your war.’
‘Then go home, cabrón.’
Adam tells him about his sister and what the Republicans did to Paco.
‘So it’s everyone’s war. So try killing the enemy: if you don’t they will surely kill you.’
And now they are trying to do just that. Emerging from the mist, surprising Adam and Chimo who thought they were behind the Englishman; but all the senses tell untruths in the gunsmoke and the noise that never ceases.
Adam fires his rifle. Once, twice. Men fall. British or Spanish? The rifle jams. He lunges with the bayonet and the blade is as red as the poppies in the field.
Chimo pulls his sleeve. ‘Let’s get out of here, Amado.’
And they are running along the hillside between shallow trenches, over bodies, taking cover behind a crop of boulders.
But these boulders are no one’s exclusive property. These boulders are an objective within the objective of the hill which is an objective within the campaign. And suddenly the fighting is thick around them; so thick that Adam cannot always distinguish Fascists from reds.
He grabs a rifle from the tight grip of a dead soldier. Fires it. The calico-rip of machine-pistol. Men fall forward which means they have been shot in the back but no one can be blamed because the reel of the ancient movie is out of control.
A punch on the head, just below the ear; he can no longer hear. He makes his way carefully through the silent carnage. He is alone now in the mist walking with a drunkard’s gait.
His head is heavy on his shoulders, his body bends with its weight; he wants to lie down and sleep. He stumbles, slides into a shell-hole, stays there, feet in a puddle, back propped against torn soil. He feels the earth shift as shells fall but he hears nothing.
The convoy skirting the Battle of Jarama at 3.30 am consisted of a black Chevrolet, an ambulance and three lorries.
At the wheel of the Chevrolet sat Christopher Lance wearing his check jacket and the pink, grey and brown tie of Lancing Old Boys. With him was a small, shy woman named Margaret Hill, matron of the British-American Hospital in Madrid and Fernanda Jacobson, head of the Scottish Ambulance Unit who often wore kilt and tartan hose and was not shy at all.
With them were 72 charges, British evacuees whom the Government allowed to leave Spain and Spanish refugees from the reds whom the Government didn’t. They had gathered furtively that evening at the British Embassy at 8 pm; now they were on their way through 32 check points to Alicante to be taken by a British destroyer, HMS Esk, north through the Mediterranean and across the Gulf of Lions to Marseilles and freedom.
As the convoy turned on to the Madrid–Valencia road shells exploded behind them and to their right machine-guns and rifles barked and coughed.
Martine Ruiz listened to them as the baby moved impatiently within her. In the makeshift British-American Hospital in Madrid on the corner of Velazquez at Ayala before reporting to the embassy she had insisted that it had no intention of entering the hostile world for at least another week or so; but even as she had been smiling comfortably at the British women the pains had been coming regularly.
The ambulance leaped over a shell-hole; Martine moaned and placed her hands across her drum-tight belly. The priest comforted her.
‘It will be soon,’ an old Spanish woman beside her said. ‘There is a hospital in Alicante.’
‘It won’t be for a long time yet,’ Martine said.
‘I can tell.’
‘It’s my baby,’ Martine Ruiz said.
The convoy stopped. Martine heard voices. But she trusted this Englishman who had a pass stamped by the Ministry of Works, the War Office, the British Embassy, the syndicates and Azaña himself.
The door of the ambulance opened. A sentry looked in. He was unshaven and wore a shiny-peaked cap on his unkempt hair. He saw the hump of Martine’s stomach and smiled. He would deliver a baby with one hand and shoot a Fascist with the other, this one.
‘A boy or a girl?’ he asked.
‘A girl,’ Martine said, smiling at him.
‘A boy,’ the old woman said.
‘Twins,’ the sentry said and, still smiling, shut the doors.
The convoy moved off. The gunfire grew fainter.
The baby pushed again. Not in Alicante, Martine said to the baby. There they will find out who I am and, although they may let you live, you will not have a mother. Tranquilo, she said. Please baby, boy or girl, tranquilo.
‘It will be soon,’ the old woman said.
The priest said nothing.
Tom Canfield, crouching, made his way along the dirt path beside the Jarama. The water idled past islands of black mud on which dark weed-like watercress grew. A stork stood alone among the bodies in a field, and its arrogance and the abandoned desolation of the field made Tom decide that the battle had passed by here, that the Fascists had crossed the river so he must be in Nationalist territory. All he could do was hold out till dusk, then try and cross the river as the Fascists had done, work his way through their lines to the Republicans and hitch a lift to the air-base at Guadalajara. Which sounded easy enough, except that the countryside with its vineyards and fallow cornfields was flat, and Fascist reconnaissance planes were flying low over the river.
Dusk began to gather with its own brand of loneliness. His wounded arm belonged to someone else; his chest hurt. A squad of Polikarpovs flew through the valley, scattering and climbing as they reached the outskirts of Madrid. One lingered. Seidler looking for him. You could bet good money on it.
Tom remembered an evening like this, a little cruel with a saline breeze coming in from the Atlantic, when he and a girl had escaped from a party at his father’s mansion at Southampton and ended up of all places in the potato fields at the south fork of the island. He had taken his open Mercer with the wire wheels and white-wall tyres. She was a happy girl with golden limbs and easy ways and they had lingered in the Mercer until the spray from the ocean had cooled their ardour. When they got back to the house the party was over, his father was bust and life would never be the same again. But he would always remember the girl.
Tom smiled. A bullet hit a tree hanging over the river gouging a finger of sappy wood from it. He dropped to the ground, took cover behind another farmhouse with a patio scattered with olive stones. There was some bread on a scrubbed table and a leather wineskin. The bread was stale but not too hard; he ate it and drank sweet dark wine from the wineskin. The wine intoxicated him immediately.
He heard a dog barking. He opened a studded door with a rusty key in the lock. The dog was half pointer, half hunter, with a whiplash tail, brown and white fur, a brown nose and yellowish eyes. It was young, starving and excited; as Tom stroked its lean ribs it pissed with excitement. Tom gave it the last of the bread.
A heavy machine-gun opened up; bullets thudded into the walls of the patio. The lingering Polikarpov returned, firing a burst in the direction of the machine-gun. Seidler without a doubt. The machine-gun stopped firing but Tom decided to leave the farmhouse which was a natural target. He let himself out of the patio. The dog
