Franco's Map

by Walter Ellis

  He had been on leave on April 1 – All Fools Day – when the order came through to rejoin his regiment, the 1st battalion Irish Guards, in Glasgow in two days’ time. Glasgow? That made no sense. How were they supposed to get to France from Glasgow? But no doubt the brass knew their business. You had to hope so, at any rate. The following night, en route to Scotland, he had dined at his parents’ home in Northamptonshire, listening to his father as the old man huffed and puffed, torn between paternal pride, anxiety, and political despair.

  Major General Sir Frederick Bramall had served with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front throughout the Great War, rising in 1918 to the rank of Brigadier. His last six months of active service had witnessed the greatest feat of British arms since Waterloo. His son, living at Dreenagh, their home in County Monaghan, had followed the exploits of the Irish regiments with particular pride. Each day, he and Billy McKenna, the head ‘keeper, had read in the newspapers how the Irish troops and their comrades from England, Scotland and Wales, together with the Dominion forces, had outlasted and outfought the Germans until they brought the Great War to a triumphant conclusion. To Bramall it had been an epic, like something out of Homer.

  The years that followed had proved a cruel anti-climax. Homecomings for Irish regiments were muted. Instead of being greeted as heroes, they were scorned as occupiers. Soldiers in uniform were spat on in the street. The political settlement that followed, giving the 26 Counties their independence, was the death knell of the Anglo-Irish. Emboldened by the dramatic events of 1916 and embittered by the tactics of the British irregulars, the Black and Tans, rebels drove Protestants off the land they had worked for centuries, claiming it in the name of the Irish people.

  The loss of Dreenagh was traumatic. The house itself, built in 1798 – the year, ironically, of the last great Rising against English rule – was a storehouse of memories. It was burned to the ground as if it were the palace of the Tsar. McKenna – a veteran of Omdurman and the second Boer War – had been murdered in front of his wife, shot in the belly, left to die like a stuck pig. Sir Frederick could not believe that such an injustice could go unpunished. Ireland’s betrayal of him and his kind removed all remaining traces of tolerance from his world view. His first and only principle became that governments should stand firm against Socialism, thuggery and petty nationalism. Obliged to move with his wife and son to a new home in England, he had watched, appalled, as the same Bolshevik attitudes spread across Europe. The General Strike of 1926 represented to Sir Frederick a rejection of the natural order. Unable to use cavalry to break the protest, he had mobilised a force of undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge alongside young fellows from the City, using them to force a path through picket lines. The “Bramall Boys” made quite a splash and few in the Government cared to object.

  Bramall, raised with an awareness of exile, was proud of his father, as he might have been proud of a distinguished ancestor. But it was hard to listen to him sometimes.

  Over dinner in Aynho, he was convinced that Churchill would once more lead England to disaster, just as he had at the Dardanelles.” We should be fighting the bloody Communists, not each other,” he announced, stabbing the air with his fork.

  “You took on the Germans soon enough in the last lot,” Bramall replied. “Didn’t seem to bother you then.”

  The General shrank back. “Different thing altogether. The Kaiser getting above himself. Hitler admires England. Sees it as a force for stability in the world.”

  “And the invasion of Poland?”

  “Only claiming back what was rightfully his.”

  “Like DeValera?”

  A scowl. “That bastard was half-Spanish, born in New York. Ireland was our home for centuries. We belong there. He stole our birthright.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, father. It was my home, too.”

  Bramall’s regiment, the 1st Irish were never going to France. Their war would be fought among the ice floes 1,500 miles to the north. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had sought to implement his long-standing plan to occupy Norway, thus denying the Germans the sea lanes essential to their imports of iron ore from Sweden. But Chamberlain, in his final weeks as Prime Minister, had prevaricated and Hitler struck first, obliging the British and their allies to take on an enemy already in place and confident of reinforcement. The Navy responded as best it could, but though it sank a number of German ships, including a whole squadron of destroyers, ultimately it was forced to withdraw under a relentless air assault. Bramall’s hastily cobbled together invasion force, commanded by Admiral Boyle, 12th Earl of Cork, fought with distinction at Narvik, the most northerly objective, 150 miles inside the Arctic Circle. The port was taken and held against a determined counter-attack. But it was too little too late and a general retreat was ordered. By June 7, all allied forces had been evacuated to the UK to lick their wounds. The entire Norwegian campaign, mismanaged from start to finish, had lasted exactly a month.

