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Chapter 2
BARBASTRO, though a long way from the front line, looked bleak and chipped.
Swarms of militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and down the streets, trying
to keep warm. On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous
year and announcing that 'six handsome bulls' would be killed in the arena on
such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked! Where were the
handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in
Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the
best matadors were Fascists.
They sent my company by lorry to Sietamo, then westward to Alcubierre, which
was just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. Sietamo had been fought over three
times before the Anarchists finally took it in October, and parts of it were
smashed to pieces by shell-fire and most of the houses pockmarked by
rifle-bullets. We were 1500 feet above sea-level now. It was beastly cold, with
dense mists that came swirling up from nowhere. Between Sietamo and Alcubierre
the lorry--driver lost his way (this was one of the regular features of the war)
and we were wandering for hours in the mist. It was late at night when we
reached Alcubierre. Somebody shepherded us through morasses of mud into a
mule-stable where we dug ourselves down into the chaff and promptly fell asleep.
Chaff is not bad to sleep in when it is clean, not so good as hay but better
than straw. It was only in the morning light that I discovered that the chaff
was full of breadcrusts, torn newspapers, bones, dead rats, and jagged milk
tins.
We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic
smell of war--in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food.
Alcubierre had never been shelled and was in a better state than most of the
villages immediately behind the line. Yet I believe that even in peacetime you
could not travel in that part of Spain without being struck by the peculiar
squalid misery of the Aragonese villages. They are built like fortresses, a mass
of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling round the church, and even in
spring you see hardly a flower anywhere; the houses have no gardens, only
back-yards where ragged fowls skate over the beds of mule-dung. It was vile
weather, with alternate mist and rain. The narrow earth roads had been churned
into a sea of mud, in places two feet deep, through which the lorries struggled
with racing wheels and the peasants led their clumsy carts which were pulled by
strings of mules, sometimes as many as six in a string, always pulling tandem.
The constant come-and-go of troops had reduced the village to a state of
unspeakable filth. It did not possess and never had possessed such a thing as a
lavatory or a drain of any kind, and there was not a square yard anywhere where
you could tread without watching your step. The church had long been used as a
latrine; so had all the fields for a quarter of a mile round. I never think of
my first two months at war without thinking of wintry stubble fields whose edges
are crusted with dung.
Two days passed and no rifles were issued to us. When you had been to the
Comite de Guerra and inspected the row of holes in the wall--holes made by
rifle-volleys, various Fascists having been executed there--you had seen all
the sights that Alcubierre contained. Up in the front line things were obviously
quiet; very few wounded were coming in. The chief excitement was the arrival of
Fascist deserters, who were brought under guard from the front line. Many of the
troops opposite us on this part of the line were not Fascists at all, merely
wretched conscripts who had been doing their military service at the time when
war broke out and were only too anxious to escape. Occasionally small batches of
them took the risk of slipping across to our lines. No doubt more would have
done so if their relatives had not been in Fascist territory. These deserters
were the first 'real' Fascists I had ever seen. It struck me that they were
indistinguishable from ourselves, except that they wore khaki overalls. They
were always ravenously hungry when they arrived--natural enough after a day or
two of dodging about in no man's land, but it was always triumphantly pointed to
as a proof that the Fascist troops were starving. I watched one of them being
fed in a peasant's house. It was somehow rather a pitiful sight. A tall boy of
twenty, deeply windburnt, with his clothes in rags, crouched over the fire
shovelling a pannikinful of stew into himself at desperate speed; and all the
while his eyes flitted nervously round the ring of militiamen who stood watching
him. I think he still half-believed that we were bloodthirsty 'Reds' and were
going to shoot him as soon as he had finished his meal; the armed man who
guarded him kept stroking his shoulder and making reassuring noises. On one
memorable day fifteen deserters arrived in a single batch. They were led through
the village in triumph with a man riding in front of them on a white horse. I
managed to take a rather blurry photograph which was stolen from me later.
On our third morning in Alcubierre the rifles arrived. A sergeant with a
coarse dark-yellow face was handing them out in the mule-stable. I got a shock
of dismay when I saw the thing they gave me. It was a German Mauser dated 1896--
more than forty years old! It was rusty, the bolt was stiff, the wooden
barrel-guard was split; one glance down the muzzle showed that it was corroded
and past praying for. Most of the rifles were equally bad, some of them even
worse, and no attempt was made to give the best weapons to the men who knew how
to use them. The best rifle of the lot, only ten years old, was given to a half--
witted little beast of fifteen, known to everyone as the maricoon (Nancy-boy).
