He watched the rays shoot out from his formless, pulsating center continually in movement. The troop carriers, the jeeps, the few armored cars would not be recognizable yet to the enemy as the oldest and most deadly form of attack, the arms of the horn. The cavalry themselves were being enveloped and they did not know it. Envelopment to them meant a line of bodies, not little points appearing on their rear, each one three or four hundred meters from the next. He could see here and there a change of pattern as units turned to clean up the momentary annoyance and to lose touch with the victorious but now uncertain Sixth Division infantry. Instead of co-operating in a well-supported classic attack, the enemy was being forced to accept a puzzle picture of strongpoints fed and connected by elusive gray-green vehicles.
With an hour to go before sunset the Avellanistas realized that the mouth of the pocket was still open and that nothing else offered a sure road back to the llanos. They began to fall back and fight for it. And then at last the barrage from that unsuspected, unharrassed regiment of artillery came down and closed it.
The infantry broke up into stunned and disorganized groups clinging to the ground or waving their shirts in attempts to surrender. On their right flank those of the cavalry who could still reach their horses got away; on the left Avellana’s llaneros, who were not accustomed to separate themselves from their horses and had taken little part in the action beyond wild firing, were hopelessly caught. With the blind instinct of cattle they tried to get out by the one route free of elusive troop carriers and jeeps, straight for Miro’s main position where the troops were wiping off the sweat and thanking God that casualties had been small.
The mob sorted itself out into formations which might or might not correspond to the original squadrons. It was impossible to estimate the number of horsemen in the charge — anything from twelve to fifteen hundred, halved as they reached the incredulous infantry, halved again as they galloped on. It was evident that this thundering mass riding stirrup to stirrup with the low sun glinting on the little points of the lowered lances was so terrifying that firing from the front was wild; but any man with an automatic weapon, not on the direct line of the charge, could do appalling execution.
Reduced now to three or four hundred, the llaneros swept over the troop of Bofors guns, who had only time to cut parallel lanes in them, and reached the cover of the broad belt of scrub and forest along the river. Miro looked at his watch — seven minutes from the time when the mob had cohered and charged. Well, it did at last show a use for cavalry. Assuming that the commander was prepared to lose 80 per cent, the remaining 20 per cent stood a good chance of arriving on the objective. What good they could ever do there was more than doubtful. These last poor devils with the charmed lives would now presumably gallop in column — if there was still a gallop left in their horses — down the causeway for the river. But Basilio Ferrer’s field company commanded the approaches with their light machine-guns well dug in on each side of the bridge. There wasn’t a ghost of a chance of even a single horseman crossing it.
He drove over to the Bofors troop. The gunners, sheltering behind and under their guns, had suffered remarkably little damage. Out in front of the guns were three bodies, trampled and smashed. The farthest out, still just conscious, was that superb and primitive fighting man, Corporal Menendez. As Miro knelt down by his side, the Corporal smiled as if he had seen God. Such worship was always hard to bear. Miro prayed that Pepe Menendez, with both worlds within his vision, was muddling the two of them.
“Why?” he asked the troop sergeant. “Why in front of the guns?”
“They charged him, my General. So he grabbed a Sten gun and charged them.”
The last firing had moved away to the west. With half an ear he listened for the bursts of Basilio’s machine guns putting an end to the llaneros. All was silent in the dark clumps and belts of palms which hid the river and its backwaters. The panic-stricken riders must have suddenly and too sanely halted on the causeway and dispersed on foot into cover to wait for a chance of swimming the river after dark. It was not unlikely, but it seemed somehow unnatural.
The position worried him. He didn’t want a bunch of wild animals, most of them wounded, crawling about at night, sniping at Basilio’s cooking fires and possibly setting off the bridge charges by accident. He took his command vehicle down to the bridge with a Saracen for escort.
