Thing to Love (21 page)

“It is difficult to begin, Don Gregorio,” Miro broke in. “You — you have modernized war, you see. On a small scale, of course. But the firework display is inevitable. It does not mean all you think . . .”

“Miro, I am not to be treated as a child. One explosion was so terrible that we heard it in San Vicente.”

“One moment, Don Gregorio, and I will explain it.”

Miro covered the telephone and turned to his A.D.C.

“Salvador, was there anything they could possibly have heard in San Vicente?”

“No, my General. Imagination, unless Paco Salinas is bombarding the Citadel.”

“What the devil shall I tell him? He won't believe it's nonsense.”

“Say it was Colonel Chaves.”

Miro stared down his A.D.C. and then saw that his flippancy was sound sense.

“We think it was Rosalindo Chaves. There was nothing else you could have heard, Don Gregorio.”

“He is dead?”

“No, no! But a brick hit his flask when he was drinking.”

“You still laugh, then? The Division is not destroyed?”

“It has turned out much as I told you it would. A little worse in what Ledesma dropped on us. A little better in what he hit. Have you any news? Without anything in the air I am as blind as they were fifty years ago.”

“Only that Sixth Division has requisitioned all available transport and is coming up by road. Third is using the railway, but short of locomotives and rolling stock.”

“And Fourth Division?”

“We have heard nothing except that they have moved up from the frontier. Look, Miro!” the President added agitatedly. “I know that I am not a soldier, but I am alarmed. When you have
left Cumana behind what is to prevent Twelfth Cavalry taking San Vicente?”

“Nothing whatever unless I blow the Jaquiri Bridge. And I am just as anxious to avoid that as Jesús-María.”

“But then we are lost!”

“Soldiers obey orders, Don Gregorio. Tomorrow, when I have committed myself, Twelfth Cavalry will close in for the kill. They dare not leave Cumana for San Vicente. If they did, I could escape across the bridge. Alternatively I could force the Quebradas Pass and take all Siete Dolores. A children's game! They would have my base and I would have theirs. The duty of Twelfth Cavalry is to stop my retreat, and that is what they will do. But I should think it quite likely that while they are at Cumana some of the younger officers will change into civilian clothes and visit San Vicente. I suggest you give the police a list of names and addresses. They would be far better in jail than with their units.”

“But this is comic opera, Miro!”

“War often is. The more imposing an organization, the more fun when a little individual makes it look foolish.”

“Doña Concha and Doña Felicia send you their compliments. They are here.”

“I have forbidden all private use of the telephones, Don Gregorio. Will you kiss their hands for me and tell them all their friends are well?”

The President for an instant was silent.

“Get it over, get it over!” he begged — it was the first time that Miro had ever heard his voice unsteady. “And as mercifully as you can. I never intended this — never foresaw it.”

“No one intended it. Everyone in our time has hoped to avoid war except the Germans.”

“I meant the inhumanity of it, Miro. We are all without emotions. And Cumana? Is anything left of it?”

“It is hardly touched. I had no troops in the town, and the Air Force could see I had not. But it may not always be so lucky. The Ministry of the Interior should organize transport and homes for refugees.”

By nightfall the dust had settled back upon Cumana, and the rough paving of plaza and main street no longer reverberated with the bouncing of the guns, the gear changes, the voices and pounding engines at the traffic blocks, the steady roar of the close-packed convoys as they head southeast and left the town in a singing silence and — since the transformer station was a heap of bricks — the unfamiliar darkness of sparse lamps and candles.

The main body of Fifth Division covered twenty kilometers before it halted for the night. Miro was impatient to leave a large and obvious gap between himself and Cumana, so that the enemy might be certain of his intentions. Every hour counted. If Twelfth Cavalry had begun to pour through the Quebradas Pass and over the sands of the Rio Jaquiri by midday, Calixto Irigoyen's raid on Lérida could be launched. If Jesús-María hesitated, then the whole operation fell a day behind schedule. For four days the Division was self-sufficient. On the fifth day, if fighting were heavy, there would be need for more care than the brigade commanders believed. On the sixth it was the enemy who must supply their petrol and ammunition.

