Derek Lambert: The Gate of the Sun

‘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 Englishman speaks.

‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ he says. His bayonet dips.

Unanswerable knowledge expands inside Adam. Who is the enemy?

He says, ‘What are we going to do?’

The Englishman says reproachfully: ‘You shouldn’t be on’t other side.’

‘Why not? I believe in what I’m fighting for.’

‘You can’t.’ The Englishman knows this to be true and there is nothing more to be said about it.

‘I should kill you,’ Adam says.

‘If you don’t some other bugger will.’

‘And you should try and kill me.’

‘An Englishman? Nay, lad.’

‘Why are you fighting for the reds?’

‘Because I’m Jewish.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘A lot more but you wouldn’t understand, lad.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t understand,’ Adam says as he notices the Englishman looking beyond him, as he hears the click of a rifle bolt, as he turns deflecting the barrel of Chimo’s rifle, as Chimo pulls the trigger firing a bullet into the greyness above the rain.

And now the mist embraces them again and the Englishman disappears in it, an illusionist’s apparition. Adam calls out but his voice is swallowed by the mist and there is no reply.

Chimo hits him on the shoulder with the heel of his hand. ‘Son of the great whore!’

‘He was English.’

‘So? I am killing Spaniards.’

‘It’s your war.’

‘Then go home, cabrón .’

Adam tells him about his sister and what the Republicans did to Paco.

‘So it’s everyone’s war. So try killing the enemy: if you don’t they will surely kill you.’

And now they are trying to do just that. Emerging from the mist, surprising Adam and Chimo who thought they were behind the Englishman; but all the senses tell untruths in the gunsmoke and the noise that never ceases.

Adam fires his rifle. Once, twice. Men fall. British or Spanish? The rifle jams. He lunges with the bayonet and the blade is as red as the poppies in the field.

Chimo pulls his sleeve. ‘Let’s get out of here, Amado.’

And they are running along the hillside between shallow trenches, over bodies, taking cover behind a crop of boulders.

But these boulders are no one’s exclusive property. These boulders are an objective within the objective of the hill which is an objective within the campaign. And suddenly the fighting is thick around them; so thick that Adam cannot always distinguish Fascists from reds.

He grabs a rifle from the tight grip of a dead soldier. Fires it. The calico-rip of machine-pistol. Men fall forward which means they have been shot in the back but no one can be blamed because the reel of the ancient movie is out of control.

A punch on the head, just below the ear; he can no longer hear. He makes his way carefully through the silent carnage. He is alone now in the mist walking with a drunkard’s gait.

His head is heavy on his shoulders, his body bends with its weight; he wants to lie down and sleep. He stumbles, slides into a shell-hole, stays there, feet in a puddle, back propped against torn soil. He feels the earth shift as shells fall but he hears nothing.

The convoy skirting the Battle of Jarama at 3.30 am consisted of a black Chevrolet, an ambulance and three lorries.

At the wheel of the Chevrolet sat Christopher Lance wearing his check jacket and the pink, grey and brown tie of Lancing Old Boys. With him was a small, shy woman named Margaret Hill, matron of the British-American Hospital in Madrid and Fernanda Jacobson, head of the Scottish Ambulance Unit who often wore kilt and tartan hose and was not shy at all.

With them were 72 charges, British evacuees whom the Government allowed to leave Spain and Spanish refugees from the reds whom the Government didn’t. They had gathered furtively that evening at the British Embassy at 8 pm; now they were on their way through 32 check points to Alicante to be taken by a British destroyer, HMS Esk , north through the Mediterranean and across the Gulf of Lions to Marseilles and freedom.

As the convoy turned on to the Madrid–Valencia road shells exploded behind them and to their right machine-guns and rifles barked and coughed.

Martine Ruiz listened to them as the baby moved impatiently within her. In the makeshift British-American Hospital in Madrid on the corner of Velazquez at Ayala before reporting to the embassy she had insisted that it had no intention of entering the hostile world for at least another week or so; but even as she had been smiling comfortably at the British women the pains had been coming regularly.