squad?
Delgado, holding his cane between two hands, turned and faced them. ‘You,’ to Canfield, ‘will be executed because you were found wearing civilian clothes and carrying false papers. You,’ – to Adam – ‘should be executed for desertion.’
Should?
‘But I am willing to concede you were shell-shocked. However, you know my views on foreign mercenaries meddling in Spain’s war. It seems logical, therefore, that you should carry out the execution.’ The captain handed Adam the pistol. ‘After all, he is the enemy.’
Adam took the gun. It had been tended with love, and he knew the mechanism would work snugly.
Delgado pointed at the blood-stained wall with his cane. ‘Over there.’ The blood stains were the colour of rust. ‘Do you want to be blindfolded?’ he asked Canfield.
‘I like to look the enemy in the eye. One of the lessons you learn in boxing.’ There was a catch in his voice and his body was shaking and because they had known each other a long time, 12 hours at least, Adam knew that he was thinking, ‘Please, God, don’t let me be a coward.’
Cowardice? Who cared about cowardice? Why did they teach children that it mattered? If I live I will teach children that cowardice is natural, the most natural thing in the world; but I shan’t live because I can’t shoot Tom Canfield.
‘If you refuse,’ Delgado was saying, ‘you, too, will be executed for desertion, for refusing to obey an order, for cowardice.’
There it was again, cowardice. I wish I could pin medals on the breasts of all those who have exhibited cowardice in the face of the enemy. I wish I could tell my children that they should never be ashamed of crying.
‘There.’ Delgado indicated a line whitewashed on the mud. ‘Get it over with quickly: we are due to attack again.’
The sound of aircraft filled the sky. Adam looked up. Russian-built Katiuska twin-engined bombers.
‘Get on with it,’ Delgado snapped.
Adam raised the pistol.
‘I will raise my cane,’ Delgado said. ‘When I drop it you will fire. Empty the barrel, just in case.’
Adam stared down the barrel of the pistol, lined up Canfield’s chest with the inverted V blade foresight and the V notch rearsight. Why shouldn’t I shoot him? He is the enemy, a red, and I have killed many of those already.
Canfield said, ‘How about that …’ He lost his sentence, recaptured it. ‘… last request? A cigarette?’
You don’t smoke, Adam thought. He stroked the trigger. Two pressures? Why do you hesitate, Adam Fleming? Canfield chose to fight on that side, you on this. You came to Spain to kill reds, didn’t you? Priest-killers, murderers of your sister’s husband.
Who is the enemy?
‘Permission refused.’ Delgado’s cane fell.
The last thing Adam Fleming remembered was the roar of a Katiuska bomber.
Tom Canfield assumed he was dead.
The crash and the pointed ache in his skull and the crepitus of fractured wall … Now all he could see was a khaki-coloured dustiness. Perhaps he was in the process of dying. He tested his limbs. They moved painlessly, all except the arm that had been wounded in the plane crash. His hand went to his chest searching for bullet holes. Nothing. The dust began to clear. He heard a groan. He sat up.
The flap of bamboo lay across his knees. Then he heard the drone of the Katiuska bombers.
He stood up and blundered through the settling dust. The first body he encountered was Delgado’s. He was still alive but for once he did not look freshly barbered. Then the two soldiers and the captain. One of the soldiers was dead. Lastly Adam Fleming, pistol still clenched in his fist. There was a wound on the side of his head and his face was grey.
He knelt beside him. He was alive but only just. His breathing was shallow and blood flowed freely from the scalp wound. Tom took a torn cushion from a cane chair, placed it under his head and tried to staunch the bleeding with his handkerchief.
‘Were you going to shoot me?’ he asked the unconscious man. ‘Would I have shot you?’
He heard voices. He knelt behind a heap of rubble beside a legless rubber doll. Fascist soldiers were approaching. They would look after Fleming.
He took the pistol from his hand and edged round the remnants of the farmhouse. As he ran towards an olive grove he heard a noise behind him. He flung himself to the ground and the brown and white dog with the foraging nose licked his face, then whipped his chest with its long tail.
‘Another survivor,’ Tom said. He patted the dog’s lean ribs. ‘Come on, let’s find some breakfast.’
The hill where Adam Fleming had been fighting lay ahead. He began to climb towards the Republican lines on the other side.
Machine-gun fire chattered in the distance but yesterday’s battlefield was deserted except for corpses. The sky was pure and pale, and the mist in the valley was rising. It was going to be a fine, spring-beckoning day.
He was near the brow of the hill now. There he would be a silhouette, a perfect target. He flattened himself on the shell-torn ground and, with the dog beside him, inched upwards.
Bodies lay stiffly around him, many of them British by the look of them, wearing berets and Balaclavas and job-lot uniforms, staring at the sky as though in search of reasons.
At the crest of the mole-shaped hill he rolled towards the Republican lines. Hit a rock and lay still. When he tried to stand up there was no strength in him. He noticed blood from his wounded arm splashing on to a slab of stone. How long had it been bleeding like that? Pain knifed his chest.
The dog whined, whip-lash tail lowered.
He continued down the hill, cannoning into ilex trees, slithering in the water draining from the top of the hill. There was a dirt road at the bottom and he had to reach it. He collapsed into a fragrant patch of sage 50 metres short of it. He stretched out one hand and felt the dog. Or is this all an illusion? Did Adam Fleming pull the trigger?
The smell of the sage and the warmth of the dog faded.
It was replaced by the smell of ether.
He opened his eyes. A middle-aged man with pugnacious features, Slavonic angles to his eyes and sparse grey hair, stood beside his bed.
The man said, ‘Please, don’t say Where am I.’
‘Okay, I won’t.’ He heard his own voice; it was thin and far away.
‘You’re in a field hospital. A monastery, in fact. And you’re extremely lucky to be alive for two reasons.’
‘Which are?’
‘A peasant found you bleeding to death near a dirt road. He stopped the bleeding by tying a strip of your shirt round your arm, pushing a stick underneath it and twisting it. A primitive tourniquet.’
‘Secondly?’
