MAMista (36 page)

As the descent continued, the expectation of being attacked created a tension throughout the whole party. The men showed it in different ways. Angel Paz fussed more than usual. Singer became irritable and stopped his singing. Lucas was preoccupied and sometimes seemed to be lost in another world, his eyes unseeing and his ears deaf to repeated conversation. Only Inez showed little or no change in her demeaour. She was determined to show herself physically equal to the men and this sustained her.

Once down into the lowland jungle they arranged themselves into a battle formation. The guns were loaded. Novillo and Tito, his loader, kept close to the Hotchkiss machine gun. It was dark and steamy here. Sometimes the humidity reached a point where it made breathing painful. Mosquitoes, and tiny flies that drank from the corners of the eyes and the mucus of the nose, greeted them with renewed ferocity. That night no one rested properly. By dawn everyone was ready to move despite their lack of sleep.

The next day the sky darkened and showers of heavy rain fell. The hills they had left behind them flickered with the blue lightning of an electrical storm.

No longer did Paz order a long midday halt. Too many times such stops had caused muscles to seize up and made the next stage an agony. They all knew this and approved. Most of them smoked cheroots to help them stay awake and appease their hunger. The short stops didn't give them enough rest and the short stops were now all they got. What Paz saw as tiredness, and what Singer called ‘the mañana syndrome', Lucas knew was sickness. The jungle had started to select its victims.

The ones who had grown up on a Western-style diet and environment found the journey difficult. They lacked the
natural skills the Indians showed. They could not cut bamboo or sleep in wet mud. They were the choicest targets for mosquitoes and leeches. They suffered badly from the sores that wet clothing makes. But those city-dwellers had good general health. It provided them with resistance to many of the diseases they encountered. They were not anaemic. Their cuts healed and their coughs were not the lung-wrenching symptoms of pneumonia that Lucas was beginning to hear around him.

The men remained cheerful but they did not talk excitedly as they had done at the beginning. No one now sang of the lovers of Teruel, or cheered or applauded some especially bold or foolish act. They were withdrawing into themselves, dwelling upon their aches and pains and sicknesses. The boils and sores that they had accepted as a part of their lives were now becoming ulcers from which they had seen men die. Their diarrhoea was becoming the bloody torment of dysentery that probed their bowels like red-hot needles and humiliated them with its stink and mess all day and all night.

Some sort of fever seemed to be affecting them. Lucas noticed that some men were carrying the guns and the loads of others who did not have the strength to manage. The slight swellings of face, arms and legs that were just additional evidence of vitamin B deficiency were now developing into the flabby softenings that foreshadowed beriberi. Lucas worried about these men. He had made a secret wager with himself that the first man to collapse would do so before they reached the foothills of the next range: the Sierra Serpiente. He wondered what Angel Paz would do with the men who could march no more.

Rain had flooded the central basin. Some of it had become swamp into which a laden man went up to his knees. Some of it was elephant grass, coarse fibres as thick as a man's arm and eight feet tall. The steamy rottenness that was a part of every jungle had an added dimension here. Science
denied it but there was a sweetness in the air, a smell of decay which men instinctively fear. This was the smell of fever.

It was steamy hot. Neither fish nor man could traverse the semi-liquid lowland that meandered along the watercourse. Sometimes it inflicted long detours upon them as they followed the edges of huge mortlakes. No animal life survived in the basin except snakes, and of course the leeches, flies and mosquitoes which were not deterred by the heavy rain showers that descended without warning. Even birds and alligators avoided this region.

Lucas walked ahead of Inez. His stumbling footsteps gave her a chance to avoid the softer ground, the rotting roots or the fallen timber as he encountered them.

‘The flies are worse now,' Inez said.

‘Smoke,' said Lucas.

‘I have no breath to smoke.'

‘Take this and have some smoke in your mouth.' He passed his lighted cheroot to her. ‘It will keep some of the small ones away.'

‘It's not the small ones that give me trouble.' She took the cheroot and blew smoke so that the aroma of it was in her clothes and in her hair. There was a roll of thunder and the rain began again.

