The general entered, and the small group of some twenty officers — heads of services, brigade commanders and his senior staff — stood up in respect, at the same time greeting him as informally and affectionately as if he had come into the anteroom of the Headquarters mess. It was far too small a group for his taste and methods of command, but for the moment security had to be paramount.
He mounted the improvised dais at the end of the room, observing that the Provost Company had somewhat dramatically covered his desk with the flag of Guayanas. Well, under the circumstances it was perhaps appropriate.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “and my very good friends: The first news I have for you is that Don Jesús-María de Hoyos y Alarcón has been relieved of his command by President Vidal. I address you as Captain General of the Republic. The title is empty, and for the time being we will forget it. Just as usual, I am commanding the magnificent Division with which you have presented me.
“Before we go any further I must apologize to you. For a few hours I had to destroy your faith in our efficiency. The difficulty was to absolve all my officers from blame if there should ever be a Court of Inquiry into the monumental, the gorgeous and unparalleled mess we made of the Air Force convoy. Captain Irala is well used to being shot at by the lot of you, but Major Ferrer is not. I thank them both for their trust and courage. I don’t know whether it has yet occurred to you all that the Air Force has joined the rebellion with very little ammunition.
“I am going to order you to defend the Constitution of Guayanas. Leaving out Twentieth Cavalry Division on the Northern Frontier, which cannot enter the campaign in time, we have to engage Second, Third and Sixth Divisions plus Twelfth Cavalry Division, an effective strength of nearly 42,000 ill-equipped but gallant men. With such odds against us, it is a gamble which we may lose. . . .”
The protests echoed in the bare pavilion as if it held its usual crowd of young footballers instead of colonels and majors whom age and training had taught to control their native tendency to enthusiasm.
“Well, I too will give you my reasons for thinking we shall not. But first I wish to ask you if any officer wishes to resign his commission before it is too late?
“Very well. Then we will go on to consider the most interesting exercise I have ever proposed to you. I have no air cover and not enough troops to follow up the certain victory of the armor. I cannot therefore destroy the enemy. I can only punish and demoralize him, and hope that it will be enough.
“We do not yet know the intentions of our late and sympathetic friend, Don Jesús-María, and I very much doubt if he has any. Up to this evening Avellana must have been expecting the flight of President Vidal. Only now will he have learned that the Chamber has voted for resistance. He probably hopes that Fifth Division will defend the Citadel and San Vicente while handing over the rest of the country to him.
“So we may safely assume that Don Jesús-María’s divisions are loosely concentrated in and about their peacetime stations and that their movements will be entirely dictated by our own. I may add that I have ordered all commanders to report to me instantly at the Citadel. In their indignation they will reply, if I know them, by public telegram from public telegraph offices, surrounded by their enthusiastic civil and military supporters. Bouquets, vivas and pretty girls shouting Death to General Kucera! These replies will be of value to us in establishing what changes, if any, there have been in their order of battle.”
There was a ripple of laughter. The Division had learned to appreciate the dry humor of their commander. It was a family secret. They knew very well that he was most careful how he employed it outside the closed world of the Citadel.
“Now, you are aware, gentlemen, that the Republic has only two landing grounds fit for jet aircraft. San Vicente we hold, but as yet we have only machines under repair in the hangars and no pilots. Lérida is out of our reach and impossible to take. I want you to keep that in your minds: Lérida is impossible to take. You are sure of it. Avellana and Jesús-María will be sure of it. There must never be a doubt of it, never a whisper that we are thinking of it — until, that is, I order you to take it.”
Captain Irala took advantage of the pause to unroll a map of southern Guayanas and hang it up.
“I am delighted to see, brothers,” Miro went on, “that you are all trying to suppress a collective expression of horror. You have thought out the result of a march on Lérida with speed and accuracy. It would take us a week to fight our way through the Quebradas Pass against the machine guns and demolitions of Twelfth Cavalry. Meanwhile Third, Fourth and Sixth Divisions would have come up on our rear.
