Читать книгу The Gate of the Sun - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 12

February 1937.

Chimo, philosopher, legionnaire and murderer, said, ‘What are you thinking about, Amado?’

Adam Fleming, sheltering in a slit trench from rain and bullets, said, ‘England.’

‘More than that, Amado – you sighed.’ Chimo was an authority on untruths and half-truths because they came readily to his own lips.

‘Why do you call me Amado? My name is Adam. Why not Adamo?’

‘You are Amado. That is you. Were you perhaps thinking about a woman?’ Chimo was an authority on women, too.

‘I was thinking about my sister.’

This troubled Chimo. He massaged his jagged teeth with one finger and the red tassel on his gorillo cap trembled with his anxiety. Finally, he said, ‘But you sighed.’

‘My sister is in Madrid …’

‘She isn’t a red?’ Chimo, brushing raindrops from his abundant moustache, looked apprehensively at Adam through monkey-brown eyes.

‘No, Chimo, she is not a red.’

‘Then to be in Madrid is bad. Very bad. They are starving there. And if we cut the road to Valencia on the other side of the Jarama river then hunger will make them surrender and there will be a great killing.’

‘Were you there when we attacked Madrid?’ Adam asked. He had arrived in Spain last November but he had been too late to take part in the attack which Franco had called off on the 23rd, laying siege to the city instead.

‘I was there,’ Chimo said. ‘They fought like devils, the reds. Particularly the women. Ah, those women, fiercer than the Moors. Those Madrileños, those cats … You have to admire them. Abandoned by their Government who ran off to Valencia, fighting with 50-year-old Swiss rifles, antique weapons taken from the museums … But they were good in the streets, those cats, not like our Moors who are good in open spaces, in deserts …’

‘I heard there was a lot of killing in the city before we attacked.’

‘I heard that, too. Mola and his Fifth Column! Obvious, wasn’t it, that the reds would seek them out and kill them. I hear they took a thousand from the Model Prison and shot them a few miles from Barajas airport. Killing has become a pastime in Spain,’ Chimo said.

‘I hear that Franco could have taken Madrid if he hadn’t decided to relieve Moscardó, at Toledo. I hear,’ Adam said carefully, ‘that Franco doesn’t want to win the war too quickly. He doesn’t want to rule a people who are still full of spirit.’

‘You will hear many things,’ Chimo told him. ‘Every Spaniard is a politician.’

A shell fired from the Republican lines on the far bank of the Jarama, south of Madrid, slurred through the rain digging a crater 50 metres in front of the trench and showering their grey-green campaign tunics with mud.

‘Sons of whores,’ Chimo said. ‘Red pigs. That was the first. The second lands behind us. The third …’

‘I know about range-finding,’ Adam said. He had acquitted himself reasonably well in the cadet corps at Epsom College at everything except rolling puttees round his calves.

‘… lands here. With our name on it.’

Rain bounced on the lip of the trench and fell soggily onto the brown blankets covering their guns; Adam wondered if it would drown the lice; he doubted it – they were survivors.

Chimo said, ‘Tell me, Amado, what are you, an Englishman, doing in this trench waiting for the third shell?’

‘What are you doing, Chimo?’

‘I am a legionario.’

‘What are you fighting for, peace?’

‘Peace?’ The tassel on his cap quivered. ‘Peace is the enemy of the soldier.’

‘How old are you, Chimo?’

‘Nearly 27.’

‘A veteran!’

‘And you, inglés?’

‘Twenty-one,’ Adam said. A confession.

‘And what are you fighting for?’

‘Ideals,’ Adam said, silencing Chimo who was an authority on many things but a stranger to ideals.

Ideals, too, were self-effacing at Epsom College unless, that is, they were represented by the gods of sport, although there were outposts in that mellow-bricked academy where learning ran a close second to rugby and cricket.

