Lord of All the Dead

by Javier Cercas

  It was past eleven and the traffic was getting heavier and heavier. Beside the road the solid patches of dark open fields were scarce now, dissolved in the growing suburban glow of hotels, restaurants, service stations, and darkened industrial estates; a profuse yellow brilliance illuminated the sky in the distance, like the coals of a colossal fire: it was Madrid. For a while we went back to talking about Manuel Mena and the Shearer.

  “You can be sure of one thing,” David concluded as we drove into the city on the Extremadura road. “That man is going to take a whole lot of secrets to his grave.”

  8

  Manuel Mena reported to his first posting as a second lieutenant on September 25, 1937, and until the day of his death, twelve months later, lived with a hallucinatory intensity, accumulating the type of extreme experiences through which, as some survivors of war maintain in public, so many essential things are learned, and through which, as all survivors of war secretly know, nothing is learned except that humans can become much worse than we who have never been to war can ever imagine. During that time Manuel Mena saw front-line combat over much of the geography of Spain, fought in the worst battles, endured the elements at temperatures of more than one hundred twenty degrees above and ten degrees below zero, survived nightmarish marches through rocky deserts and sheer mountain ranges, repelled surprise attacks, carried out sudden attacks, took or attempted to storm towns or cities emptied by fear, inhospitable heights, fortified lines, and inaccessible summits, was wounded by enemy fire on five occasions, and saw an indeterminable number of men die. It is very possible, however, that his life ended before he’d ever slept with a woman, unless he lost his virginity on a visit to some brothel near the front; some people claim that he was in love with a beautiful, well-read, delicate, elegant, and intelligent girl named María Ruiz, daughter of the village’s biggest landowner, but there is no evidence that she reciprocated, nor any certainty that this was not just one more of the fictions that swirl around his legend.

  The last year of Manuel Mena’s life can be reconstructed with certain precision thanks to the help of a few documents; they’re not infallible—no document is—but, handled with critical imagination, they offer a reliable way out of the fog of legend and into the clarity of history. The most important of them is undoubtedly the Diary of Operations of Manuel Mena’s unit: the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, belonging to the Group of Ifni Rifle Companies. The group was native to and took its name from the tiny West African territory, located opposite the Canary Islands, which in 1934 had officially become a Spanish colony. It was a shock unit comprised of North African and Spanish troops—most of the soldiers were African; most of the officers were Spanish—which over the course of the war the rebel commanders sent to the toughest fronts in order to settle awkward situations; the result of this commitment was that by the end of the conflict the unit had a casualty rate well over 50 per cent: almost four thousand wounded and more than a thousand killed. It is possible that, after dozing for months in the non-epic drowsiness of the Extremadura front, Manuel Mena wanted to experience the profoundly terrifying idealism of war at an exhausting and exposed posting; if that was the case, reality would have more than satisfied those desires.

