“Not even slightly,” Lemp murmured. “No, not even.” He retreated to his cabin again. Once he got there, he started sketching and making notes. After a few minutes, he shut the curtain that gave him more privacy than anyone else on the boat enjoyed. He didn’t want his men to think he’d gone round the bend.
* * *
A train hauled Alistair Walsh and God only knew how many other English soldiers towards a port on the Atlantic or the western side of the English Channel. He didn’t know exactly where he was going. He did wonder whether the officers who’d dragged him and his comrades away from the line in front of Paris knew where they were sending them.
Inside a cat carrier improvised from a lady’s fancy hatbox, Pussy meowed. “Hush, there,” Walsh said, and fed the cat a bit of bully beef. Pussy loved the stuff, which, to Walsh’s way of thinking, only proved the little beast didn’t have the brains God gave a flatiron or a General Staff colonel.
Rank had its privileges. Had Jock or Alonzo tried to bring a cat along when they got transferred to… somewhere, some officious corporal would have made sure it never got on the train. But a staff sergeant was allowed his little eccentricities.
And Pussy entertained the rest of the smelly, dirty, khaki-clad men shoehorned into the compartment with him. They vied with one another at finding little delicacies for her. And their weary, badly shaved faces softened when they stroked her. She wasn’t a woman, but she was warm and soft-the next best thing, you might say. They laughed when she chased a bit of string over their forest of knees, and hardly swore at all if she slipped and dug claws into a leg to keep from falling.
They didn’t know where they were going, either. Some guessed Russia. More plumped for Norway. “Me, Ah don’t much care,” Jock said. “Put a goddamn Fritz in front of me, and Ah’ll shoot the bugger.” When he came out with that, the rest of the men solemnly nodded. How could you sum things up better?
One fellow kept insisting they wouldn’t see any more Fritzes-they’d done their bit, he insisted, and were going back to Blighty for good. The other soldiers humored him, as they would have humored any harmless maniac. Like them, Walsh would have loved to believe it. Like them, he couldn’t. Once the army got hold of you, it didn’t turn you loose till the war ended-which didn’t look like happening any time soon-or till it used you up.
In Brest (which turned out to be their destination), they filed aboard what was called a troopship. By the way it smelled, it had hauled more cattle, or maybe sheep, than soldiers. Pussy found the symphony of stinks fascinating. Walsh lit a Navy Cut to blunt what it did to his nostrils. On that ship, he would have lit a Gitane, and he thought they smelled like smoldering asphalt.
They made it back to England without meeting a U-boat. He heartily approved of that. They came into port just after sunup, and got served huge helpings of bangers and mash and properly brewed tea. After British army rations, French army rations, and a lot of whatever he could scavenge, he approved of that, too.
“You see?” said the chap who was convinced they were going to be discharged. “They wouldn’t feed us like this if they meant to keep us on.” For the first time, Walsh began to wonder. That did fit in with the way the army mind worked.
Whether it did or not, it turned out not to be true. A captain with a really splendid red mustache stood up on a barrel and addressed the soldiers just returned to their native soil: “Well, lads, we’ll be entraining you soon. Then it’s Scotland, and then another little pleasure cruise.” His wry grin said he knew what the troopship had been like. Maybe he’d been on it, though an officer would have had better accommodations than other ranks. He went on, “After that, it’s Norway. If Adolf thinks we’ll just sit by whilst he gobbles it up, he’d best think again, what?”
“Norway?” That astonished, dismayed bleat came from the luckless private who’d been so sure he would soon be set at liberty.
“Norway,” the captain repeated. “The Norwegians are tough fighters-there just aren’t enough of them to hold back the Fritzes on their own.” His smile suddenly went broad and lickerish. “And the girls there are mighty pretty, and they’ll be mighty glad to see the blokes who’re helping to keep ’em free.”
That might turn out to be true, and it might not. Most likely, it would be part truth, part stretcher. Some Frenchwomen enjoyed spitting in an English soldier’s eye, while others were complaisant as could be.
