A Broken Land (22 page)

‘You examined the enemy position?’ Cal nodded; he had done so through a periscope, which only gave a partial impression of what lay before them. ‘In the morning we will take back the San Fernando Bridge.’

‘Juan Luis, they have machine guns on fixed arcs of fire.’ That got a dismissive shrug.
No change there
, thought Cal. ‘It is what the Allies faced in the Great War and I think you know how many died.’

‘Mr friend, we must show these communists our mettle.’

‘That would make sense if they were showing theirs alongside you.’

It took some effort to get Florencia back to the Florida that night, but Cal insisted, not with foreboding – you cannot think like that – but people would die on the morrow and he wanted her to himself before they faced that. Awoken when it was still dark, it was a silent pair that dressed and made their way to rejoin what was now known as the ‘Laporta Column’.

At least, this time, everyone had a weapon and the whole of Madrid had been resupplied with ammunition. Also, they were fighting over ground that had already seen much action, so there were lots of craters and dead ground. With what was a sort of bomb squad, he sought to lecture them on how to use that: to crawl from hole to hole until they could get close enough to throw their grenades.

The blowing of loud whistles launched the assault, which was not the only thing that made Cal think of the trenches of the Western Front; likewise the passionate yell as the militiamen and women left cover, the bayonets glinting in the sunlight. Then there came the steady rattle of the machine guns and death for some, terror for others.

The bombing team, the
dinamiteros
, under his guidance, crept out into the no man’s land between the lines, seeking to stay below the raking fire that had obviously decimated their comrades, following Cal as he inched forward from crater to crater, then doing as he suggested, spreading right and left. It was only a hope that his call was heard, but crouched, he pulled the pin from his first grenade and set it flying forward, dropping down immediately as the ground before him spurted up displaced mud.

The explosions acted like a spring to those rifle-bearing fighters who had got stuck in dead ground; they leapt up and charged and paid a high price in getting to the enemy position. Cal was up and running too, pistol out, inside a series of entrenchments and sandbagged barricades, shooting until his gun was empty, then picking up a discarded rifle and working with the bayonet as he had been taught, all those years ago, in basic training.

The anarchists took the first position, only to find that their enemies had fallen back a second and prepared line of defence, and with their superior training they had taken their heavy weapons with them. Certainly they suffered – the position was full of the dead and dying of both sides – and as a victory it was only a partial one, for they were nowhere near the bridge.

It took all day to get the rest of the column forward and to make this one legionnaires’ trench system their own, to get it ready for the
next day’s attack, and to also clear the intervening ground of the dead and wounded. For all they had suffered a hundred dead and five times that number with incapacitating wounds, their spirits were high.

As darkness fell, the main body moved back to the start point, where they could eat and sleep, only a strong piquet left behind. They were eating around the relit fires when they heard the sound of boots, and Drecker appeared once more at the head of his company. This time they stopped and shouldered arms, then listened as their commander read to them from the writing of Lenin, no easy task with the accompanying jeers and whistles. After twenty minutes they about-turned and marched off again.

The next three days were nothing short of a disaster, and nothing an exhausted Cal Jardine could say would get Laporta to call off his increasingly costly attacks. Even with wounded fighters returning they were down to a quarter strength and still the bridge eluded them; they were closer – through a periscope you could see the top of the roadway in the centre – they had forced back their enemies, but the cost, even if they were inflicting heavy losses, was disproportionate.

And, at the end of each day’s fighting, Drecker would come up with his company of the Fifth Regiment, have a short parade, maybe harangue his men, smoke a fag, then march off again, and as he did this it was impossible to miss the reaction of Juan Luis’s face; if he knew he was being goaded it made no difference, even if, on a headcount, there were fewer than four hundred effectives left out of his original three thousand.

The Fifth Company had just marched off, to a lower level of jeers than hitherto, in the main ignored through exhaustion. A near
dead-on
-his
feet Cal Jardine was talking to Alverson and Hemingway, telling them the picture so they could report both on the attacks and the bravery being shown, when the rattle of an automatic weapon broke the stillness.

