A Broken Land (14 page)

His entry into the ditch was an ignominious dive, Vince using more of a slither but both were close-run affairs as the ground behind them
began to spurt up great chunks of earth. All Cal could think about at first was the noise of the roaring engine, but then he was listening for the sound of brakes, praying it was one he would not hear, but he had to be prepared.

‘Everybody ready?’ he yelled, spinning upright, his pistol poised.

Vince’s shout melded into his own. ‘Keep your heads down.’

Now the bullets were ripping into the back of the ditch, uselessly in terms of hitting flesh but a first real taste for these boys of what it was like to be under sustained fire, and damned unpleasant it was; nothing ever inures you to the crack of a bullet passing close and for them this was their baptism. The breath he had been holding left Cal Jardine’s body as the truck roared on; either they did not care about the blueshirts or they saw they were beyond salvation. Added to that, their fusillade had ceased; it was time to give them a little present.

‘Squad four,’ he shouted, raising his head just enough to see the cloud of receding dust, sure in his heart that they would not stop now, his instructions backed up by his hands. ‘Truck at ten o’clock, fire at will.’

The lads scrambled up the bank, too high in truth, showing too much upper body, but they did a good job of delivery in the parting shot, steady, trying to aim as well as fire, sending enough shots in through the truck tailgate to do damage, one clever enough to take out a rear tyre. Too keen to see how they had done, one or two then raised themselves, and it took a sharp command to seek to get them to take cover again.

Vince, in giving that, was a fraction too late. The return fire might have been from the back of a moving bucking vehicle but it was concentrated and probably came from highly trained men. One of
the squad took a bullet in the shoulder, judging by the way he jerked sideways, then he tumbled back to lay inert at the ditch bottom, his mates crowding round him.

‘Leave him,’ Cal yelled. ‘Reload.’

Vince was on his way to provide first aid, and just before he blocked his view, Cal saw the look of shock on those young faces at the idea that one of their comrades should be left to suffer – but this was a battle, and how serious a one was yet to be made plain. Vince must have quietly backed up that command, given they attended to their empty rifles while Cal, looking back into the town, was aware that one thing that needed to be done to create a functioning fighting unit had not been fulfilled – the selection of who would act as medics.

A trio of cars were on their way, large, black and hardtops, nose to tail, not only packed inside but with blueshirts hanging on to the door rims, their feet on the running boards. His policy remained the same: do not stop them before they reached his position, let them pass, then put a fusillade into them to speed their flight, hopefully giving them wounded with whom they would be required to deal.

His hope played out well, his notion that people already in flight and past the real centre of resistance would not stop and retrace their route to engage, so a procession of cars, a few trucks and a couple of motorcycles with sidecars were afforded the same treatment, the second of the latter taking such deadly fire that it went over on its side spilling rider, pillion passenger and the two who had crammed into the sidecar.

Cal had the pleasure then of yelling to hold fire; the next vehicle through was carrying a great black and red flag and was crowded
with Laporta’s men, the driver skidding to a halt as the fighters tumbled out to make sure that anyone wounded from both the overturned car and motorcycle combination were killed off.

Only then could Cal Jardine relax enough to go and see how the wounded man was faring.

P
erhaps the greatest gift in taking the town so suddenly was the restoration of the ability to communicate with Barcelona; any telephone equipment in previous locations had either been ripped out and removed by the Falangists or destroyed. Somewhere behind the Barcelona column repairs to damaged wires had been undertaken so that, albeit with difficulty, much switching and a very crackling line, Juan Luis Laporta was able to contact Colonel Villabova to find out the progress of the main body advancing on Lérida, as well as report his own successes.

Expecting praise for his rapid progress and recent victory, Laporta was infuriated by the tone of complaint in the response of the titular commander. The list of towns and villages from which the enemy had been ejected was, it seemed, not just insignificant, the whole strategy of the column was mistaken, racing ahead with no thought to their flanks or the taking and securing of territory for the Republic.

Not a witness to this exchange – he would not have understood it anyway – Cal Jardine had got his wounded boy into the home of the local doctor who, if he had fled, being no supporter of Republicanism, had at least left in his surgery the means to deal with a bullet wound.

There were many other casualties and a row of sheet-covered bodies by the bridge, evidence that taking it had extracted a high price in blood. Those of the enemy dead, and there were no wounded, were thrown into the canal to float south as a warning to other places tempted to support the generals.

Florencia, interrogating the jubilant survivors of Albatàrrec – it had suffered death and torture as had everywhere else and its inhabitants were now busy feeding and fêting their saviours – had found a woman who used to act as the doctor’s nurse and she was fetched into the surgery to take charge. Competent, she knew how to stem the flow of blood as well as cleanse the wound, though it was soon apparent the bullet was still lodged in the left shoulder and would need to be removed, an operation better carried out back in the city. The lad, named Stanley, would be sent to Barcelona with the anarchist wounded.

As soon as he was sure Stanley was in good hands he left to make sure that the rest of his boys were being cared for – the rearguard having been fetched in from their foxholes – that they had food and drink as well as the means to clean both themselves and their equipment, both adequately dealt with by Vince Castellano, now sorting them out a billet so they could get some much sought-after sleep. He also felt the need to give them a lecture and, of course, to praise them.

