Page 83 of The Gathering Storm

‘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.

Spring had come, even up there in the sierra, but it was still wretchedly cold at night and when the mysterious fogs rolled in. One moment you might be sitting on a rock, enjoying a cigarette in the sunshine under a sparkling-clear blue sky; the next you could be enveloped in thick, white, damp and distinctly chilly mist. Sometimes in the morning the valley would be hidden under a sea of milk, while the hilltops rose up from it like blue-grey islands. And always in the distance the huge, snowcapped peaks of the Pyrenees stood clear, guarding eternity.

The days passed in a monotonous cycle of sentry-go, camp duties, and foraging expeditions. The enemy fired occasionally. Sometimes there were positive volleys, as though frustrated children were lashing out; and then the excited Communists fired back, wild fusillades accompanied by cheering, abusive shouts, and the singing of partisan songs. Now and then a rifle bullet would come far enough to hit the parapet, almost spent, but mostly they fell harmlessly into the valley.

The foraging expeditions were for firewood. The hills could never have yielded much in the way of vegetation, but months of occupation had stripped them bare. Foragers had to go further afield all the time to collect enough miserable little twigs to cook the rations. Down on the valley floor in front of their position there were some bushes, stunted oaks, and reeds that, when dry, burned effectively. But foraging there was hazardous, for the bored enemy sentries loved to shoot at anything that moved. Basil learned that they generally fired too high, and the bullets would whine overhead like hornets. But occasionally one would strike the rock close enough to fling shards of limestone into the group, upon which they would throw themselves flat on their faces, no doubt affording satisfaction to the Fascists – until they got up again and went on.

When they had been at the position two weeks, Basil and Zennor were made corporals, each in charge of twelve men. ‘I suppose it’s because we’re educated,’ Basil said, ‘and we know how to shoot.’

‘Well, if they’re going to give us responsibilities,’ Zennor said determinedly, ‘at least we should have rifles that work.’

They succeeded in swapping with Rubio and Manuel, each using his own tactics. Basil got Rubio’s good rifle away from him with a mixture of threats and cigarettes; Zennor subjected Manuel to a long and earnest lecture about one’s duty to the cause and the importance of loyalty to one comrades that had him close to tears.

‘In the end, he begged me to take it.’

‘You’re a lot less of a typical Englishman than you appear at first sight,’ Basil said admiringly.

Being a corporal conferred little other than responsibility. The militias were political entities, and run on lines of complete equality. There were no badges, no titles, no deference, no saluting, no increased pay or extra rations: the unit was a democracy, not a hierarchy. Officers and men called each other ‘comrade’; orders were requests, and always required discussion. Before a comrade would do as you asked, he had to understand why the thing needed doing, and why it was his duty to the Party and the cause to carry it out. He would often want to propose counter-arguments, to the end itself, or to the method of achieving it, that could take ten minutes. It troubled Zennor, who had British Army ideas, much more than Basil, who was more inclined to find things funny than annoying. His Spanish improved rapidly. ‘Not so much conversational Spanish as argumentative Spanish,’ he said to Zennor one evening.

‘I read somewhere, before we left Barcelona, that they’re raising a non-political army now, along conventional lines,’ Zennor said. ‘Thank God for that, I say. They’ll never get anywhere with this crazy system.’

‘But they’re good fellows underneath,’ Basil said, enjoying the first evening cigarette, in anticipation of dinner. Wild rosemary grew below the parapet, and some genius on kitchen duties had added a handful to the stew – he could smell it. ‘And I rather like the fact that they understand why they’re obeying an order, rather than being drilled into unquestioning obedience.’

‘That’s because we’re not under fire. You’d soon see how unquestioning obedience matters if we were fighting a conventional battle. And I don’t see the moral difference between parade-ground drilling, and the political indoctrination these boys have undergone.’

‘Mind drilling versus body drilling,’ Basil said. ‘Which is worse? I suppose we’ll never know.’

‘We might learn by the end of this war,’ Zennor said.