Lorries growled up to take the troops from the dockside to the train station. Had the Germans sneaked a few bombers across the Channel, they could have worked a fearful slaughter. But everything went off smoothly. No one seemed to give a damn about Pussy. Walsh was probably breaking all kinds of laws by bringing her into the country, but he didn’t care.
The train proved less crowded than the one in France that had hauled him away from the fighting there. Tinned rations were passed out. He sighed. They’d keep him full, which didn’t mean he loved them.
As the train rattled through the north of England, Jock nudged him and asked, “You won’t mind if me and my mates ’op it here, will you, Sergeant?” The Yorkshireman’s grin said he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.
“Oh, right,” Walsh answered. “Desertion in wartime-they’ll pin a medal on you for that, they will.” He glanced over to make sure the private understood exactly what officialdom would do if he and his mates took off. The twinkle in Jock’s eyes showed he did. Walsh gave him a cigarette and fired up one of his own. They smoked in companionable silence.
Scotland. Walsh had expected Edinburgh, but the train pounded on, north and east. “Aberdeen,” guessed someone whose clotted accent said he knew the local geography pretty well. It made sense. Norway was pretty far north, and they wouldn’t be sailing toward the part the Germans had already grabbed. Walsh hoped like blazes they wouldn’t, anyhow.
Aberdeen seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a gray granite city, as if the bones of the countryside were carved into churches and shops and houses and blocks of flats. The North Sea lay beyond. Walsh hadn’t seen it before. It looked colder and generally grimmer than the Channel. Who would have imagined anything could?
More khaki lorries waited at the station as the soldiers got off their trains. Some of the drivers smoked. One or two nipped from flasks unlikely to hold water. A raw wind blew down out of the north. Summer? Gray Aberdeen scoffed at summer. What would Norway be like? Walsh half wished he hadn’t thought to wonder.
He clumped up the gangplank onto a freighter that had seen better days but didn’t reek of livestock, Pussy still in her hatbox. As soon as he found his assigned place, he let her scurry around for a while. The cat had been very good about staying cooped up-she’d slept most of the way north. But she needed to get out while she could.
She rewarded him by dropping a dead mouse on his bunk. Aren’t you proud of me? the green eyes asked. Isn’t it a lovely present? Will you eat it right now or save it for later? Walsh took it by the tail and tossed it in a dustbin. He made much of Pussy afterwards and chucked her under the chin, but he could tell she was disappointed.
A small convoy pulled out of the harbor: troopships escorted by a destroyer and a pair of smaller warships. Frigates? Corvettes? Walsh was no sailor; he didn’t know their right names. He did know he was glad to have them along.
A name began to drift through the freighter. Trondheim. It was somewhere up the Norwegian coast. Just where, Walsh couldn’t have said. How far away from the place were the Germans? Somebody in the convoy probably knew. Walsh hoped so. Nobody admitted anything about it where he could hear, though. He did notice that abandon-ship drills came more often and were more thorough than any he’d seen before. He didn’t take that for a good sign.
Daylight lingered long, and got longer as the ships zigzagged northeast. Walsh didn’t take that for a good sign, either. U-boats and enemy airplanes had most of the clock’s face in which to prowl. A sailor told him the last run in to Trondheim was planned for the brief hours of darkness. He hoped that would be lo
ng enough to shield them from prying eyes. Past hoping, he couldn’t do anything about it but worry.
As twilight neared, an angular biplane with floats under the wings buzzed toward the convoy from the east. The warships opened up on it right away. It flew past them and dropped a small bomb that just missed one of the lumbering freighters. Then it sprayed that troopship with machine-gun bullets and went back the way it had come.
Two more German biplanes attacked the convoy an hour later. Gathering darkness or dumb luck kept them from doing much harm. All the ships made it to Trondheim. As he had before, Walsh filed off the freighter. Pussy meowed inside her makeshift carrier. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. That answered one thing. The Germans weren’t very far away after all.
