The Blind Man of Seville (31 page)

‘General Orgaz volunteered us. Colonel Esperanza has been asked to form a regiment. A battalion is going to be made up out of the Legion, the Regulares and the Flechas, here in Ceuta.’

That’s how I remember Pablito’s little announcement. Banal. I’m so bored I’m going along with it. So little has happened in the last few years I forgot I had this journal. My diary is in my drawings. I’m unused to writing. Four pages cover two years. Isn’t this the rhythm of life? Periods of change, followed by long periods of getting used to the change until you feel compelled to change again. Boredom is my only motive. It’s probably Pablito’s, too, but he dresses it up in anti-communist rhetoric. He doesn’t know the first thing about communism.

8th July 1941, Ceuta

There was a good turnout in the port to see us off. General Orgaz stirred us all up. If we didn’t suspect it before, we know it now — we’re a political device. (Am I sounding like Oscar now?) The uniform says something about what’s going on in Madrid: we’re wearing the red berets of the Carlists, the blue shirts of the Falange and the khaki trousers of the Legion. Royalists, fascists and military all satisfied and implicated.

The Germans have been at the Pyrenees for months. Rumour had it that they were going to send a strike force to take Gibraltar, which sounded too much like invasion. We’re being sent to Russia to make the Germans feel better about Spain, to make it look as if we’re on their side. The newspaper tells us that Stalin is the real enemy, but no mention of us entering the war. Games are being played and we are in the middle. I have a feeling of doom about this whole expedition, but beyond the harbour walls we pick up a school of dolphin, who escort us most of the way to Algeciras, which I take to be a good omen.

10th July 1941, Seville

We’ve been put in the Pineda barracks at the southern end of the city. We had a night on the town. We didn’t pay for a single drink. The last time some of our number were here they were hacking men to death on the streets of Triana. Now we’re the heroes, sent to keep communism at bay. Five years is an eon in human relations.

Despite the brutal heat, I like Seville. The dark, cool bars. The people with short memories and a need to express joy. I think this is a place to live in.

18th July 1941, Grafenwöhr, Germany

We changed trains at Hendaye in southern France. The French shook their fists and hurled rocks at the carriages as we passed through. At our first stop in Germany, Karlsruhe station was full of people cheering and singing
‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’.
They covered the train in flowers. Now we’re somewhere northeast of Nürnberg. Weather grey. New recruits and most of the
guripas
already depressed, missing home. Us veterans depressed because we’ve just been told that the División Azul, as we ‘re called, is not going to be motorized but horsedrawn.

8th August 1941, Grafenwöhr

Pablito has a black eye and a cut lip. He doesn’t like the Germans any more than the communists he hasn’t yet met. The men, the guripas, like wearing their blue shirts and red berets instead of the regulation German uniform. A fight broke out in the Rathskeller in town. ‘They tell us we don’t know how to take care of our weapons,’ says Pablito. ‘But the real reason is that we’re fucking all their women and the girls have never had it so good.’ I don’t know if we’ll ever fit in with our new allies. The food stinks worse than the latrines, their tobacco smokes like hay and there is no wine. While Colónel Esperanza has taken delivery of a Studebaker President, we have been supplied with 6,000 horses from Serbia. It should take us two months just to get the animals trained, but we ‘re moving up to the front at the end of the month. Pablito’s heard that we ‘re going to march on Moscow, but I see the way the Germans look at us. They put a high value on discipline, obedience, command and neatness. Our secret weapon is our passion. But it is too secret for them to see. Only in battle will they understand the flame that burns inside every guripa. One shout of
‘A mí la legión!’
and the whole floor will rise up and ram the Russians back to Siberia.

27th August 1941, somewhere in Poland

Our reputation with local women precedes us. We’ve been forbidden to have anything to do with Jewish women, who we recognize by the yellow star they have to wear, or the Polish women
(panienkas).
We heard that 10 Company of 262 marched with blown-up condoms attached to their rifles as a protest.

