From his rough dugout on the next hill, Miro watched his untried troops. All were lying still and learning that noise and light did not kill; the enemy was far too ready to believe that they did. Their second assault went in and withered away as the machine-gunners uncurled themselves from their scratches in the hard ground and took full advantage of Colonel Chaves’s sadistic planning of the defense.
But it was already evident that Jesús-María’s troops were not going to pack up under punishment and let the cause of Avellana go by default. Miro felt a sour pride in them, for his opinion of the soldiers of Guayanas was justified. He had always preached that when well led — and well led they were at battalion level — they were capable of an élan disturbingly barbaric for the twentieth century. As for Fifth, his creation, the living collective soul which shared his heart with Felicia, it was like a son; one was unduly sensitive to its faults but had to admit it was fulfilling its promise.
Apart from Chaves’s situation reports, and what he himself could see of the defense of the Ridge, he was damnably in the dark. Calixto’s last message confirmed that the Saracens had reached the open country of Siete Dolores and deployed. Since then the appeals of Headquarters for more news had remained unanswered. As for Don Gregorio, he was observing still another rule of his Managerial Society: that there should be no inconvenient witnesses to unpleasant facts of management. He merely said that TAQUILLA had been overwhelmingly successful, and refused to give details.
Meanwhile the threat of a Sedan was becoming hotter and closer than when Miro had conceived it on paper. A fresh brigade of Third Division had been thrown into the attack on the Ridge of the Lizards and was using ground and its mortars more cleverly. The artillery of Sixth, entering the battle for the first time, found and temporarily silenced that battery which Miro and Mario Nicuesa had heard from the line of the Breakfast Tram. Air-to-ground communication was becoming more efficient.
About two in the afternoon the steady infiltration of Sixth Division patrols was built up into a probing attack. Chaves’s forward positions on the left flank held, but obviously could not hold for long. If they were withdrawn, the ridge could be turned, and it was still early in the day for that; if they were allowed to stand and fight it out, what was left of them would have to surrender.
Miro knew very well what Rosalindo would do — reinforce his flank and break up the attack of Sixth Division at the cost of crippling losses. By temperament he was incapable of not hitting back, and would never see that if the enemy were not allowed to win today, there wouldn’t be enough of Fifth Division left to exploit victory tomorrow.
Miro also sensed the secret fear of his most combative officers. They were unhappy at these retreats. They were beginning to feel that their commander’s care for the individual, which had been so marked at home in the Citadel, could be a handicap in action and that he would not face casualties. Well, nor would he — in the wrong place.
But this meant that on no account must he interfere and make the choice for Rosalindo. Rosalindo must think he had made it himself. Miro cursed the necessity for tact. There was quite enough to do without having to concentrate on the psychology of a proud descendant of blood-worshipers. All this had been so easy in the Citadel! Rosalindo’s impetuosity, Mario Nicuesa’s reluctance to go ahead if he lost so much as a track off a tank — they were just a jest in the mess, and now were unavoidable reality.
He crashed down to Rosalindo’s command post in his jeep. The administration of the battle seemed to be working as smoothly as on maneuvers. Routine, so often practiced that it was inescapable, was by itself keeping the excitable temperament of the commander under control.
“Rosalindo,” he said, “I wanted to use the lull for a word with you about the breakout tomorrow.”
“The lull, Chief?”
“Well, you seem to be on top of them.”
“Christ!”
Miro unfolded his own map. Rosalindo’s was already so complicated by his dashing chalkmarks that any interference with it might throw his train of thought out of gear.
“Strike there, I think! Not at the junction between Third and Fourth. Fourth will have ceased to exist as a fighting force. On its exposed left, Third will try to form a defensive front against the armor. Well, let them! Strike at the hinge and cut it off. Bring every shell you’ve got left down on the ridges, and out you go!”