“No. The axis of our advance will be the main road from Cumana to Los Milagros. It will give the enemy a reasonable picture of a contemptuous, head-on attack in which I am trusting to the strength of my spearhead and underestimating their power of maneuver. My former colleagues suspect that I despise the Army of Guayanas. You know that I do not, that I think we have the most savage and relentless fighting men in the world when properly led and trained. But we will take advantage of their opinion of me.
“When I have crossed the Jaquiri and am racing southeast, Don Jesús-María is far too good a soldier not to see that I am doomed. He will at once order Twelfth Cavalry Division to cut my line of communications by taking Cumana and the Jaquiri Bridge. It will not occur to him that I need no communications. The Division, as you know, is self-sufficient for a period the length of which has given us a good many heated arguments. For this short campaign four or five days will be enough.”
The Captain General turned to the map behind him and with the speed and decision of a cartoonist sketched the opening moves of battle.
“Here is the position on the evening of what I shall describe — to be in fashion — as D-day. Twelfth Cavalry have seized their opportunity and are sweeping down the left bank of the Rio Jaquiri. This is the only way I can open a road to Lérida. Or at any rate open it wide enough for you to fight your way through with the Saracens, Calixto.”
Lieutenant Colonel Calixto Irigoyen sat up in his chair with the unexpected suddenness of a hiccup. An amiable grin spread over his broad, slightly pock-marked face.
“It will make a change from racing tramcars in San Vicente,” he said.
“It will indeed. I propose that you should start at nightfall by the Escala de los Ingleses. We agreed that it was practicable for tracked vehicles. But in the dark, without lights? Are you satisfied?”
Fifth Division’s Armored Brigade was a luxury of dubious value. The geography of Guayanas severely limited its power of maneuver. Unwilling that the armor should be a mere advertisement for Vidalismo, Miro and his officers had studied in person the full possibilities of tracks, passes and contour lines which, from the map alone, looked so unpromising that any other army would have left them to be reported on, at need, by the untrained eye of an infantry captain.
The “English Ladder” was nothing but a dotted line, no longer continuous, in a tangle of steep foothills. There was no history of English raiders using it, or Spanish either for that matter. Even its name was only a local possession and derived from local trade. In the eighteenth century the open roadstead of Viera, conveniently cut off by the Rio Jaquiri from the center of government at San Vicente, was a peaceful market for illegal imports. The cargoes of the ships, mostly English, had come up through the coastal forest on the heads and backs of Indians, and reached the wealthy citizens of Lérida, Vergara and the North by pack train of mules and llamas through the unpoliced, remote Escala de los Ingleses.
It started over the pebbles of a dry watercourse, turned back on itself and climbed a ridge; dropped into a wide valley, sparsely inhabited, where it became a drove road; scrambled out of it with the aid of a sloping causeway engineered by Indians before the Conquest; wandered along the escarpment of a great hogback until at last the snow caps of the Cordillera came into sight across the trees and irrigated farmlands of Siete Dolores; then lost its identity among the earth lanes
connecting the villages with each other and with Lérida.
Calixto Irigoyen closed his heavy-lidded eyes. His forefinger described unsteady arabesques in the air as it rose from the level of his belt, was extended nearly to the full length of his arm and stabbed at an imaginary plateau.
“Yes, if we don’t go beyond the first ridge in the dark. After that — well, we can make the gradients up from the fords. Along the slopes we may have to dig out or build up. And fallen scree will be troublesome even if the villagers have tried to level it. It will mean losses, Chief — heavy losses, unless the fighters have used up all their cannon shell on your staff car.”