‘I don’t think war ever teaches anything,’ Basil said idly. ‘You never find out who was right. You only see who is left.’ He saw Zennor raise his eyebrows at that, and thought it quite a nifty phrase. He would record it in his notebook – he was still writing it up every night, though he was unsure what use his experience would turn out to be to the newspaper.

Meanwhile, was it being useful to him? It was certainly moulding him. After three weeks, he had stopped fretting about being dirty. He had almost stopped noticing it. It was impossible to take off one’s clothes or boots: you simply added or subtracted layers according to the temperature. Nobody shaved – water was in short supply. There was none on the mountain, so it had to be brought up on mule-back from the valley, and was issued for drinking only, a quart a day per man, horrible cloudy water, which gave him diarrhoea for two horrific days before his body adjusted. There were no latrines and everyone defecated outside the barricade anywhere they could squat, so the smell of excrement was the first thing you noticed when coming out of the dugout in the morning. It became second nature to watch your step anywhere beyond the walls. Occasionally he thought that if London Basil could have seen him now, he would never have come, but most of the time he didn’t think about it.

Apart from the water shortage, they had adequate rations: food was also brought up by mule, but there was enough of it, and it wasn’t bad – usually some kind of stew and bread for dinner, sometimes rice or beans; bread and bacon for breakfast; the occasional ration of dried sausage and cheese. They were also issued with a pack of cigarettes each per day. What they lacked was military supplies. They had little ammunition, and much of that useless. They had no tin hats, no bayonets, no grenades, no range-finders, no field glasses, wire-cutters, flares, electric torches; unsurprisingly no maps – that area of Spain had never properly been surveyed. They didn’t even have any cleaning materials: the pull-through had never been heard of, and there was no gun oil. They had to grease their guns with olive oil when they could get it; sometimes bacon fat.

To alleviate the boredom, Basil often volunteered for patrols, which took place at night or in foggy weather, and were not popular with the others, who saw no reason to exert themselves or face danger for no material benefit. Basil surprised himself the first time he heard himself volunteer – another way in which he had changed, he supposed, because he realised only then that the danger did not bother him. There was a chance of being shot by the Fascists, certainly, but he backed himself to be wily. There was more likelihood of being shot on your return by your own sentry, who had probably fallen asleep and, waking with a start, assumed the Fascists were coming and started firing wildly. The challenge and password were forgotten in such moments. They were usually elevated revolutionary sentiments like progreso, solidaridad, unidad, or adelante.

To go on patrol was a change from the deadly routine, a chance to exert the body and exercise the mind. There were no paths down the ragged ravine sides: Basil enjoyed having to pick a way like a mountain goat from foothold to foothold – and to remember the way back – then across the valley floor and up the other side, trying to make no sound, to approach the Fascist stronghold. Dislodge a pebble or break a twig, and the darkness would fill with bullets whistling overhead.

One misty night he and his section of four got as far as the barbed wire, and crouched there, listening to the Fascists talking inside their compound. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, and didn’t suppose it was anything worth hearing. He doubted these patrols answered any military purpose. But he felt oddly alive creeping about on the dark, stark hillsides.

He was preparing to leave when he heard the clump of boots as someone came up to the parapet, and he made an urgent sign to his men to keep down. He smelt a cigarette, heard someone muttering to himself. A sentry, he supposed. Cautiously he shifted his position so as to crane upwards, and saw a shadowy figure standing there, looking out, the position of the face marked by the glowing end of a cigarette, like the red bull painted on a target. Basil froze, making a mental note to remind his men later not to smoke on guard duty. Had they been heard? Was the man scanning for them, with a view to opening fire? He could see indistinct movements, but did not know what the man was doing, until suddenly a thin stream of liquid arced over the barbed wire, luckily a few feet away. He heard the man next to him draw a breath to curse, and jabbed him warningly with his elbow. The sentry aloft cleared his throat and there was a gigantic hawk-and-spit, but he did not see where that landed.