Lucas caught her as she stumbled. Her body was hot under the cotton jacket. Fever. He was immediately concerned. An infection or a malaria attack now would be a sentence of death, and he would be the presiding physician. It was the doctor's burden but now he resented it. He took her pulse. The others marched on past without seeing them. Their faces were hollow, grey and devoid of all expression.

Her pulse was weak but not much faster than normal. Perhaps it was nothing. ‘I'm going to sort out a couple of tablets for you,' he said.

‘What for?'

‘Just a tonic.' It was a doctor's joke. It was always ‘a
tonic'. How many death-beds were bedecked with tonic bottles? Lucas smiled at her and then moved forward to take a turn with the jungle knife. He was not much use against the bamboo but up-front they'd hit a patch of thorn.

Lucas slashed at the jungle with dispassionate energy. He feared and despised nature in all her guises. He was pragmatic: cautious and suspicious of everyone's motives, especially his own. He glanced over to where Paz and Singer were talking to Santos and Rómulo, the surviving twin. They were briefing Santos for a detour that would take him half a mile to the east. Singer had this obsessional dread of being under fire pinned against a terrain obstacle. Santos and Rómulo would ensure that the flank was unthreatened.

The contempt bordering on hatred that Singer and Paz had for each other – and the deep dislike which Lucas had for them both – had not lessened with the rigours of the journey. But, faced with a common goal, the three men had found a way of working together. Singer's resilience and sense of humour found a response in Paz with his youthful optimism and moral outrage. But both men, and Inez and Santos too, granted Lucas a seniority that was never explicit. To what extent it derived from his medical expertise, his military experience, his cynicism or his age no one could say. But it was through Lucas that Santos was able to voice his fears and suggestions. It was through Lucas that Singer and Paz found mutual command.

Lucas slashed at the thorn. Although till now he had been able to remain clinical about the medical state of the party, the idea that Inez might be sick made his fears personal and morbid. He toyed with the idea of hiding some of the medical supplies so that she could have a prior claim to them but there was no need to do that. He knew that every man on the march would gladly grant her his share of the medical supplies. Lucas had never served in an army like this one. However much he might despise their political
dreams, hate the system they wanted to impose, and tell himself that he detested their methods of waging war, he could not deny there was some enviable bond between these men. It made them incomparably selfless and dedicated. Lucas, and the two cutters at his side, came to the end of the thorn. Here the real jungle began again. It became more and more gloomy as they moved forward into vegetation that joined overhead.

When Santos and Rómulo left the main party they had to cut their way through the last of the thorn that stretched to the flank. Rómulo – robotically efficient since the death of his brother – worked hard but the two men made slow progress. Lucas thought it must be Santos when he first heard the gun firing. He saw the blue flashes lighting the jungle overhead. It was a shortcoming of Lucas and his expertise that he waited to identify the gun before grabbing Inez and falling flat on his face. Not an M-60; he knew the sound of those too well. About five hundred rounds a minute, he thought, too heavy for a Sten, too light for a point five, bursts too long for a BAR. Either a Bren or a Vickers.

Singer was shouting something that Lucas could not understand. Then came two loud explosions, about one hundred yards to his right. One was a phosphorus grenade. It started a flicker of fire in the underbrush.

Novillo had wrestled his Hotchkiss machine gun and dropped it on to the tripod that Tito, his number two, had thrown down into position. Novillo locked it into place. Carlos had the ammunition box open and was fiddling with a long straight metal clip. Carlos had never been under fire before. He was still fumbling with it when Novillo snatched it away and fed it into the breech, pulling the trigger almost simultaneously. The Hotchkiss was very loud. Its sound bounced off the overhanging trees. Its rate of fire was slow enough for Tito to find another clip in his satchel and hold it ready before the first clip was used.

Singer blew four short blasts on his whistle. Singer's worst
fears seemed to have been realized. Only a few men at the head of the party were through the thorn: the firing was all to the right of them; to the left of them was swamp.

Angel Paz sprinted back through the passage they'd cut through the thorn. He tapped men's shoulders and got them moving and then rushed back again.

Santos came running. Unable to find Paz he asked Singer for orders. ‘Make smoke!' Singer said. ‘We need the cover.'