Morning brought no news. The advance continued. Ledesma's bombers circled overhead. A cheerful rumor ran down the column that Captain Irala had been on their wavelength to ask the price of prints of photographs. Fighters occasionally swooped on the road in the hope of disorganizing the move, but were not even paid the compliment of small-arms fire. This leisurely watch from the air at least confirmed to Miro and his staff that their plan was the only one possible. The Division's vastly superior speed was neutralized. There was not a hope of surprise, of the swinging, hard-hitting attacks which could destroy the enemy piecemeal. Speed could be used only to ensure that the Division was encircled when and where it wanted.

It was a little after four in the afternoon when contact was made. One of Chaves's reconnaissance units, working forward through the lower slopes of the foothills far out on the left, was engaged by a strong enemy patrol, checked and forced to deploy. Chaves reacted instantly and continued the advance, but the pace was getting slower and a battle for the ridges was building up.

Battle . . . Miro replaced the earphones. It was the last thing he wanted at this time and on this vital sector. Jesús-María or more probably the commander of Sixth Division must indeed have requisitioned every lorry he could lay his hands on to get up at this speed. And on a most unlikely flank. Or was it unlikely? The enemy's game was to hold him anyhow and anywhere till Third and Fourth Division could come up. And there was no surer way of doing that than to start an old-fashioned infantry battle in the foothills.

A very nasty development. He had expected that his detachments far out in the plain, supported by a troop of armored vehicles, would be the first to make contact and would then withdraw in the dusk according to plan. Chaves's force on the edge of the hills was no stronger than the very minimum needed to check the enemy till dark, when the Saracens could slip into the Escala de los Ingleses unobserved. And now pressure was building up so rapidly, with two good hours of daylight left, that it looked as if Calixto might never get into his valley at all.

Miro decided to go up to the front himself — not that he had any intention of interfering with Rosalindo's control of the action, but only he, with his own eyes, could decide whether or not the Saracens should be launched on their raid. Held back as they were on the left wing they could easily be used in support of Chaves. But that move defeated its own purpose. To rally, refuel, engage themselves in single file on the rough track immediately after action — and all without rest and in the dark — meant that they might not reach Lérida before the scratch force which Twelfth Cavalry would send back to stop them.

In the short time it took Miro to reach the first yellow humps of the hills, the noise of battle changed. The scattered rifle fire, the monkey chatter of machine guns and mortar bursts were now punctuated by artillery fire. And the guns were not his. His were far back — all ready, with the mass of the Division, the transport and the armor, for the retreat to Cruzada.

Rosalindo was being compelled to extend his left into country from which it could not easily be extricated. The gray, dead grass, the folds and the dry watercourses, formed ideal ground for the
well-trained infantry of Sixth Division, and there was no sound line for defense unless one let the Escala go. Miro was unjustly infuriated by Jesús-María's heavy, conventional buildup. It was unsound and useless, for he could not possibly guess that he had struck in a vital sector.

There was little doubt that in the hour of daylight which was left the enemy could reach the Escala. He still hesitated to call in the armor, for he did not want the Avellanistas to feel it until it could be decisive. And it was far away, ready for the retreat to Cruzada. Then he saw a low ridge change hands — cheaply for him, expensively for the enemy — but only one more could be allowed.

He called up Mario Nicuesa and gave him the objectives for a regiment of Shermans. In the light of the low sun the little black figures of the enemy were in almost continual movement. He thought, trying to be impassive, how curious it was that this unimportant skirmish should decide the fate of Vidal. Or would training count — long training in instant readiness and speed? The sun was nearly on the horizon when he heard the rattle of the armor. The squadrons swept on between him and the hills, then into the gullies and over the ridges, mopping up the marionettes now in more agitated movement than ever, on another three thousand meters, halting hull down, destroying the enemy guns and then waddling gently homewards to Division with the turrets open and an air of shaking the dust out of their ears. Well, he couldn't stop Mario Nicuesa and his squadron commanders enjoying themselves in their first attack, but it was sending the enemy to school.

