by John Wilson
What a strange man Hugh is.
I wonder if Horst will be tended to by the nurse I met in Barcelona.
JULY 20
I have a hat. A beret actually. There is very little regulation-issue headgear, so everyone wears whatever they have or can scrounge. Had I known this, I would have picked something up in Barcelona.
Anyway, I have been talking to Marcel the Frenchman we traveled with. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he assumes that because Bob and I are from Canada, we can speak fluent French. In reality, I think he simply wants to practice his English because he has a bunch of distant relatives in New Brunswick and wants to go there one day.
Marcel owns a beret that he claims was once the property of the writer Ernest Hemingway when he lived in Paris. I doubt that is true, although the beret looks old and worn enough, and Marcel does say that he is planning on writing a book about his experiences in Spain. He puts me to shame by writing voluminous notes in a large red notebook at every opportunity.
This morning, Marcel acquired a wide-brimmed canvas hat from a local farmer in exchange for a bottle of cheap brandy he had brought from Barcelona. The hat is in no better condition than the beret, but the brim helps keep the blistering sun off. I had admired Marcel’s beret, and since I didn’t have a hat of any sort, he offered it to me. It is only a loan and Marcel insisted that I promise to return it after the battle.
I pinned my badge on it and wore it proudly all day. Bob says I look like a Parisian gangster and Hugh commented that a steel helmet would be more use, but I am happy.
JULY 21
Just a quick scrawl to say we have our orders. We move out tonight for the Ebro. It’s not long now. I’m so excited I can barely hold this pen still. This is what I came for. I wish I’d written more before. I don’t know when I’ll get another chance to write.
JULY 22
In a barn, somewhere. We march at night and hide from the Fascist planes during the day. Thankfully, there are few planes about, otherwise they could not fail to notice that something is afoot. Men stream along every road and track, and trucks rumble back and forth incessantly. It’s tiring, but all our spirits are high. I haven’t seen any tanks yet, but then, I suppose they are being kept hidden until the attack.
JULY 23
Still in the barn. It’s boring and hot. When will we move forward?
Christopher sang us a song this evening. Apparently it was written by a Brit at a place outside Madrid called Jarama. It’s sung to the tune of “Red River Valley,” but the words disturbed me. They are not about glory and what we are fighting for but about a bunch of bored soldiers thinking they have been forgotten. I persuaded Christopher to tell me the words.
There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama,
That’s a place that we all know so well.
For ’tis there that we wasted our manhood,
And most of our old age as well.
From this valley they tell us we’re leaving
But don’t hasten to bid us adieu
For e’en though we make our departure
We’ll be back in an hour or two.
Oh, we’re proud of the British Battalion
And the marathon record it’s made
Please do us this one little favor
And take this last word to Brigade:
“You will never be happy with strangers,
They would not understand you as we,
So remember the Jarama Valley
And the old men who wait patiently.”
“It’s not about the war or fighting,” I pointed out.
“My young friend,” Christopher said in his upper-class voice, “soldier’s songs rarely are. If you are in the business of killing and dying, you don’t want to sing about it. Only those not in war make up songs like that. Soldiers sing about home, sweethearts and boredom.”
“It just doesn’t seem very patriotic,” I insisted.
Christopher smiled at me. “How about this then? At Jarama, the British Battalion of six hundred men fought for three days over a place they called ‘Suicide Hill.’ Four hundred of them didn’t make it. Is that patriotic enough for you?”
JULY 24
It is eight o’clock and the sun has just sunk below the lip of the gully we are sheltering in. I will write what I can before the twilight fades. We are not allowed candles. In five hours we attack. The Mac-Paps are in the second wave and will cross the Ebro tomorrow morning. The Catalans will go ahead of us and clear the far bank of the Moorish troops dug in there. We cross between Flix and Asco and head south to Corbera and Gandesa. Tiny says it is about 12 miles to Gandesa. Units south of us will be closer, but we will have an easier time as we will follow a major valley most of the way. Other units will have to fight over a series of ridges. I hope he is right.
Tiny called us together this afternoon to let us know about the attack. He took us to the top of a nearby ridge, no easy task in the heat of the day. From the top, we could see the castle of Flix to the north and Asco to the south. Neither are more than 1 or 2 miles away, but they are in another world. The world across the river, where we must go tomorrow.
Hugh asked what the orders were. Tiny smiled and said that they were simple enough even for Hugh to understand: “Go as fast and as far as possible toward Gandesa.” I expected Hugh to retort with some comment about how were we supposed to win with orders like that, but he kept silent.
No one will sleep tonight. Those of us lucky enough to have rifles clean them obsessively. There is only one rifle for every two men, and Bob got one because he scored better than me on the range. He has promised to shoot the first Moor we see and give me his rifle.
This is it, what we all came for. Everyone sits silent with their own thoughts. No one jokes or fools about. Even Hugh has stopped complaining. Many of the men write letters on scraps of paper. I gave Bob a page from this journal and he wrote a letter to his parents. I have it in my pocket in case anything happens to him. This journal will be my letter. I have asked Bob to give it to the Spanish nurse in Barcelona.