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  Manuel Mena joined the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen just at the moment when the unit, after having fought without a rest for almost a year, had been taken out of active service on the outskirts of Zaragoza. The expression “without a rest” is not hyperbole: since the beginning of the previous autumn Manuel Mena’s comrades-in-arms had taken part in the decisive combats in the battle for Madrid, had entered Brunete, fought in Villanueva de la Cañada and defended Las Rozas, had taken the peak of Cobertera, had prevented the Pindoque Bridge over the River Jarama from being blown up in a surprise attack, had lost three hundred men in two days at the head of the Toledo bridge—among them seven of its thirteen officers—had fought on the Albarracín front and contained the Republican offensive against Zaragoza fighting at Zuera, San Mateo de Gállego, and Fuentes de Ebro. So, when Manuel Mena took up his post as second lieutenant at the end of September, the unit was exhausted and decimated. Along with the complete Group of Ifni Riflemen, the First Tabor then belonged to Barrón’s 13th Division, known as the “Black Hand” because their insignia contains a black image of a hand against a red background, with a motto written in Arabic letters that reads: “Who entered Brunete?” The following two months were for Manuel Mena a period of adaptation to his new officer’s life, and for the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen an interregnum between hostilities that their commanders took advantage of to rest, to reorganise the battalion, and to instruct the new Spanish and Moroccan recruits who arrived to cover the losses occasioned in almost twelve months of continuous combat. It is more than likely that Manuel Mena participated in the training of these raw soldiers. It is also likely that he himself was instructed in the handling of Hotchkiss machine guns—the light M1909 as well as the medium M1914, the two types of these weapons the Francoists relied on—because he was immediately assigned to the Tabor’s machine-gun company. It is even possible that during those days he might have participated in some secondary or auxiliary action with his own unit or with another. What is certain is that at the beginning of December, the First Tabor was in Alcolea del Pinar, in the vicinity of Guadalajara, preparing with the 13th Division and with the best of the Francoist army for the definitive attack on Madrid, which had been resisting since November of the previous year. Nevertheless, the operation—devised by Franco after the conquest of the north of the country—was never carried out, and at the beginning of January Manuel Mena was transferred again to Aragón with his unit to take part in one of the bloodiest battles of the war: the Battle of Teruel.

  Manuel Mena’s first battle with the Ifni Riflemen took place there. The battle had started two weeks earlier, when an army of 80,000 Republican soldiers cut off that rebel capital, which almost since the beginning of the war had been surrounded by Republican lines on all sides except one, the Jiloca Valley, where the road and railway ran that connected the city with Zaragoza and the rest of Francoist territory. The closure of the Republican ring had been carried out the night of December 15, when Líster’s 11th Division broke through the front in the foothills of the Muletón and cut off the Jiloca Valley and Teruel’s communications with the Francoist rearguard by coming down from the heights of Celadas, taking the village of Concud and joining up in San Blas with the 64th Division, which came in from Rubiales. It was such a fast and efficient manoeuvre, designed by the Republican High Command with two main objectives: one of propaganda and the other strategic. Inferior in all facets to the Francoist army, the Republican army had gone from defeat to defeat since the beginning of the war, unable even to conquer a single provincial capital, and its High Command thought that taking the small and badly defended Teruel could raise the ravaged morale of its side and attract international attention to its cause, encouraging hope that, with help from outside, the Republic could still turn around a war that increasingly seemed lost. That was the propaganda objective. As for the strategic objective, it consisted precisely in preventing Franco from attacking Madrid with his elite forces, among them the Ifni Riflemen, and in preparing the ground at the same time so the Republican army could carry out its most ambitious plan, known as Plan P, based on launching an offensive against the Extremadura front that would reach the Portuguese border and cut the Francoist zone in two. Otherwise, the whole success of the operation depended on reality confirming a rule and a complementary hypothesis elaborated by the Republican High Command over the course of the struggle: the rule maintained that Franco was not going to concede the tiniest amount of territory without immediately trying to recover it, moving the battle to wherever the Republicans dug in; the hypothesis ventured that Franco would not accept the loss of a provincial capital without throwing his best troops into the battle in an attempt to retake it. Both the hypothesis and the r
ule turned out to be right and, even though until December 21 Franco wondered whether to proceed with his initial plans to move again against the capital of the Republic, as his advisors urged, in the end he decided to postpone the attack, and on December 29 he undertook, with the troops originally destined to attack Madrid, a direct counteroffensive to go to the aid of besieged Teruel.