Adam was sent to Epsom, close to the race-track, the home of the Derby, because his mother wished him to be a doctor and the college was renowned for its contributions to medicine.

It was at Epsom that Adam first became aware that his character was seamed with perversity. What he objected to, he subsequently decided, was the attempt to inscribe privilege on pubescent souls. To achieve this many enlightened disciplines were invoked. Games were compulsory unless a medical certificate was produced; such a document was viewed as evidence of weakness and its possessor was consigned to the company of other failures. Crimes were punished by headmaster or housemaster with a cane; misdemeanours by prefects with a slipper and they never shirked their responsibilities. Meals were passed from seniors to juniors along tables the length of the hall, any remotely digestible morsels being removed en route so that the smallest diners were given incentive to rise through the ranks to the heights where the food, although still largely indigestible, was at least warm. A chaplain boomed prayers at 8.40 every morning; modest homosexual practices were not severely discouraged because they were a natural adjunct of puberty and a necessary preparation for the rigours of heterosexual intercourse that lay ahead.

Adam invoked the wrath of both masters and boys not because he was one of the runts of the herd but because he seemed constructed to become one of its leaders. He wasn’t tall but his muscles were long and sinuously sheathed, his expression was secretive, and his hair was black and careless and widow-peaked.

So what did he do? He refused to shove in the scrum; he played tennis, a highly suspect sport; he smoked State Express 555 in a hollow on Epsom Downs while the rest of the house made panting cross-country runs around the frost-sparkling racecourse; and, unforgivably, he read. Inevitably such transgressions brought about retribution. But again he broke the character-moulding rules that decreed that you endured cane or slipper with stoicism: he howled and yelled until the punishment was curtailed; then he rose, dry-eyed, and grinned at his tormentor.

At the end of his first year he told his mother that he had no intention of becoming a doctor. And God help the ailing population of Great Britain, he added, if any of his fellow inmates ever got a scalpel in their hands. His father, home from the City that evening and smelling slightly of whisky, was summoned but, as always, he kept his distance from family crises, regarding children as a necessary by-product of marriage. His mother accused Adam of being ungrateful but soon became accustomed to the prospect of having a barrister in the family and was heard to confide at a garden party, ‘Who knows, he may become Attorney General one day.’

Towards the end of his last year, before going to Cambridge, Adam, who had no intention of becoming a lawyer, seriously endangered his reputation: he accidentally revealed that, despite his consumption of State Express, he could run and so swift was he that he was entered for the mile in the public school championships. Canings and slipperings ceased; he was extracted from the scrum and encouraged to play tennis; he was served lean meat and fresh vegetables; a maths master who reported seeing him leave the Capitol cinema in Epsom with a shopgirl was taken on one side and rebuked for voyeurism.

For Adam the mile was a triumph: he came last.

‘Where did you learn your Spanish?’ Chimo asked.

‘At Cambridge,’ Adam replied.

A rat peered over the lip of the trench. One of their own machine-guns opened up behind them. A Gatling replied; he wished the trenches were deeper but the legionnaires and Moors were used to scooping the sand of North Africa.

‘Cambridge, where is that?’

‘In England,’ Adam told him. ‘In East Anglia. It has a bridge over a river called the Cam. There are many colleges there. One of them, Trinity, was founded, refounded rather, by Henry VIII. Have you heard of him?’

‘He had many wives,’ Chimo said. ‘He must have been a stupid king.’

‘He chopped some of their heads off.’

‘Not so stupid,’ Chimo said. ‘At Cambridge they taught you to speak with a city voice.’

‘The purest in Spain. Castilian.’

‘Tell that to a Basque; tell that to a Catalan,’ said Chimo who spoke with a broad Andaluz accent.

The rain seeped through the blanket on to Adam’s rifle, a 7 mm Spanish Mauser. He turned his head and noticed minerals, quartz probably, shining wetly in the hills.