He expected at least to hear the ping of a rifle shot against the plating of so tempting a target, but there was no sign at all of the enemy beyond three dead horses a little beyond the point where the survivors of the charge would have ridden on to the causeway. The bridge was empty. Basilio’s men were standing up behind the sandbags of their positions. There seemed to be something wrong with discipline. Too much excitement. Too much gesticulation. He found Basilio sitting like a deserted tramp by the side of the road, and jumped out.
“Where are they?”
“I let them go, my General.”
“You — what?”
“I let them go. What did it matter? I cannot kill any more. Ever since the Escala . . . and Avellana thought I did not care. No, I am not a soldier! You should have seen them. They were harmless. And packed like that on the causeway — it was murder. I ordered the company to let them go.”
Miro said nothing. He was too astonished to be angry. And Basilio’s revelation of himself was true. His melancholy, long-suffering face was not and had never been that of a soldier. What had been so deceptive was the reserve of energy, the extraordinary tireless ability to get the best out of his men — at bottom nothing more than the drive of a highly respected foreman bricklayer in an emergency. What Basilio had done was unthinkable. Yet he had not disobeyed any definite order. He simply had not the instinct to attack an unexpected target. Avellana’s accusation of cruelty only drove home the accusations he had already made against himself. Both were wholly unjustified.
“Didn’t you think where they might go?”
“The road is empty, my General. They can go where they please. They are finished.”
“Basilio, you are now a civilian again,” Miro said, still using the Christian name quite unconsciously, since the whole affair was clean out of the world of reprimands and courts-martial. “Without honor, without dishonor. Here is an order for a staff car. Dress yourself as best you can from the dead llaneros, and get out of the country. You should just have time.”
It was already deep twilight. He took two machine-gun crews from Ferrer’s company on board his command vehicle and crossed the bridge with the escorting Saracen. There was no time to seek a stronger force and anyway it was enough. On the way to the San Vicente road he talked to his Headquarters and found that as usual the chief problem was the rounding-up of prisoners. That task was no longer necessary. He ordered them to be disarmed and dismissed into the emptiness of the llanos. Somewhere they must have a supply base, and they were harmless. Basilio had said that, too. One could only cling to the possibility that he was right.
At the junction with the Hermosillo—San Vicente road he looked anxiously for the tracks of the horses, hoping that they had cantered straight across the road in an instinctive rush for the freedom of the plains or that they had turned north to Hermosillo where the first of the Avellanistas might already have crossed by boat and occupied the town. But they had gone south, riding on the verges of the road. The lack of pursuit, the momentary relaxation, had been too much for the severely wounded, who till then had clung to a comrade or the horse’s mane. He counted seven along their route.
The glare of a burning truck lit up the sky ahead and was then absorbed by the lights of the staging point and the flood-lit Red Cross over the Field Hospital. As they roared towards it Miro had an impression of a dark lane running obliquely from the road through the ambulances and transport.
At the entrance to it he stopped and jumped out, waving away in his bitter foreboding the medical staff who rushed up to him. The flying llaneros, unthinking as their cattle, had charged the camp which
vaguely threatened them, overturning the tents in their path and the dressing stations which had been set up for blood transfusion and urgent medical or surgical treatment. Orderlies, doctors, nurses, wounded of both sides, everyone on their narrow path had been lanced.
Near the center of the lane someone, regardless of the Convention, had resisted. Four of the llaneros lay dead on the ground. Beyond them a lance was stuck into the ground skewering a body much fatter than any of the genial surgeons whom Miro could remember. He walked over to it. The lance was through two bodies, one of them a woman’s.
The sweat burst out all over him. He recognized the red hair spread out and the back of the glossy black head which had dropped in it. With the tears pouring silently down his cheeks he put his foot on Salvador’s back and pulled the lance clear. It was the last service he could do for him.