Why did I do that? I barely know her. I suppose it’s because this is such a different world, no one at home could understand. I’m not the same person I was only a few weeks ago when I crossed the mountains. In some ways I’ve grown up. I guess, if I survive the next few days, I’ll grow up even more.
Tomorrow, each of us will carry a pack that must weigh at least 50 pounds. Until the bridges are built, we will have to survive on whatever we can carry with us, scrounge from the locals or steal from the enemy. In addition to my blanket, mess kit and so on, I have several extra clips of ammunition (which will be no use if I have an enemy rifle with a different caliber); a sack of biscuits; a couple of small loaves of bread; three rings of red, spicy, dry chorizo sausage; several oranges; and, oddly, a tin of English corned beef. We all received one of the last items, so I suppose a shipload must have got through the blockade. I wish it had been loaded with rifles.
Water will be a problem, so I have my canteen and two extra leather pouches called botas. They take a bit of practice to use as they are held away from the mouth and the water, or wine, is sprayed in. It was messy to begin with, but I am getting the hang of it.
There is no moon tonight, so it is getting too dark to write much more. I will carry the journal in my tunic pocket and scrawl a few words whenever I get a chance. On to Gandesa!
ELEVEN
Laia and I stood on the highest bit of wall we could scramble up. We could just make out the roofs of Asco, 5 kilometers south. Somewhere on the winding river between here and there, my grandfather, Bob, Tiny, Christopher, Marcel, Hugh, Carl and the other two Americans had crossed to go into battle. The temptation to read on was almost overwhelming, but I had resisted.
“Now we know where to go next,” Laia said.
“Down to Asco and then along the valley to Corbera and Gandesa.”
“Exactly. We shall follow in your grandfather’s footsteps.”
“Are
there buses?” I asked.
“Yes, but I have a better idea.”
“What?”
Laia’s face broke into a mischievous smile. “You’ll find out tomorrow.” She jumped down off the wall and headed back toward town. “Come on,” she shouted back at me, “I’ll buy you a plate of snails.”
“Did you say snails?”
“You’ll love them,” she said with a laugh. “They’re a local delicacy.”
As I trotted after Laia, I thought of something else Grandfather had mentioned in his journal. “Do you think the nurse in Barcelona that he keeps thinking about was Maria?”
Laia stopped and turned to me. “I was wondering that too. Do you think so?”
“It’s possible. I hope he mentions a name soon.”
“Something else I was wondering,” Laia said. “The beret must be the one in the suitcase.” I nodded. “But your grandfather says that it was special to Marcel and it was only on loan. I wonder why he never gave it back.” We walked the rest of the way down the hill in silence.
As it turned out, we didn’t get our snails right away. Our landlady was waiting for us by the guesthouse door. Without giving us a chance to say anything, she grabbed my arm and led us off down the street, babbling something over her shoulder.
“What’s she saying?” I asked Laia, who seemed to find my predicament vastly amusing.
“She told you to come with her.”
“As if I had any choice,” I said.
“There is something she wishes to show you. Something from her childhood.”
I groaned. What was there about her childhood that could possibly interest me? I silently prayed that whatever it was, it didn’t involve hugging and bursting into song.
The old woman hurried us along about three blocks and stopped in front of a black wrought-iron gate. Above the gate was the silhouette of a plane with bombs falling from it. On one side was the word Refugi and on the other Antiaeri. A narrow passage led to a heavy black door in the hillside.
“Is this an air-raid shelter?” I guessed.
“Yes,” Laia replied, and then we were through the gate and at the door.
A man almost as old as our guide appeared from a small room, and he and the old woman spoke rapidly. I caught the woman saying something about Brigadas Internacionales, and the old man stared hard at me. When she had finished, he stepped forward and grasped my hand. “Gracias por su abuelo,” he said as he pumped it up and down.
“He’s thanking you for your grandfather,” Laia said.
“De nada,” I replied, hoping that I’d got the expression for “Don’t mention it” correct.
Obviously feeling that I was her exclusive property and that I had spent enough time with the old man, our landlady hustled me forward. The man produced a huge key, and as he unlocked the door and hauled it open, I was left to marvel at how everyone here seemed intent on thanking me profusely for something I had nothing to do with.
When the door was open, the man pulled a switch beside a large black box on the wall and lights flickered on all along a brick-lined tunnel. The roof was rounded and the tunnel seemed to end in a room carved out of the natural rock. The woman hustled me along.
The room, and other rough corridors leading off it, were lined with modern information boards showing maps, pictures of planes, different types of bombs and ruined buildings. There were also old pictures of the tunnels lined with people—men, women and children—sitting against the walls and staring at the camera with worried expressions. I wanted to look more closely at the pictures and have Laia translate the text for me, but the old woman was talking again and Laia was struggling to keep up.