‘Catalan,’ Adam said. ‘Basque. Communist, Anarchist, Trotskyist … That’s our strength, their confusion.’

‘Did you know I can’t read or write, Amado?’

‘Does it matter? You talk enough for ten men.’

‘All Spaniards talk a lot. Ask a Spaniard a question and he delivers a speech.’

A spent bullet skittered across the mud throwing up wings of spray. Chimo said, ‘Tell me something, Amado, are you scared?’

‘I would be a fool not to be.’

‘You are a fool to be here at all: it is not your war.’

‘I sometimes wonder whose war it is.’

‘Clever words from one of your books?’ Adam had with him behind the lines Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, the French edition of Ulysses, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and an anti-war book, Cry Havoc! by a newspaper columnist, Beverly Nichols.

‘Nothing clever. But if it had been left to the Spanish it might have been over by now.’

‘Who would have won?’ Chimo asked.

‘Without German and Italian planes our side wouldn’t have been able to land troops in Spain. Without Russian “advisers”, without their tanks and planes, the Republicans would have been driven into the sea. Perhaps it is their war, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Stalin’s.’

‘And Britain’s? You are here, inglés.’

‘Most of my countrymen are on the other side.’ Adam jerked his head towards the enemy lines across the small, thickly curved river. ‘With the Americans and French and Poles …’

‘And Germans and Italians. It isn’t just Spaniards who are fighting each other.’ Chimo combed his extravagant moustache with muddy fingers. ‘Why are you fighting on our side, Amado? And don’t confuse me with ideals.’

‘Because I was looking for something to believe in,’ Adam said.

A second shell exploded behind them throwing up gouts of sparkling rock.

‘The third one,’ Chimo said, ‘is ours.’

Four of them at the dinner table to celebrate the 60th birthday of William Stoppard, Professor of Economics at Oxford. Kate, his daughter, 18 and already bored; Richard Hibbert, at Trinity, Cambridge, who would have joined the International Brigade if he hadn’t been a pacifist; and Adam. Subject: non-intervention.

‘It is, of course, quite disgraceful,’ said Stoppard, his pointed pepper-and-salt beard agreeing with him.

‘Why?’ Adam asked in the pause before dessert. Two of the leaded windows in the rambling house near Lambourn were open and evening smells, chestnut and horses, reached him making him restless.

‘Why?’ The beard seemed suspended in disbelief. Kate, blonde with neat features, hair arranged in frozen waves, stared at him. She took a De Reszke from a slim gold case and lit it.

‘I hope no one minds,’ she said.

‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Adam said.

‘Too bad.’ She blew a jet of smoke across the table at him.

‘Perhaps,’ Stoppard said, ‘you could explain yourself, young man.’

‘I’m questioning your assumption, sir,’ said Adam who had drunk three whiskies before dinner. ‘Am I to assume that you are referring to the possibility of intervention on the side of the Republicans?’

Was there any other kind? the silence asked.

Hibbert, who was in love with Kate Stoppard, said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Fascists at Badajoz.’ He turned his heavy and wrathful face to Stoppard for approval; Stoppard’s beard nodded.

Adam poured himself wine and said, ‘You must have read about the atrocities perpetrated by the Republicans at Madrid.’

Kate squashed her half-smoked cigarette – she didn’t look as though she had enjoyed it anyway – and considered him, neat head to one side. The flames of the candles on the table wavered in a breeze summoned from the darkness outside.

Stoppard began to lecture.

‘The Fascists are the insurgents. Their ostensible object: to overthrow by force the Government of the Republic elected by popular franchise. Their ulterior motive: to re-establish the privileges they enjoyed under the monarchy – in effect the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera – which were the exploitation of the poor.’

Adam said, ‘With respect, sir, if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ As the second silence of the evening lengthened he said to Kate, ‘That’s what Wellington said when some idiot said to him, “Mr Jones, I believe?” I’m a great admirer of Arthur Wellesley.’

