Page 94 of The Gathering Storm

Basil flung himself flat, pressing his face into the mud as the bullets whined overhead. The darkness spat with flame and heaved with noise as the more ready of the loyalists hurled their bombs. Basil dragged out the first of his, wrested away the pin, rose to his knees and flung it wildly, then dropped again to the mud. He had no idea where it went. The Fascists were throwing bombs now too: one burst a little to Basil’s left, in a red glare and a gout of heat, and he heard a high-pitched scream close by him. Javier gave a cry. ‘He’s hit! Jorge, Jorge!’

Basil felt him try to get up, and reached out a hand to yank him down. ‘Stay down, you bloody fool!’ In the heat of the moment, his Spanish abandoned him. He fumbled out his second bomb and threw it, and saw it hit the parapet with a burst of light and dust. He dropped again, hearing the bullets sing around him. How could he not be hit? He was aware of Javier wriggling away from him, presumably trying to get to his brother, whom he could hear crying for Javier in a voice of childish fear.

‘I’m coming, pequeño!’ Javier replied.

Basil actually heard the bullet strike – a solid smack, like someone pounding a steak – and a gurgling grunt from Javier. But the firing intensified just then, and Basil burrowed into the mud, unable to look.

After what seemed like an eternity, the firing suddenly died, and Dupont at once got up and shouted, in Spanish and then English, ‘Come on! Forward! Charge!’ Basil was on his feet without volition, only desperately glad to be doing something rather than waiting passively for death. He staggered forward, weighted with mud, following Dupont. He saw Zennor to his right, and was vaguely glad, saw, to his amazement, skinny Jorge to his left, limping gamely, but no Javier. Dupont threw another bomb, and Basil did the same with his last, seeing it burst well inside this time, in a satisfying fountain of debris.

There was a short slope leading to the parapet. It proved to be made of sandbags, which gave a foothold, enabling them to scramble over easily. Basil assumed there would be a Fascist waiting for him on the other side, and how could he possibly miss at that range? But there was no-one, only a scene of devastation from the bombs they had thrown: shattered huts, gaping holes, splintered wood and flung corrugated iron, here and there a dead body. They had driven them off; or had they rallied to the other attack point? Off to the right there was still firing, rifle flashes stabbing the darkness, greenish against the red of fires. The sound was oddly inconsequential, like water rattling over stones.

Dupont waved a hand. ‘See what you can find, lads. Ammunition, rifles, food. Anything.’

Zennor came up to Basil. There was a shallow cut across his brow, and he had smeared blood into his hair as he’d brushed it out of his eyes. ‘We ought to try and find the machine-gun,’ he said. ‘If we can get that back …’

‘Right.’ Basil turned and banged into Jorge, who was standing so close behind him he was almost touching him. He was trembling all over. Remembering that he had been limping – and remembering the scream – Basil said, ‘Are you hit?’

‘My foot,’ Jorge said. ‘But it doesn’t hurt.’ He plucked at Basil’s sleeve. ‘Javier’s down. He’s wounded. Hurt bad. You must come.’

Basil pulled away. ‘I can’t. I have to—’ He waved vaguely at Zennor’s retreating back.

‘Please!’ Jorge cried, the whites of his eyes showing in the darkness. ‘Help me, for the love of God. I can’t go back without him. Mama will kill me. Help him!’

He clutched again but Basil wrested himself away and went after Zennor, who was disappearing into a structure that must have been a machine-gun nest. He ran to catch up. As he reached the doorway, he saw that there was a tripod and stacked boxes of ammunition, but no gun – they must have carried it away. And as Zennor turned to say the same thing, someone who had been hiding behind the stack rose and came out. Basil cried a warning, even as he saw the soldier, his face wild and stretched with panic, lunge forward, saw Zennor jerk at the impact, saw his puzzled, almost enquiring look. Then he pressed his hands to his chest, made a gulping sort of noise, and crumpled to the ground, pulling the soldier’s bayonet out of his hands so that it clattered to the floor.

Basil found he had lifted his rifle into the firing position without even knowing it. The soldier screamed, a high-pitched sound like a girl, and clapped his hands to his cheeks in terror. Basil saw that he expected to be shot, even as he also saw he was a scrawny youth, probably not seventeen. It seemed only sad and pointless now, but he felt obliged to do it. With a sense of weariness, of a terrible weight rolling over him, he pulled the trigger. The boy was flung backwards, smacked into the wall, and slithered down into a sitting position. He stared a moment at Basil, and then his eyes closed and his chin fell onto his chest.