“She spent many days and nights here when she was a girl,” Laia said. “During the war there was a lot of bombing. You could feel the ground shake and stones fell from the roof.” As Laia was explaining all this, the old woman jumped up and down and waved her arms in the air to simulate the ground moving and things falling down. “It felt like everything was going to collapse on top of you, and if you survived, you didn’t know if you would have a house to go back to. You could hear the bombs fall above.”
The woman was leaping around now, screaming, “Boom! Boom! Boom!”
Obviously unimpressed by my stunned reaction, she dragged me aside to one of the information boards and dramatically pressed a black button. A TV screen sputtered to life with images of black planes, bombs falling and exploding, burning buildings, walls collapsing and bodies, looking like limp dolls, scattered through the rubble in the streets. On the soundtrack, sirens wailed and explosions roared. As suddenly as it had begun, the audiovisual display ended, leaving us standing in overwhelmed silence.
“La guerra,” the woman said quietly.
“The war,” Laia translated, unnecessarily. Even I knew that much.
As if returning to life, the woman plucked at my sleeve and led me to another board. This one was mostly taken up with a picture of people in the tunnel. She peered at the picture and pointed an arthritic finger at a little girl huddled in the middle distance. She wasn’t clearly in focus but looked to be about five or six. She peered nervously out from between two adults, presumably her parents.
“Esa soy yo,” the woman said.
I didn’t need Laia to translate. “That’s you?” I asked.
The woman nodded vigorously. “Tenia cinco años.”
“You were five years old.” The woman grinned broadly to reveal a row of yellowed teeth. She grabbed my hand. I thought I was off on another excursion to her past, but she did the same to Laia. Spouting a long string of Spanish, the old woman forced us to hold hands and shoved us down the corridor toward the daylight. As we emerged, blinking at the brightness, I asked Laia what the woman had said.
Laia gave my hand a squeeze that sent shivers down my spine. “She said the war is over. Go and be young.”
The next morning, I texted DJ. hru bro? up the mntn yet? ig stories 2 tell. hag1. Then I suffered through our landlady’s tearful farewell and promised to come back one day. I followed Laia to find out what method of transport she had in mind. We stopped outside a well-lit storefront. Lined up on the sidewalk outside were several brightly colored scooters.
“Scooters?” I said.
“Yes,” Laia said proudly. “They are cheap to rent, and on them we can go wherever we want, not just where the bus goes.”
“But I don’t have a full license,” I said. “I can’t rent one.”
“Yes, you can,” Laia said, smiling. “If we get small scooters, fifty cc, we only have to be sixteen years old and we do not need licenses. We will not be able to win a race with a Porsche, but we have time.”
Half an hour later, we were puttering through the narrow streets on bright blue scooters. I was a bit wobbly to begin with because of the weight of my backpack, but our machines were really easy to drive—they had electric starters and automatic transmissions—and they were cheap, only about $150 for four days. We made a brief stop to buy some sausage and bread before I followed Laia out of town into the hilly, dry countryside. As the sun rose higher and I watched Laia’s dark hair fly out from under her helmet, I reflected that I had never felt happier. “Thanks, Grandfather,” I murmured.
After we turned inland at Asco, the road was hillier than I had expected and dry. The only things that seemed to grow here were olive trees and grape vines, and they were pretty boring to look at after the first few thousand. I entertained myself wondering if Grandfather had walked over this or that hill.
After 15 kilometers, I ached all over and was getting tired of almost being sucked out into the middle of the road every time a huge truck roared past inches away from me. I was relieved when Laia turned off past a collection of stone buildings, and we came to a stop in front of some sort of memorial.
“This is the Memorial of the Camposines,” she explained. “It is dedicated to the soldiers of both sides in the battle.”
I slid off my scooter and gratefully dropped my backpack to
the ground. Laia did the same but much more gracefully. She took a printed sheet from her pack and looked at it. “This is a memorial in two parts. That part,” she said, indicating a concrete wall lined with colored information boards, “tells the story of ten soldiers who fought around here. They symbolize all who fought here. The other part”—Laia pointed to a set of steps disappearing round the corner—“is not open to the public. It is an”—she frowned in concentration—“an ossario, a place where the bones of the dead are kept.”
“A graveyard,” I suggested.
“Yes,” Laia agreed hesitantly. “Bones are still being found in the hills around, so they are brought here for burial. Soldiers from both sides lie together.”
I took a step toward the information boards, but Laia stopped me. “I have a suggestion. I will read the boards while you read the next pages of the journal. Then you can look around while I read.”
“Sure,” I said. I was happy enough to sit and get on with the journal, but I felt a bit like I was being ordered about. I was getting used to the country and feeling more comfortable traveling. I appreciated everything Laia had done and was doing—I would never have found out half as much without her—but a part of me wanted to have more say in what we did. I’d escaped one big brother; I didn’t want a big sister. Still, now probably wasn’t the time to say anything about it. I retrieved Grandfather’s book from my pack and sat on one of the wooden benches looking out over the wide valley.
JULY 25, SUNSET