But when, half embracing it, he had lifted the body, it was clear that his first thought had been wrong. The Luger in Salvador’s hand was empty. The four dead were his. It was possible, knowing Salvador’s character, to reconstruct the scene. When his trigger clicked instead of firing he would never have thrown himself uselessly and dramatically in front of his Agueda. He would have coolly turned and held her close. And the white arm which had been round his neck might have been a last eager response or a convulsive tightening as the lance went home so savagely that the flying horseman could not withdraw it.
CHAPTER XX
[March 15]
IN THE ANIMATION of the terrace of the Ateneo, Henry Pen-ruddock felt a hysteria of vivacity. The members had decided that the crisis was over although they knew very well that it was not. Their illusion that life ran in its accustomed groove was forgivable, for without a confining groove, without the compulsion of a balance of power, it could not run at all. And the balance was plainly evident. Atrocities, revenge, police persecution were not very likely when everyone could imagine the long guns of the Citadel feeling blindly for the sky. They could even go and watch them doing it, those nasty, phallic antennae thrust out towards the city by unseen men from thicknesses of steel and concrete.
The consul’s own attitude to revolution had always reflected his dual allegiance. The contented exile shrugged his massive shoulders and admitted that revolution was effective, normally causing rather less disturbance in the life of a nation than a general election. The solid Englishman, however, could not help feeling quietly superior to these excitable Latins forever tampering with Constitutions, forever unable to allow them time to work.
This time he did not feel superior. The tragedy, the courage and the cruelty had profoundly moved him. Both processions which he had watched during the week were too significant — though he was by no means sure of what — for anyone to disparage them. That neither could possibly have taken place in his own country did not give him his usual satisfaction. Political maturity was all very well, but this blazing vitality was the sign of a civilization on the march to the top.
He had seen a San Vicente absolutely inhibited. It was incredible. Not even a brick thrown. Not even a cheer for Avellana or General Kucera, unless a man had first looked round to see who his neighbors were. The city council watched from behind the velvet-curtained windows of the Ayuntamiento, giving no sign of approval or disapproval. The Palace and the Ministries were as dead as cold stores with no beef going in or out. And meanwhile the rear guard of Fifth Division rumbled along the Alameda and out to the Avenida Gregorio Vidal and on to the Citadel with its guns bouncing at the end of their trails and its grim men in the trucks and troop carriers ignoring the city they could conquer at the lift of a finger, their uniforms dark-stained, much-used, but never ragged.
Kucera himself rode in an open jeep, stiffly for him, looking straight in front of him, acknowledging only the salute of his own military police who were directing the traffic — an unanswerable gesture of contempt for the town. Penruddock wondered if the general had considered for a moment the possibility of assassination from rooftop or archway. At any rate he was right to ignore it. Not even a lunatic would have risked letting loose the smoldering anger of those unbeaten troops. By evening the whole Division was united in the Citadel awaiting the orders of the civil government. That, they said, was how Miro Kucera had put it. One of the ironical courtesies for which he was famous. The civil government had better give orders with which he could agree.
And then two days later the second procession: the entry of Gil Avellana. Youth at the helm and whatever-it-was at the prow. Not that the wildly cheering workers in the streets had been particularly youthful. Many were fathers of families trusting the promise that bread and vegetables would come down to a price they could afford, and those who were not had little bloom of youth left on them. But the cavalcade — it was too gay and too traditional to be called anything else — seemed to have few participants over thirty beyond Avellana himself, generous, handsome in his national costume and riding a black horse. Behind him was that blasted fanatic, Pedro Valdés, at the head of a squadron of Twentieth Cavalry — it was said he couldn’t collect enough of his hard-fighting Sixth Division to make a show. Then came a mob of llaneros dressed for fiesta. They smelled, but represented historical continuity. According to the Ateneo, there weren’t many llaneros available either. The women volunteers followed, marching with decided panache but disapproved by a conventional San Vicente. They were all slung with arms, God help us, though no one had ever heard of a shot fired by them! That solemn and dangerous ass Carrillo led the university. There had been some naughty shouts of: “Where’s his horse?” Morote’s men, carrying the arms with which they had taken San Vicente and handling them extremely dangerously, were the toughest of the lot. The consul liked them — he had to admit it. He supposed it was because they had dignity.
