Page 55 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)
Training began the following day, under the instruction of a rosy-cheeked young man in a smart uniform who explained to Zennor that he had been a regular army lieutenant.
He told them foreigners did not have to attend instruction: there seemed to be a belief among Spaniards that all Englishmen had military instruction from the cradle.
Basil would have accepted the exeat and gone and found a heap of straw somewhere to sit and read quietly, but Zennor said on behalf of both of them that they needed to learn the drill like anyone else.
What followed was not drill in any sense: the recruits were ardent revolutionaries and longing to get to the Front and trounce the enemy, but they had no idea of military procedures, and were actively averse to discipline.
They would not even stand in line, constantly wandering off to chat to someone else they had spotted, swapping cigarettes and sweets, and talking non-stop like a treeful of starlings.
And they had absorbed the revolutionary code of equality to the point that if they were given an order they didn’t like, they would leave the rank and go up to the officer to argue about it vigorously.
Gradually, day by day, in a shambling manner, they learned to stand in ranks, and to march in formation of a sort round the big cobbled yards.
Coming to attention was not the clump-thump that Basil had witnessed at home: it was a prolonged rattle-and-shuffle as everyone achieved the position in his own time, and adjusted it as he thought necessary.
Many of the recruits did not know their right from their left.
Javier, the young man who drilled beside Basil – it was all Christian names in the militia, surnames being deemed part of the old order and unacceptably deferential – was particularly baffled.
On the order to march he would stare with desperate, frowning concentration at Basil’s feet, and try to copy him, frequently clutching Basil’s arm in the effort to stay upright as he tripped over his own boots or collided with the man in front.
Eventually, Basil pulled a red thread from his already frayed scarf and tied it through an eyelet hole of his left boot.
‘ Rojo ,’ he told him, again and again. ‘Red first.’ Eventually Javier got the hang of it, and forced grateful cigarettes on him every time he saw him.
After a week, it was decided that the centuria marched well enough to be seen in public, and they were taken out of barracks to march through the town and up and down the pleasure-gardens, which were the common parade ground for the militias.
The men were desperately proud to be seen, though their uniform was still hopelessly patchy, and their drill would have made a British sergeant weep, but for three hours each time they marched stiffly up and down, throwing out their chests and trying to look like soldiers, but fatally grinning and waving every time they saw a girlfriend, mother, grandfather or neighbour they recognised.
Drill took up the mornings. Afternoons had no military shape, and often the recruits played unregulated games of football, up and down the riding-school, or found a quiet spot to sleep – they were great sleepers in the afternoon – or wandered off into the town.
Basil often persuaded Zennor to go with him to a café in the Plaza de Espana to attempt to supply the deficiencies of the barracks mess.
The evening meal was always the same, a kind of stew served in greasy tin pannikins, with great lumps of bread, and a thin local wine, which they drank out of a common porrón , a bottle with a long spout from which you could direct liquid into your mouth without the lips touching it.
At the café they could get coffee, and sausage, and boiled potatoes, and a kind of dry, grainy yellow cake – nothing very tempting, except that it was different.
Basil had always thought of himself as a rebel, but he had always lived in a tightly structured world where he was the disruptive element.
Finding himself in a place where nothing was as it should have been threw him off balance.
His mind automatically searched for order and discipline against which to brace himself.
And he had always been personally fastidious.
He didn’t like to be uncomfortable. It offended him to be dirty.
Many times in those early days, he thought about leaving and going home.
But gradually he became fond of the other recruits, who were so very friendly, as well as touchingly dedicated to their cause.
Physical discomforts didn’t concern them at all.
And there was the effortless way in which Zennor seemed to fit in and cope with everything, and the quiet enthusiasm with which he looked forward to the next stage of the adventure.
So Basil squared mental shoulders and dug in, telling himself there was nothing he could not stand for a few weeks in the cause of making a name for himself back home.
The most troubling thing was that there was no rifle drill.
Zennor, talking to the officer after drill one day, learned there were no rifles in the barracks, other than those issued to the sentries.
Rifles were in desperately short supply, he said: militiamen going up to the Front would take over the rifles of the men coming out of the line to rest.
‘But you know how to shoot,’ the officer said, more a statement than a question, but with a hopeful look.
‘Yes,’ Zennor said, frowning, ‘but—’
‘Then you will be all right,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Rifles will be issued. Everything will be done, in due course.’
Basil, whose Spanish had improved no end in the past couple of weeks, took his friend’s arm as they walked away. ‘“Rifles will be issued”? We haven’t even got full uniforms. What have we got ourselves into?’
‘Oh, I expect it will be all right. I’ve noticed that these chaps lack any kind of order or routine, the way we know it, but things get done, more or less. Eventually.’ He looked at Basil frowningly. ‘You aren’t thinking of chucking, are you?’
‘Well—’ Basil began.
‘Please don’t go,’ Zennor said urgently. ‘The chaps need us. They’re splendid fellows. And the cause is a good one.’
Actually, Basil had only the vaguest idea what the cause was. But the fellows certainly were splendid.
Zennor, looking down in embarrassment, said awkwardly, ‘ I need you. Don’t want to do this alone.’
That clinched it. When an Englishman went so far as to express his inner feelings, you had to take it seriously.
Basil had just settled in to the lack-of-routine, and had come to believe that they would never go to the Front, when one evening the order came to be ready to go in two hours.
There was a stampede for the quartermaster’s stores to try to get hold of equipment, most of which was still not available.
And suddenly the barracks filled with women, wives and sisters and mothers of the recruits, who had heard the news of departure on the town’s grapevine and had come hurrying in to help them pack their kitbags, press parting gifts on them, and smile and weep simultaneously with pride and apprehension.
Blankets were rolled, pannikins slung from knapsacks, bottles of wine and lengths of sausage forced in among the socks and shirts.
The train would be leaving the station at eight o’clock, they were told, but it was already ten past when they were finally paraded in the barracks square, still fumbling with fastenings and searching pockets for stray items, chattering, questioning, laughing.
Then there was a further delay as a commissar in a smart uniform and bright boots climbed up onto a box and addressed them in what was evidently a rousing speech, though his accent was so strong Basil understood only one word in five.
Two attendants had unrolled a great red banner to hold above him as he exhorted them in the name of the revolution; some of the men had tears in their eyes; at the end, there was a great roar of approval.
How strange it all seemed: Basil had another moment of standing outside himself.
Torchlight flickered, gleaming off a buckle here, a curved, wet female cheek there; voices echoed off the stone walls; above the barracks square, the sky was black and indifferent.
On the march to the station, nothing at all seemed real.
They were taken on a circuitous route all round the town so that everyone could see them, and everywhere they were acclaimed by crowds shouting and waving flags, while revolutionary songs pumped out from the loudspeakers, and the men grinned as they marched, basking in the love and pride, close to believing themselves heroes.
The train was so crowded there was not room for everyone to sit.
Basil and Zennor were ushered by their own particular comrades into a favoured corner of a compartment: they were, Basil realised, the equivalent of a good-luck mascot.
The last-comers had to stand, so crushed together they could probably have gone to sleep on their feet without the slightest chance of falling down.
The train gave a melancholy wheep! and began to crawl out of the station, where still crowds, mostly women now, called in high, echoing voices like a colony of seabirds, and were left behind.
Now Felipe passed round cigarettes; Ramón hauled out a bottle of wine; chattering resumed as the train gathered speed to a heady twenty kilometres an hour, clattering and lurching on the ill-maintained track.
And Basil, out of his pervading sense of unreality, stared across at Zennor, struggling to extract a lump of dried red sausage from his pack, and thought, What on earth have I got myself into?