The Eldorado Network (7 page)

'I see what you mean about the hill,' Barker said. 'Damn steep.'

'Don't look out so far.' Barker jerked his head back. 'There are snipers in a farmhouse, halfway down the slope,' Summers warned.

'Are there really?' Barker said.

With a sharp and savage bang a sandbag erupted, and dirt sprayed everywhere. The visitors drew back, startled rather than frightened, for the sandbag itself had seemed to explode, without cause. It formed part of the slit where Barker had been looking out. 'I didn't do that,' he said stupidly.

Summers allowed himself a brief, bleak smile. 'No,, that was an enemy bullet. They go off with a loud bang when they hit.'

Townsend looked interested. 'I thought explosive bullets were outlawed,' he said.

Summers merely glanced at him. 'Now I think you have seen everything. There is probably lunch waiting for you at Brigade H.Q.'

As they filed out, the American lingered to examine the shattered sandbag. He scorched his fingers on a fragment of bullet, and cursed himself softly: 'Damn idiot.'

'You are, if you believe all that codswallop,' the soldier said. He was squatting in a corner, eyes half-shut, arms resting on knees, hands dangling.

'Is that so?' Townsend sucked his fingers and looked more closely. 'Wait a minute . . . You're the guy we talked to in the church, right? David ...'

'Davis.'

'Well, I was close. Anyway, you've changed somewhat since then. What hit you? A Pontiac or a Plymouth?'

Davis raised his face. One eye was a shiny red, half-hidden by swollen flesh as black and puffy as an old mushroom. There were cuts and scrapes all over his forehead and jawline. His upper lip was lopsidedly bloated, and his nose looked crooked. 'There's a war on,' he said. 'Haven't you seen a casualty before?'

'You didn't get that collection from General Mola.'

'No.' Davis took an empty sandbag and began scraping dirt into it, using an old saucepan as a shovel. 'No, I didn't. When we came back here I found a Frenchman with his trousers down, right where I made my dug-out. Talk about smell. They eat snails, you know.'

'So I hear.'

'It's true, I seen 'em do it. So I smashed his face in and his friends didn't like it. We got quite lively for a while. That's how I came to be out here. Bloody old Summers's doing.'

'Solitary confinement?' Townsend suggested.

'That and a bit more. He wants them to drop a shell on me, shut me up for good.' Davis dumped the sandbag on its base, packing the dirt down hard. 'My Jarama doesn't tally with his Party Line fairy tales.'

Townsend had his notebook open, 'Tell me about your Jarama.'

Davis gave it some thought while he scraped up more dirt with his saucepan. 'Ready?' he asked. Bloody shambles. Got that?'

'Yes.'

'Well, that's what it was. Bloody shambles from start to finish.' Davis spat into the sandbag and closed its neck. His fingers were shaking as they tried to unknot a piece of string.

'How did it start?' Townsend asked gently.

'It started . . .' Davis sniffed, and blinked, and a tremendous weariness seemed to come over him. He stared, frowning at the muddle of footprints in the dusty dirt. 'It started without any breakfast,' he said. 'Imagine that. We'd spent all day in the train and all night in the truck, and it was cold, I'm telling you. You don't know what it's like to be cold till you've been tired out and starving at the same time. The cold soaks right into your guts, and your guts are empty, and you get to the state where your hand hasn't the strength to pick up a piece of bread.'

'This was when they brought your Battalion up to the Front,' Townsend said.

'Certainly!' Davis relaxed his hands, and began picking at the hard knots again. 'And about time too, or so we thought. First-class, fully trained, crack fighting men, we were. All in uniform made out of high-grade cheesecloth. Nothing fits, but that's democracy, isn't it? The main thing is, we're fully trained, we know exactly what to do.' He chewed on a knot and looked sideways at Townsend.

'What did they train you to do?'

'Attack,' Davis said. He walked his fingers down his thighs. 'Advance and defeat the enemy.'

'How?'

'Fire the rifle at him. We knew all about the rifle, we'd all fired it, once, on the range. Five rounds, Crack bloody marksmen, we were. Irresistible.'

'But what if the enemy resisted?'

'Then we threw the grenade at him, and he ran away, and we won. We were on the right side, see? We just had to attack and he would run away.' Davis beamed at Townsend, his bruised face distorting under the strain.

'Ahah! Senor Townsend!' Luis cried, bounding down the trench. 'The others sent me to  --  '

'Sure, sure. Sit down and shut up.'

