Derek Lambert: The Gate of the Sun

The ambulance leaped over a shell-hole; Martine moaned and placed her hands across her drum-tight belly. The priest comforted her.

‘It will be soon,’ an old Spanish woman beside her said. ‘There is a hospital in Alicante.’

‘It won’t be for a long time yet,’ Martine said.

‘I can tell.’

‘It’s my baby,’ Martine Ruiz said.

The convoy stopped. Martine heard voices. But she trusted this Englishman who had a pass stamped by the Ministry of Works, the War Office, the British Embassy, the syndicates and Azaña himself.

The door of the ambulance opened. A sentry looked in. He was unshaven and wore a shiny-peaked cap on his unkempt hair. He saw the hump of Martine’s stomach and smiled. He would deliver a baby with one hand and shoot a Fascist with the other, this one.

‘A boy or a girl?’ he asked.

‘A girl,’ Martine said, smiling at him.

‘A boy,’ the old woman said.

‘Twins,’ the sentry said and, still smiling, shut the doors.

The convoy moved off. The gunfire grew fainter.

The baby pushed again. Not in Alicante, Martine said to the baby. There they will find out who I am and, although they may let you live, you will not have a mother. Tranquilo , she said. Please baby, boy or girl, tranquilo .

‘It will be soon,’ the old woman said.

The priest said nothing.

Tom Canfield, crouching, made his way along the dirt path beside the Jarama. The water idled past islands of black mud on which dark weed-like watercress grew. A stork stood alone among the bodies in a field, and its arrogance and the abandoned desolation of the field made Tom decide that the battle had passed by here, that the Fascists had crossed the river so he must be in Nationalist territory. All he could do was hold out till dusk, then try and cross the river as the Fascists had done, work his way through their lines to the Republicans and hitch a lift to the air-base at Guadalajara. Which sounded easy enough, except that the countryside with its vineyards and fallow cornfields was flat, and Fascist reconnaissance planes were flying low over the river.

Dusk began to gather with its own brand of loneliness. His wounded arm belonged to someone else; his chest hurt. A squad of Polikarpovs flew through the valley, scattering and climbing as they reached the outskirts of Madrid. One lingered. Seidler looking for him. You could bet good money on it.

Tom remembered an evening like this, a little cruel with a saline breeze coming in from the Atlantic, when he and a girl had escaped from a party at his father’s mansion at Southampton and ended up of all places in the potato fields at the south fork of the island. He had taken his open Mercer with the wire wheels and white-wall tyres. She was a happy girl with golden limbs and easy ways and they had lingered in the Mercer until the spray from the ocean had cooled their ardour. When they got back to the house the party was over, his father was bust and life would never be the same again. But he would always remember the girl.

Tom smiled. A bullet hit a tree hanging over the river gouging a finger of sappy wood from it. He dropped to the ground, took cover behind another farmhouse with a patio scattered with olive stones. There was some bread on a scrubbed table and a leather wineskin. The bread was stale but not too hard; he ate it and drank sweet dark wine from the wineskin. The wine intoxicated him immediately.

He heard a dog barking. He opened a studded door with a rusty key in the lock. The dog was half pointer, half hunter, with a whiplash tail, brown and white fur, a brown nose and yellowish eyes. It was young, starving and excited; as Tom stroked its lean ribs it pissed with excitement. Tom gave it the last of the bread.

A heavy machine-gun opened up; bullets thudded into the walls of the patio. The lingering Polikarpov returned, firing a burst in the direction of the machine-gun. Seidler without a doubt. The machine-gun stopped firing but Tom decided to leave the farmhouse which was a natural target. He let himself out of the patio. The dog followed.

The river led him through the rain into mist. He came to a broken bridge that had been blown up, coming to rest where it had originally been built. He ran across it, the dog at his heels.

The gunfire was louder now. No chance yet of getting through the Fascist lines. He noticed a shell-hole partly covered by a length of shattered fencing. He slithered down the side, coming to rest opposite a young, dark-haired soldier dazed with battle.

Sometimes a meeting between two people is a conceiving. A dual life is propagated and it possesses a special lustre even when its partners are divided by time or location. These partners, although they may fight, are blessed because together they may glimpse a vindication of life. All of this passes unnoticed at the time; all, that is, except an easiness between them.

Tom Canfield became aware of this easiness when, coming face to face with Adam Fleming in a shell-hole in the middle of Spain, he said, ‘Hi, soldier,’ and Adam replied incredulously, ‘I can hear you.’

And because a sense of absurdity is companion of these relationships, Tom laughed idiotically and said, ‘You can what?’

‘Hear you. I was deaf until you dropped in.’ And then he, too, began to laugh.

Tom watched him until the laughter was stilled. He had an argumentative face and, despite the laughter, his eyes were wide with shock. Tom was glad he was a flier: these young men from the debating forums of Europe hadn’t been prepared for the brutality of a battlefield.

‘Where did you learn to shoot?’ he asked pointing at the Russian rifle in the young man’s hands.

‘At college.’

‘In England? I thought you only learned cricket.’

‘And tennis. I played a lot of tennis.’

‘Because you were supposed to play cricket?’

‘You’re very perceptive. My name’s Adam Fleming.’ He saluted across the muddy water at the bottom of the crater.

‘Tom Canfield. How’s it going up there?’ he asked, nodding his head at the lowering sky.

Adam shrugged.

‘Fifty-fifty. I got disorientated,’ he said as though an explanation was necessary. ‘I didn’t know who I was fighting. Maybe someone fired a rifle too close to my ear. I felt as though I had been punched.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Tom said.

‘You’re a boxer?’

‘A mauler.’ Tom hesitated. ‘What made you come out here?’ He cradled his wounded arm inside his flying jacket; the dog settled itself at his feet and closed its eyes.

‘The same as you probably. It’s difficult to put in words.’

‘I would have guessed you were pretty neat with words.’

‘I knew a great injustice was being perpetrated. I knew words weren’t enough; they never are. And you have to make your stand while you’re young … I’m not very good with words tonight,’ he said.

‘I guess you’ve been fighting too long,’ Tom said.

A shell burst overhead. Hot metal hissed in the water.

Adam said, ‘My father had a cartoon in his study. It was by an artist from the Great War called Bruce Bairnsfather. It showed two old soldiers sitting in a shell-hole just like this and one soldier is saying to the other, “If you knows of a better ’ole go to it.”’

‘This is the best hole I know of,’ Tom said.

‘You’re lucky, being a flier.’

‘A privileged background,’ Tom said. ‘My old man owned a Cessna.’

Fleming, he decided, came from London; a left-wing intellectual rather than an enlightened slogger like himself.

Adam said, ‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’

‘It’s a weird thing to say but there was no other choice.’

‘I understand that. Did you ever doubt?’