Derek Lambert - The Gate of the Sun

The baker, plump with a monk’s fringe, hands gloved with flour, stood at the doorway.

‘You have made a mistake, Ana Gomez. Tomorrow is the day for the front.’

‘No mistake, comrade. How was the electricity last night?’

‘Twice the lights failed. How can a man make bread in the dark?’

‘By candle-light,’ Ana said handing him the six candles. ‘Now give me three of those loaves.’ And when he hesitated, ‘You are fat with your own bread; my children are starving.’

She placed the three loaves in the bottom of her basket and covered them with a cloth. As she walked home through the rain she thought, ‘Today is Friday and we will be able to eat – the bread and some of the vegetable pap that was supposed to be a substitute for meat. And on Monday there will be more rations. But what of Saturday and Sunday? We shall eat the rabbit,’ she decided.

As she neared Tetuan the air-raid siren wailed. No one took much notice: they had become used to Junkers and Heinkels laying their eggs on the city. The city, she thought, was a fine target for bombers, a fortress on a plateau.

She walked down a street of small shops guarded by two tanks. The crews wore black leather jackets, Russians probably. A bomb fell at the far end of the street; a thin block of offices collapsed taking its balconies with it and crushing the empty butcher’s shop below. The air smelled of explosives and distemper.

The crews disappeared into their tanks.

Ana took shelter in a doorway beside a small church. A poster had been stuck on a shop window on the opposite side of the street, beside a bank still displaying the stock market prices for last summer. It showed a negro, an Asian and a Caucasian wearing steel helmets; beneath their crusading faces ran the caption, ‘ALL THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD ARE IN THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES ALONGSIDE THE SPANISH NATION’.

The bombers flew lazily back to their bases at Avila or Guadalajara and the leather-jacketed crews emerged from their tanks and stood stretching in the powdery rain blowing down the street with the dust from the explosions.

Ana emerged from the doorway. She thought about the bread, still warm and soft in her bag, and thought how good it would taste tonight and then, anticipating tomorrow’s hunger, she thought, ‘I will kill that rabbit while the children are playing. Break its neck with a single blow with the blade of my hand. Who are you, Ana Gomez, to worry about killing a pet when you have shot Moors and Spaniards and would have shot your own kind if they had turned and run?’

She wished the rabbit wasn’t so trusting.

When she got home she noticed that the faces of the children were dirty with dried tears.

‘So, what have you done?’

Pablo, lips trembling, pointed into the yard, ‘The rabbit escaped,’ he said.

Anger leaped inside her. She went to the bedroom and shut the door behind her and sat on the edge of the bed.

When she came out the children were sitting in one corner watching her warily.

‘Who let it escape?’

‘I did,’ they both said.

She nodded and said, ‘Your hunger will be your punishment.’

Then she fetched one of the loaves from her bag and cut it in three pieces. She sliced them, then smeared them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt.

They sat down and ate like a family.

The slaughter was cosmopolitan.

Chimo brought the details to Adam Fleming who was resting with other legionnaires in an olive grove at the foot of Pingarrón, the heights which the Fascists had just captured after crossing the Jarama.

Moors had slit the throats of Spaniards; Irish had fought Irish; Italians had checked the Fascists’ advance; the French fighting for the Republicans 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.