The Return (40 page)
Authors: Victoria Hislop
Tags: #British - Spain, #Psychological Fiction, #Family, #British, #Spain - History - Civil War; 1936-1939 - Social Aspects, #General, #Granada (Spain), #Historical, #War & Military, #Families, #Fiction, #Spain
On their first day in the city, the trio from Granada were caught up in the chaos of such an air raid and nearly choked on the dust of shattered masonry, which did not settle until long after they had emerged from the claustrophobia of the airless, underground shelter.
When they had arrived in Madrid, the very worst of that winter’s chill was over but the hunger continued. The constant nagging of an empty stomach was enough to encourage some men to join up with the militia, since it meant at least the promise of rations, and as Antonio queued up with his friends to sign up, he realised that he too was looking forward to a decent plateful of food. It was days since they had eaten more than a bowlful of watered-down lentils.
The mood here in Madrid was very different from that in Granada, where there were so many restricting new rules. Here was an almost revolutionary atmosphere, relaxed, casual and even sensual by comparison. Hotels were taken over for the soldiers, many of whom had never seen such grand panelling and fine gilding. The buildings themselves were cracked like old china.
The foreigners were a novelty to the Granadinos.They enjoyed the camaraderie with strangers from countries they could not even picture but found it odd that their own private conflict was now being played out on an open stage.
‘Why do you think they’re here?’ Francisco asked his friends, baffled by the foreigners’ presence. ‘They know as well as we do what will happen if Franco invades this city.’
‘They hate fascism as much as we do,’ answered Antonio.
‘And if they don’t help stop it in our country, it will only spread to theirs,’ added Salvador.
‘It’s like a disease,’ said Antonio.
International Brigaders were hungry for action and mostly unafraid of what might happen to them. The people of Madrid could not have wished for better friends.
It was Antonio and his friends’ first night in the poster-daubed city, a bigger and more sophisticated place than the one they had grown up in. The three of them were sitting up at a bar in one of the old hotels, and Antonio caught sight of himself in the tarnished glaze of the old mirrors that lined the walls behind the bar. Though the reflection was murky, their faces seemed happy and relaxed, as though they were just three young men, out for the night, carefree, shirts slightly crumpled, their hair slicked back, a little the worse for wear. The dim, sepia glow of the room flattered them and obscured the cavernous shadows under their eyes, hollowed out by hunger and exhaustion.
Antonio lost interest in his own reflection. His attention was drawn away by a group of girls who stood talking by the door. While he was merely observing them in the mirror they remained unselfconscious, but he knew that would change as soon as they knew they were noticed.
He nudged Salvador and realised that he had been similarly mesmerised. After the days of being packed in a truck like livestock, and the prospect of battle, the allure of these women was almost irresistible.
These girls were among the few people in this city for whom life had improved with this conflict. From the arrival of the first militia regiment, and now all the young men from foreign countries as well, business had boomed. Demand greatly exceeded supply, and though there were women who in peaceful times would have died rather than sell their bodies, some were now hungry enough to compromise.
When the three girls sauntered towards the bar, Francisco turned and smiled. He too had been watching them. They carried with them the cloying smell of cheap scent that was more intoxicating to these young men than the best Parisian fragrance worn by the smart women of Granada. Conversation began and the women introduced themselves as dancers. Perhaps they had been once. Drinks were bought and the chatter continued, with all of them shouting above the sound of a hundred other voices and the insistent music of an accordion player who moved about between the tables. There was only one thing on all their minds, though, and within the hour they were in a rundown brothel a few streets away, drunk on cheap brandy and succumbing to the powerful anaesthetic of sex.
The following morning, renewed after the deepest of sleeps, the friends from Granada were dispatched to the front line. The battle at Jarama, south-east of Madrid, had been going on for ten days now. It was where these young men wanted to be and the reason they had come. Antonio did not dread the crack of gunshots, the thud of a shell landing close by, the deep groan of an imploding building. The Granadinos were now officially part of the untrained militia unit they had travelled up with from the south. The Republic had lost such a huge part of its trained army that it welcomed any willing fighters such as these. Their enthusiasm and innocence obscured even the thought of death - it had barely entered their heads - and they posed with the other soldiers for light-hearted photographs that were unlikely to reach home.
At Jarama, Nationalist troops were aiming to seize the highway that ran to Valencia and had surprised the Republicans with their attack on 6 February. With the support of German tanks and planes, forty thousand troops, including many foreign legionaries, who were the most ruthless of them all, Franco had begun his offensive. Before the Republicans had time to organise themselves, strategic hills and bridges had been seized. Soviet tanks slowed the advance a little, but the Nationalists had begun to move forward and huge losses had already been sustained when the Granadinos arrived.
When they reached the site of the battle, they expected to go into action immediately. They stood around the lorry that had brought them and surveyed the landscape. It hardly looked like a battleground.They saw neat vineyards and rows of olive trees, low hills and clumps of gorse and wild thyme.
‘There doesn’t seem to be much cover . . .’ commented Francisco.
He was right and before they had the opportunity to use their guns they found themselves part of a team dispatched to dig trenches. A pile of old doors had been salvaged from the shattered remains of a nearby village and were to be used to strengthen the trench walls. Francisco and Antonio worked together, standing in the ditch while others passed the doors down to them. Many still had their smooth brass handles; some had the faded paint of a door number.
‘I wonder what happened to the people who lived behind this one,’Antonio mused. It had once guarded the privacy of its owners but now their home must be standing open to the winds.