And Juan, His Worship the Alcalde, pacing out from the Ayuntamiento as if all the ancient municipalities of Spain were watching him, and halting the procession to present Gil Avellana with the golden keys of the city! It had been a clever gesture, for Avellana was probably none too pleased at the Capital being administered without reference to him and without any exaggerated declaration of support.
The Alcalde detached himself gracefully from a group of politicians — all the easier since he had no portfolios to hand out — and joined Henry Penruddock at his table.
“I never knew that the Ayuntamiento of San Vicente had a set of golden keys,” said the consul as soon as Juan had been provided with a drink and was momentarily free of interruptions.
“It doesn’t, Enrique. But I fear I shall have to go to the expense of providing some.”
“Where the devil did you get them?”
“Out of a confectioner’s shop. Cardboard gilt. Used for decorating cakes on civic occasions. I weighed them down with a heavy chain and the suggestion of impermanence was entirely lost on Gil. He would have been just as happy if I had offered him an illuminated copy of the Constitution or the works of Karl Marx bound in tooled Ledesma skin. Gil cannot resist a gesture, Enrique — his own or anyone else’s. An excellent quality. Not only does it create the myths so useful to a politician, but it compels him to live up to them.”
“Didn’t I see that girl of yours dressed up as a sergeant?”
“Vita is always somewhat exalted, but capable of selflessness and devotion. Seeing herself, as now she does, in a historical setting . . .”
“You intended it, then?”
“I was aware, Enrique, that when Gil was isolated and despairing in Los Venados he would quite certainly form some embarrassing and unworthy attachment. Deeply respecting Doña Pilar as I do, I did not wish her to be insulted by a rival who was not intolerably lovely and discreet. I must admit I hardly expected to see my Vita giving the step to a platoon of female students. But we live in times of enthusiasm and I am old-fashioned. To lift over the female figure and head four kilos of ammunition seems to me an unromantic beginning. On the other hand, to the youth of today, among whom apparently I must include Gil Avellana, it is possibly a ch
arming and delicate preliminary. But you ask me if it was what I intended. Yes, in the sense that I was playing with possible futures — Vita’s influence on Gil and Agueda’s on Salvador. Then am I guilty, too, of Agueda’s death? Perhaps, Enrique. But only those who are incapable of love complain of the price they must pay for it. She and Salvador will intercede for me.”
The consul’s basket chair creaked as he moved his bulk uneasily. Love — well, it was a strong word. He supposed that he did, within reason. At any rate he felt a jolly affection for most of his friends. But for Juan he felt more than that. Very much more indeed. And Juan, in spite of his Panama-hatted temperament, was half destroyed already and would soon be all destroyed. There was so little he could do to help, privately or officially. He wished to God that a second rescue might be as simple as the first, when he forced his old friend into making money by setting him up in what he insisted on calling patent medicines.
“What’s the latest from the Citadel?” he asked.
“Accept our terms or come and get us.”
“And the terms?”
“They tell me nothing. All I know is that there have been raised voices in Gil Avellana’s Cabinet.”
“I hope Doña Felicia —”
“She is at home, Enrique. We have now only one interest. But I would rather she hated me for years than that this should bring us together. Day by day I watch her beginning to understand what I have known all along to be nearly inevitable.”
“The Army wants his blood, too?”
“The Army especially. His only friend is that kindly old fool.”
Juan nodded towards a table where Don Jesús-María, now restored to his rank of Captain General, was sitting with Captain Paco Salinas. They made an unlikely pair. Henry Penruddock, knowing Jesús-María’s harmless vanities, suggested that the reason was the striking contrast of their uniforms.
Thing to Love Page 34