‘I couldn’t have asked for more. For men who are raw you
performed splendidly.’ Though these youngsters were pleased and knew they had every right to be, the rearguard less than the others, Cal could sense a residual layer of resentment, exemplified by the looks on their faces when Broxburn Jock spoke, his face tired and pinched, his voice cracked.

‘How’s wee Stan farin’?’

‘He’s in good hands, Jock, comfortable and asleep. The wound is clean and he will be evacuated to a proper hospital for an operation to remove a bullet.’ The pause was brief, the tone Cal employed turning quite hard. ‘I know you are not chuffed with the order I gave to leave Stan when he took his wound, but we were in the middle of a fight.’

One or two nodded, others did not. Tempted, as he was, to admit he had failed to designate anyone to deal with casualties, Cal felt it would come across as false. He had to be hard of heart and that was something they needed to learn, and he glanced at Vince, who had returned from his search and was looking at him, unseen by the lads, with an amused expression on his face as if to imply he knew what was coming.

‘That’s the way it is, and you’d best get used to it. In a battle, the effectives come before everyone else, and most important, you lot forgot to reload, which should be automatic. How would that have played out if one of those trucks full of Civil Guards had decided to stop and make a fight of it and you with empty weapons? It would not just be wee Stan in the surgery. You’re all volunteers, so if you don’t like it you can ship out anytime and I won’t seek to keep you, but know this. If I’m here and Vince is here, we tell you what to do and you do it without question. It has to be that way to keep you alive.’

They were not all abashed by his tone; the best of them held their cold stares and Cal would not have had it any other way. While he could not abide the way the anarchists behaved, neither did he want to lead men who were incapable of individual thoughts or were too frightened to express them. The best soldiers had a combination of both, as well as the initiative to act without orders.

‘Now, for the future, if any of you know first aid, give your names to Vince, and I will see about getting the kind of kit you need to be effective as medics.’

‘Right, you lot,’ Vince called. ‘I got us a billet in the schoolhouse, so let’s get some rest.’

Crossing the main square, now full of the column’s trucks, as well as the now-upright cannon and an abandoned fuel bowser, Cal and Florencia passed the communists, as before in a separate section by the steps to the church, their equipment neatly arranged and looking as smart as they had the first time he had seen them. Florencia took pleasure in telling Cal, in a voice loud enough for them to overhear, that ‘the cowards took no part in the battle, but stayed to the rear where they were safe’.

The only reaction she got was from one of the squad leaders, who looked at her with the same level of hate as she was displaying, then snapped his upraised thumb through his teeth, which meant Cal had to drag his woman away from what would have been a futile dispute.

‘Come on, let’s find out what your leader has in mind.’

They found Juan Luis in the office of the town mayor, sitting behind his desk: he, a left socialist, had been found hanging from the wide archway of the door that led to the courtyard of his house,
with a notice saying he was a traitor pinned to his chest. Inside, his family – a wife and two daughters – had been raped and mutilated, then finished off with gunshots to the head.

In total, the insurgents had murdered some thirty-four of the town’s inhabitants before fleeing, taking with them those sympathisers who had not already fled to safety, the locals who supported their aims and had helped their ‘cleansing’. It had to be hoped that in raking those fleeing vehicles, some of those who had betrayed their fellow citizens to the Falange had been killed along with the blueshirts.

Having not long come off the phone to Villabova, Laporta was in a mood of quiet fury, and in reacting to Cal Jardine he showed scant gratitude for the fact that his bacon had been saved by the actions of the Olympians. A question as to the removal of the wounded got a very brusque response, almost a dismissive wave of the hand. About to remonstrate with him, Florencia beat Cal to it; she launched into a furious burst of Spanish invective, halfway through which Laporta started to laugh, his shoulders shaking.

‘My friend, she has just told me I am an ingrate.’ Then his hand went up to protect his face as Florencia, still yelling at him in Spanish, picked up the late mayor’s ashtray and made to throw it at his head; he was saved by Cal grabbing it out of her hand. ‘If she is like this in bed I wonder you have the energy to fight.’

‘I think you owe my boys a vote of thanks,’ Cal said, not in the least amused, now actually restraining Florencia with one arm round her waist, seeking to avoid her kicking legs and now suffering an equal number of insults as the man behind the desk.

The look on Laporta’s face changed immediately, and the laughter ceased. ‘Which I will do in person, my friend, but right now I
am suffering from being told by Villabova, our little Cortez, that everything we have done is an error.’

‘What?’ Cal enquired, before snapping at Florencia to calm down, which she did as Laporta talked; his tone was enough to tell her that the matter was serious.

‘He has told me we need to secure the whole region through which we have passed, not just the road to Saragossa, and he listed a whole number of places I have never heard of that we have failed to occupy and cleanse of fascists. Clearly he had a map which tells him this, but one fact is obvious: he has been so busy taking other areas he has not yet reached Lérida, this while our friends are being executed by the hundred further west.’