* * *
Everyone on his side had told Joaquin Delgadillo he would march into Madrid in triumph. Well, here he was, but not the way he’d had in mind. He’d heard the Republicans shot prisoners. That didn’t seem to be true: he was still breathing. Maybe they thought he was too insignificant to be worth a bullet. If they did, he didn’t want to change their minds for them.
He wasn’t even in a proper jail. They housed him and their other prisoners in a barbed-wire enclosure in a park. They gave the captives tents of such surpassing rattiness that he would have thought it a deliberate insult had he not known they used equally ratty ones themselves (so did his side).
They fed him beans and cabbage and occasional chopped-up potatoes. It wasn’t very good, and he always craved more than he got. But he wouldn’t starve on these rations-not soon, anyhow. He’d been hungry often enough-too often-in the field to get excited about this.
Most of the Republican guards were men recovering from wounds. They couldn’t move fast. But they carried submachine guns. If anyone tried to escape, they could send a hell of a lot of bullets after him.
Joaquin wasn’t going anywhere, not right away. He was just glad to say alive after the disastrous raid on the Internationals. He was even more relieved to find himself untortured after being taken prisoner. Little by little, he started to realize not everything his superiors had told him about the Republicans was the gospel truth.
He didn’t do anything about the realization, not yet. For one thing, it was still a newly sprouted seed pushing up through dead leaves and chunks of bark toward the light. For another, he was in no position to do anything about anything. He ate. He slept. He mooched around the camp, taking care not to get too close to the wire. Coming too close-or anything else out of the ordinary-would have made the guards open up on him without warning.
When flights of bombers droned over his foxhole to drop their deadly cargo on Madrid, he’d cheered. How not? Those bombs were falling on the enemy’s heads. Well, so they were. One thing that hadn’t occurred to him before he got captured was that those bombs were also liable to come down on the heads of prisoners of war.
The only spades the Republicans allowed inside the wire perimeter were the ones the captives used to lengthen their latrine trenches and shovel lime into them to fight the stink. The guards counted the spades before they doled them out, and made sure they got them all back every time. Joaquin had no trouble seeing why: they didn’t want the prisoners tunneling under the barbed wire. But it meant the captured Nationalists had nothing but a few mugs and tin mess kits to dig scrapes in which to shelter when the bombers came by.
Joaquin had borne up when Republican planes bombed his positions. He’d always consoled himself by thinking his side had more planes with which to punish the godless foe. And he’d been right. The Nationalists did have more bombers… and they concentrated them against Madrid.
He’d always thought of bombing as a pinpoint business. That wasn’t how Marshal Sanjurjo’s flyers went about it. Madrid belonged to the Republicans. As far as the Nationalists were concerned, they could put their bombs anywhere and still hurt their opponents.
They could-and they did. Maybe they didn’t aim as well as Joaquin thought they could. Or maybe they just didn’t care. With antiaircraft guns shooting at them from the ground, with Republican fighters sometimes tearing into them, the pilots and bombardiers wanted nothing more than to get back to their airstrips in one piece.
Either they didn’t know the camp for their comrades lay right in the middle of the city they were flattening or they didn’t care. Joaquin would have bet on the latter.
You could watch the bombs fall from the planes’ bellies. You could watch them swell as they grew nearer. You could listen to the rising whistle as they clove the air on their way down. You could watch fire and smoke and dust leap up and out as they burst.
You could, yes-if you were stupid enough. You could get smashed or chopped by flying fragments and rubble, too. Artillery fire and those earlier bombings from the Republicans had rammed one lesson into Joaquin: when things started blowing up, you got as low and as flat as you could. Even that might not be enough, but it gave you your best chance.
Most of the prisoners knew as much. They lay down in whatever tiny dips in the ground they could find. Those who had anything to dig with scraped at the hard, dry dirt as fiercely as they could. Some of those who didn’t broke fingernails and tore fingertips in the animal urge to burrow.
Joaquin screamed when bombs went off nearby. That was as much instinct as the prisoners’ frantic scrabbling at the dirt. Odds were the thunderous explosions kept other men from hearing his cries. And odds were his weren’t the only shrieks rising up to the uncaring sky.
