The Return (49 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
Antonio could never understand why his friend desired action for its own sake, and, just as he expected, news of huge loss of life on the Aragón front began to filter through.
In December, though, they were on the move. Loaded into a lorry, at the beginning of the bitterest winter anyone could recall, Antonio and Francisco were taken towards the town of Teruel, east of Madrid.Teruel was held by the Nationalists, and the Republicans hoped that Franco would divert troops from Madrid if they made it their target. There were fears that Franco was planning a renewed assault on the capital and the Republican leaders knew that something had to be done in order to draw their forces away.
The attack on Teruel took the Nationalists by surprise and for a while the Republicans enjoyed the advantage, eventually capturing the garrison. Grounded by severe weather, German and Italian planes were initially unable to join the conflict, but even without them, the Nationalists had the advantage of more weaponry and more manpower. They proceeded to use both to the full, and subjected Teruel to a relentless battering.
The landscape itself was cruel: flat and barren, with bare, chiselled hillsides. Antonio and Francisco, who were positioned inside the town and almost dead with cold, watched as dozens of their comrades died on this wasteland. They were both so hardened to discomfort now that Antonio wondered if they would one day cease to feel pain.The only time that Francisco did not complain about the general state of this war and the inadequacies of Republican leadership, was when he was immersed in danger and death. Even a hacking cough did not appear to bother him, and often he seemed at his most contented when he was in the midst of machine-gun fire.
On Christmas Day they were camped out on the outside of town. Snow had been falling for days and the soldiers’ clothes were sodden. There was no hope of drying anything out. With saturated boots more than double their usual weight, walking was more arduous than ever.
Francisco was wheezing badly now. He was holding a cigarette but it fell to the ground as he doubled up, his whole body racked by a fit of coughing.
‘Look, why don’t you sit down for a while, or even come in here?’ suggested Antonio. He put his arm around his friend and guided him towards a makeshift tent that was being used for medical supplies.
‘It’s nothing,’ protested Francisco. ‘Just flu or something. I’m all right.’ He brusquely shrugged off Antonio’s guiding hand.
‘Look, Francisco, you need some rest.’
‘I don’t,’ came his voice in a rattling whisper, his throat full of phlegm.
Antonio looked Francisco in the eyes and saw they were full of tears. It could have been the cold that made them water in this way, but Antonio could see a man at breaking point. His friend’s heaving chest and the exhaustion from fourteen sleepless nights in the damp had pushed even this tough individual beyond endurance. Pain or injury he might have borne with some fortitude but this was sickness and his body was failing him.
‘I have to be strong,’ he sobbed in desperation.To find his body placing such limitations on his desires and to encounter his own frailty were harder to endure than sickness itself. He felt so ashamed.
Antonio put his arm around Francisco and found himself supporting his entire weight. Through the thick cloth of his uniform he could feel his friend’s raging fever. Francisco was steaming.
‘I don’t . . . I don’t . . . I want to . . . Don’t . . .’ As he slid into a state of shivering delirium, his sentences became rambling.Within the hour he had slipped into unconsciousness and that night was taken away from the battlefield to a military hospital.
The enemy in this battle was as much the horizontal sleet that sliced into their faces as the strafing bullets. The dampness sat in their lungs. Many men died of the cold. They simply did not wake up in the morning. Some of them had used alcohol to anaesthetise themselves and it had relaxed them into such deep slumber that their hearts forgot to beat. At least in the snow their bodies would not immediately putrefy.
The campaign continued for another month into the New Year. With Francisco on sick leave back in Madrid, Antonio found he was able to detach himself from the horrors around him. Francisco was always angry with his own side as well as with the enemy, and his continual protests had merely exacerbated their disgruntlement.
Antonio survived these weeks on the Aragón front, but always felt less than heroic. Before the battle was over, along with many others, he fought in the streets of Teruel, engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Until now he had always fired abstractly into the distance but one day he saw his enemy face to face and knew the colour of his eyes.
In that fraction of a second, before the moment of no return, Antonio hesitated.There was a man in front of him, younger than himself, crinkly haired, sharp-boned; they could have been mistaken for cousins. The colour of his shirt was the only clue that told Antonio this man was on the Nationalist side. It was purely a matter of pigment in the dye that instructed him to end this man’s life and if he refrained now, he would probably lose his own.
Antonio discovered that there was nothing more brutalising than to drive a bayonet into another human being, and in this killing he felt part of himself die too. He would never forget the way in which this boy’s look of fear contorted into an expression of pain before petrifying into the gargoyle features of death. It took less than thirty seconds for Antonio to see his victim pass through these stages and to hear the thud of a body landing heavily on the ground in front of him. It was horrifying.
Returning to base that evening, a few men short, Antonio reflected on how arbitrary it all was. For the first time since he had become a fighting man he felt like a pawn on a chessboard. There were lives being sacrificed on the whim of someone most of them would never meet.
The tug of war over Teruel continued until February when the Nationalists took the town back from the Republicans. It had been another campaign with massive waste of life on both sides and little gain. Antonio tried not to see this as a turning point in the conflict, but the one chilling thing it seemed to prove was that Franco’s resources were apparently limitless.
Chapter Thirty
ANTONIO, NOW FEELING very pessimistic, had a few months back in Madrid and was no longer so desperate to join the latest battle against Franco. A new offensive was launched by the Fascists in Aragón with the aim of slicing in half the broad north-south strip of Republican territory on the country’s Mediterranean coast, and by the middle of April 1938, they had successfully made a passageway to the sea, splitting Republican territory into two. Catalonia in the north was now separated from the centre and south.
