The Gate of the Sun. Derek Lambert
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had really shown that they had cojones; Balkans, many of them Greeks, had defended ferociously; the British were still fighting suicidally to hold a hill below Pingarrón; the Americans were waiting to do battle.
‘Ah, those Yanks,’ Chimo said. ‘Soon we shall see if they shoot like Sergeant York.’
‘I’m lucky to be fighting at all,’ Adam said. ‘Lucky to be alive. Where were you when Delgado appeared at the entrance to the bunker?’
‘I was being diplomatic,’ Chimo said. He tested the cutting edge of his yellow teeth on the ball of his thumb.
‘And brave?’
‘I know nothing of bravery: I am a soldier. They are the brave ones.’ He pointed at the hills where, alongside the Popular Army, the International Brigades were fighting to stop the Fascists reaching the Madrid–Valencia road. ‘They know nothing about fighting. Have you seen the British?’
‘I don’t want to see the British,’ Adam said.
He wondered if there was anyone he knew from Cambridge fighting under Tom Wintringham, Communist military correspondent of the Daily Worker, and commanding officer of the 600-strong British Battalion engaged in its first battle.
Already the poet John Cornford was dead, wounded in the Battle for Madrid, killed in Andalucia the day after his 21st birthday. In that engagement half of the 145 members of the British Number 1 company had been killed or wounded.
‘You should see them,’ Chimo said. ‘They haven’t got a map between them …’
‘How do you know?’
‘You should see them wandering about … Their rifles haven’t been greased and they blow up in their hands. And their uniforms! Berets, peaked caps, ponchos, a steel helmet or two, breeches, baggy slacks, alpargatas …’
‘What are alpargatas?’ Adam asked without interest. His body ached with exhaustion, his mind with questions.
‘Canvas shoes with rope soles. Imagine wearing those in the mud. Our guns pick them off while they’re still stuck in it.’
Poor, sad, would-be soldiers, Adam thought. That was true courage: even Chimo understood that. But what are you dying for? Ideals? I have those too. Haven’t I? He touched his sister’s letter in the pocket of his tunic.
What he feared most was coming face to face with an Englishman. Could he kill him? And in any case should it be so different from killing a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Spaniard? Patriotism, surely, is only an accident of birth.
No, he decided, I should not be able to kill him.
An orderly served cold rice, which they ate with their hands, and cold coffee. Rain dripped from the silver-green leaves of the olive trees. The rain in Cambridge had smelled of grass; this rain smelled of cordite.
Adam leaned against the trunk of an olive tree, shielding his Mauser rifle with his blanket. He closed his eyes and dozed on his feet, limbs jerking as he ducked bayonets. Chimo’s voice reached him in snatches.
‘Not saying they aren’t good fighters, they are … but shit, how can they fight in peasants’ shoes with guns that kill them instead of us?’
Delgado said, ‘No unexploded shells here?’ There was mud on his boots and his eyes were pouched with fatigue but his grey-green legion uniform was freshly pressed and he looked as though he had just left the barbers.
Adam pushed himself away from the olive tree. ‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Good. We attack in five minutes.’
Adam looked at his wrist-watch. They had been resting for 35 minutes.
Delgado said, ‘A lot of your countrymen up there,’ pointing at the pock-marked hill. ‘You’ll have to kill some.’
‘If they don’t kill me, sir.’
‘Spaniards are fighting Spaniards … Now you’ll find out what that feels like.’
‘I know what it feels like, sir.’
‘How can you?’
‘Is it any different from killing a Pole or a Belgian or a Greek?’
‘I didn’t want foreigners in my unit,’ Delgado said. ‘I’ve been lucky: you’re the only one. This is our war.’ He bent his cane between his two hands.
‘And the Germans’ war. And Italians’. Perhaps it isn’t your war any more, sir.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you, inglés, that you’re fighting on the wrong side?’
Delgado strode away, his young captain in tow.
Adam fought his fatigue. Close your eyelids for a moment and you are in the armchair of the past.
Sometimes on Epsom Downs he had played at war, storming the racecourse grandstand on one occasion while thunder flashes exploded and masters in khaki stood in the line of fire barking contradictory orders. Adam had taken the opportunity to smoke a Passing Cloud in a nest of hawthorn bushes.
A red Very light blossomed in the sky. The legionnaires moved from their oasis and advanced towards the hill which the British Battalion, intellectuals, poets, adventurers, Jews from Manchester, Leeds and London, even a few members of the IRA, was defending.
Adam, rifle bayoneting the mist gathering in the rain, advanced into battle.
Chimo said, ‘Don’t worry, Amado, there are Spaniards fighting with the brigade as well as British.’
How could you tell one from the other? Phantom figures in front of them. Shouts and curses in Spanish and English.
‘Stay close to me.’ Chimo said. ‘I will kill your Englishmen for you.’
‘And I will kill your Spaniards.’
And then the mist lifts and there is great confusion and it’s apparent that, in their job-lot uniforms, reds are shooting reds as well as Fascists. Adam sees the scene as an old, frantically-speeded movie; when the reel spends itself the killing will stop.
He aims his Mauser and fires at nothing in particular. Finds himself on the edge of the movie screen beside a half-dug trench, cartridge cases and jagged slivers of shell-casing shining in the mud.
The Englishman stands in front of him, rifle, armed with a bayonet, clenched in white-knuckled hands. He wears a woollen Balaclava and rope-soled shoes. And spectacles, rimless and spotted with rain. An Englishman all right.
The Englishman prods his bayonet forward. The blade shines wetly but there is no blood on it. He blinks rapidly behind his spectacles, the sort you can buy in Woolworths without a prescription.
Adam holds his rifle, speared with a ten-inch blade, loosely. He does not want to kill this short-sighted Englishman. Nor does he wish to be killed. As they face each other fear pours into this pause in time, twists Adam’s bowels and roughens his throat.
Before coming to Spain he has not considered death; now it is as close as life. He understands that one thrust from that wet bayonet and the half-dug trench and the shining fragments of war and Kate with her damp hair curling at the nape of her neck will be no more. What does the Englishman see through his rimless, Woolworth’s spectacles?
‘Come on, you Fascist bastard,’ the Englishman says. ‘Fight.’
But Adam can’t move. He opens his mouth but his lips and tongue are frozen as they are in a nightmare that sometimes visits him.
The Englishman’s bayonet stabs, nearer this time.
‘Ah can’t kill you just like that,’ he continues, northern vowels as flat as slate. ‘Not if you don’t move.’
‘And I can’t kill you with an accent like that.’
A lozenge of silence inside the noise of battle. Then the