The night came down. Miro drove over to the dark herd of Saracens, shook Irigoyen's hand and ordered the advance into the Escala. In the echoing foothills the noise of the column was unexpectedly deafening. At least one good thing had come out of defeat and misjudgment. If he had not been forced to use the armor this sudden, inexplicable roar of vehicles could have warned the enemy of some purposeful movement up the valley. Chaves, still at his command post, noticed the racket and at once started an imitation battle which appalled Miro for a good five minutes until his brigade commander could report. He wondered what
Sixth Division would make of it. No doubt they would sleep well with the delightful thought that Fifth Division patrols were fighting each other in the dark.

The profit-and-loss account was not very clear till the morning when the division was on the road to Cruzada, strung out, disorganized — from the point of view of the staff — but moving fast. It had used far too much petrol. Disengagement, however, was clean.

The first good news came in after breakfast. Second Combat Group, left behind at Cumana, reported that troop trains carrying the Infantry Brigade and the guns of Twelfth Cavalry were already at the foot of the Quebradas Pass, and that horsed regiments, striking down the road and along the sands of the Rio Jaquiri, had put in a dashing attack on bridge and junction, evidently disbelieving Ledesma's reports that both were undefended. The Second Combat Group had got safely away, jeeps racing horses.

Calixto Irigoyen was still preserving wireless silence, which meant that the Saracens were lurching and crawling through the foothills in full daylight without being spotted by any reconnaissance plane. A little before midday Irigoyen came on the air and reported that his column had at last been discovered. He was approaching the Indian causeway and had lost one car in the descent which he had not attempted to recover. He sounded cheerful, suggesting that the general could pick it up any time he happened to be passing.

Miro smiled to himself — except in public he had done no smiling at all since the previous evening — at the prospect of Ledesma's horror when he appreciated the threat to Lérida. But, on second thoughts, it was ten to one that he wouldn't feel any, that he would stiffly consider the military men quite absurd to be frightened by a mere regiment of armored cars. Jesús-María would be alarmed all right, but he wasn't a man to disperse the fog of war by plunging boldly into it. One could safely reckon that it would be well into the afternoon before he ordered Twelfth Cavalry to clear the pass of traffic and rush a scratch force back into Siete Dolores to protect the airfield.

By road it couldn't be done. The appalling zigzags would still be full of horsed transport coming down to the plain. Then allow time for Jesús-María to act; time for Twelfth Cavalry to organize a detachment of such fire power and mobility that it could tackle the Saracens; time for the rolling stock at Cumana to be turned round and loaded with men and guns. About 10
P.M
. should be right for T
AQUILLA
: the sabotage of the railway in the Quebradas Pass.

Miro was unhappy that the operation should depend so inescapably on Vidal. Don Gregorio had been content with is devious and secret inquiries; on the other hand he had insisted that nobody, not even Captain Irala, was to know of T
AQUILLA
. Only two of his own agents, he said, were in the plot. No doubt he hoped that in the disorganization caused by military traffic the accident would pass as genuine.

It would be like him to give more importance to that than to timing. Miro told Salvador Irala to go at once to Divisional Signals and see in person that the link was open from Headquarters to Citadel, and Citadel to the President wherever he might be.

An hour later Calixto Irigoyen reported again.

“Half of us over the causeway, Chief. And we're getting everything the Air Force collected for you.”

“Serious?”

“No more than living at the bottom of a rubbish tip. No casualties. You wouldn't believe what they're throwing at us. Your aunt's bedstead. Wine barrels full of petrol. Boxes of explosives — ammonal from the quarries, I think. Nearest shot was a hundred liters of sulphuric acid.”

“Can you get through tomorrow?”

“We should be out of the mountains, but too late to attack. Don't count on anything, Chief, till the morning of the fourteenth.”

It would just do. The breakdown train was stuck in shattered Cumana Junction. The line would have to be cleared by hand. That put the narrow road alongside it out of action too. God, what a triumphant mess for cavalrymen to handle! On the night of the thirteenth they might begin to nurse some sort of a train up
the Pass; but then they had to reach Lérida, detrain and move to the airfield.