By mid-summer Francisco had recovered. The unit in which he and Antonio served was once more part of the defence of the city. Until Franco took the capital, the Republicans were determined to fight on.
Everyone now expected Nationalist troops to march north and take Barcelona, where the Republican government had moved in the previous October, but instead of this they turned south towards Valencia.
There were acute shortages of everything for soldiers and civilians alike in both sections of the Republic’s divided territory: not just food and medical supplies, but morale too. There was also a growing sense of panic and fear at the isolation in the separate parts of their territory, and communication between the two areas could only be carried out with difficulty. In the cities, there were still people who had secretly supported the Nationalists since the beginning of the conflict, and these networks of informers added to the sinister threat of unease.
Antonio and Francisco were about to be involved in another battle. It was almost an act of desperation on the part of the Republicans. Their objective was to reunite the two parts of their territory.
‘How do you rate our chances?’ asked Francisco, as he laced up his boots before they went off to this new front on the River Ebro.
‘Why bother to speculate?’ answered Antonio. ‘We’ve got fewer guns and fewer planes, so I’d prefer not to think about it.’
Though he felt pessimistic, they were strong in numbers if not in weapons. A huge Republican army of eighty thousand men had been deployed. Conscription had brought in thousands of boys aged only sixteen as well as middle-aged men. On the night of 24 July, thousands of them crossed the River Ebro from north to south and attacked Nationalist lines.
The surprise nature of the attack gave an initial advantage, but Franco coolly ordered reinforcements. He saw this as his opportunity to annihilate the Republican army.
One of his first actions was to open the dams in the upper reaches of the river in the Pyrenees.This raised the water enough to sweep away the bridges on which the Republican troops were relying in order to receive supplies, and thereafter Franco continued to bomb the bridges, destroying them as regularly as they could be repaired. As well as moving thousands of additional troops into the area, the Nationalists also brought in huge amounts of their air force and for the first few days, the complete absence of defending Republican aircraft allowed German and Italian planes to attack the Republican army.
Temperatures soared to extreme heights in the first month of this engagement, and created an inferno reminiscent of Brunete. The lack of cover was similar too, but the violence was even more intense. For weeks, the Republicans, increasingly dehydrated and starving, were relentlessly bombarded on the ground and from the air. German equipment, particularly aircraft, was limitless and Franco was happy to sacrifice as many of the hundreds of thousands of troops under arms as it took, in order to wipe the Republicans off the face of the earth.
On a blazing afternoon, attempting to find cover in a valley, with the Fascists occupying a ridge above them, Francisco successfully fired on several of the enemy who had proved to be sitting targets.
‘We need to get a lot more of them than that,’ shouted Antonio.
After weeks of anticipating a bullet at any moment, the expectation of it can diminish when it does not come. During those months on the Ebro, Francisco’s sense of immortality grew. Antonio thought it was typically perverse of his friend that, as conditions and prospects had deteriorated, Francisco had become increasingly positive.
‘We’ve come this far,’ he said optimistically. ‘I don’t think anything will get us now.’ Having survived near fatal illness he was not going to be beaten by anything else.
It had not been possible to dig trenches in the solid ground, and their unit had built up a small makeshift fortress from rocks and boulders. They were having an hour of rare respite from enemy shelling and there was welcome shade behind the wall that they had made for themselves. Five of them, leaning almost comfortably, sat smoking.
‘Think of it this way, Antonio. Franco has to get the help of the Germans and Italians,’ Francisco quipped.‘We’re fighting them alone. A bit of Russian support maybe . . .’
‘But look at what’s happening to our numbers, Francisco . . . We’re being systematically wiped out. Swatted like flies.’
‘How do we know for sure?’
‘Maybe you should believe some things you’re told,’said Antonio wearily.
That afternoon, the Granadinos were separated when they were suddenly under attack. From a hill above, the enemy pounded them and for an hour or so shells poured down in a relentless storm.There was nowhere to take cover and the shriek of bullets drowned out any instructions they were given. In occasional moments of silence, cries of agony could be heard.
When Francisco’s end came, he felt no pain. He was quite literally swept away by the force of the shell that landed beside him and there was little left to recognise. Antonio, who was fifty or so metres away at the time, identified what remained of the body. A gold ring worn distinctively on the middle finger of his right hand put any doubt aside. It sickened him to do so, but Antonio carefully removed the ring from the incongruously icy severed hand and replaced the hand by the rest of the body. As he drew a blanket over Francisco, he realised that his eyes were dry. Sometimes grief is too great for tears.
It was now late September and within a fortnight, the battle would be over for Antonio too.
It was getting dark and fighting would soon be over for the day.
‘It’s very quiet out there,’ said a fellow militia. ‘Maybe they’re retreating.’
‘Some chance,’ replied Antonio, reloading his rifle.
He spotted some movement in a copse above them and raised his weapon. Before he had the chance to fire he felt a sudden, shocking pain in his side. He sank to the ground, slowly, unable to cry out or shout for help, and his comrade thought he had tripped over one of the rocks that littered the hard, treeless terrain they were crossing. Antonio felt light-headed, detached. Was he dead? Why was someone leaning over him, a kindly, muffled voice asking him something he could not understand . . . ?
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