Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘What’s that? What is it?’ I begin to shake him so as not to be the one to say it.

‘Bayonets.’

I feel something I’ve never felt in my life: the skin at the back of my neck contracting into a facial gesture and all its hairs standing on end like the hackles of a cornered cat. Who’d have thought we still had that animal graft back there?

‘It’s the English,’ he adds unnecessarily.

Thanks to Verraco, who’s wrecked the radar, they’ve managed to creep up on us in the night (we’d always been assured they’d attack by day) almost right to the foot of the mountain (we’d always been assured they’d attack from the sea) and would have slipped stealthily into our tents and foxholes and killed us where we slept (standing guard being an old joke by now, when we can barely stand up at all) had one of them not stepped in the wrong place and been blown to kingdom come, his ghastly shrieks mingled with the exploding mine. In answer to his solo a chorus of howls goes up with him, except that these are no longer cries of pain, but the ululations of hundreds of savages storming the hill. Chanino manages to get off the first FAL burst before the night is furrowed by a cage of incandescent wires stretching between the rocks and the ground. Between the blindness of the tracer fire, the explosions of the grenades and the thunder of the rifles and bursts of machine-gun fire our brief initial panic is swallowed whole by the purest, most indescribable terror. As we only had one working FAL between us, I began stacking the magazines on Carlitos’s chest before passing them to Chanino every thirty seconds. He fires anywhere: judging by the trajectories of the tracer fire our foxhole is facing the wrong way, but he doesn’t take his finger off the trigger until the magazine’s empty. The FAL’s barrel is red-hot and, when I get hold of it to reload, my hand sticks fast to it; I feel nothing but a slight tug as the skin on my hand comes away. The howls of the wounded ring out now as loud as the war cries of the attacking horde, and still we can’t see a single one. Then the flares start to fall: snaking trails of cold mercury light trickle slowly down from the sky, dazzling us like full-beam headlights on the road; they light up the battlefield like a football pitch and down below the English advance in formation like a well-organised team, neutralising the first positions. They come at the open mouths of the foxholes from the sides and the back, not caring which, and stick the barrels of their rifles and machine guns right inside to make sure they don’t miss, then drop a phosphorus grenade in to make sure and step aside to dodge the white flash, then move on to the next position to repeat the procedure, methodically, like weeding a field. You might have wanted to surrender, but they aren’t asking questions. Thirty metres below us they catch three in their tent, which stands there for a few seconds, struggling and moaning horribly like some new species of mammoth hunted down with machine guns, fighting not to go down, till the bullets slice through tent poles and guy ropes, and very slowly it collapses, bagging the air at first, then letting it out through the holes, and still it writhes on the ground, until the hunters advance towards it and begin bayoneting it, sticking their knives in wherever there’s a movement, trampling the canvas until their feet meet with no resistance, bayonets poised vertical in the air, ready to fall the moment their sharpened vision detects the surreptitious movement of a wee mouse beneath the ever more clearly moulded contours of the blood-soaked canvas. Realising I’m about to die, I lie back and begin to admire the beauty of the spectacle, of the mountain frozen in the light of the flares, a hundredfold more brilliant than the moonlight; of the precise, nimble movements of the English leaping from rock to rock, blending into the terrain, crawling beneath the green tracer fire that furrows the brightness just above the ground, ricocheting and outlining the contours of the crags with their geometric tracery, and it’s all so beautiful that it makes you want to stretch out an arm and touch it, like when you cross a country road on a summer night and a swarm of fireflies on the wing floats by, their phosphorescent trails brushing the window, and opening it you reach out and feel the occasional bump of one against your open palm and, with any luck, catch it and capture the light in your closed hand, intermittent in the pink glow between your fingers. Since the English appeared in the broad flare-light, we’ve stopped shooting, I don’t know why: firing into the dark was one thing, but as soon as we can see them we stop: I stop passing the magazines and Chanino drops the FAL and the two of us just peep out of the mouth of the foxhole, watching. The shouting and the shooting ring out behind us now, English voices and the heavy rattle of a machine gun, which must be ours, the marine infantry no doubt, because the English immediately go past again carrying a couple of wounded and disappear downhill.

‘They’re retreating!’ Chanino whispers.

For a few minutes all we can hear are the sporadic pot-shots of our FALs and the odd burst of PAM machine-gun fire and wounded howling in either language and I decide to go out and see if there’s a way we can cut and run before they get back. In the darkness of mere silhouettes the Cordobans start shooting at me.

‘It’s me, you bloody fools!’ I scream at them from the mud. ‘The English have gone.’

‘Did you see the Gurkhas? The Gurkhas!’ shouts Rosendo.

I hadn’t. The ones I saw were all quite fair-skinned, but the short ones, their faces covered in shoe polish, could easily have passed for Gurkhas.

‘Have we won?’ Toto asks me.

‘I think they’ll be back to fucking waste us,’ I say. ‘Why don’t we make the most of it and get out of here while we can?’

We all hear the whistle before they manage to answer. I dive into them head first as the first shell falls less than ten metres away and some red-hot shrapnel materialises in our midst and sets fire to our jackets. We roll about furiously like three weasels in a bag, trying to escape from this horrible thing that sears our skins until it falls in the mud at the bottom and sputters out, hissing like a hot coal in water. The shelling we’re taking is the worst so far: the shells fall at two-or three-second intervals, shaking us about inside the foxhole and, to stop them bursting our eardrums and from the pain of the burns and the sheer terror, we shout for half an hour or two hours non-stop till we have no voices left, and as the silence flows back a hoarse croak remains floating over the trenches: it’s our throats, which go on shouting independent of our wills in the miserable lulls called every so often by the English to see if there’s anyone still left alive. I let two or three go by but can’t make up my mind; my legs won’t carry me. But in the next one I’m making a dash for our foxhole when a blast turns me over in the air and drops me on my back in a puddle, which breaks my fall. The stars above me turn in the imperturbable sky. My outstretched fingers touch others wrapped in wool, I turn my head and see a body wedged between an enormous boulder and a landslide. Beside it a pair of legs sticks out from the churned-up earth. When the hand of the dead man tries to get hold of mine, I give a cry and roll to one side. Just then a flare starts to fall and its light is reflected in the bulging eyes that stare at me without seeing. It’s Toto. He opens his mouth, gushing blood, and lies there with his eyes enormously wide.

‘The Cordobans. They killed them,’ I think I stammer at the edge of our foxhole, and the hands of Chanino and Rubén emerge to drag me inside.

When I wake, I can hear them debating the best way to surrender.