Colonel Chaves pulled one end of his mandarin mustache. So this was the Caudillo in action! The genial blue eyes, the usual outward calm of the machine were still there, but the man was tense with an inner excitement. After a searching of memory, Rosalindo recognized it. It recalled a cousin of his on the whiter side of the family, a passionate card-player so engrossed in the game that he was up from his chair with his knife out if any bystander dared to pass behind him and comment on his hand.
He did not comment. He merely stated as a matter of brisk fact that he would lose half the leading brigade in the breakout.
“You won’t. But if you do, it’s worth it.”
“Christ!” Rosalindo exclaimed again. “I thought we were going to slide out by the back door. I’ll want every man I’ve got for this new plan of yours, Chief. I’ll have to let the ridge go.”
“Will you? Well, you’ve held it longer than I thought possible.”
“With your permission, Chief! This is urgent.”
The orders poured from the commander of the Cruzada Box: Forward positions facing Sixth Division to be abandoned. The Ridge of the Lizards to go. But softly, for the Love of God, softly! And perhaps the gentlemen of No. 2 Battery of the Medium Regiment, if they had now recovered from the interference with their lunch, would arrange that when the Avellanistas were standing on top of the Ridge and giving their vivas they would lie down again and never get up.
“Don’t go and reoccupy it, Rosalindo,” Miro laughed.
“I won’t, Chief. It may be empty for a little while. But I’ll need that little while to pull everything back to the main positions.”
By sixteen hours the ring had closed on Fifth Division, but the ground traded had cost the enemy a disproportionate price. Third was merely snarling and licking its wounds. Sixth, instead of continuing its dangerous and enterprising reconnaissance in force, seemed to be very cautiously massing for the kill, with its guns in close support.
The reason for this extreme caution was quickly apparent. The barrage came down on the dummy armor, caught helplessly in cover waiting, and waiting too long, for its decisive stroke. Miro had long since massed his Bofors guns to discourage too close an examination from the air, but they were hardly needed. Smoke from the burning scrub hid from the enemy exactly what he had destroyed, and the explosion of the ingenious devices planted by Basilio Ferrer could leave little doubt that the ranging of Sixth’s Divisional Artillery was excellent, as indeed it was.
Sixth now pushed on boldly before the coming dusk. Miro toured the perimeter of the Cruzada Box in person, radiating his own confidence to the troops and assuring them — since he could not even whisper the truth — that supplies were on their way up from Viera and that they could stay where they were for weeks. It was odd what troops would believe — anything if they had trust in their commander. In action it was useful to be a god, however infuriating at home. It should have been plain to any halfwit that they could barely hold for another twenty-four hours, with or without the trickle of supplies — and the ship wasn’t in yet — which might with luck come up from Viera.
What he could see and deduce of the enemy movements gave him the impression of an old-fashioned rabble careless of flanks and rear, and waiting to overwhelm the defense next day by sheer weight of numbers. It took an effort of imagination to see that Jesús-María’s tactics were reasonable. After all, he knew that the Saracens were in faraway Siete Dolores, and that the rest of the armor had been destroyed or hopelessly disorganized.
Miro returned to his Headquarters to find wild excitement. An agitated signal was in from President Vidal. What
was he to do? The fighters were coming down on San Vicente Airfield. He had no men. Nothing. What was he to do?
So Calixto had put Lérida out of action! That was that. The Air Force was at last out of the battle. The enemy was blind, blind and tapping with a stick, in action with a fast and mobile Division — though at the moment it couldn’t move at all — which had complete liberty to forbid or encourage, as it liked, reconnaissance.
Don Gregorio did not seem to realize that a pilot and his aircraft when on the ground were not very formidable. Miro emphasized their helplessness by replying that the President should have them arrested by municipal police and interned in the Citadel. He added that some of the bombers would be coming down later — unless they decided to fly over the frontier and ask for asylum — and that the civilian ground staff of the airport should try to clear the runways. He was ordering a heavily armed party to come out from the Citadel to the airfields and be at the disposal of civil police.