Dug down into the olive groves on the hillside above the River Jarama, they waited for their first taste of action. By now they had done more than their fair share of trench reinforcement and this conflict had provided nothing but boredom. The dampness of the ground was bad enough during the day, but at night it gave them no sleep, and here for the first time they picked up the lice that were to plague them for many months to come. The inescapable, continual need to scratch, both day and night was torture.
‘How much longer do you think?’ muttered Francisco.
‘For what?’
‘This. This sitting here. This waiting. This nothing.’
‘God knows . . . but we can’t make things happen.’
‘But we’ve been doing
nothing
for days. I can’t stand it. I was more useful in Granada. I’m not sure I want to hang around here.’
nothing
for days. I can’t stand it. I was more useful in Granada. I’m not sure I want to hang around here.’
‘Well, you’ll have to. You’ll get shot by our own men if you try and leave. So don’t even think of it.’
Playing chess or writing letters to relatives kept them occupied only for a while.
‘It seems a bit pointless writing letters,’ said Antonio with uncharacteristic glumness, ‘when the person you’re writing to might not even be alive by the time the letter arrives.’
He was addressing his letter to his aunt Rosita, in the hope that she might keep it for Concha. It was too incriminating to send a letter directly to his mother. He hoped that she was safe and wondered whether she had managed to visit his father. He prayed that Mercedes would have found Javier, or made her way back home. It was not safe for a sixteen-year-old girl to be alone.
‘I don’t even know if my mother is alive,’ Francisco said as he folded a sheaf of paper ready to post, ‘and by the time she gets this I might have died. Of boredom.’
Antonio tried to cheer his friend, even though he was feeling equally frustrated.The tedium of the wait was maddening them all.
Even if periods of inactivity have a timelessness about them, they never go on for ever and, sure enough, fighting soon resumed. Within a day or so, they were on the front line, where the relentless rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, the boom of cannon and the shouts of ‘
Fuego!
’ soon replaced the ennui.
Fuego!
’ soon replaced the ennui.
Suddenly they were ordered to try to take command of a nearby ridge. As they dug in at the bottom of the slope, several battalions of Nationalist soldiers swept over the brow of the hill and charged towards them. At the moment when they could almost see the whites of their eyes, the order to fire was given. Some turned and ran for cover, others were mown down. The machine guns went briefly silent as their belts were replaced but the volleys of gunfire from the Nationalists went on for some minutes. An order was given to several dozen of the Republican soldiers, including Antonio, to advance up the ridge where they could be in a position to fire at the Nationalists but heavy artillery drove them back. The soldier next to Antonio was blasted open. His blood sprayed everyone within a few metres and, through the smoke, Antonio tripped over another body that lay spread-eagled across his path. Uncertain whether he was dead or alive, Antonio carried him back to their base. Only half of the unit survived the day. It was a brutal introduction to the reality of this conflict. The image of the shattered bodies haunted him that night.
The Nationalists, determined to drive the Republicans out, continued their assault on some last key positions. There were huge numbers of casualties, including many among the idealistic bands of International Brigaders, some of whom had not held a rifle before.Theirs were often unreliable weapons, old and defunct, with catches that jammed or useless ammunition. Thousands of them would now never get much practice in using them as they were dead within hours. In one afternoon,Antonio counted dozens who had been killed in an assault not far from their own location. Their sacrifice seemed utterly futile.
The course of the battle changed when Soviet planes went into action and began to prevent the Nationalists from protecting their own forces. Nationalist bombers were now being driven off by Soviet fighters.
At the end of February, the battle was over. Both sides had suffered huge losses but the Nationalists had advanced only a few kilometres. Every centimetre of dust they had gained had cost them many lives. As a mathematical equation, it made no sense at all, but in terms of morale, the Republican confidence was boosted. It was a stalemate they regarded as a battle won.
Francisco failed to see it as a victory.
‘We’ve lost thousands and so have they. And they’ve taken some ground,’ he pointed out.
‘But not much, Francisco,’ signed Salvador.
‘It just seems a bloody mess to me, that’s all,’ said Francisco angrily.
No one was going to disagree with him. A ‘bloody mess’ was precisely what it was.
They returned to Madrid for a short while.This was a place where they could still get a haircut, a shave, clean clothes, and even stay in a comfortable bed. Life there was continuing as normal in spite of the threat of air raids. Once or twice they heard that the legendary communist leader Dolores Ibarruri was in their neighbourhood and joined a throng already amassing to hear her. The tireless, black-clad figure of Ibarruri, known by everyone as ‘La Pasionaria’, ‘The Passion Flower’, was a common sight on the streets of Madrid. She never failed to rally those with flagging spirits.
When Antonio caught sight of the chiselled face for the first time it was as though he had inhaled pure air. They had all often heard her voice on the radio or when it was broadcast from the travelling loud-hailers that had toured the front line, but the real person had a majesty that the voice alone did not convey. The woman’s physical presence was extraordinary and her immense power and charisma radiated around the square.
In an unconscious gesture that came so naturally to Spanish women, she clasped her hands together. First of all she addressed the women, reminding them of the sacrifice they must make.
‘Prefer to be widows of heroes, rather than wives of cowards!’ she exhorted them, the rich timbre of her voice booming above the heads of the quiet crowd.
The solid flesh and blood of the woman inspired them all.They needed, all of them, to be as strong as she.
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