Cal spun round to see Juan Luis Laporta spin sideways. Worse, Florencia was beside him and she seemed to jerk, then shrink to the ground as he set off towards her as fast as he could. The feeling of the bullet hitting him was like a branding, not a pain, and as it turned him he was vaguely aware that just to his left, bullets were raking the ground; he looked to his right just as one of the firers was upset by panic, and found himself looking to the line of buildings. There was someone there, a vague shape that seemed familiar.

A second bullet took his shoulder, dropping him to his knees, and now he was crawling towards an inert Florencia and Laporta on his hands and knees, his head drooping. All around were cries and shouting, with people running in every direction to what seemed like little purpose. He did get to Florencia and he was sure he said her name, but there was no response and he passed out.

T
he antiseptic smell registered first and then, slowly, he opened his eyes. Above his head was a slow circulating ceiling fan and he knew he was in the Barcelona Ritz, yet when he reached out to touch Florencia, not only was she not there but the edge of the bed was too close to his hand. The stains on the ceiling where water had penetrated were wrong, not the sort of thing to be tolerated by the manager of a luxury hotel; but then, it came back to him, there had been fighting.

Turning his head he saw not blonde, tousled hair but another head swathed in bandages a few feet away, in a bed that was near to touching his own; the same on the other side, though the man in that was lying, eyes closed, in seeming contented sleep. That was when the first of the pain kicked in, a dull throb in his shoulder, and there was another, less significant, in his belly. Confused, the head of the nurse, leaning over him and smiling, was what finally told Callum Jardine he was in hospital, and one that was very crowded.

‘You nearly didn’t make it, old buddy; you lost a lot of blood and it was touch and go if they could get enough back into you to keep you alive. I couldn’t carry you, and if I had not had Ernie Hemingway to help me you would be meat. He’s a big strong guy and not too many people seemed to care about you – they were trying to save their own.’

Tyler Alverson said this to a patient now sitting in a state of some shock; the first question he asked the American got a slow and sad shake of the head – Florencia had been dead on arrival at the forward dressing station, and it took some time for that to sink in and to ask about Juan Luis Laporta. He had died on the operating table from a single bullet that had passed though his chest and lungs.

Both bodies had been taken back to Barcelona for burial in the cemetery at Montjuïc. The whole of the city did not turn out for Florencia, the great crowd came to bury Juan Luis Laporta, but she basked in the glory of every anarchist who could walk being at her graveside too, and many of the flowers were split between the two plots.

‘The official story is it was accidental discharge, a weapon going off that shouldn’t, some schmuck forgetting to put on his safety catch.’

‘You believe that?’

‘If I don’t, Cal, I’m in no position to do anything about it.’

‘You could tell the world.’

‘And get thrown out of Spain for something I’m not sure of? No thanks. Besides, it might have just been someone who didn’t want to die. You said yourself the attacks Laporta was pressing on with were crazy. OK, a lot of people would have been happy to see him dead, but there are too many conspiracies out there to go adding another
one, and that would be about someone, I hate to remind you, the world knows nothing about.’

Cal knew he was in a rear area, the town of Tarancón, that he had been in a coma for three weeks and the doctor, a German socialist, had told him that the Battle for Madrid had fizzled out with neither side really able to claim victory. The city was still under threat but Franco had lost too many men to press home a new assault, especially in winter. The Republicans and the Nationalists were regrouping.

Alverson pulled a bottle of Johnnie Walker from his bag and handed it over. ‘Ernie says to have this, it cures everything, and to remind you that you are due to go hunting and fishing with him as soon as the war is over.’

‘Some pain in the ass, Tyler.’

‘Yep, but then you don’t compete with the big soft bastard.’

‘Thank him for me, for everything. Tell him I’d give him another medal if I had one.’

‘Look, I sent word to London, to Vince, and he got in contact with your wife.’

‘Who rushed to my bedside,’ Cal said bitterly, then regretted it. Lizzie hated blood, hated hospitals, and half the time probably hated him for all the grief he had caused her. The idea of a woman who jumped three feet when a balloon burst coming to a war zone was risible.