Night curtained the battle, a night obsessed with the actions of the day and vacuously repeating them like a restless sleeper. Silence endured a minute or five or ten, and then, at some part of the perimeter, was broken by the rattle of automatic fire as one side or the other imagined a threat which was not there at all or was devised for that very purpose. Miro ordered his bugler to blow the Mess Call in the next lull.
The wild-bird, wild-cattle calls, half Spanish and half Indian, of his adopted country delighted him. He insisted on their frequent use, even for command when the roar of vehicles did not make them inaudible. To remind battle-weary troops that their commander was now about to sit at table might have been unwise with cold and sardonic Northerners, but he instinctively felt that his personal army — now in any case enjoying their alcohol and the same rice stew as himself — would be comforted to know that the Caudillo was relaxed.
The bugler chose his moment, and the long call wailed down the shallow valleys carrying its message of life amidst death to the Box, to the enemy and to Cruzada. Rosalindo Chaves must have instantly understood its significance to morale, for his own bugler on a hilltop a mile away to the north answered with the General Salute.
There was little relaxation for Miro, however. He had barely swallowed his meal when Salvador Irala interrupted its digestion.
Mario Nicuesa had lost four tanks and, for the moment, all hope of bringing a fighting force through to Ventas and the open.
“Did you speak to Ferrer?”
“Yes. He says that he can get three of them on the line again by sacrificing one of his recovery vehicles. I told him to get on with it. He was going to anyway.”
“No one can have all the virtues, Salvador,” said Miro, answering the implied criticism of the commander of his Armored Brigade. “Whatever Colonel Nicuesa can give me tomorrow will be mechanically perfect with not a nut or a round of ammunition missing.”
“All the same, my General, it’s a pity that Colonel Chaves thinks a sparkplug is something you can light with a match.”
“How tired are you, Salvador?”
“Ever since I was fifteen, my General, I have considered sleep a waste of time.”
“Good! Then go down and stay with Colonel Nicuesa. And tact! You are not to give an order. You are not to threaten to report to me. In any emergency just assure everybody that you know my mind. The armor must get through. All of it if possible. Half of it, if that is all I can have.”
When his A.D.C. had left, Miro tried to sleep, for he had to start in another six hours to join the Armored Brigade at Ventas. And then at last the longed-for signal from the Saracens came through. It was the second in command, faintly on the air. Calixto Irigoyen was dead and half the regiment lost. Only an hour out of Lérida they had been compelled to deploy by the demolitions and mountain guns of a scratch force sent up by the Vergara Garrison and had then been intercepted by a motorized column from Twelfth Cavalry, weak and disorganized but reinforced by three troops of their Bofors guns which had been left behind at the top of the Quebradas Pass. Lieutenant Colonel Irigoyen had engaged the guns, very effectively handled in their antitank role, and finally charged them with eleven cars to ensure the escape of the rest. The Regiment had accomplished its mission. They were now clear of pursuit, but their way out down the Escala was blocked. Ammunition was running short, and they asked for orders.
Miro was brought back to his youth as vividly as by any dream in which the mature man is assailed by the circumstances and scents and sights of twenty years earlier. Up to the loss of Calixto, war as commander in chief had had little resemblance to war as a young captain. Triumphant power contrasted with suffering. One had loved and trusted, intertwined the daily life with that of a friend, and then had seen him killed. It became a routine. He had forgotten it until Calixto’s face, still so vivid, took its place among the fading specters of memory.
He spoke to the second in command and congratulated him on the Regiment’s magnificent and heroic exploit in the emotional words of Spanish oratory which he would expect and not find empty. If the survivors could stay where they were without more losses, they could hope for relief the following night. If relief did not come or if at any time their position were hopeless, they were to abandon their vehicles and take to the hills with rations and water.