“They’ll have used it on us at Cumana Junction. Drive for Lérida, Calixto! Stop for nothing! On the morning of D plus I, when your movement is spotted from the air, it will be too late for Twelfth Cavalry to get back through the Quebradas Pass in enough strength to hold you up. No recovery of vehicles, and sacrifice what you must to get through! When you reach Lérida, destroy all aircraft on the ground, crater the runways, scatter vehicles over the airfield and wreck them! I cannot foresee what your orders will be then. That depends how we go. The price I must pay for depriving the enemy of air reconnaissance is dangerously high.
“As soon as Calixto has entered the Escala, our screen will push on until it is engaged by the enemy. Its orders — which it won’t like — will be to fall back at once. The picture I wish Jesús-María to form is that we are alarmed at the strength of the opposition. So we should be. He is a thoroughly sound tactician of the old school. He will see that my only hope is to be Napoleonic and defeat him piecemeal. Therefore his three division will be nicely balanced, with one always threatening my flank if I try any tricks with the others.
“When I retreat he will assume that I have seen the danger. I am, as I told you, doomed. It will thus seem perfectly natural to him that I should fall back on Cruzada.”
“You can’t, Chief!” Colonel Chaves exclaimed in horror. “You’re trapped!”
“I know I am, Rosalindo. It’s as certain as anything can be in this world that you will have Third and Sixth Divisions on your front and left, and Fourth Division coming up on your right to close the ring — which is where I want it. I say ‘you’ because you will be commanding the defensive box at Cruzada with your back against the forest. This is a killing match. I am sorry for the first waves which try to break in. It will be a disappointment to meet the concentrated fire power of the Division after dealing so easily with our advance guards. You will have all the Divisional artillery, but not the armor. How long can you hold the box, Rosalindo?”
“Till the ammunition runs out. Or are you going to supply us through Viera and the narrow gauge?”
“If the worst came to the worst I could try. And Jesús-María will think I intend to try. But there are only two locomotives and the jetty is so rotten that they have gone back to using surfboats. The coffee and cocoa go north from Cruzada by road now. I shall land petrol and rations at Viera, but I doubt if we shall ever see much of them at Cruzada.
“Well, gentlemen, while you contemplate our Sedan, I will tell you a story. Some three years ago President Vidal asked me to report on the strategic value of the Viera Railway. The London Company was offering it for sale. Like the rest of our system it was originally built and owned by the British. But when the shareholders of the Southern Guayanas were bought out by the State in 1947 nobody bothered with the Viera.
“I went down to Cruzada with the consul general, Don Enrique Penruddock, who was very properly endeavoring — in the service of his country — to get something for nothing. When I told him that the strategic value of his line was even less than the commercial, he called for another bottle — I recommend the Fonda Perez if you have time to visit it, Rosalindo — and said ‘What about the Breakfast Tram?’
“The Breakfast Tram is the planters’ name for the line which carries coffee and cocoa from the outlying fincas to Purua Junction nine kilometers west of Cruzada. North of Purua it is still used. South of Purua, where disease has wiped out the cocoa, and the coffee on the edge of the plateau is going wild — at any rate it is no longer of export quality — the line is derelict. When I inspected it, the only traffic I saw was one Negro and four sacks on a homemade hand trolley.
“But the Breakfast Tram was built by British engineers in the 1890’s when men still believed that sound construction meant a life of a hundred years. There are no tunnels. The causeways through the marshes are still solid. The gradients are normal, but curves sharp.
“Gentlemen, on the night of D plus I when we shall all be digging in around Cruzada I propose to set out with Mario and the armor along the line of the Breakfast Tram.”
Colonel Mario Nicuesa, commanding the Armored Brigade, took off his glasses and polished them. He was in his late thirties, a lightly built man of gray skin and smooth black hair who looked more like an energetic accountant than a soldier.
“We shall move only at night, and laager in the forest during the day. The trees do not always meet over the track and I am taking no risks. We shall preserve radio silence but I shall be in continual touch with the Division by field telephone. We may even be able to use an existing line.