Santos rummaged through his canvas bag. In his haste he grabbed one of the old coloured smoke markers that no one had ever been able to find a use for. He threw it as far as he could. There was a loud plop and the wind off the swamp blew delicate pink smoke across the front of them. Singer laughed. ‘Here come the gay guerrilleros!' he shouted.

‘Small bursts,' Paz called to Novillo, who could see no sign of an enemy and responded with a couple of very short bursts simply to show that he had heard.

Paz ran forward to where Lucas and Inez were sheltering behind a tree. They were at the very front and there was firing from their right. Paz crouched over them. His face was running with sweat and his glasses were steamed up so that he pushed them up on to his forehead in order to see better.

‘We're pinned against the swamp,' he told Lucas. ‘Some of the men are still on the far side of the thorn. It's bad. We must push on or they will massacre us.'

‘Yes,' said Lucas. It began to rain. Heavy droplets of it that burst with a tiny splash as they landed.

Paz wiped his glasses on his neckerchief. He said, ‘When they are all through the thorn there will be two blasts on the whistle. I'll start moving forward. Follow me.'

‘What about the mules?' Lucas asked, thinking about his baggage.

‘I've told them to unstrap their loads. If some of them have to be left behind we'll come back for them.'

‘They must carry all the loads.' Lucas said. ‘We need it all.'

‘They will do their best,' Paz said. ‘These men don't abandon supplies without reason.' Then there was more firing. Lucas and Inez went flat. When they raised their heads again Paz was gone.

Paz stumbled off into the jungle. He almost fell on some tree roots but recovered his balance and kept running. He reached Rómulo, René the bullfighter and four other soldiers. Without orders they had unstrapped the baggage from one of the mules and were manhandling it forward. Paz looked at the men and then lifted the end of a leather pack to test its weight. The packs were very heavy. Without them the men would have a better chance of getting through. ‘We must have the stores, comrades. We must.'

The men nodded and slipped the straps over their shoulders. There was another echoing crash of a grenade and some single shots. Then came a loud scream that could not be placed even when it modulated to whimpering.

The enemy machine gun fired again. This time Novillo too recognized it was a Bren. He traversed his Hotchkiss looking for movement. Either the enemy had two Brens or they had moved fifty yards along the right flank. Another two hundred yards and they would be surrounded.

Inez heard it too. ‘Are they moving?' she asked Lucas.

‘Sounds like it,' he said.

Paz felt sure they were trying to get round the flank. He took two grenades from the bag that Nameo the Cuban always carried. Paz removed the pins, paused to count, and lobbed both of them into the spot where the Bren was first heard. ‘There!' he called. ‘We'll go through there.'

Novillo fired a burst that finished the clip. Then he unlocked the gun from its mount. It weighed thirty-four pounds. He'd always wanted to fire it from the hip but until now there had always been someone to say no.

There were two blasts of the whistle and then a muddle of gunshots from the right. Paz shouted, ‘Follow me! Go! Go!' Santos took up the cry and shouted it in a dialect.
Howling like savages the whole party moved forward. Their weapons and stores, and the uncertain ground underfoot, made their advance painfully slow. The enemy Bren fired again and someone fell with the short strangled cry of pain that is the mark of a mortal wound. There was a confusion of yells and shooting. The Bren fired the long bursts that usually mean the gunner can see his target. Two more men fell. One of them was Rómulo. He was carrying a pannier and went down with a shrill yell and a crash. It was enough. The rush faltered. The men scattered and went to ground.

Paz blew his whistle. ‘Go! Go!' he shouted, but once a group of men go to cover under fire it is not easy to get them on their feet and moving into it again.

Paz looked to where Rómulo had fallen. It was a long way back. ‘It had to be there,' he said. Rómulo's pannier had tumbled into a swampy stream and there was a clear field of fire all round it, all the way back to the thorn.

‘I'll go,' Lucas called. He was already slipping the strap of the first-aid satchel on to his shoulder. Another sudden shower of rain swept across the swampy ground like grey mist. The rain was reducing visibility. Lucas decided that it was now or never.