Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (61 page)

As we readied to leave, with clanking of buffers and couplings, and sudden jerks backward and forward, the girls ran up and handed us their little oranges, with large lustrous looks in their eyes. The small boys formed a line, shouting, ‘Salud, compaiieros!’ The old women waved and wept.

I shared a compartment with a half-dozen muffled-up soldiers who had only arrived the day before, including an ill-favoured young Catalan whose pox-pitted cheeks sprouted stubble like a grave in May. Garrulous – as we all were – he declared himself to be an anarchist, but one with a pivotal sense of nationalism, which made him boast, quite properly, that having been born in Barcelona, he was no more Spanish than the rest of us.

For this reason he’d joined the Brigade. He kept slapping his chest. ‘Pau Guasch,’ he said. ‘International Catalan, me! International damn Chinese-Russian-Catalan-Polish. No damn father, damn mother, damn God.’ He’d helped burn down three churches in Gerona, he said. He’d scattered petrol, thrown a match, and said, ‘Woosh!’

In the end we told him to shut up, his spluttering English was too much for us. He seemed in no way put down. He took a potato from his pocket, crossed himself before eating it, and muttered, ‘Damn Trotsky, King of the Jews.’

The train jerked and clattered at an unsteady eight miles an hour, often stopping, like a tired animal, for gasping periods of rest. We moved through a grey and desolate country crossed by deserted roads and scattered with empty villages that seemed to have had their eyes put out.

It was then that I began to sense for the first time something of the gaseous squalor of a country at war, an infection so deep it seemed to rot the earth, drain it of colour, life and sound. This was not the battlefield; but acts of war had been committed here,little murders, small excesses of vengeance. The landscape was plagued, stained and mottled, and all humanity seemed to have been banished from it. The normal drive of life had come to a halt, nobody stirred, even the trees looked blighted; one saw no dogs or children, horses or girls, no smoking fires or washing on lines, no one talking in doorways or walking by the river, leaning out of windows or watching the train go by – only a lifeless smear over roof and field, like something cancelled or in a coma; and here and there, at the windswept crossroads, a few soldiers huddled in dripping capes. Worse than a country at war, this one was at war with itself– an ultimate, more permanent wastage.

Night came, and darkness, outside and inside the train. Only the winter stars moved. We were still smoking the last of our Gauloises Bleus, stripping them down and re-rolling them into finer and even finer spills. Our faces, lit by the dim glow of our fags, hung like hazy rose masks in the shadows. Then one by one, heads nodded, fags dropped from sagging mouths, and faces faded from sight.

It was a long broken night, the windows tight shut, our bodies drawing warmth from each other. But there were too many of us packed into this tiny old carriage, and those who chose to lie on the floor soon regretted it. Long murmuring confidences, snores, sudden whimpers of nightmare, a girl’s name muttered again and again, Pau Guasch howling blasphemies when a boot trod on his face, oaths in three languages when someone opened a window.

It may have been twenty hours later – waking and sleeping, arguing, telling stories, nibbling bread and olives, or just sitting in silence and gazing dully at each other – that the train slowed down to less than a walking pace and finally halted in a gasp of exhausted steam under the cheese-green lights of Valencia station.

We were to change trains here, and were promised hot food. The time was about midnight, and the great city around us showed no light as though trying to deny its existence, its miles of dark buildings giving off an air of prostration, pressed tight to the ground like turtles.

We had pulled up in a siding. A late moon was rising. Some women arrived with buckets of stew. They moved in a quick, jerky silence, not even talking to each other, ladling out the thin broth in little frightened jabs. Suddenly one of them stopped, lifted her head, gave a panicky yelp like a puppy, dropped her food bucket and scampered away. She had heard something we had not, her ears better tuned already to the signals of what was to come.

Following her cry and departure, the others fled too. Then the station lights were switched off. An inert kind of stillness smothered the city, a stretched and expectant waiting. Then from the blank eastern sky, far out over the sea, came a fine point of sound, growing to a deep throbbing roar, advancing steadily overhead towards us. Such a sound that the women on the platform had learned to beware of, but which to us was only an aircraft at night. And which, as we listened, changed from the familiar, casual passage of peace to one of malignant purpose. The fatal sound which Spain was the first country in Europe to know, but with which most of the world would soon be visited.

