Page 57 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)
The comandante allowed everyone to go in batches and look at them, and in a state of festering boredom Basil and Zennor did not refuse their turn.
The enemy turned out to be very like themselves, skinny young men, unshaven and rough-haired, indistinguishable from their own side except that they had khaki uniforms, and were more ragged, with boots falling to pieces.
They were being held in an abandoned cottage by the armed Communists, who had brought them down from the front line.
One of them was clearly terrified, and shook like a horse, his eyes white and rolling, probably believing that the Reds were feral beasts who intended to torture and kill him.
Food was brought to them, and being faced with a pannikin of stew, the lad – who appeared to be no more than fifteen – did not seem to know what to do with it.
His guard stroked his shoulder and made crooning noises as he would to a horse, and finally took the spoon, wrapped the boy’s fingers around it, and dug it into the steaming mess.
Once he started eating, the boy shovelled with desperate haste.
The guard grinned at Basil, patted the boy again with a proprietorial air, and said in Spanish, ‘You see, the Fascist troops are always starving. That’s why they’re no match for us. ’
On the third day, a covered mule cart arrived with the rifles for the centuria .
They were unloaded at one of the larger barns, and the men gathered there to have them handed out.
Basil and Zennor examined what they had been allocated, and Basil exclaimed, ‘What in God’s name is this?
’ It was a German Mauser, and the date stamped under the manufacturer’s name was 1896.
It was rusty – the bolt so rusted it wouldn’t move – and the stock had a split you could put a pencil into.
Zennor’s was no better. He looked down inside the barrel and said, ‘It’s completely corroded inside.
It will never fire.’ The other rifles were as bad.
The boy next to him was turning his round and round and staring at it in bafflement, and Basil could see at a glance that if he ever managed to load and fire it, it would explode and take his hand off.
‘What are we supposed to do with these?’ Basil said, his voice high with frustration.
‘Look,’ Zennor said. Two young lads had just come back with something obviously newer and less rusty, and were nudging each other and grinning in self-congratulation.
They were two of the youngest in the company, only fourteen, and from the way they were holding their prize rifles obviously had no idea how to use them.
Zennor asked them for a look, and they showed him reluctantly, without actually letting go.
They were dated 1926, and though dirty, were intact and not rusty.
‘I’m going to talk to the sergeant,’ Zennor said, in a determined voice Basil had never heard before.
‘Obviously the best rifles ought to be given to people who can shoot. That’s only common sense. ’
Before Basil could say anything, he was pushing his way through the throng and was addressing the sergeant. Basil could not hear what was said, but saw the sergeant’s face redden, saw the fury on it as he bawled at Zennor, and made a furious gesture of dismissal.
He came back, not chastened, but quietly angry. ‘He said you and I are foreigners, and the best rifles go to the good Communists, those most loyal to the cause.’
‘But that’s …’ Basil was lost for words.
‘I know. And how could those little beasts ever have done anything for the Party?’
Later they learned that one of the lads, Manuel, was the sergeant’s nephew, and the other, Mateo, always known as Rubio for his fair hair, was his best friend at school.
But there was no time now to worry about it.
After five minutes’ instruction on how to load the rifle, they were told to get their packs and form up.
Then, without further warning, they set off for the front line.
Basil felt only relief at leaving the stinking village behind.
Fear of death had not managed to find room in his head yet, though he was anxious about his useless, rusty rifle.
‘Don’t worry,’ Zennor said calmly. ‘We’ll have the good ones off them when we get to the front. Rubio will do anything for chocolate, and Manuel is a blockhead and does whatever Rubio says.’
‘But what about the sergeant? He’ll make us give them back, and punish us.’
‘He won’t. The sergeant will do anything for cigarettes,’ Zennor said.
Basil could only admire his confidence and resourcefulness.
Back in London he had thought him rather pathetic, like the swotty boy in specs at school who was always bullied, but before Basil’s very eyes he was turning into a hero and a solid, grown-up man.
