Derek Lambert: The Gate of the Sun

The crash and the pointed ache in his skull and the crepitus of fractured wall … Now all he could see was a khaki-coloured dustiness. Perhaps he was in the process of dying. He tested his limbs. They moved painlessly, all except the arm that had been wounded in the plane crash. His hand went to his chest searching for bullet holes. Nothing. The dust began to clear. He heard a groan. He sat up.

The flap of bamboo lay across his knees. Then he heard the drone of the Katiuska bombers.

He stood up and blundered through the settling dust. The first body he encountered was Delgado’s. He was still alive but for once he did not look freshly barbered. Then the two soldiers and the captain. One of the soldiers was dead. Lastly Adam Fleming, pistol still clenched in his fist. There was a wound on the side of his head and his face was grey.

He knelt beside him. He was alive but only just. His breathing was shallow and blood flowed freely from the scalp wound. Tom took a torn cushion from a cane chair, placed it under his head and tried to staunch the bleeding with his handkerchief.

‘Were you going to shoot me?’ he asked the unconscious man. ‘Would I have shot you ?’

He heard voices. He knelt behind a heap of rubble beside a legless rubber doll. Fascist soldiers were approaching. They would look after Fleming.

He took the pistol from his hand and edged round the remnants of the farmhouse. As he ran towards an olive grove he heard a noise behind him. He flung himself to the ground and the brown and white dog with the foraging nose licked his face, then whipped his chest with its long tail.

‘Another survivor,’ Tom said. He patted the dog’s lean ribs. ‘Come on, let’s find some breakfast.’

The hill where Adam Fleming had been fighting lay ahead. He began to climb towards the Republican lines on the other side.

Machine-gun fire chattered in the distance but yesterday’s battlefield was deserted except for corpses. The sky was pure and pale, and the mist in the valley was rising. It was going to be a fine, spring-beckoning day.

He was near the brow of the hill now. There he would be a silhouette, a perfect target. He flattened himself on the shell-torn ground and, with the dog beside him, inched upwards.

Bodies lay stiffly around him, many of them British by the look of them, wearing berets and Balaclavas and job-lot uniforms, staring at the sky as though in search of reasons.

At the crest of the mole-shaped hill he rolled towards the Republican lines. Hit a rock and lay still. When he tried to stand up there was no strength in him. He noticed blood from his wounded arm splashing on to a slab of stone. How long had it been bleeding like that? Pain knifed his chest.

The dog whined, whip-lash tail lowered.

He continued down the hill, cannoning into ilex trees, slithering in the water draining from the top of the hill. There was a dirt road at the bottom and he had to reach it. He collapsed into a fragrant patch of sage 50 metres short of it. He stretched out one hand and felt the dog. Or is this all an illusion? Did Adam Fleming pull the trigger?

The smell of the sage and the warmth of the dog faded.

It was replaced by the smell of ether.

He opened his eyes. A middle-aged man with pugnacious features, Slavonic angles to his eyes and sparse grey hair, stood beside his bed.

The man said, ‘Please, don’t say Where am I.’

‘Okay, I won’t.’ He heard his own voice; it was thin and far away.

‘You’re in a field hospital. A monastery, in fact. And you’re extremely lucky to be alive for two reasons.’

‘Which are?’

‘A peasant found you bleeding to death near a dirt road. He stopped the bleeding by tying a strip of your shirt round your arm, pushing a stick underneath it and twisting it. A primitive tourniquet.’

‘Secondly?’

‘Then I drove by and saved your life.’

Tom closed his eyes. He was vaguely aware of something intrusive in his good arm. He tried to find it but he couldn’t move his other arm. He retreated into a star-filled sky.

‘Why did you come to Spain?’ Tom asked Dr Norman Bethune from Montreal when he next stood at his bedside.

‘I needed a war,’ Bethune said. ‘To see if I can save lives in the next one.’

‘Which next one would that be?’

‘The one we’re rehearsing for,’ said Bethune who was taking refrigerated blood to the front line instead of waiting for haemorrhaging casualties to reach hospitals. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I wouldn’t want to go three rounds with Braddock but I’m okay, I guess. Whose blood have I got inside me?’ He jerked his head at the pipe protruding from his arm.

‘God knows. Good blood by the look of you. Maybe you owe your life to a priest.’

‘Don’t tell the commissar that,’ Tom said. ‘Are these all your patients?’ He pointed at the broken and bandaged patients lying on an assortment of beds in the stone-floored dining hall of the monastery.

‘A few, those with colour in their cheeks. I gave the first transfusion at the front on 23 December last year. Remember that date: maybe it will be more important than the date the war broke out.’

Tom raised himself on his pillow, then said abruptly, ‘When can I fly again?’

‘When your arm’s mended. You broke it a few days ago. Right?’

‘I got shot down.’

‘And later you must have fallen. And when you fell you turned a simple fracture into a compound fracture and a splinter of bone penetrated an artery and the haemorrhage became a deluge.’

‘I can fly with my left hand.’

‘When your ribs are mended.’

‘Ribs?’

Bethune pointed at his chest. ‘They weren’t practising first-aid when they strapped you up.’

‘Shit,’ said Tom Canfield. ‘No pain though.’

‘Breathe in deeply.’

‘Shit,’ said Tom Canfield.

During the next five days Tom fell in love and learned how to acquire a fortune.

The girl’s name was Josefina. She was 18 and stern in the fashion of nurses, although sometimes the touch of her fingers was shy. She was a student nurse, qualified by war, and she came from a small coastal town astride the provinces of Valencia and Alicante.

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