Stoppard said, ‘Perhaps, Adam, you would be good enough to elaborate on that last statement and enlighten us.’

A timorous girl in a black and white uniform served dessert, lemon soufflé.

‘Certainly,’ said Adam. ‘Do you believe in God, sir?’

‘Get on with it, man,’ Hibbert said excavating fiercely with his spoon in the soufflé.

‘I ask because I cannot understand how you can support a regime that condones the destruction of churches and the murder of priests.’

‘Ah, the Irresponsibles; I thought we’d come to them,’ Stoppard remarked indulgently. He tasted his soufflé; his beard approved.

‘From February to June this year,’ Adam said, concentrating, ‘160 churches were burned. There were also 269 assassinations, 113 general strikes and 228 half-cocked ones. Spain was in a state of anarchy, so is it small wonder that generals such as Mola, Queipo de Llano and Franco and the rest decided to bring back stability?’

‘Did you do your homework on the way?’ Stoppard asked. He winked at Hibbert.

‘As a matter of fact I did. It was inevitable that you would talk about non-intervention. But there’s nothing to stop anyone intervening. Not even you, sir.’

Hibbert said irrelevantly, ‘John Cornford’s fighting with the International Brigades. And Sommerfield. And Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew.’

‘A pity they’re fighting on the wrong side.’

‘Are you a Fascist, Adam? A blackshirt?’ Hibbert asked.

‘What I am,’ Adam said, watching Kate lick lemon soufflé from her upper lip and wondering about her breasts beneath her silk dress, ‘is anti-Communist. We all know what’s happened in Russia – a worse tyranny than before. Do we want that in Spain?’

Stoppard laid down his spoon and addressed his class. What we were witnessing in Spain, he told them, was an exercise in European Fascism. Hitler wanted to assist Spain so that he could establish bases there for the next war and help himself to the country’s iron ore. Mussolini was helping because he wanted to control the Mediterranean. And both wanted to test their planes, their guns and their tanks. If they, the enemies of the future, were championing the Fascists, why should not Britain aid the Republicans?

Adam, who had learned at Cambridge never to answer a question directly, said, ‘What is so different between Fascism and Communism?’

The third silence of the evening. Kate took a cigarette from her case and tapped it on one painted fingernail.

Adam said, ‘Is Hitler a dictator?’

Of course.

‘And Stalin?’

So it appeared.

‘Are they not both anti-Semitic?’

Perhaps.

‘Enemies, imagined or otherwise, purged?’

There were similarities.

‘Both presiding over elitist societies in which the masses are subservient?’

‘That’s certainly true in Germany,’ Hibbert said.

‘And Russia. Ask any peasant.’

‘I haven’t met any recently,’ Stoppard said but no one in the class smiled.

The maid served coffee; Stoppard lit a cigar. ‘Adam,’ he said, almost fondly, ‘suggested just now that there was nothing to stop anyone intervening. On either side, you implied. Is that correct?’

‘Quite correct, sir.’

‘Then why, Adam, don’t you volunteer to fight for the Fascists?’

‘I might just do that,’ Adam said.

Chimo said, ‘Have you had many women, Amado?’

‘Not many,’ said Adam, who had made love to three girls.

‘I have had many, many girls.’

‘I’m sure they all remember you.’

‘Oh sure, they remember Chimo. And I remember one of them. You know, she gave me a present.’ He pointed to his crotch.

‘You don’t have to go with whores: you’re too much of a man.’

‘You don’t know girls. How can you fuck them with a chaperone sitting on your knee?’

‘Fuck the chaperone,’ said Adam, old soldier with three months service behind him.

Kate took Adam to her father’s cottage in the Cotswolds for a long weekend – without her father’s consent – five days after the dinner party at Lambourn.