Franco’s airfields in Majorca, armed by Italian and German warplanes, were only a few minutes’ flight from the mainland. Barcelona and Valencia lay as open cities, their defences but a few noisy and ineffectual guns.

As the bombers closed in, spreading their steady roar above us, I felt a quick surge of unnatural excitement. I left the train, and the roofed platform, and wandered off alone to the marshalling yards some distance away. This was my first air-raid, and I wanted to meet it by myself, to taste the full brunt of it without fuss or panic. We’d already seen posters and photographs of what bombs could do to a city, slicing down through apartment blocks, leaving all their intimacies exposed – the wedding portrait on the wall, the cheap little crucifix, the broken bed hanging bare to the street – the feeling of whole families huddled together in their private caves being suddenly blasted to death in one breath. New images of outrage which Spain was the first to show us, and which in some idiot way I was impatient to share.

The bombers seemed now overhead, moving slowly, heavily, ploughing deep furrows of sound. A single searchlight switched on, then off again quickly, as though trying to cancel itself out. Then the whole silent city woke to an almost hysterical clamour, guns crackling and chattering in all directions, while long arcs of tracer-bullets looped across the sky in a brilliant skein of stars. This frantic outburst of fire lasted only a minute or two, then petered out, its panic exhausted.

The airplanes swung casually over the city, left now to their own intentions. Just a couple of dozen young men, in their rocking dim-lit cabins, and the million below them waiting their chance in the dark. A plane accelerated and went into a dive, followed by the others in a roaring procession. They swooped low and fast, guided perhaps by the late moon on the water, on the rooftops and railway tracks. Then the bombs were released – not from any great height, for the tearing shriek of their fall was short. There followed a series of thumping explosions and blasts of light as parcels of flame straddled the edge of the station. I felt the ground jump at my feet and smelt the reek of burnt dust. A bomb hit the track near the loading sheds, and two trucks sailed sideways against a halo of fire, while torn lines circled around them like ribbons. Further off an old house lit from inside like a turnip lamp, then crumpled and disappeared. A warehouse slowly expanded in the gory bloom of a direct hit, and several other fires were rooted in the distance. But it was over quickly – a little more of the city destroyed, more people burned or buried, then the bombers turned back out to sea.

I found I’d stood out in the open and watched this air-raid on Valencia with curiosity but otherwise no emotion. I was surprised at my detachment and lack of fear. I may even have felt some queer satisfaction. It was something I learned about myself that night which I have never quite understood.

Once the planes had gone, there was little to be heard but the crackling of flames and the distant bells of a fire-engine. I was joined by two of my companions from the train, both silent, both fresh to this, as I was. A railwayman crossed the lines, groping about, bent double. We asked him if he was all right, and he said yes, but he needed help. He shone a torch on his left hand, which was smashed and bleeding, then jerked his head in the direction of the nearby street. We ran round the edge of the burning warehouse and found two little houses, also well alight. They were small working-class shops, blazing tents of tiles and beams from beneath which came an old man’s cry.

‘My uncle,’ said the railwayman, tearing away at the smoking rubble with his one undamaged hand. ‘I told him to sleep in the cinema.’ The roofs collapsed suddenly, sending a skirt of sparks riffling across the road. The old man’s cries ceased, and we staggered back while great curling flames took over. ‘The fault is his,’ said the railwayman. ‘He would have been safe in the cine. He used to go there every afternoon.’ He stood doubled up, staring furiously at the blazing ruin, his clothes smoking, his hands hanging black and helpless.

Walking back towards the station, we stumbled over a figure on the pavement, lying powdered white, like a dying crusader. His face and body were covered in plaster dust, and he shook violently from head to toe. We rolled him on to a couple of boards and carried him to the main platform, where several other bodies were already spread out in rows. A moaning woman held a broken child in her arms; two others lay clasped together in silence, while a bearded doctor, in a dingy white coat, just wandered up and down the platform blaspheming.

It was a small, brief horror imposed on the sleeping citizens of Valencia, and one so slight and routine, compared with what was happening elsewhere in Spain, as to be scarcely worth recording. Those few minutes’ bombing I’d witnessed were simply an early essay in a new kind of warfare, soon to be known – and accepted – throughout the world.