2nd September 1941, Grodno

First signs of battle on the march to Grodno … outskirts of the town have been levelled. The centre is full of rubble, which the Jews have been put to work cleaning up. They are exhausted as their rations are meagre. Pablito’s attitude to the Germans is hardening by the day. He now finds them sinister. We’re to be toughened up by being marched to the front. Pablito has fallen for a blonde, green-eyed panienka called Anna.

12th September 1941, Ozmiana

Colonel Esperanza’s Studebaker has taken a beating on the roads. It won’t be long before he’s marching like the rest of us. A black Mercedes pulled up alongside the other day and General Muñoz Grandes got out and had lunch with us. Pablito and the guripas were in an uproar. He inspires us, as he is one of the few commanders who understand what it’s like to be an ordinary soldier.

16th September 1941, Minsk

Pablito says there’s a compound outside town where the Russian prisoners are kept. They ‘re given no food. The locals throw what they can over the fence and are shot at for their trouble. Pablito is happy — his panienka has turned up in Minsk. I’m happy because the chickpeas and olive oil arrived yesterday.

Already cold. Autumn chill in the air.

9th October 1941, Novo Sokol’niki

We’re stalled outside Velikje Luki — rail lines blown up by partisans. We forage in town and end up roasting dead horses over charcoal pits in the rail yard, singing songs, drinking potato vodka. Pablito, lovesick for Anna, sings very well. Flamenco on the steppe.

10th October 1941, Dno

Off-loaded here on to different gauge trains. Old woman hanging from a lamppost. Partisan. Guripas shocked. ‘What is this war?’ one of them asks, as if he didn’t know what had happened in his own country three years ago.

Next stop Novgorod and the front. We’re on combat pay from now on. Reds rule the skies. Supplies low. Few spares. Partisans. No Pablito — he didn’t show up for evening Mass.

11 October 1941, Dno

Occupation measures in force here so I have to accompany the German patrol on a house-to-house search for Pablito. We don’t find him. In one house I’m astonished to see Anna, his panienka, working with some Russian civilians. I can’t think how she could have got so far. Outside in the street I tell the German NCO and two men go in and haul her out. The other women start screaming and the Germans beat them down with rifle butts. They force Anna to her knees in the street and ask about Pablito. She denies everything but knows why she’s been chosen. The NCO, a colossal brute, takes his glove off and gives her four savage slaps to her face that leave her head hanging like a torn doll. They take her to a burnt-out building across the street. Anna’s scarf comes loose and her blonde hair falls down. The men murmur. The NCO has a face like tank armour plates. The grey afternoon turns bleaker. The temperature drops. More questions asked, more denials follow. They strip her naked. She is blue white underneath. She sobs from the cold and fear. They twist her arms up behind her back and lift her off the floor. She screams. The NCO asks for a bayonet and uses the blade to flick her hardened nipples and that does it. The terror of cold steel. She tells how she was forced to lead Pablito into a trap for the partisans. They let her dress again. The patrol takes all the women away. I return and make my report to Major Pérez Pérez.

12th October 1941, Dno

In the morning Lt Martínez orders me to put together an eleven-man firing squad. Two male communist partisans and Pablito’s panienka have been delivered to us for execution. We put them against the wall in the freight yard. The girl cannot stand and there are no posts to tie her to. Lt Martínez tells the two men to hold her up between them. They arrange themselves like a family photograph. Lt. Martínez walks back to our line and shouts ‘Carguen!’, ‘Apunten’, and on the word ‘Fuego’ she looks up. I shoot her in the mouth.

A patrol found Pablito later that day, hanging by some wire from a tree. He’d been stripped naked, his eyes had been gouged out and his genitals cut off. We had a funeral Mass for him, our first casualty. Pablito, the anti-communist, who died without firing a shot.

13th October 1941, Podberez’e

We left the train under heavy artillery fire and deployed south of the town along the river Volkhov. There’s thick forest behind us, full of partisans. Across the Volkhov are the Russians. Thick mud all around, known as the
rasputitsa,
difficult to move. Frost at night.