They walked through countryside where stems of smoke rose steadily from hollows in the hills and horse chestnuts lay shiny in their split, hedgehog shells and boys with concertina socks kicked flocks of fallen leaves; they drank beer that tasted of nuts in small pubs; they danced to Lew Stone records; they made love on a bed that smelled of lavender.

But throughout the interlude Adam was aware of disquiet. It visited him as he watched the sun rise mistily through the branches of a moulting apple tree, or while he felt pastoral loneliness settle in the evenings; it materialized in the wasting happiness after they had made love.

At first he blamed it on the challenge he had accepted at Lambourn: it wasn’t every young man who was going to fight for the Fascists. That, surely, was enough to disturb the most swashbuckling of crusaders.

But it wasn’t until the afternoon of the Sunday, when she lay in bed with her back curved into his chest and his hands were cupped round her small breasts and he was examining the freckles on her back just below the nape of her neck, where her short, golden hair was still damp from exertion, that he realized the other cause for his disquiet.

‘Don’t think,’ she said, turning towards him, ‘that you have to go and fight because of me.’ Well, he didn’t; but suddenly he understood that she was only there beside him because he was prepared to risk death – a refreshing change from conventional young men with normal life expectations.

And, as he considered this premise, it came to him that maybe his motives were suspect. Did he really believe in the Fascist cause or was it wilfulness asserting itself? Surely ideals were the essence of purity. How was it, then, that both he and the other Englishmen fighting on opposite sides could both possess them? Can I be wrong? he asked himself.

She said, ‘What are you thinking about, Adam?’ and he said, ‘This and that.’

‘You were in another place.’ She reached for his hand and placed it on the soft hair between her thighs, and he forgot his disquiet.

Later, walking through silent woods, she held his hand. How long would the war last? she asked him. Not long, he told her: Franco was at the gates of Madrid.

‘Months?’

‘Weeks.’

‘Everything has been so quick,’ she said. ‘We only met a few days ago …’

‘What would your father say if he knew what we’d done in his cottage?’

‘Cut us off without a penny,’ Kate said promptly.

Us?

They sat on a log and she took a cigarette from her case, lit it and blew puffs of smoke through narrowed lips as though she found them distasteful. Ruffled pigeons settled above them.

‘I’ll always remember how you stood up for yourself at dinner that evening,’ she said.

‘They were debating in formulas. Mathematics aren’t always right.’

‘I hope you don’t think that just because …’

‘You’re cheap?’

‘Do they all say that?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Adam said.

‘How many?’

‘None of your bloody business,’ Adam said.

‘You don’t think I’m trying to trap you?’

‘By having a baby?’

‘I won’t,’ she said.

‘Did you bring me to the cottage because I’m going to war?’

‘Because you’re coming back from it.’

He put his arm round her waist under her coat. He could feel the fragile sharpness of her bones, the flatness of her stomach. He felt that he was expected to utter words of deep moment but they were elusive.

He stood up. She tossed aside her cigarette and he stamped on it, pulverizing it with the heel of his shoe. He turned her and pointed her towards the cottage. When they got back he lit a fire with pine cones and they watched the sparks chase each other up the chimney. He knew that she was waiting for the words that lay trapped in his throat so he switched off the lights and they lay down beside each other and he stared into the caverns of the fires in search of answers and justifications.

The justification was brought to Adam on a silver salver on 6 October, two days before the Michaelmas term was due to begin. He was sitting in the garden of his parents’ house in East Grinstead reading a newspaper summary of recent developments in Spain. Summer hadn’t quite abdicated, sunlight shining through smoke lit chrysanthemums and persistent roses, and a biplane traversed the pale sky towing a banner advertising the News Chronicle.

Adam read that General Francisco Franco had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist army and Head of State and that the Republicans had created a Popular Army. The Fascists seemed to be on the rampage – in September they had captured Irún, San Sebastian and Toledo – and if he didn’t act soon it would be too late.