‘Vince told some guy called Peter Lanchester, who I am asked to cable to say you are out of the woods, but I figure that’s your call.’

‘Doctor says I can try getting out of bed tomorrow.’

‘What you should do is get out of Spain.’

‘And ruin your scoop?’

‘There will be others, Cal, and you …’ Alverson did not finish that, but there was no doubting what he felt; going after those weapons could see him killed ‘… well, it ain’t worth it.’

‘Tell me what’s happening, everything.’

‘You planning to go home?’

‘Just tell me,’ Cal replied, so impatiently it supplied an answer to the previous question.

The truth was, not a lot was happening on the original front; it was trenches on both sides before Madrid – with Cal opining that at least they had learnt – the Nationalists holding nearly all of the western suburbs but unable to advance; likewise the defenders, who had dug in where they had no other method and erected near-impenetrable barricades in the working-class districts.

The city was being bombed daily and life was getting harder. A Nationalist assault to the north, an attempt to get across the Corunna Road, had ended up with another set of International Brigades being thrown into a mincing machine, but the enemy casualties were nearly as bad, and given the appalling weather conditions, it was no surprise the battle had descended into a stalemate.

Germany and Italy having recognised Franco’s government the previous November, the Italians had sent ground troops in divisional strength, though they were billed as volunteers, and the supplies from the fascist dictators were pouring in through Portugal, despite a protest to the League of Nations. The democracies were still observing an embargo.

‘The talk is we are in for a long haul.’

‘Do Florencia’s parents know?’

‘No idea.’

‘I need a pen and paper, Tyler, that’s a letter I have to write.’

‘You got it. I will try to stay in touch, but if the front moves so must I.’

‘You forget, I always know how to find you.’

Writing his first letter was painful, a tacit admission that Florencia was no more, even if he knew it to be true. The reply came with a photograph of her on the day she had joined the
Mujeres Libres
, which for the first time produced tears, not many, it was not his way, but a reflection of the depth of his feelings of loss.

Replies came from other letters: from Lizzie, ordering him home, from Vince just wishing him well and from Peter Lanchester saying basically, but kindly, he had been asking for it and if there was anything he needed, etc. Monty Redfern, typically, offered to send a private ambulance all the way to Spain if he wanted one.

Recovery was slow, at first the mere act of walking a shuffling struggle, but as his strength began to return, Jardine began to exercise, gently at first, but with an incremental daily increase. The hospital he left as quickly as the doctor would allow, beds being at a premium, and he found a room in a house to rent, one abandoned by a supporter of the generals, though he did not ask if the family had got away or been shot, and it was there that Christmas passed and a new year arrived.

There was one other thing he could work on while he fought his way back to full physical fitness – his Spanish, which given he was surrounded by locals, began to seem competent, though he could never feel comfortable with the sibilant lisp, nor reach the degree of fluency he had with the French and German he had learnt as a child and youth.

Newspapers helped and it was from them, even this far from true
civilisation, that he learnt in a week-old copy of
The Times
of the death of Sir Basil Zaharoff, which saddened him greatly. Naturally, he followed the course of the war, the battle in the winter snows in the mountains to the north-west of Madrid, as Franco tried to cut supplies to the city, again mostly a failure given it bled the Nationalists as much as the Republicans.

By the time Franco attacked and took Málaga he was running again, feeling no pain and ready to get back to what he saw now as a duty he owed to the memory of Florencia.

Barcelona was a city that, to a Briton, blossomed early, already in mid March full of flowers that, in the colour, seemed to mock the grey mood of the city, one that Cal Jardine had to fight in his own mind as certain vistas triggered painful memories. Unable to face his deceased lover’s parents, he made straight for the headquarters of the POUM in Las Ramblas.

Getting to see Andreu Nin, even if he was no longer apparently a member of the Catalan government, was never going to be easy, alone even harder, and the offices of his Workers’ Party were really the last place to talk with him – there were too many prying eyes – nor did he feel the telephone to be secure, even if the exchange which he had helped capture was still in anarchist hands.