'But they want  --  '

'The hell with them. You never found me. Okay, Davis, so you got here and no breakfast. This was what time? Dawn?'

Luis looked from Townsend's notebook to Davis's crooked grin, and suddenly realised: the American had found his Lone Ranger. He sat down and listened.

'It was daylight,' Davis said. 'There was some sort of food, bread, coffee, I don't know what, nobody could stay awake to eat. We all just got out of the trucks and fell asleep. Must've looked like a massacre: bodies everywhere.'

'What about the fighting?' Townsend asked him. 'Was there any fighting going on?'

Davis shook his head. 'That came later. They let us sleep for a couple of hours and then woke us up. Time to attack. The funny thing is, we all felt good. Couple of hours sleep, nice sunny morning, birds singing, and here was our chance to win the war. So, up the hill we went.'

Luis listened carefully. He deeply regretted his earlier criticism of Templeton. Then, he had spoken out of impatience and ignorance. Now was his chance to learn the truth about the gallantry of action, from this battle-scarred yet good-humoured veteran.

Townsend wanted to know how many went up the hill.

'The whole damn battalion, about six hundred. You could hear the bullets fizzing overhead as you got to the top of the hill. Everyone was grinning, we were all excited. Now and then we heard things going off bang, guns firing or shells landing, we didn't know and we didn't care. We just wanted to attack. We knew exactly what was going to happen. The enemy was going to run like hell!

Luis felt his blood pulse faster, and his thigh muscles were tense with excitement.

Townsend flipped a page. 'What about support? Where was your covering fire?'

'All arranged.' Davis pulled the string through his mouth to straighten the kinks. 'Brigade HQ was sending tanks and artillery and bombers. French artillery, Russian tanks, Spanish planes. Solidarity, see? The people versus the fascists. We couldn't go wrong, could we?'

'Okay,' Townsend murmured. He was wondering if Davis would get into action before that bastard Summers came back. 'Okay. What next?'

'We charged.' Davis leaned back and rested on his elbows.

'You charged.'

'We charged and we charged and we charged, not very fast because most of us weren't very fit, and the ground was a bit rough. Also we hadn't had much sleep and no breakfast. If you want the truth, we charged bloody slowly. More of a limp, if you know what I mean.' Davis hooked the string behind his head and glanced seriously at the American. Luis moved to where he could watch the soldier better.

Townsend looked at his notes, looked at Davis, looked

at his thumb. 'And where was the enemy meanwhile?'

he asked.

'Meanwhile,' Davis said with a sudden, lunatic smile, 'meanwhile the enemy was lying doggo halfway down the hill and shooting his funny bullets at us with complete disregard for expense.'

'Which means you lost a few men.'

'We lost about two hundred.'

'What happened to your covering fire?'

'Never came.'

'So then you withdrew?'

'Some did. Most of us found a little rock to hide behind. Then they started dropping shells on us, mortar bombs, Christ knows what. And every time we twitched, some bastard had a go at us with his funny bullets. Later on, it got hot, blinding baking hot. A thing I've learnt,' Davis said to Luis, 'is you get twice as thirsty four times as fast when you're under fire. Promise me you'll never go into battle without a full waterbottle.'

'Certainly,' Luis said, nodding hard.

'None of us had water.' Davis turned back to Townsend.

'They hadn't given us canteens, see. There were a lot of wounded out there, too, all wanting water. Another thing I've learnt,' he said to Luis, 'is don't get yourself wounded on a hot hill. Much better to be shot dead and have done with it.' Luis nodded again. 'I think they all died in the end, Davis said. 'They all shut up, anyway.'

'What happened to you?' Townsend asked.

'I got back at night.' Davis stood up and began piercing holes in the top of the sandbag. 'Next day we attacked again and another two hundred got killed and that was just about the end of the battalion.'

'Two-thirds killed in twenty-four hours," Townsend said. Luis began to worry. Maybe this was not such a good story. Now Davis was poking the string through the holes and blinking a lot; whether from tears or from the effort of focusing Luis could not be sure.

Townsend went over to an observation slit and glanced out. 'I don't understand why you didn't just plaster this hillside with bullets,' he said. 'Hell, you had height and  --  '

'Didn't I tell you about the rifles?' Davis cried. 'Our famous Russian rifles! They were not really meant to fire bullets, and they all broke. One thing I've learnt  --  ' He turned to Luis, but Townsend got in first: 'But you had grenades, you said.'