But was wilfulness enough? Do I want to be a soldier of fortune, champion of my own ego? He flung down the newspaper and paced the lawns. He was near the pond where frogs plopped in the summer when the maid found him and handed him the letter on the salver as though it were something to eat.

The envelope, which bore a new Edward VIII stamp, had been posted in London the previous day but the writing was his sister’s and she was in Madrid. Fear stirred and he held the envelope for a few moments without opening it.

The letter was dated 16 August, so it must have been smuggled out of Spain – via Marseille, perhaps, on one of the British warships evacuating refugees – and posted in London.

Dear Adam,

Paco is dead. He was taken from our apartment two nights ago and driven to a village called Paracuellos del Jarama where, with two dozen other suspects, he was executed. They were forced to dig a mass grave, then machine-gunned and finished off with bullets in the backs of their necks.

I say suspects. Suspected of what I have no idea. Certainly Paco had no interests in politics, just his job and his home and his children – and me. But he was a good Catholic and an architect and relatively well off, so I suppose that was sufficient reason. Or maybe a private quarrel across the drawing board was settled in the name of the Republic; many old scores are being settled that way. All I know is that I am lost. I hear the children and I hear the maid (she is more scared than any of us) and I hear the shooting and I suppose I eat and sleep. It is supposed to be dangerous to walk in the streets but so far the Irresponsibles, as they call them, have not killed a foreign woman. Not that I care, although I should because of the children.

A part of me also knows that I must not leave Spain. For Paco’s sake, for the children’s sake because they are Spanish. I am writing to you because we always shared and father never much cared for Paco, did he? Well, tell him the dago is dead. He was a good man, Adam …

The back-sloping letters lengthened, died. The letter was signed Eve. Her name was Julia but with Adam it had always been Eve.

Adam, letter in hand, heard the plop of stones thrown by her two boys into the pond; saw the ripple of the water beneath the duckweed. They had been happy that day, Adam and Eve, sharing Eve’s family, sharing a day that smelled of daffodils and hope, even sharing the hostility of their father which, now that there were children, was more a family joke than a threat.

Ah, Paco of the healthy skin and glossy hair and provident disposition who believed that Spain would be a land of opportunity as soon as the Republic had settled … poor, naïve Paco who was forced to dig his own grave out of the land in which he believed.

Adam threw a pebble into the pond and watched the green ripples until they lapped the bank, then strode rapidly away.

Five days later he was in the solemn city of Burgos in the north of Spain.

The third shell duly arrived in the slit trench. It came with the sound of a wave unfurling and, with an impact that shook the trench, buried itself in the mud and soft rock, resting lethally five yards from Adam.

‘Shit,’ said Chimo, ‘we’d better get out of here.’

‘It’s a dud,’ Adam said. It was not unknown for Spanish munition workers who didn’t want to kill other Spaniards to immobilize ammunition.

‘There are duds and duds. Maybe this has got a delayed fuse.’

‘Why would it have that?’

‘So that we all think it’s a nice shiny shell. We even go up and pat it. Then, whoosh, it blows us over the countryside. That’s the reds for you, those sons of whores …’

The legionnaire next to Chimo said, ‘Those bastards … We came here to fight, not wait until we’re blown into little pieces by one sleeping shell.’

He climbed out of the trench and made a crouching run for the concrete bunker at the base of the flat-topped hills. The others followed. Adam, taking a last look at the shell half-buried in the mud, went last. It was his misfortune that he was a good runner.

Keeping low, he passed empty trenches, a ruined farmhouse with a stork’s nest on the roof, a shrike perched on a telegraph wire, shell-holes, sage and brush and leafless fig trees … To his left he saw the curves of the river and the rulered line of Jarama canal.

Bullets fired from across the river sang past him. But what he feared was heavy artillery or a strafing run by one of the German fighters now occupying luminous pools in the clouds.