Were the guards on the other side of the wire screaming, too? Of course they were. Terror conquered Nationalists and Republicans with equal ease. And if some of the Republicans weren’t calling out to their mothers or to God, Joaquin would have been amazed. You could tear the cassock off a priest or torch a church, but tearing the beliefs you grew up with out of your heart wasn’t so easy.
Then two bombs smashed down inside the perimeter, and Joaquin stopped caring about anything but staying alive longer than the next few seconds. He got picked up and slammed down, as if by a wrestler the size of a building. Blood dribbled from his nose; iron and salt filled his mouth. He spat, praying the blast hadn’t shredded his lungs. Were his ears also bleeding? He wouldn’t have been surprised.
More bombs burst-mercifully, farther away. As if from a long way off, he heard screams full of anguish, not fear. He knew the difference; he’d heard both kinds too often. Whoever was making noises like that wouldn’t keep making them very long-not if God showed even a little kindness, he wouldn’t.
If the bombs had blown a hole in the barbed wire, the camp might empty like a cracked basin. Then again, it might not. The thought flickered through Joaquin and then blew out. He was too stunned to do anything but lie there with his sleeve pressed to his face to try to stanch the flood from his nose. How many others in here would be in much better shape?
The guards wouldn’t, either… That thought also flickered and blew out. To try to escape, Joaquin would have needed more resolution than he owned right this minute. He imagined running this way and that, trying to find a gap in the perimeter. Imagining was easy. Doing wouldn’t be. Even telling his rosary beads took as much as he had in him.
Guards came into the prisoners’ enclosure to take away men who’d been killed or wounded. They didn’t seem to treat the injured Nationalists any worse than stretcher-bearers and medics who fought for Marshal Sanjurjo would have. Seeing that, Joaquin decided the Republicans weren’t just fattening him for the slaughter, so to speak.
He got another surprise a few days later: the International who’d captured him came to see how he was doing. He wouldn’t have known the man by sight, not when the ill-fated raid came off in the middle of the night. But the fellow’s slow, bad Spanish and the timbre of his voice were familiar. “Here I am!” Joaquin called from his side of the wire.
“Bueno.” The International-the American, the Jew, he’d said he was-nodded back. “They treat you all right?”
Joaquin considered. “Not too bad.
Could be worse.” Lord knew that was true. They might have decided to see how many small chunks they could tear off him before he died. He’d feared they would do exactly that. And they still might, if he annoyed them enough.
“Here. Catch.” The International tossed an almost-full pack of Gitanes over the barbed wire. Joaquin grabbed it eagerly. He could smoke some of the harsh cigarettes and trade the rest for… well, for anything you could get here. On this side of the wire, cigarettes were as good as pesetas, maybe better.
“Muchas gracias,” he said. “You didn’t have to do this. You must be a gentleman.”
To his amazement, he saw he’d flustered the fellow from the other side. The Jew was ordinary, or a little homelier than that: short, kind of pudgy, with a big nose and not a whole lot of chin. “I don’t want to be a gentleman,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to be a gentleman. Everybody ought to be equal, si?”
“Then how does anyone decide what needs doing?” Joaquin asked. “Once he does decide, how does he get them to go along?”
“Ah!” The International leaned forward till he almost pricked that formidable nose on the barbed wire’s fangs. “Here’s how…” Like an airplane climbing from a runway, the talk took off from there.
* * *
Mike Carroll eyed Chaim Weinberg in mingled amusement and scorn. “You came here to fight the fucking Fascists, man. You didn’t come here to convert ’em.”
“Bite me,” Chaim answered. “The more of those guys we win over, the better.”
“You know what Mencken said about that kind of shit,” Mike persisted. He quoted with relish: “‘I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.’”
Chaim didn’t want to listen, especially since Mike hardly ever read anything that didn’t follow the Party line. Why now? “Who cares what a reactionary says?”
“He may be a reactionary, but he’s a damn fine writer.” The other American sounded a little defensive, or more than a little.
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