Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (70 page)

The driver spoke rough bullying Spanish with a Russian accent – the first I had heard for weeks. His small companion crawled towards him and answered with the low voice of a girl, agreeing, placating, wheedling. He dug into his pocket, produced a tin of sardines, and slowly broke it open. Then he scooped out one of the brittle little fish, gave it a shake, and held it in front of the girl. She lifted the scarf from her face, opened her mouth like a bird’s, and he popped the oily morsel between her lips. She seemed to swallow it whole, with only the faintest flicker of her throat, then stretched her mouth open for more. So he patiently fed her till the tin was empty, wiping her lips at last with his sleeve.

He’d found her in the mountains, he said; thin and bony as a stork’s nest. He was fattening her up to be a proper armful. All she does, he said, is eat and sleep. And when she slept, he ate.

There was something Grand Guignol about these two, their incongruity and their different sizes, he bull-like, a great black minotaur, and she – in spite of her wrapping of scarves – no more than a doll. With her face uncovered she was waxenly beautiful and not more than fourteen, I would have thought. Was he the father-protector he appeared to be, or she as childish as she seemed?

Serrano, who suddenly came awake in a paroxysm of coughing, rolled off the tarpaulin and asked where we were. I explained about the snow, the bridge, the Russian driver and the girl, but he only shook his head and moaned. The driver opened another tin of sardines and shared it with us, pushing back the girl into a corner as he did so. He seemed to be loaded with food, he even had bread, and the pockets of his greatcoat clinked and clattered. Serrano asked him why we were carrying donkey harness instead of guns, and the man laughed and said did we want to be blown up?

The girl gazed long and silently at Serrano, and was about to say something, when the Russian took her back to his cab, pulled the truck on to the road and began the long slow climb up the Sierra. The snow had thinned a bit now, and came only in large flaky gusts as though someone was opening and shutting a gigantic door. Along the roadside, among the rocks and tree stumps, we passed strings of broken-down trucks and wagons. Men, swaddled in blankets, crouched in the cabins or huddled by blowing fires. There seemed to be no traffic at all going towards the front, it all appeared to be coming away towards us – lorries, strings of mules; occasionally a scattered bunch of men, and now and then an ancient high-roofed ambulance.

We drove in silence, in a dumb state of nothing, having no part of what we saw, nor any certain direction. Serrano let his head fall lower and lower between his shoulders, and his shoulders between his knees. Even the shouting Russian in the front had suddenly grown silent. Then as darkness fell, and the snow squalls lessened, quick flashes of fire, like summer lightning, began to dapple along the hill ridges ahead of us.

The road was bad now, cluttered with rocks and holes and the litter of smashed-up vehicles. We stopped by a derelict barn, sheltered in a kind of quarry, and bedded down there for the night. The Russian propped his girl in the corner, helped us build a fire, then handed round more sardines. He was now the big shaggy leader, the guardian, the provider, and we began to wonder what we would have done without him. Shuffling round on his knees, smacking our hands with bread, then hobbling away to feed the girl, his busy bulk seemed to crowd the barn like some amiable restless bear.

With the fire and the food Serrano was on the mend; his fine curls glistened, as did his eyes. And the girl watched him silently, first uncovering her face, then more slyly her shoulders, wriggling inch by inch towards him. In spite of the cold, her expression was one of simple rapture, which I don’t think the boy even noticed. But the driver did: he cuffed her ears with his paws and pushed her back whimpering against the wall. Then he came and squatted by the fire and told us the story of his life, which, being Russian, was long and dank.

At intervals, in the distance, we heard the snapping of gunfire, sound sharpened by the edge of frost. So Teruel was not far, and the front still awake, but we were too exhausted to care. To the epic drone of the driver’s story Serrano and I fell asleep. The sleep was unhealthy and broken. The gunfire drew nearer. I woke to the blank glimmer of a dying fire. Serrano lay curled and twitching like a dreaming dog, his mouth giving faint little yelps; while sprawled on his back in the corner,the Russian snored heavily, the girl held over his chest like a blanket.