‘But you all agreed back in Barcelona that taking back Saragossa is vital—’

‘My friend,’ Laporta interrupted, ‘Villabova is not of the CNT or FAI. He is a soldier and I am not, something of which he was keen to remind me.’

‘But I am.’

‘Yes, you are, so I now ask you, as a soldier, what should I do?’

Cal pointed to a sulking Florencia and said, ‘I think you best tell her what you have just told me.’

The explanation did nothing to lessen her fury but it did redirect it and the name Villabova, mixed with a few choice insults, was the result. It served the purpose, giving Cal time to think and to reflect that Laporta was, at last, open about the need for military advice. He was, of course, not in the presence of his lieutenants, so it might be a one-off.

‘What is happening elsewhere in the Peninsula?’

The list that followed took some getting hold of, but thankfully
every time Laporta included Florencia, Cal had time to absorb it, well aware, and the anarchist had added the caveat, that much of what he said was less than hard, incontestable fact; the situation was still fluid, the only certainty being that in the territory they controlled, the fascists were not only shooting people by the hundreds, they were boasting about it on the radio, especially one of the senior generals in Seville, who was daily listing the details of his operation to cleanse ‘sacred Spain’ of the disease of socialism.

Enough ships had stayed loyal to their officers to get the first elements of the Army of Africa, especially their heavy equipment, over the Straits to the mainland, and they were being shielded from Republican destroyers by two German pocket battleships, while the man who had taken command in Morocco, General Franco, lacking enough vessels to move his men in time, had sent a message to Rome and Berlin requesting aircraft to provide transport.

‘Have they agreed?’ Cal asked.

‘No one knows yet. Our government have appealed for aid to London and Paris.’

Cal was tempted to tell Laporta not to hold his breath on that one; if Peter Lanchester was right, the British government would want to stay well out of it. Paris, with a Popular Front government of its own, could be more sympathetic to the Republic, and so was a better bet. There was good news from Valencia, the vital port for agricultural exports and thus the flow of much needed currency: it had been saved, while the leader of the revolt, that serial rebel General Sanjurjo, had died in a plane crash.

‘So who will take over?’

Laporta shrugged. ‘Let us hope they all kill each other trying.’

Confused as it was, it became apparent to Cal, as Juan Luis talked,
that the population centres, the bigger cities, seemed to be the key; it was those the insurgent generals were seeking to take and it had to be a strategy designed to suit their purpose, so it was axiomatic that the best course of action was to deny them their aim.

Great swathes of land did not matter to them because they had seen clearly a fact still obscure to the likes of Villabova: this was not conventional warfare, in which one army manoeuvred to defeat another and took ground; it was a series of disjointed regional actions in which the Republic was reacting to events, not imposing its will.

The army knew they could occupy the hinterland once they had control of the provincial centres, and one of those was Saragossa. Whatever happened elsewhere, and that could have no bearing on the present conversation, Laporta should continue to head for his objective; this Villabova character was dead wrong.

‘Do we know the level of the enemy forces in Saragossa?’

‘Madrid say it is being held by disloyal army units, with a force of Carlists on the way from Navarre to help them hold it.’

Fired by religion, which was what bound them to both the cause of the generals and, historically, that of Don Carlos, a junior member of the monarchical House of Bourbon, the Carlists would be as fanatical as the Falange. The people of Navarre had fought two full and bloody wars against the Spanish government, and launched several insurrections that had lasted over forty years. Whatever else they were militarily, they were not quitters.

‘Then the best thing you can do is get there as quickly as possible, that is, before they do.’

‘Disobey him?’

‘Has he ordered you to stop and consolidate?’

‘No.’

‘Then I have given you my advice. You can also demand that Villabova support you.’

Laporta got up from the desk, came round, and embraced Cal. That was acceptable; the great smacking kiss on the cheek was not and the Spaniard was forcibly pushed away, Cal sitting down to avoid repetition.

‘But for the love of God, before we move any further, get hold of some maps.’

While they continued talking, neither had noticed that Florencia had edged towards the door – she had heard a voice they had not – opening it a fraction and putting her ear to the crack. After a few moments, she waved an impatient hand at Cal and gestured that he should come to join her; his lifted eyebrows and glance at Laporta only made her cross, so he nodded to Juan Luis and slipped out of his chair. Invited to put his ear to the door, he could hear what he thought was Manfred Drecker’s voice, but it was incomprehensible.

‘
Querido
,’ Florencia whispered, pushing the door till the crack disappeared. ‘That bastard Drecker is on the phone to one of his slimy friends and he is telling him how he and his communists took the town by crossing the canal downstream and attacking it from the rear.’

‘What?’

That got him a finger to her lips and the door was opened a crack again, ear to it, her face screwed up, but Cal had heard enough. He grabbed the handle and pulled it open, seeing Drecker with his back to him talking on the phone, fag in the air, his voice emphatic and before him some kind of map-like drawing, obviously so engrossed he had not heard. Florencia had come to join him and then Laporta
appeared in the open doorway, and now it was Cal’s turn to call for silence.