  Back in London, to which he had returned by train from Scotland, Bramall shut his eyes against the memory and the shame. Someone at Brigade headquarters said he’d been mentioned in dispatches. There was even talk of a medal. He wasn’t displeased by this. It would be something to show Pa. But he didn’t care that much either. He simply wanted to enjoy his week’s leave and then return to his regiment.

  Apart from the smell and the flowers, the flat was exactly as he had left it. But familiar things were now strange to him as if he were removed, or dislocated, from the ordinary world. This had happened to him before, most recently after his return from Spain. The first time was when he and his parents had fled Ireland in 1921, travelling through a countryside that was suddenly, and heartbreakingly alien. At the railway station, his mother had shielded him from the mockery of local youths while his father shook his fist at them. On the train, they were mocked for their accent. One fellow, stinking of beer, with spittle in his beard, shouted out that they weren’t wanted and get the hell back to England. It was as if their lives had been turned inside out. That’s what it felt like now, except that this time he was needed. On the surface, life went on, but with a sense of something missing. It was time to call home. He dialled the operator and gave her the number. Then he waited and pressed the phone to his ear.

  It was his mother who answered. She sounded old – and Irish. “Aynho 54.”

  “It’s me, mother. I’m in London.”

  All he could hear at the other end was silence.

  London: Roland Gardens, four days later

  The sergeant from Special Branch. closed the front door and replaced his warrant card in the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. “I really am sorry about this, sir,” he said. “I know you’re just back from duty and you’re supposed to be on leave, but I’ve been asked to give you this and wait for a response.”

  “Quite all right,” said Bramall. “I was getting bored anyway.” Motioning to the officer to follow him into the living room, he continued over to the sideboard and switched off the wireless. Then he opened the letter. It said SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) at the top and “Most Confidential.” Its message was terse and to the point.

  You are ordered to report to the Hatton Court Hotel, Hanslope, Bucks, tomorrow [June 15], there to await further instructions. You are to tell no one, family included, where you are going. When you have read this letter, hand it to the officer who gave it to you and he will provide you with tickets and cash sufficient for the undertaking. A room has been booked for you at the hotel in the name of Mr Chris Germaine.

  There was no signature.

  Bramall folded the letter and handed it back to the sergeant, who exchanged it for a larger white envelope.

  “Your rail pass and hotel details,” he said. I’ll tell them to expect you then, shall I?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  They both smiled at that.


  When the Branch man had gone, Bramall switched the wireless back on and boiled a kettle. He wanted to catch the news on the Home Service. Once his tea was brewed, he poured himself a cup and sat down with a plate of biscuits he’d found in a cupboard, next to a tin of mustard. For a second he’d toyed with the idea of punishing the bottle of Jameson he kept next to the tea caddy. But he resisted the impulse. He’d assumed he’d be reassigned to France to join the BEF, but the retreat from Dunkirk had put paid to that. He remembered talking to a major on the troopship home. If the Germans took France, he said, the country wouldn’t have the men or equipment to go in a second time. It would be back door stuff: sabotage and espionage. All the attention would be on forming an armed resistance.

  So maybe that was it. Maybe they wanted him to go behind enemy lines and help set up some form of guerrilla army. Just because he was a linguist and a veteran of Narvik, they probably assumed he was a natural insurgent. In fact, before Norway, the only weapon he’d ever fired was a shotgun, and he knew as much about organising armed resistance as he did about the theory of relativity.