He reached the bunker first. And found that the colonel in charge of the bandera, the battalion, was waiting for him. His name was Delgado, a native of Seville, and, modelling himself on General Queipo de Llano, who broadcast bloodthirsty threats to the Republicans on the radio, bore himself with exaggerated stiffness and wore his small moustache as though it were a medal; he disliked all foreigners, whether they were fighting for the Republicans or the Fascists.

He said to Adam, ‘I must be losing my hearing – I didn’t hear any order to retreat.’

Adam drew himself to attention. ‘We’re not retreating …’

‘We?’

Adam looked behind him, spotted the last of the legionnaires who had followed him disappearing into a trench.

‘I am not retreating. I’ve come to report an unexploded shell.’

‘It’s my experience that unexploded shells report themselves.’

‘In our trench. If it had gone off it would have killed the lot of us.’

‘Who gave the orders to abandon the trench?’

‘No one, sir.’

‘But you got out first?’ Delgado slapped his cane against a polished boot. He looked as though he had just shaved and showered.

‘I run faster,’ Adam said.

‘Are you implying that the rest of the men ran away too?’

‘I did not run away.’

‘You could hardly say you were attacking. What if other members of the company had followed your example?’

Adam didn’t reply: they hadn’t.

‘Name?’

‘Fleming, sir.’

‘Ah, Fleming,’ tapping his boot with his cane. ‘Why do you want to fight for us, Fleming? Most of your countrymen are fighting for the reds.’

‘Because I’m anti-Communist.’

‘Not pro-Nationalist?’

‘If I am one then surely I am the other.’

‘You’re beginning to talk like a diplomat.’ Delgado took a step forward. ‘What makes you think you can help us?’

‘I can fire a rifle.’

‘Where? At a fiesta, a fairground?’

Adam told him that in the cadet corps he had been a crack shot; no mention of the puttees.

‘Did they teach you to run away in this cadet corps of yours?’

‘I learned how to run at college.’

‘In the wrong direction?’

A young captain loomed behind Delgado. Adam shrugged.

Delgado said, ‘I believe this to be a Spaniard’s war. I don’t believe foreigners should interfere.’

Adam thought: ‘What about the Moors?’ but he said nothing.

‘Odd that you should have chosen this time to retreat. We were going to attack in one hour from now. I should have you shot.’

‘I came to warn you about the shell.’

‘I don’t believe in that shell. How old are you, Fleming?’

Adam told him he was 21.

‘I had a son of 20. He’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam said.

‘He was shot in the lungs and in the stomach. He died in great pain.’

Adam remained silent.

‘Do you know who shot him?’

‘The reds … Anarchists, Communists, Trotskyists …’

‘He was shot at Badajoz by the Legion. He was fighting for the reds.’

The rain had stopped and there were patches of blue in the sky and despite the sporadic gunfire, a bird was singing on the telegraph wire. Inside the bunker a radio crackled.

Delgado turned to the captain. ‘Escort this man to his trench,’ he said. ‘I want to hear more about this non-exploding shell.’

The captain put on his cap and drew his pistol.

‘That’s not necessary,’ Adam said but the captain who was young and glossy, like Paco had been, prodded the barrel of the pistol, a Luger, in the direction of the trench.

‘How old are you sir?’ Adam asked the captain.

‘May God be with you if there isn’t any shell,’ the captain said.

A sparrow-hawk hovered above them.

They were ten yards from the trench when the shell blew.

The attack was delayed until dawn the following day. Then, supported by a barrage from their batteries of 155 mm artillery and a baptismal blast from the Condor Legion’s 88 mm guns, they moved, legionnaires and Moors, across the wet, blasted earth where, in the summer, corn had rippled, towards the river separating them from the enemy.

Some time during the fighting, when the barrel of his rifle was hot and there was blood on the bayonet and his ears ached with gunfire and his skull was full of battle, he vaguely noticed a plane drop from the sky, gently like a broken bird; he thought it levelled out but he couldn’t be sure because by then he was busy killing again.