Zennor was trying to get up. He had got his hands and knees under him but seemed unable to lift himself. Basil put his rifle down carefully, as though it might go off again, and knelt beside Zennor. He was too heavy for Basil to get him to his feet, so he helped turn him into a sitting position, supporting him with an arm. Zennor seemed to be about to speak, but instead he coughed, a horrible choking, gurgling sound, expelling a great gout of blood, that soaked the front of his tunic. He tried again to say something, staring into Basil’s eyes as though willing him to understand, but only coughed again, and the blood this time was a wet flood. Basil was going to say, ‘Don’t try to talk, old man,’ when he realised Zennor wasn’t looking at him any more. The eyes were fixed, but not on him. He had never seen anyone die before, but he discovered that the difference between a living body and a dead one was too profound to be mistaken. His friend had gone.

The tropas de asalto secured their position and joined up with Basil’s unit. The Fascists were already regrouping, but they were able to hold out against them for twelve hours, long enough to get the dead and wounded back, before making a controlled retreat, abandoning the redoubt, but taking with them a quantity of ammunition, a few rifles, and some rations. The machine-gun they never found. The main objective, to draw fire, had been carried out, but the attack on the other side had not succeeded: the road had not been cut. So was it a success, or wasn’t it? Had it been it worth the cost?

Javier had been hit in the head, neck and chest by a spray of bullets, and never regained consciousness. He was pronounced dead on arrival at camp. Only then did Jorge allow his wound to be looked at. The front half of his foot had been severed by shrapnel, and only the mud and blood had bound foot and boot together. Even so, neither the camp doctor nor Basil could understand how he had continued to get along on it for so long. He was taken off with the rest of the wounded to the hospital in Siétamo for treatment and discharge from the militia. Basil watched him go, so dazed with grief for his brother he had no fears for his own future as a guerra discapacidados.

It was two days later that Basil was wounded, and his own state of shock and grief for his friend probably contributed to it, making him incautious. He was out on patrol in no man’s land, crawling on his belly through the swampy reed beds. Longing for a clean breath of air, he had raised himself up, forgetting that the movement of the tall reeds would have given away their position. He had just put up his hand to wipe the sweat out of his eyes, and before it reached his face, a sniper bullet went through it. After the initial shock of the blow, he felt no pain at first; when it did arrive, it was terrible. Morphine was in short supply after the recent action, and reserved for the worst injuries. Eventually there was space in an ambulance to take him to the hospital. He was thrown about so violently by the jolting over the ruts that his head bounced from the roof to the side. He couldn’t use his hand to save himself.

The doctor who cleaned, dressed and plastered his hand was not sympathetic. ‘Serves you right,’ he grumbled. He was well educated, had visited England several times in his student days, and his English was excellent. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

Basil roused himself from a haze of pain and hopelessness. ‘I volunteered,’ he said. ‘I wanted to help.’

‘Help? How are you helping?’

‘Fighting Fascism. Helping Spain.’

‘Spain does not need your help. We can manage our own affairs without foreigners barging in. You arrogant English think you can teach us poor Spanish peasants about democracy and the rule of law? Spain was an old civilisation when your barbarian king was cutting off his wives’ heads.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Basil said wearily. ‘My friend was killed in the last action.’ It sounded weak, like a plea for compassion – which he supposed it was. ‘We only wanted to help.’

‘And see how it turned out!’ He paused while he finished smoothing the plaster, eyed Basil for a moment, then leaned closer and said in a kinder voice, ‘You don’t want to be here, my friend, do you? You want to go home.’

Home! The word cut through the fog in Basil’s mind like a breath of clean air in a stifling room. He met the doctor’s eyes, hope in his own.

The doctor nodded, as though a question had been answered. ‘This hand will be long healing, and you will never get full use of it again,’ he said clearly, as though someone might be listening. ‘What a pity it is your right hand, your rifle hand. You cannot pull a trigger now. I must certify you medically unfit, and recommend you for discharge.’

‘Discharge?’ Basil repeated.

‘You are no use to us now. You will leave the militia and go home to England.’

It turned out to be a simple process. The doctor gave him a certificate on which he was ‘declared useless’, which he took before the hospital medical board. They endorsed it, and sent him to the militia headquarters, where his papers were stamped for discharge and he was given a travel warrant. Then he caught a transport to the station where, after the usual delay and contradictory announcements, he was able to board a train for Paris.