30th October 1941, Sitno

We’ve been withdrawn after a fierce week and some bad losses. This war is less understandable by the moment. We attacked Dubrovka the other day. We thought to outflank the Russian defences and come at them from behind. As soon as we reformed south of the town we were hit by artillery and in getting out of the sector found ourselves in a minefield. What was a minefield doing there? There were bodies everywhere. García with his left leg missing and holding his crotch, shouting,
‘A mí la Legión!’
We closed ranks and attacked the Russians. We went mad when we got to them and would have hacked them all to death if we had not been so exhausted. Lt Martínez tells us that the Russian units all have political officers whose job it is to maintain discipline. They sow mines behind their front-line troops to stop them from retreating. Who are we fighting here? Not the local people. As soon as we take prisoners they become as useful to us as our own men.

1st November 1941, Sitno

I know heat. I understand heat. I’ve seen what it does to men. I’ve seen men die from drinking water. But cold, I don’t know cold. The landscape has hardened around us. The trees are brittle with frost. The ground beneath the drifting powdery snow is like iron. Our boots ring against it. A pick makes no impression. We have to use explosives to dig ourselves in. My piss turns instantly to ice as it hits the ground. And our Russian prisoners tell us that it is not yet cold.

8th November 1941

There’s ice on the Volkhov. It’s difficult to believe that it will freeze one-metre solid and completely change the strategy of this little war. Already soldiers can cross the river on planks. They tried to move horses as well, but one came off the planks and fell through the ice. In its frenzy it tore the reins from its handler, who watched as the terrified animal tried to clamber out. It was surprising how short a time it took for such a large beast to succumb to the cold. Within a minute its back legs ceased to operate. In two minutes its forelegs were still. By afternoon ice had formed around its middle and the animal was frozen solid, still with the terror moment alive in its eyes. It has become a monument to horror. No sculptor could have done better given the task by some mad municipality. The guripas new to the front can’t take their eyes off it. Some look back to the west bank of the river and realize that civilization is behind them and that beyond the Ice Horse there won’t be the expected glory, the passionate cause, but rather a blood-slackening sight of the coldest chamber of the human heart.

9th November 1941

In Nikltkino I came across a scene from the Middle Ages. A Russian prisoner with a hammer was moving among the ranks of his dead comrades, breaking their fingers, which still clutched their weapons. None of them wore boots. They’d all been stolen. With the fingers and arms broken and the weapons removed, their furs and quilted jackets can be taken. I now look like the Wolf Man and have recently acquired a bearskin hat. The front is now extended to include Otonskii and Posad.

18th November 1941, Dubrovka

The Russians have counterattacked the limits of our new front. Posad hit with everything — mortar, anti-tank and artillery. We got it the next day, followed by a full charge from the Reds. They started with a resounding
‘Urrah!’
and something else which, when they got closer, we heard as:
‘Ispanskii kaput!’
Our artillery broke them up; we mowed down the rest like wheat — which was how the Russians charged, standing upright, never crouched. Perhaps they thought it unmanly. They regrouped and hit us again at night and we met them on the snow-covered plain under the slow-falling flares, the woods black behind them. Unreal. The night so silent before the mayhem. We threw grenades and followed up with a bayonet charge. The Reds dispersed. As they merged back into the woods we heard our new recruits, who’d just experienced their first charge, shout after them:
‘Otro toro! Otro toro!’

5th December 1941

I am back at the front after a flesh wound sent me to the field hospital. I never want to see that place again. Not even the cold could suppress the stench; rather it has frozen it into my nostrils permanently.

The cold has reached a new dimension: -35°C. When men die from heat they go mad, they start jabbering, their brain in a rage. In the cold a man just drifts away. One moment he is there, perhaps even drawing on a cigarette and the next he is gone. Men are dying from the cerebral fluid freezing in their heads under their steel helmets. I’m glad of my fur hat. With the drop in temperature the Russians have started talking to us in Spanish, using Republicans to translate. They promise warmth, food and entertainment. We tell them to fuck their whore mothers.