  He sipped his tea. At three o’clock, the news came on. A special bulletin, they said. It could hardly have been worse. It was like an announcement of the end of civilisation, and he wondered how the newsreader, seated in his studio in Broadcasting House, managed to keep his voice from cracking. German troops had entered Paris. The Swastika was flying over the Arc de Triomphe. The Government of Prime Minister Reynaud, operating from its provisional headquarters in Bordeaux, had declared the capital an “open city” three days before and the resistance offered to the Wehrmacht had been minimal. To the east, the Maginot Line was breached. France’s much vaunted frontier defences had been reduced to an irrelevance. In Brest, Canadian troops under the command of General Alanbrooke were being evacuated after destroying most of their heavy equipment.

  Bramall sat still for several minutes. Then he drained the remains of his tea and stepped outside to clear his head.

  Madrid: Puerto del Sol, June 14

  They made an odd couple. As Colonel Raoul Ortega walked up the ornate marble stairway of Spain’s Interior Ministry next to his boss Ramón Serrano Suñer, the comparison to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza made by his wife did not seem out of place The pencil-thin Serrano gesturing, his head held high, looked to be lost in some higher realm. Ortega, bobbing and weaving, taking two steps forward for each one of his master’s, gave the impression that he would rather be at lunch. But if either man found the situation comic, he did not betray the fact. Their conversation was deadly serious. It was as if the fate of all Spain depended on their deliberations, which in fact, arguably, it did.

  The colonel briefly accelerated on the landing so that he reached Serrano’s office in time to throw open the double doors. He could scarcely contain his glee. “The news is even better than we hoped,” he announced as the Minister swept past his secretary and made his way into his inner sanctum.

  Serrano didn’t reply. Instead, he closed his eyes and offered a silent prayer. There was relief mixed with exultation in the expression that creased the pale parchment of his face as Ortega reeled off the headlines: Wehrmacht enters Paris; Maginot Line breached; Canadians scuttling from Brest. “After all its boasting,” the aide concluded, “France is finished.”

  It was an annus mirabilis. Serrano Suñer, just 39 years-old, his shock of prematurely white hair swept back from his forehead, stood by his desk and struck a heroic pose. His eyes were so intensely focused and his skin drawn so tightly across his cheeks that, just for a moment, Ortega – brought up on picture books and party propaganda – fancied him as El Cid, tied in death to his horse so that he could still lead his troops into battle against the Moors. “I detect the hand of God, Raoul,” the Minister said at last. “Who would have thought, after all we endured, that we should ever see this day?”

  Ortega nodded contentedly. A police wagon outside in the square was bringing in a fresh batch of leftists to be interrogated and shot. As the vehicle passed into the combined ministerial and police headquarters, he could hear the double doors slam shut. The noose was continuing to tighten. More enemies of the state under lock and key, soon to learn their fate. Everything was as it should be.

  The Minister, whose appearance could switch in an instant from suave international statesman to a child in adult’s clothing, was not only the most important member of the Government after Franco, he was also the Caudillo’s brother-in-law and Inspector-General of the Falange. Tall and gangling, obsessed with his health, he had only recently transferred his primary allegiance from Fascist Italy to Nazi Germany and was still coming to terms with the consequences. Instead of wishing to consolidate Spain, as Mussolini had urged, he was now infused, like his master, with a new imperial vision. Just that very day, as he had urged for months, Spanish forces had occupied the international zone of Tangier, putting the League of Nations in its place and demonstrating in the clearest possible fashion Spain’s disdain for the old world order. Berlin, meanwhile, had been informed that Madrid was adjusting its status in the European war from “neutral” to “non-belligerent.” All that remained before Spain entered the war was the negotiation of a treaty of economic cooperation with Germany. But the march on Tangier demonstrated good faith. The Führer would be pleased.

  The Minister breathed in deeply. “The New Order has been blessed by Providence,” he said, addressing his aide as if he were a public meeting. “This is a great day for Spain, where the first battle was fought. France – vainglorious France – has been crushed by the forces of Fascism. Germany and Italy are on the march. Soon, I promise you, Spain will join them. Today is not the end, my friend, it is only the beginning.”

  In the cells below, someone screamed.