  Five days later, on January 3, Manuel Mena disembarked at the railway station of Cella, in the middle of the Jiloca Valley, almost twelve and a half miles from Teruel. The station, or rather the stopping place, was a rectangular stone building beside a single track, isolated from any sign of civilisation and surrounded by hills bristling with enemy trenches. Teruel had not yet fallen into Republican hands, but since December 21 ferocious combat had raged inside it, house to house and hand to hand, with grenades and bayonets, through a mountain of rubble in the middle of which some thousands of troops of Franco’s 52nd Division resisted desperately, without water or medicine or provisions, commanded by Domingo Rey d’Harcourt and crouching in the ruins of the buildings of the Bank of Spain, the seminary and the civil government, which surrendered that very day, as did the Santa Clara convent and hospital. I don’t know if Manuel Mena had ever seen snow before in his life, but during the days previous to his arrival a fierce blizzard had fallen over the region of Teruel and temperatures had fallen to unheard-of lows, covering the valley of Jiloca in white; it is very likely that the majority of the members of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen, who, like Manuel Mena, had to await the rest of the 13th Division on that white plain lost in the middle of nowhere, had never seen snow.

  Manuel Mena spent the night from January 3 to 4 there, around the Cella station, sleeping on the ground and trying to protect himself from the cold. He was not well equipped to withstand it—neither his footwear nor his clothing were winter issue, and he could barely cover himself with his regulation blanket and cape—so when darkness fell he dug or ordered others to dig a hole in the snow; then he spread a blanket over the uncovered earth and wrapped up there with two or three comrades in the hope that the natural warmth of the men lying beside him, the protection of the garments he managed to pile on top of them, and the resistance of his youth would allow him to get a few hours of sleep and wake up without symptoms of frostbite. I don’t know how he got through that night. Or the next morning. But at dusk on the following day the 13th Division finished disembarking all its forces at the Cella stop and, without losing a minute, set off for the village and the Altos de Celadas.

  Manuel Mena went with it. The men began to advance in order to approach along a path buried in the snow that soon began to undulate gently up the slope, between abandoned houses and sheepfolds. There was a glacial cold, an icy wind was blowing, and, above the military column crossing the immaculate white of the landscape like a phantasmagorical caravan, the sky was low and uniform, the colour of chalk. To the right was General Sáenz de Buruaga’s 150th Division, which had already taken the heights between Cerro Gordo and the Celadas road and, even farther to the right, Saguardía’s 62nd Division, which on the evening of New Year’s Day dominated the plain, including the village of Concud; as for the 13th Division, that of Manuel Mena, it was supposed to take Hill 1207, a plateau called La Losilla, which almost since the beginning of the war the Republicans had reinforced with a system of staggered trenches, which had been decisive for the 150th Division to be able to take Alto de Celadas, strategically key in the conquest of Teruel. I do not know whether, as he marched through the valley of Jiloca towards the Republican positions, Manuel Mena knew the mission his unit had been assigned; undoubtedly he knew the following day, when General Barrón assembled his officers in the village of Celadas, three miles from La Losilla, and set out the plan of operations. That night they again slept outdoors in refuges dug into the snow and, when he woke up, Manuel Mena could see the snow-covered and deserted fields around him, and in a second of unsurpassable astonishment might have thought that the 13th Division had abandoned them before dawn, him and the two or three comrades he’d slept beside, or that he was still sleeping and was dreaming that dizzyingly empty whiteness, until he realised that during the night another storm had passed and nocturnal snow was covering the soldiers and their equipment like a spotless sheet. Later he would also discover, now almost without astonishment, before resuming the march, how the cold had solidified into a brown block the milky coffee in his canteen and how, as one of his comrades would recall a long time later, one incautious young man had turned his own head into a ball bristling with stalagmites of ice by trying to comb his hair with melted snow.

  That very afternoon the 13th Division’s assault on La Losilla began. It was a frontal attack, because the Francoist command wanted to break the siege of Teruel at all costs and prevent the city’s fall, which seemed imminent, and in the urgency of the moment forewent the indispensible preparation of an artillery attack to soften up a very solid Republican line, defended by well-armed men of the experienced 39th Republican Division under the command of Major Alba Rebullida, who in recent weeks had further reinforced their position with fortifications and barbed wire and had dug trenches, and machine-gun and mortar pits. The Francoist attacks started from Peirón, a hill facing La Losilla, on the counterslope of which the 15th Division had camped. They were, I insist, impudent, almost suicidal attacks. The first fell to the 4th and 5th Banderas of the Legion and was stopped by the Republicans at El Pozuelo, the hollow that separated the Francoist positions from the Republican ones and which was left strewn with corpses, wounded men, and frustrated attackers who hit the ground and sought cover in that riverbed with no cover, offering easy targets in their green uniforms against the white snow, until nightfall allowed them to return to the base they had started from.