“On the night of D plus 2 or D plus 3 — that depends on what success Calixto has had — we shall be at Ventas where we can at last deploy. There will have been an enemy post here, probably taking it easy in the station warehouse. It won’t be there any longer because Fifth Combat Group, which is preceding my cautious advance, has been thoroughly trained in forest fighting. I shall require this post wiped out at whatever cost before it can use its wireless intelligibly.
“There are passable tracks from Ventas to the edge of the forest. At dawn we shall be under cover behind the left flank of Fourth Division. That is why I shall not interfere with its advance. It has a high proportion of partly trained conscripts who will not stand against this sort of thunderbolt in open country. And at last no aircraft in the sky to warn them it is coming! We shall undoubtedly overrun the Divisional Headquarters. I am promising you no more than that. But if I were Don Jesús-María I should command the battle from Juy. The squadron out on our right wing will go through Juy unopposed.
“We can now ignore Fourth Division. As for Third, Mario and the armor are making a clean sweep of their base area. Our own casualties will, I think, turn out to be fairly light. Now, your questions, please.”
“Have you got a tame witch-doctor, Chief?” asked Colonel Chaves.
“No, Rosalindo, why?”
“Because you need so much luck that he’d better sacrifice a white armadillo for you. Suppose they send fifty tons of Breakfast Express to block the line, and not a Sambo with a hand-trolley?”
“If they do, Fifth Combat Group will report it. I shall then request Major Ferrer, who will be with me, to take the brakes off and give it a push downhill to the nearest curve. There are also sidings and loading bays. If there weren’t we should find this advance in single file impossible.”
“Well, if you’re happy. And you’re stripping the Citadel of everything that can move?”
“Everything.”
“What about Twentieth Cavalry up in the llanos? You said we could leave them out of consideration, but the capital is at their mercy.”
“Yes, it is,” Miro admitted. “But remember that this campaign will be over in a week one way or the other. If we are beaten we must surrender and Twentieth Cavalry may just arrive in time for the Victory Parade, though I doubt it. If we win, they will turn the horses round and pretend they were just out selling manure.”
“Twelfth Cavalry, now,” said Mario Nicuesa briskly. “I don’t like it. If you’re right there are Third and Sixth divisions trying to fall back on Cumana. Well, they can’t. I am right-hooking them again and again. I am always outside them, denying the road. But if Twelfth Cavalry comes up from Cumana with its guns I have to get out of there quick.”
“Possibly, Mario,” Miro agreed. “But not quick. Twelft
h will only have horsed traction. Everything on wheels will have raced back to Lérida to chase Calixto off the airfield.”
“Ultimate objective, Chief!” Lieutenant Colonel Irigoyen suddenly exploded. “What’s the ultimate objective?”
“To return the Army to civil life or to its allegiance as soon as possible.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“Up to the politicians,” Miro answered with a shrug.
“I only asked because my chaps may object to taking new wives and settling down in the Cordillera.”
Salvador Irala gave a too audible chuckle, and kept his eyes on his papers to avoid the look which he knew his commander would have fired at him.
“I’ll see that the President demands safe-conduct for the Regiment in his first message.”
“Well, I hope Avellana accepts,” said Calixto, “because I see no way of ever getting out of Siete Dolores. Twelfth Cavalry is hot on my tail. Fourth Division, very angry, is bound to be all over the entrance to the Escala. Or shall I take Vergara for you and hold it until I run out of ammunition and am arrested by the police?”
“If you’re bothered about morale,” Miro said, “there is no need to tell the regiment everything.”
“I’ll tell them the whole story once we’re away. By God, yes! There’s nothing my uncles like so much as to be out in the blue on their own. It’s just that I don’t want to call you up at Headquarters and tell you I’m abandoning the Saracens, unless you’re prepared for it.”
Miro was puzzled. There was a silence among his officers which generally indicated that they knew something which he did not. Lieutenant Colonel Irigoyen was clearly out of character. He was normally most respectful at a conference, and outside it could be trusted to use his own initiative to a point of insubordination.
Thing to Love Page 18
