Derek Lambert - The Gate of the Sun

A part of me also knows that I must not leave Spain. For Paco’s sake, for the children’s sake because they are Spanish. I am writing to you because we always shared and father never much cared for Paco, did he? Well, tell him the dago is dead. He was a good man, Adam …

The back-sloping letters lengthened, died. The letter was signed Eve. Her name was Julia but with Adam it had always been Eve.

Adam, letter in hand, heard the plop of stones thrown by her two boys into the pond; saw the ripple of the water beneath the duckweed. They had been happy that day, Adam and Eve, sharing Eve’s family, sharing a day that smelled of daffodils and hope, even sharing the hostility of their father which, now that there were children, was more a family joke than a threat.

Ah, Paco of the healthy skin and glossy hair and provident disposition who believed that Spain would be a land of opportunity as soon as the Republic had settled … poor, naïve Paco who was forced to dig his own grave out of the land in which he believed.

Adam threw a pebble into the pond and watched the green ripples until they lapped the bank, then strode rapidly away.

Five days later he was in the solemn city of Burgos in the north of Spain.

The third shell duly arrived in the slit trench. It came with the sound of a wave unfurling and, with an impact that shook the trench, buried itself in the mud and soft rock, resting lethally five yards from Adam.

‘Shit,’ said Chimo, ‘we’d better get out of here.’

‘It’s a dud,’ Adam said. It was not unknown for Spanish munition workers who didn’t want to kill other Spaniards to immobilize ammunition.

‘There are duds and duds. Maybe this has got a delayed fuse.’

‘Why would it have that?’

‘So that we all think it’s a nice shiny shell. We even go up and pat it. Then, whoosh, it blows us over the countryside. That’s the reds for you, those sons of whores …’

The legionnaire next to Chimo said, ‘Those bastards … We came here to fight, not wait until we’re blown into little pieces by one sleeping shell.’

He climbed out of the trench and made a crouching run for the concrete bunker at the base of the flat-topped hills. The others followed. Adam, taking a last look at the shell half-buried in the mud, went last. It was his misfortune that he was a good runner.

Keeping low, he passed empty trenches, a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest on the roof, a shrike perched on a telegraph wire, shell-holes, sage and brush and leafless fig trees … To his left he saw the curves of the river and the rulered line of Jarama canal.

Bullets fired from across the river sang past him. But what he feared was heavy artillery or a strafing run by one of the German fighters now occupying luminous pools in the clouds.

He reached the bunker first. And found that the colonel in charge of the bandera , the battalion, was waiting for him. His name was Delgado, a native of Seville, and, modelling himself on General Queipo de Llano, who broadcast bloodthirsty threats to the Republicans on the radio, bore himself with exaggerated stiffness and wore his small moustache as though it were a medal; he disliked all foreigners, whether they were fighting for the Republicans or the Fascists.

He said to Adam, ‘I must be losing my hearing – I didn’t hear any order to retreat.’

Adam drew himself to attention. ‘We’re not retreating …’

‘We?’

Adam looked behind him, spotted the last of the legionnaires who had followed him disappearing into a trench.

‘I am not retreating. I’ve come to report an unexploded shell.’

‘It’s my experience that unexploded shells report themselves.’

‘In our trench. If it had gone off it would have killed the lot of us.’

‘Who gave the orders to abandon the trench?’

‘No one, sir.’

‘But you got out first?’ Delgado slapped his cane against a polished boot. He looked as though he had just shaved and showered.

‘I run faster,’ Adam said.

‘Are you implying that the rest of the men ran away too?’

‘I did not run away.’

‘You could hardly say you were attacking. What if other members of the company had followed your example?’

Adam didn’t reply: they hadn’t.

‘Name?’

‘Fleming, sir.’

‘Ah, Fleming,’ tapping his boot with his cane. ‘Why do you want to fight for us, Fleming? Most of your countrymen are fighting for the reds.’

‘Because I’m anti-Communist.’

‘Not pro-Nationalist?’

‘If I am one then surely I am the other.’

‘You’re beginning to talk like a diplomat.’ Delgado took a step forward. ‘What makes you think you can help us?’

‘I can fire a rifle.’

‘Where? At a fiesta, a fairground?’

Adam told him that in the cadet corps he had been a crack shot; no mention of the puttees.

‘Did they teach you to run away in this cadet corps of yours?’

‘I learned how to run at college.’

‘In the wrong direction?’

A young captain loomed behind Delgado. Adam shrugged.

Delgado said, ‘I believe this to be a Spaniard’s war. I don’t believe foreigners should interfere.’

Adam thought: ‘What about the Moors?’ but he said nothing.

‘Odd that you should have chosen this time to retreat. We were going to attack in one hour from now. I should have you shot.’

‘I came to warn you about the shell.’

‘I don’t believe in that shell. How old are you, Fleming?’

Adam told him he was 21.

‘I had a son of 20. He’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said.

‘He was shot in the lungs and in the stomach. He died in great pain.’

Adam remained silent.

‘Do you know who shot him?’

‘The reds … Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyists …’

‘He was shot at Badajoz by the Legion. He was fighting for the reds.’

The rain had stopped and there were patches of blue in the sky and despite the sporadic gunfire, a bird was singing on the telegraph wire. Inside the bunker a radio crackled.

Delgado turned to the captain. ‘Escort this man to his trench,’ he said. ‘I want to hear more about this non-exploding shell.’

The captain put on his cap and drew his pistol.

‘That’s not necessary,’ Adam said but the captain who was young and glossy, like Paco had been, prodded the barrel of the pistol, a Luger, in the direction of the trench.

‘How old are you sir?’ Adam asked the captain.

‘May God be with you if there isn’t any shell,’ the captain said.

A sparrow-hawk hovered above them.

They were ten yards from the trench when the shell blew.

The attack was delayed until dawn the following day. Then, supported by a barrage from their batteries of 155 mm artillery and a baptismal blast from the Condor Legion’s 88 mm guns, they moved, legionnaires and Moors, across the wet, blasted earth where, in the summer, corn had rippled, towards the river separating them from the enemy.

Some time during the fighting, when the barrel of his rifle was hot and there was blood on the bayonet and his ears ached with gunfire and his skull was full of battle, he vaguely noticed a plane drop from the sky, gently like a broken bird; he thought it levelled out but he couldn’t be sure because by then he was busy killing again.

The smell was pungent, sickly and familiar. Tom Canfield’s nostrils twitched; he opened his eyes. After a few moments he had it: locust beans. One of the maid’s sons had brought some to the house on Long Island one day and they had chewed them together. His eyes focused on a dark corner of wherever he was and saw a mound of them, pods sweetly putrefying.