It was one of the coldest nights I could remember. I lay with my hands between my thighs, my clenched teeth chattering, my overcoat crackling with frost. A deadening numbness assailed the toes and fingertips, and the nostrils stung as though split by skewers. Eventually, I got to my feet and stamped about. Snow whipped in gusts through holes in the roof. Indifferent, in his corner, the Russian continued to snore, while the girl on his belly sniffled and wept.

Just before daylight the gunfire stopped, and I woke Serrano – who seemed to be sleeping in a posture too close to death, his mouth hanging open like a poisoned rodent’s. I lit a new fire and boiled some snow and we dipped our last crusts of bread in it. Suddenly, as the fire blazed up, we saw that the Russian’s corner was empty. Then we heard from outside the mad whirring of a starting handle, a shout, an engine bursting into life and then fade as the truck drove away.

We had been dumped. The driver hadn’t even said goodbye, or even left us a single tin of sardines. We were on our own – wherever that might be – without direction, orders or food. What was I doing in these Spanish mountains, anonymous of purpose, with this pretty Portuguese boy of whom I knew nothing?

As the late daylight came, I left Serrano huddled by the fire, and went outside and got my first view of Teruel. It stood some five miles distant and slightly above us, a gleaming city of ice, its cathedral, castle, turrets, towers, all dusted with a silver, shimmering light. A city of silence, without dimension; it could have been a life-size mural, or an intimately carved ivory for some medieval cardinal or pope. A perfect relic, in its brilliant stillness, chaste and bloodless as a martyr’s tomb. Yet already, I was to learn, within the last few days, its citizens were walling up and massacring each other.

Its silence, now, could have been the silence of exhaustion after the excesses and bombardments of the night. Its sleep, not the sleep of peace and restoration, but a readying of strength for further outrage. So in this brief moment of armistice Teruel hushed itself, bathed in the mother-of-pearl morning, motionless, save for the tendrils of slender smoke spiralling into the sky.

Presently, as I stood there, my back to the barn, blowing on my fingers and watching the town, I saw three figures approaching in the distance, running doubled up, in little stumbling spurts. They were roly-poly bundles, dressed in fluttering blankets, and they fanned out to encircle the place. As they drew nearer, popping up and down like hares or pheasants, I wondered if they thought they were invisible. I slipped back into the barn and woke up Serrano, and we watched through a hole in the wall. The smoke from our fire must have drawn their attention, but they seemed in no hurry to come to close quarters. Then I heard one call to the others to keep their heads well down, that he’d soon ‘flush out the little buggers’. His lilting voice had a South Welsh accent, and he lifted a grenade to his teeth.

I leapt out of the barn, held up my empty hands, and shouted to him not to bother. ‘Come on over,’ I said. ‘We’re from Tarazona.’ After a silence, they all straightened up and joined us. The Welshman came first, dragging a giant foot wrapped in a bundle of sacking. ‘Sod the bugger,’ he said, prodding the lump with his musket. ‘Well, what’s going on here, then, boyo?’

The three stood round me, awkward, dumpy, ageless in their woollen mufflers. Well might they ask, I thought; I didn’t know. I took them inside to the last of the fire. They crouched around on their haunches, shuddering with cold, gasping and blowing on the ashes. In their damp balaclavas only their eyes were visible and these darted about like mice in a basket.

‘Who’s that?’ asked the Welshman, jerking his head towards Serrano, who was rocking on his heels and blubbering and sneezing. I tried to explain who he was, and realized I didn’t know either.

The Welshman guessed it, then turned to Serrano and addressed him in perfect Spanish. He got no answer but sighs and moans. ‘It ‘ould pay us to get rid of’im I reckon.’

His companions got to their feet and began to turn the boy over with their rifles. Serrano went limp like a doll. The Welshman spat.

‘Bin on patrol all night,’ he growled, just to pick up two tarts from Tarazona. Well, no offence, you – but just look at
him.

Fear had curled Serrano’s hair with a glorious shine. His fragile fingers clasped one of the soldier’s boots.

‘Might as well,’ said the soldier, cocking his rifle. He had a teasing Liverpool accent.