Basil could only hope he would do as well.
It was wild country, a chain of bare rocky hills that supported no growth but low scrub, with outcrops of limestone sticking through the thin earth like bones.
The sides were steep and ribbed with rock, slashed with deep ravines.
There was no possibility here of a continuous front – rather, there was a series of fortified posts perched on the hilltops wherever the ground was flat enough, facing across the ravines the similar posts of the enemy.
‘They must be five or six hundred yards away,’ Basil said to Zennor, observing the faint line of a parapet, like a scrawl along the hillside, over which a red-and-yellow flag flew, and behind which tiny figures moved in ant-like occupations.
‘Beyond rifle range,’ Zennor said. ‘Even if we had working rifles.’
The last part of the journey to the front had been in single file, scrambling up a steep mule-track that looped back and forth across the hillside.
As soon as they reached the top, they could smell the rotten stink: everything got thrown over the escarpment, where it accumulated on ledges and in clefts, the ordure of all the months past. Unsurprisingly, there was no animal life to be seen, not even a bird, though it was the kind of country where you might normally expect to see an eagle or a buzzard cruising the rising air currents.
Beyond the human sounds of the position – conversational voices, the clink of stone or metal, the occasional cough or laugh – it was eerily quiet.
The company they were relieving were desperately anxious to get away.
They looked like scarecrows, filthy, unshaven and ragged.
A corporal, a very dark Frenchman from somewhere in the south, picked out Basil and Zennor as obviously different from the crowd, and on learning they were English, showed them round, seeming grateful to be able to communicate in something other than Spanish.
The stronghold, or position, as he called it, was semi-circular and about fifty yards across, enclosed with a parapet of limestone boulders reinforced with sandbags.
In front of the parapet was a series of narrow trenches with firing loopholes made of piles of limestone; then came the thick loops of barbed wire.
Beyond that the scarp plunged down vertiginously into the ravine, whose bottom was out of sight.
Even Basil, with no experience of such things, could see that it was unassailable by infantry.
Zennor asked the corporal if the enemy had artillery. ‘They have a couple of guns,’ he said, ‘but no ammunition. Now and then they manage to get a few shells brought up from Zaragoza, but so few they never find the range. We’ve never been hit.’
Inside the parapet were forty or so dug-outs, and the corporal showed them his, where his packed kitbag was still stowed.
‘You should take this one,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the better ones.
’ When they thanked him, he said, ‘No need. We have to stick together, we foreigners.’ He kicked moodily at a stone.
‘This is not a war, you know, it’s a comic opera, without the fancy uniforms. And with the occasional death.
’ He shrugged. ‘Not death in combat. We’ve lost five men since we got here, and had a dozen more injured, but all by accident, at their own hands.
Be especially careful after dark. These boys poop off at the least sound. ’
‘So there’s not much chance of action here?’
‘It’s a stalemate. Has been since last autumn.
’ He stared across the parapet at the ribbed hills opposite.
‘The maddest thing,’ he said, ‘is that those boys over there are exactly the same as our boys here. There’s no reason for them to be trying to kill each other.
Ours’ve been told the Fascists are murdering swine who want to rape their sisters, but when we get deserters, you can see they’re just Spanish boys like ours, scared and hungry and fed up and wanting to go home.
They could be cousins – they just happened to have lived on the other side of the valley, and got recruited by the other lot.
Politics! Bloody politics!’ He turned to them abruptly. ‘For instance, why are you here?’
Basil let Zennor answer. He wasn’t sure he could make a coherent account of himself.
‘To help drive the Fascists out and restore the legitimate government,’ Zennor answered.
He sounded comfortingly sure about it. ‘Fascism has to be stopped. If it gets a foothold here, it could spread throughout Europe.’
The corporal looked at him for a long time, as if he debated correcting everything that was wrong about that statement. Then he shrugged. ‘Well, good luck to you. I hope it’s worth it.’ And he heaved up his kitbag and walked away to find his men.