'Did I? I wonder.' Davis closed the neck  of the sack and knotted the string. 'I really wonder. Can you call this a grenade?' He took a short length of steel pipe from his tunic pocket. 'There's half a stick of gelignite in there. See the fuse? Now, watch this. As the enemy-rushes towards me I light the fuse, so.' He patted his pockets until he found a flint-and-steel lighter, the no-petrol kind used by Spanish-shepherds. It consisted of a steel wheel, a flint, and a length of yellow tinder-cord. Davis thumbed the wheel doggedly Sparks flew and died. 'Never mind,' he said, 'the fuse is probably too wet, anyway.' He gave the grenade to Luis Luis weighed the weapon in his palm. It felt smoothly sinister.

'Rifles and grenades,' Townsend said. 'That was all they gave you? No mortars, no machine-guns?'

Davis heaved the sandbag over to the damaged slot and sat on it. 'We each had a shosser,' he said.

'Shosser?' Townsend repeated. 'Is that a make, or a nickname, or what?'

'It's French,' Davis said. 'It must be a very dirty French word. The French invented it, anyway.'

'What does it do?' Townsend was happier; even if Summers came back now, the gist of the story was down on paper. 'Is it automatic?'

'Completely automatic. Fires two-rounds and automatically jams.'

Luis studied the way Townsend and Davis were looking at each other: the American serious and questioning, the Englishman slouched, sombre, dull with anger. Luis sensed a violence that was beyond warfare, a despair beyond death, and it made him uncomfortable. He wished to help, if only he knew how.

Townsend asked: 'Didn't you know about the jamming?'

'None of us had fired the shosser before we made that attack. Not many of us fired the bloody silly thing after it, either.'

'Sounds like someone made a sweet little deal... I'd like to see one of your shossers.'

'Help yourself.' Davis waved an arm. 'They're all out there.'

'Ah.' Townsend put his notebook away. 'In that case I guess it's time for lunch. Can I get you any -- '

'Sir, please!' Luis interrupted. 'You wish to have this weapon?'

Townsend shrugged. 'Sure. Maybe there's a name on it, something to identify . . . You know where you can lay your hands on one?'

Luis dodged past him, put one foot in the observation slit, and heaved himself onto the rim of the pit. Townsend shouted and Davis grabbed, but Luis jumped onto the hillside and began running. The slope seemed vaster and far steeper now that he was a part of it; he had a jumbled impression of rocks and scrub plunging to a distant, hazy flatness where a river gleamed, everything about him seeming huge and hanging high after the snugness of the observation post.

Then the bullets came.

He was dodging from rock to rock, and the harsh and startling crack! crack! from behind made him think that Davis was firing. At him? Luis stopped, looked back. Immediately the rocks in front detonated a string of blasts. Luis saw the stony splinters fly, and remembered the explosive bullets. He fell flat, and a steely whine raced overhead and made a crisp bang higher up the hillside.

The ground felt awkward and unhelpful, poking into his ribs and thighs and twisting one foot against the wishes of its ankle. A tangy fragrance reached his nose from a shrub crushed by his fall. Luis elbowed himself towards a larger rock. The shrub slowly swung upright and shivered to a tunnelling bullet which blew up far behind him.

The rock sheltered Luis as long as he lay flat and kept still. 'You didn't have to do that, son,' came Davis's voice. 'I'd have washed my feet, if only you'd asked nicely.'

'Where is a shosser?' Luis shouted. 'I cannot see any damned shossers.' As he squinted around him, he realised that he would not recognise a shosser even if he saw one.

'Are you crazy?' Townsend called. Under stress, his accent twanged like a big bow. 'Forget the sonofabitching shosser! Get your ass the hell back in here!'

Some ants were crawling up Luis's right leg. He half-raised it to knock them off and instantly attracted another bullet.

'Don't for Chrissake move!' Townsend shouted.

'One thing I've learnt..." Davis began conversationally.

Luis rolled onto his back and gazed in wonder at the sky. I have been under fire, he thought, and I have not disgraced myself! He beat his heel on the ground to dislodge the ants, failed, and decided to tolerate them; he and they had much in common, exposed to sudden death in strange surroundings.

'Listen, Luis!' It was Townsend again. 'Stay put, you hear me? Wait there till dark. You got that?'