So he dropped off a curt note, in Spanish, referring to their original meeting, hoping that the room number at the Ritz, as well as Florencia’s name, would trigger his memory and asking that he make contact, then went back to the upper floors of the now
much-depleted
Ritz to wait for what was really the answer to a simple question – did he still want that for which he had asked and was he still prepared to fund it?

The reply took two frustrating days in coming and the sender had no idea how close Jardine had come to repacking his bags and seeking a way home, for to be here, staying in a room decorated exactly like the one they had shared, was to be constantly reminded of Florencia, and that, with no one to talk to, was agony.

In the end Nin showed the same level of precaution as he did; there was no call from a downstairs desk to tell him he had a visitor, just a discreet knock on the door, which when opened produced a thick envelope which was pressed into his hand. Opening it, he was surprised that what had been written was in English, though not of a very good standard, and ran over several pages.

The POUM leader was at pains to stress that matters vis-à-vis the communists had not improved, indeed they had deteriorated, this not aided by interim attempts to buy arms on the open market, and the reason the package was so thick was quite simply that Nin wanted him to know of what had been attempted and what failure they had suffered.

At every step, those with whom they dealt, usually foreign industrialists with little sympathy for the cause they were being asked to supply, demanded massive prices as well as huge bribes, first to sell any weapons at all, then to pay off the necessary officials to provide the End User Certificates that would allow the arms to be shipped to the Republic, people the Spanish negotiators never got to meet.

What followed turned the mounting difficulties into a farce, as the foreigners stalled on delivery, changed the terms of the agreements – always at the Republic’s expense – then, when their goods finally arrived, they found them not to be what had been paid for and many were actually useless, while what could be employed was often dangerous.

Really he was telling Cal things he did not wish to know – they were finding out what he had told them, the arms trade was a dirty business – but he was obliged to read to get to the kernel of what was required. So he learnt that the Stalinists now controlled the Assault Guards, that their membership was nearing half a million and that their grip on the throat of the Republic had increased.

It was at the end he got to the nub: Nin, despite the difficulties his party faced in falling numbers, had transferred the sum of money originally mentioned to the account named and he wished the process discussed to be put into operation. He asked no questions, so the need to explain the source to which he was proposing to go – bound to be a problem of persuasion – never arose.

Cal had not expected that – he had anticipated some form of dialogue, certainly a heated discussion, and he would have told Nin, had that occurred, the provision of funds was unnecessary; he would have financed the first part himself. Yet it was an indication of the truth of what he had written that he could not risk a meeting, which meant his every move was being watched.

It made no odds; if he had the POUM funds he would use them and his business in Barcelona was finished. It was time to find his Greek, and the first step in that was to get back down to the Barcelona dock area and see if the smugglers he had used before were still operating. They were, and prospering.

Yet departing the waters off Catalonia was a lot more circumspect this time than last; there was no burst of powerful marine engines and a cresting bow wave, they left the harbour with the engines no more than idling, the ship securely dark, as was the harbour behind, and Cal had been told in no uncertain terms that silence was essential as they cleared the dredged channel.

The threat came from Italian submarines patrolling off the coast, though they were obliged to stay well out in deep water off a coastline that was noted for the long, shallow and sandy shelf, but they did put out boats full of armed men to seek the smugglers close inshore. It was a long time before the man at the wheel half-opened the throttle to increase speed and take them out in the deep Med.

In the myriad calculations Cal had to make, this one struck home. He was a long way from even having to worry about getting what he might purchase into the Republican harbours, but there was one salient fact that was obvious – they could not come in a Spanish vessel and he would have to be careful about the kind of ship used.

Once out at sea, with the coastline a distant memory, the captain could at last get up real speed, and it was exhilarating on two counts: not just the salt spray and wind on his face, but the feeling of leaving something behind, of the opening of a new page and closing a book on what had just gone before.

From Marseilles, a cable went off to Peter Lanchester asking for a meeting in Paris, and when a positive reply came he took the train north, having pre-booked a room in the Hôtel de Crillon, and that was where they met for dinner in the very formal and very grand restaurant
Les Ambassadeurs
, all gilt, a marble floor, mirrors and chandeliers in the style of Louis XV.