CHAPTER XIII
[December 15–16]
THE STATION OF VENTAS and its clearing were quite still in the paling darkness. Behind it, to the west, was the black wall of the forest reinforcing night; to the east was little vegetation, and that crushed and mangled by the tracks of the Armored Brigade. The station smelled like a butcher’s shop, for the still air preceding the dawn had made no move to cleanse it. A man was sobbing. Another coughed, the blood and tissue of his lung gurgling in his throat.
The young commander of Fifth Combat Group, a green man still decked with leaves though the dance was over, saluted.
“I am sorry, my General, but I could not risk it. They ran for cover instead of surrendering, and in another minute . . .”
“The wounded?” Miro asked.
“Brigade has seen to them and left two orderlies. The medical officer thought it best that they should wait here until we can get them forward.”
“Very well. I shall want Fifth Combat Group to follow up the armor. You should have no difficulty in finding transport. You yourself will accompany the two troops on the right flank into Juy. It is possible that you will find yourself guarding Don Jesús-María de Hoyos and his staff. I require from you the utmost courtesy.”
“Understood, my General. Anything better afterwards?”
“More than you’re likely to enjoy. Provost will relieve you before midday.”
The Captain General climbed into the command vehicle where Salvador Irala, his orderly and his personal radio operator were waiting for him, and went forward out of the bush into gray dawn. At the head of a wide valley, sweeping round and down into open country with the generous curves of a great river, was the gray armor. With not a plane in the sky it could not yet have been discovered. Fifth Combat Group reported that the enemy had no posts up on the divide. No reason why they should. There was nothing for them to see. Fifth Division could not move parallel to the forest against the lie of the land, and the detachment at Ventas was amply sufficient to give warning of any patrol working up the line of the Breakfast Tram.
Complete surprise was just possible. The shattering roar of the Armored Brigade could certainly be heard once it was round the first curve of the valley, with six or seven minutes still to go before it hit the left flank of Fourth Division. But heavy gunfire — probably the Division’s gun-howitzers in their first action — was fairly close. If, added to that, there were plenty of transport on the move, the enemy might not have more than five minutes in which to wonder what on earth was happening.
They were off. Miro, watching from an open turret, followed close behind the ostrich plumes of thundering dust. As they swept out of the mouth of the valley the sight was unbelievable. Fourth Divi
sion, out of range of Chaves’s guns, was bivouacked in the open, beginning to be busy with the cookhouses and latrines and morning parades, refueling transport, maintaining vehicles, and in all likelihood — though nothing could be heard — roaring their engines with the heartiness of any Guayanas driver greeting the dawn. It was plain that Jesús-María was holding the Division’s infantry in reserve, or never intended to use it at all.
After their first terrorizing bursts of fire, the squadron had little need to waste ammunition at all. Where the enemy bunched in panic they killed with their tracks. Where the enemy ran, they let them run. Miro at first was conventionally shocked by this utter humiliation of military dignity, though he had planned it and foreseen it. But he could not call it cowardice. No troops on earth, without even a full sun to give them courage, would have faced these sudden monsters from the Pacific.
The Armored Brigade hurtled on towards the brilliant red and gold of the eastern sky, now meeting with determined pockets of hopeless resistance but more often with mass surrender. Two troops were away on the right roaring over easy country to Juy, followed by a detachment of Fifth Combat Group in looted vehicles. Miro, Nicuesa and the Brigade wheeled left over the rolling ridges in search of the Divisional Artillery, which as yet could have received no coherent report of the disaster if indeed it had received any at all. He took with him the rest of Fifth Combat Group, to exploit and hold whatever unexpected gifts might be offered. He was ready to change his plans. Instead of a hard-fought breakout across country at the speed of the infantry, it was becoming conceivable that Chaves could launch at least half his force straight down the Cruzada road on wheels.
Speed was irresistible and luck was intoxicated by it. The two leading squadrons swept on to Fourth Division’s Regiment of Medium Artillery, leisurely beginning a dawn bombardment of the Box. One troop had just time to begin to turn to face the tanks. The rest of the gun-howitzers remained in position, their gunners dead or running.
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