Few acknowledged at the time that it was General Franco, the Supreme Patriot and Defender of the Christian Faith, who allowed these first trial-runs to be inflicted on the bodies of his countrymen, and who delivered up vast areas of Spain to be the living testing-grounds for Hitler’s new bomber-squadrons, culminating in the annihilation of the ancient city of Guernica.

About four in the morning, with fires still burning in the distance, we were rounded up by our ‘transport officer’, who was rather drunk and wearing a Mongolian jacket. Round his neck, somewhat oddly, he’d slung binoculars and a tape-measure, and he scurried about, shooing us back to the train, as though our departure was part of some major logistic.

Some of the men had loud, over-excited voices, shining eyes, and brave tales of survival. Some were quiet and staring, others appeared to have slept unaware through everything.

Our new train was drawn up in another part of the station, where we found Pau Guasch carrying a basket of bread. Once crammed into our compartment he handed chunks of it round, saying we were not fit to eat such victuals. He was half-right there; the bread must have been several weeks old, and was coated with soot and plaster. He looked smug and benign as we tried to gnaw away at his bounty; in the end we swallowed it down.

The night was long and cramped as the train lumbered inland, slowly circling and climbing the escarpment of Chiclana to reach the freezing tableland of Mancha. I had known part of this plateau in the heat of high summer when it seemed to blaze and buckle like a copper sheet. Now it was as dead as the Russian steppes, an immensity of ashen snow reflecting the hard light of the winter moon. No gold path of glory, this, for youth to go to war, but a grey path of intense disquiet.

Apart from Pau Guasch, all the men in my compartment were volunteers from outside – British, Canadian, Dutch. And poor Guasch, the only true native son of the Peninsula, found himself squashed between his own natural assumption of leadership and our teasing contempt for him – the ‘foreigner’. So we used him as the butt of our mindless exhaustion, pushed him around, tripped him up, trod him under our feet, and stuffed his shirt with crumbs and crusts of bread.

Fear, exasperation and cruelty gripped us, and we continued to taunt the furious little Catalan till we tired, at last, of our mirthless game and slumped one by one to sleep. We slept stiffly, uneasily, propping each other bolt upright, or toppling sideways like bottles in a basket. We were not warriors any more, but lumps of merchandise being carried to a dumping-ground.

In a bitter dawn we approached Albacete on the plain, clanking through tiny stations where groups of snow-swept women watched us dumbly as we passed them by. A lad at a level crossing, with a thin head-down horse, lifted a clenched fist for a moment, then dejectedly dropped it again. Silent old men and barefooted children, like Irish peasants of the Great Hunger, lined the sides of the tracks without gesture or greeting. We were received, as we trundled towards our military camp, not as heroic deliverers, or reinforcements for victory, but rather as another train-load of faceless prisoners seen through a squint-eyed blankness of spirit.

But as we steamed at last into Albacete station, we found that someone, at least, had dredged up some sense of occasion. We fell stiffly from the train and lined up raggedly on the platform, and were faced by a small brass band like a firing-squad. In the dead morning light they pointed their instruments at our heads and blew out a succession of tubercular blasts. Then a squat mackintoshed Commander climbed on to a box and addressed us in rasping tones. Until that moment, perhaps, cold and hungry though we were, we may still have retained some small remnants of courage. The Commander took them away from us, one by one, and left us with nothing but numb dismay.

He welcomed us briefly, mentioned our next of kin (which we were doing our best to forget), said we were the flower of Europe, thanked us for presenting our lives, reminded us of the blood and sacrifice we were about to bestow on the Cause, and drew our attention to the sinister might and awesome power of International Fascism now arrayed against us. Many valiant young comrades had preceded us, he said, had willingly laid down their lives in the Struggle, and now rested in the honoured graves of heroes in the battlefields of Guadalajara, Jarama and Brunete. He knew we would be proud to follow them, he said – then shook himself like a dog, scowled up at the sky, saluted, and turned and left us. We shuffled our feet in the slush and looked at each other; we were an unwashed and tattered lot. We were young and had expected a welcome of girls and kisses, even the prospect of bloodless glory; not till the Commander had pointed it out to us, I believe, had we seriously considered that we might die.