 'but thank God I can't remember counting while I did it.'

Barker's pencil skidded wildly off his notebook as the door swung open and banged his arm. A tall and very fat man with angry eyes and a shaggy, mistrustful moustache strode into the room, picked up a stool and hammered it thunderously against a table-top. He wore' tunic and trousers of workingmen's blue, with a giant pistol tugging down his belt, a flaring red kerchief, and an absurdly large black beret, so big that it fell over one ear, almost to the collar. Even before his table-battering had created silence, he was shouting. The language was French, but the style was universal. The fat man was hysterical with rage. His jowls wobbled, his nostrils flared, his voice and his gestures ripped the air.

This hulking, howling harangue went on for several minutes, while the atmosphere grew unhappier. Townsend nudged Dru and Barker. They backed out, Templeton following, and shut the door.

'Andrea Marty,' Dru said. 'Three hundred pounds of mouth. The moustache is camouflage. Low-flying aircraft mistake him for a horse's ass, and fly on.'

'Marty the Commissar?' Townsend asked. Next door, the ranting seemed to have gained in fury. 'I understood he was a horse's ass.'

'You didn't see anyone in there laughing. Marty is Chief Political Commissar of the International Brigades. You want my advice? Don't mess around with that particular horse's ass or he's liable to dump a load of horse's poo-poo all over you.'

'He sounds a bit mad,' Barker said.

'Oh, he's crackers,' Templeton told them.

'What was he raving about?' Townsend asked Dru.

'Treason. Traitors in the ranks. The revolution betrayed. Firing squads. Summary executions. All Trotskyite spies will be purged.'

'He's always on about that,' Templeton said. 'Never stops.'

Luis had been standing with his head bowed, looking very serious. Now he addressed Templeton.

'Sir, I offer my apology for what I said to you earlier. It was bad manners.'

'Oh, that's all right, chum.' Templeton was scratching his armpits, hard. 'Sorry, everybody. I'm afraid I'm a bit lousy.'

Luis was not ready to allow lice to distract him from his views on war. 'It is bad courtesy to criticise a soldier when one has not experienced the truth of war for oneself,' he declared.

'Please don't worry about it.' Templeton slapped his trousers. 'Sometimes violence seems to stun them, and other times it just wakes them up. One never knows what to do for the best.'

For a moment everyone stood around in slight embarrassment, listening to the strident bellow of the brigade conference.

'Well, we're not going to get anywhere here, are we?' Barker said. 'Why don't we trundle off and take a squint at the Front?'

'Show you the way, if you like,' Templeton offered.

As they walked up the hill, Milton Townsend took Luis aside. 'Listen, Luis,' he said. 'The stories I've been getting from Republican Army Headquarters are no damn good to me. Frankly, it's all bullshit propaganda. Now what I need, see, is a nice, simple, gung-ho bit of action. Keep your ears open, okay?'

'Okay.'

'I mean, this is war. Right? So there's got to be a chance for glory somewhere, you know what I mean? Some guy has got to save his wounded buddies, or capture a strongpoint singlehanded, or shoot down three fighter planes with four bullets, or something. I mean it happens, for Chrissake. We've just got to find it, that's all.'

'Sometimes these damned heroes get themselves killed, that is the difficulty,' Luis remarked.

'That doesn't necessarily matter. We just have to find a good witness. This fight for democracy and freedom and all that crap is fine, terrific, but we need action. You go to the movies? You like westerns?'

'Sure! Gary Cooper, Lone Ranger -- '

'Okay, you got it. Find me the Lone Ranger of the International Brigade. Dead or alive.'

They found the Front a mile and a half up the track, in trenches dug just short of the crest; and defending this stretch of the Front they found the 2nd English Battalion, now sober, dirty and glum.

Harry Summers came out to meet them. 'I take it you've got permission from Brigade H.Q. to be up here?' he asked.

'We just left there,' Dru said. 'Your lot didn't get much of a break, did they?'

'The men are quite refreshed. They voted to return, as a matter of fact, as soon as they heard we were preparing for a counter-attack.'

Townsend said: 'Preparing to make one or to meet one?'

'The former.'

'Terrific! Maybe you can show us the target?'

Summers took out a very used handkerchief. The fabric crackled as he pulled it unstuck. 'We fight for Spain,' he said. 'For the loyal, free and democratic republic. It is the fascist rebels who are seeking to capture targets. We fight for freedom, not for property.' He blew his nose.

There was a short silence. Luis looked uncertainly at Townsend, who rolled his eyes at him. 'Sir,' Luis said to Summers, 'where is the bloody enemy?' Everyone brightened up. Summers turned and led them forward.

The trenches were crumbling and filthy. Bits of food, rusting tins, broken rifles and stained clothing lay everywhere, and now that the sun was high the flies were loud: the trenches had been used as a latrine as well as a dustbin. The men of the 2nd Battalion were hard at work, cleaning out the mess and strengthening the walls; they pressed themselves against the mud to let the visitors pass; they looked tired and sad, and they said little. Dru caught one man's eye, and smiled. 'It's not the Ritz, is it?' he said.

'Soddin' French did this,' the man said. 'Bleedin' spotless, we left this place.'

They turned into a communication trench which led forward to an observation post: a walled pit with sandbagged slots looking down the steep and bare hillside to a flat valley, almost a thousand feet below. 'Down there you see the Jarama River,' Summers said, 'and beyond the Jarama you see the enemy.'

The soldier on duty stood back to make room for them at the slots. There was no difficulty in seeing the enemy, only in counting them. There were hundreds of troops, probably thousands, with cavalry and horse-drawn artillery in separate encampments. Their many small sounds travelled clearly up the windless air: a motorcycle's buzz, a man singing, the tiny clang of a hammer on steel, the nervous whinny of a horse. Smoke climbed from a dozen fires like softly unravelling wool.

'Who's in command down there?' Dru asked. 'Still General Mola?'

'Mola is the henchman of the fascist rebel Franco,' Summers said, Dru took this to be confirmation.

'How on earth did you manage to hold them off?' Barker asked. 'I mean, Mola's got a fully equipped professional army. Your chaps are just . . . well . . . volunteers.'

'Exactly. Every man in the International Brigade is fighting for a cause. The fascist mercenaries are merely fighting for pay. Another thing is our superior position. We forced the enemy to attack uphill, with no cover. But above all we succeeded because of our international solidarity. The English battalion fought alongside the Balkan battalion, the Franco-Beige battalion, the Lincoln battalion. Jarama was a political as much as a military victory.'