  That was where Manuel Mena was wounded in combat for the first time. The episode took place on January 8. On the 6th and 7th the 13th Division had launched five new attacks against La Losilla, which had been repelled with heavy losses; it was like banging their heads against a brick wall—the Republicans not only were well armed, well fortified, and well deployed, but also enjoyed commanding views over El Pozuelo, the only place where the assailants could attack them—but the Francoists kept at it and at first light on the 8th it was the turn of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen.

  I don’t know exactly how the attack went. Nobody knows: there is not a single written account of it remaining in existence or a single survivor able to tell what happened; so at this point I must be quiet, stop writing, cede the word to silence. Of course if I were a literato and this were a piece of fiction I could fantasise about what happened, I would be authorised to do so. If I were a literato I could for example imagine Manuel Mena hours before the attack, curled up in his nocturnal refuge dug into the snow, kept awake by the glacial cold and by the certainty he’s about to risk his life. I could imagine his fear and I could imagine him fearless. I could imagine him praying in silence, thinking of his mother and his brothers and nephews and nieces, knowing that the moment of truth had arrived and gathering strength to measure up and not be daunted, not to disappoint anyone, perhaps most of all not to disappoint himself. I could imagine him standing up in the dark, sure that he won’t get any more sleep now, peering over the crest of Peirón and glimpsing or imagining across from him, in the halting light of the dawn that seems to be beginning to break beyond La Losilla, over the peaks to Cerro Gordo de Formiche, the Republican trenches stretching away to his right, silent and sleepless, to the Alto de Celadas and perhaps further down as far as Teruel, at that hour still enveloped in shadows. I could imagine him waking up his men, ordering them to fall in on the counterslope of Peirón, trying to get his gut, gripped by the imminence of combat, to tolerate some food, preparing his soldiers for the fight, giving news to his captain or his lieutenant and receiving final instructions for the attack. I could imagine him crossing the crest of Peirón and immediately advancing bent over, through the fresh dawn snow, towards the hollow
of El Pozuelo leading his men, swallowing his fear, first at a brisk walk and then running, until the Republicans’ shots that begin to pepper the snow force him to dive to the ground and find a safe or theoretically safe place to set up their machine guns and start to fire on the trenches opposite to protect the advance of the first line, perhaps sheltering in a foxhole dug in the previous few days or behind a wall of stones improvised by the attackers repelled the night before and still usable. I could imagine him furiously battering or ordering his men to batter the Republican positions for hours with bursts of machine-gun fire, trying to protect himself against enemy fire or advancing along the hollow without managing it or trying to find a better position for their weapons on the side that leads up to La Losilla, less than ten feet from the enemy’s barbed wire. And of course I would be able to imagine the moment he gets wounded: I know for certain that he was hit in the right arm—although I don’t know if the shot came from a rifle or a machine-gun or a mortar—but I could imagine the shriek of pain and the simultaneous instant of panic, the tearing burn in the sleeve of his uniform and the blazing red of blood on the white snow, just as I could imagine some subordinate tying an emergency tourniquet to stop the haemorrhage—but maybe it was he himself who tied it—and I could imagine him lying for hours in the sparkling snow, enduring the unfamiliar pain of the wound, waiting until dark to be evacuated from that hell while bursts of machine-gun fire and rifle shots and mortar shells poison the air of the battle, as well as heavy artillery, shouts and insults that come down from the trenches to the hollow and rise from the hollow to the trenches, the sobs of the mortally wounded begging for help like frightened children and the deafening silence from the corpses on the snow.