  Chapter 2

  England: SIS Headquarters, Hanslope Park, June 16

  The name on the office door said “Braithwaite”. Inside, across from a ground floor window that gave on to the park, a man of about 60 was seated at a strictly functional, civil service-issue desk. He was engrossed in a file and indicated with a wave of his hand that Bramall should take the seat opposite.

  He did so and waited impatiently, pulling at threads on the armrest of his chair. Three minutes later, he stood up and wandered across to the window. The sun shone overhead with peculiar vehemence and a Tortoiseshell butterfly seemed briefly to return his stare as it fluttered, dazed and confused, against the glass. In the distance, behind a line of trees, a parade ground sergeant shouted commands, while closer by a bright red Post Office van sped up the central driveway. Bramall shifted his gaze towards a group of young women making their way towards a group of prefabs. One of them, with ebony hair down to her shoulders, was laughing, but when she saw him framed in the window she fell silent and stared straight into his eyes.

  He gasped as a familiar memory rose unbidden in his mind. He was in Spain, on the banks of the Ebro, 20 miles west of Tarragona. It was midnight, July 23, 1938. The battered Republican Army, desperately short of air cover and artillery, was shuffling forward onto the boats that would take them over the river towards the enemy dug in on the opposite side. If they could drive Franco’s eastern Army, commanded by the resourceful General Yagüe, back from the Mediterranean and link up with the embattled defenders of Catalonia, victory might yet be theirs. If not, they were finished. As a journalist, Bramall could only look on as the exhausted lines of soldiers, ill-fed and sickening after two years of war, waited their turn to board the assault craft.

  It was a hot, unforgiving night and the bitter-sweet smells of summer drifted across the water. Overhead, the faint drone of an aircraft could be heard – probably a spotter. He ignored it. He had other thoughts on his mind. Twenty-one-year-old Manuela Valdés, the daughter of a union organiser from Salamanca, stood with him, one arm around his neck, the other clutching her rifle. A veteran of the battles of Belchite and Guadalajara, Manu
ela was convinced that with this final push the Left could at last regain the initiative. She leaned into him so that he could feel the hardness of her nipples against his chest. During the month-long build-up to this latest offensive, they had become lovers. He found their affair, played on the edge of destruction, impossibly romantic. He kissed her fiercely, pressing his groin against hers.

  The old moon had only just risen above the trees and the principal light, save for a faint glow off the river and the luminescence of fireflies underfoot, was from a series of torches used to direct the soldiers to the boats. He felt in his pocket for his lighter, an American-made Zippo given to him by Frank Ryan, an Irish brigadista. Flicking open the brass lid, he ran his thumb against the flint wheel. The flame that jumped into life illuminated Manuela’s face, sending deep shadows down the hollows of her cheeks and reflecting itself in the coal-black pupils of her eyes. “Te amo – I love you,” he told her impulsively. Nothing else would have fitted the moment.

  “Te amo, también,” she replied. “But now I have to go.”

  Seconds later, 2,000 feet above their heads, a Messerschmitt 109, one of hundreds that had virtually wiped out the Republic’s antiquated Air Force, throttled back its engine prior to going into a dive. The drone they had heard a minute earlier was the sound of a night-fighter, not a spotter. Attracted by the flickering torches, the German pilot, with his battle-trained 20:20 vision, had focused his eyes on the shifting scene below and selected his target – the assault boats pulling away from the river’s eastern shore. His ammunition belts were full. The only opposition he could expect was scattered rifle fire. With a smile, he engaged his machine guns and 20mm cannons, wiggled his wings and began his strafing run.

  Two years later, Bramall found himself gripping hold of the windowsill of Braithwaite’s office as if his life depended on it. His mouth was dry and, just as he always did, he shut his eyes against the memory. Another ten seconds went by before he relaxed again and turned back into the room, doing his best to appear normal, as if nothing had happened. “Look,” he said, swallowing hard, “I don’t wish to be rude, but could we possibly make a start on whatever it is you want to talk to me about? Because I really think I should be getting back to my regiment.”