At that moment, with a clapping of giant hands, the bombardment began again.

‘Well, come on boys,’ said the Welshman, almost cheerful now, ‘better get you all back to base.’

Then we were out of the barn and running, bent low, following the limping, shouting Welshman. The bombardment was not so distant as it had been, the ground shook as though being beaten, the air screamed and tore, and we all fell flat, face down.

Under bombardment, the body takes over the mind; it stiffens and melts, the mouth floods and dries, and all one’s senses rush to the back of one’s neck. The barn disappeared in a woosh of clay and splinters, and I tried to bury myself among the slush-covered rocks.

When a shell hit the ground and exploded near by, the snow rose in the air like a dirty ghost, and hung there spikily billowing, before collapsing into the ground again. Such apparitions increased all around me, lifting, hovering and falling, together with the brutal rending and peeling back of the air, and the knowledge that under bombardment one has no courage.

I learned only later that this great build-up of shelling marked the end of the Teruel battle. Franco’s troops, helped by Italian tanks and planes, were hitting back at the fortress city. The Republican forces, together with the International Brigades, began their inevitable withdrawal, clinging briefly to the open heights and little gullies round the walls, before continuing their retreat southwards and towards the sea. The gift of Teruel at Christmas had become for the Republicans no more than a poisoned toy. It was meant to be the victory that would change the war; it was indeed the seal of defeat.

Pinned down throughout much of the morning, with the Welshman’s great foot in view, about noon I heard him call out, ‘Come on, then, follow me!’ and saw his foot bouncing before me like a snowball.

The landscape around showed all the rubbish of failure, the end of charity and hope. The fate of new Spain – that ‘arid square’ – was decided among the frozen terraces of Teruel. As the gully widened, the Welshman leading, we clambered among more trucks and debris. Three soldiers lay propped against a wall, their bodies half-stripped by the wind, their flesh a bluish-black. Their eyes were open, glazed like ice. Most certainly they had frozen to death.

I don’t think the Welshman knew where he eventually brought us – a bunker scraped out of rock and snow and half-covered by a sheet of tin. There was a dog, and a cooking-pot, and a few shivering men eating out of rusty cans. Grey-faced and in rags, their heads moved in quick animal jerks as they ate, up and down, left and right, as though hunted. They were Spanish and the Welshman hurried past them without speaking and scrambled further off down the hill with Serrano.

The Spaniards asked who I was. Ingles, I said. Then why had I come all this way too late? They were the Spanish Army. They didn’t need the help of foreigners. Or they needed the help of the world.

But they let me stay with them. ‘All your comrades have gone anyway.’ They gave me an old Winchester rifle with a couple of clips of cartridges. ‘At least you can shoot yourself.’

I stayed with the Spaniards for several days in the frozen vault of their bunker. Never had I seen any men so drained of hope and spirit. Except when the bucket of food came up each morning they seldom stirred from the foetal position in which they hunched themselves. They had no field-telephone, the place seemed to have no purpose; and their leader – an ex-schoolmaster from Talavera – said he had no idea what his men were supposed to be doing.

‘Papa Guido’ they called him, their voices intoning with bitterness. His eyes were plum-coloured with fear and exhaustion, and somewhere about his person he kept a tasselled cap which every so often he clapped on his head, whereupon everybody saluted him gravely. Stowed away in their almost speechless lethargy a black humour sometimes showed itself.

They’d had ten days’ bombardment, said Guido, and been overrun twice, though no one seemed to notice them hidden away under the bunker. But one of them had been bayoneted by chance by a running Moor who had returned to finish him off. The wounded man, middle-aged, rather plump, swung half between coma and delirium. Sometimes he sang in a faint, faraway voice, or lay inert, covered by dead men’s coats. His bleeding had stopped, but there seemed not much hope. They’d been trying to get him away, but no help came.

There was a lull, then one night a ghostly fog curled around us, a heavy vapour half-drawn from our breath and half from the circling banks of snow. It brought with it a deadlier cold than ever. With this, Guido seemed to come awake from his torpor. Stuttering madly, he began formally to address his troops, issue commands, and divide the night into watches.