The sergeant gave us five minutes' 'instruction', which consisted in explaining
how you loaded a rifle and how you took the bolt to pieces. Many of the
militiamen had never had a gun in their hands before, and very few, I imagine,
knew what the sights were for. Cartridges were handed out, fifty to a man, and
then the ranks were formed and we strapped our kits on our backs and set out for
the front line, about three miles away.
The centuria, eighty men and several dogs, wound raggedly up the road. Every
militia column had at least one dog attached to it as a mascot. One wretched
brute that marched with us had had P.O.U.M. branded on it in huge letters and
slunk along as though conscious that there was something wrong with its
appearance. At the head of the column, beside the red flag, Georges Kopp, the
stout Belgian commandante, was riding a black horse; a little way ahead a youth
from the brigand-like militia cavalry pranced to and fro, galloping up every
piece of rising ground and posing himself in picturesque attitudes at the
summit. The splendid horses of the Spanish cavalry had been captured in large
numbers during the revolution and handed over to the militia, who, of course,
were busy riding them to death.
The road wound between yellow infertile fields, untouched since last year's
harvest. Ahead of us was the low sierra that lies between Alcubierre and
Zaragoza. We were getting near the front line now, near the bombs, the
machine-guns, and the mud. In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was quiet
at present, but unlike most of the men about me I was old enough to remember the
Great War, though not old enough to have fought in it. War, to me, meant roaring
projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant mud, lice, hunger,
and cold. It is curious, but I dreaded the cold much more than I dreaded the
enemy. The thought of it had been haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona; I
had even lain awake at nights thinking of the cold in the trenches, the
stand-to's in the grisly dawns, the long hours on sentry-go with a frosted
rifle, the icy mud that would slop over my boot-tops. I admit, too, that I felt
a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You cannot
possibly conceive what a rabble we looked. We straggled along with far less
cohesion than a flock of sheep; before we had gone two miles the rear of the
column was out of sight. And quite half of the so-called men were children--but
I mean literally children, of sixteen years old at the very most. Yet they were
all happy and excited at the prospect of getting to the front at last. As we
neared the line the boys round the red flag in front began to utter shouts of
'Visca P.O.U.M.!' 'Fascistas--maricones!' and so forth--shouts which were meant
to be war-like and menacing, but which, from those childish throats, sounded as
pathetic as the cries of kittens. It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the
Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which
they did not know how to use. I remember wondering what would happen if a
Fascist aeroplane passed our way whether the airman would even bother to dive
down and give us a burst from his machine--gun. Surely even from the air he
could see that we were not real soldiers?
As the road struck into the sierra we branched off to the right and climbed a
narrow mule-track that wound round the mountain-side. The hills in that part of
Spain are of a queer formation, horseshoe-shaped with flattish tops and very
steep sides running down into immense ravines. On the higher slopes nothing
grows except stunted shrubs and heath, with the white bones of the limestone
sticking out everywhere. The front line here was not a continuous line of
trenches, which would have been impossible in such mountainous country; it was
simply a chain of fortified posts, always known as 'positions', perched on each
hill-top. In the distance you could see our 'position' at the crown of the
horseshoe; a ragged barricade of sand-bags, a red flag fluttering, the smoke of
dug-out fires. A little nearer, and you could smell a sickening sweetish stink
that lived in my nostrils for weeks afterwards. Into the cleft immediately
behind the position all the refuse of months had been tipped--a deep festering
bed of breadcrusts, excrement, and rusty tins.
The company we were relieving were getting their kits together. They had been
three months in the line; their uniforms were caked with mud, their boots
falling to pieces, their faces mostly bearded. The captain commanding the
position, Levinski by name, but known to everyone as Benjamin, and by birth a
Polish Jew, but speaking French as his native language, crawled out of his
dug-out and greeted us. He was a short youth of about twenty-five, with stiff
black hair and a pale eager face which at this period of the war was always very
dirty. A few stray bullets were cracking high overhead. The position was a semi--
circular enclosure about fifty yards across, with a parapet that was partly
sand-bags and partly lumps of limestone. There were thirty or forty dug-outs
running into the ground like rat-holes. Williams, myself, and Williams's Spanish
brother-in-law made a swift dive for the nearest unoccupied dug-out that looked
habitable. Somewhere in front an occasional rifle banged, making queer rolling
echoes among the stony hills. We had just dumped our kits and were crawling out
of the dug-out when there was another bang and one of the children of our
company rushed back from the parapet with his face pouring blood. He had fired
his rifle and had somehow managed to blow out the bolt; his scalp was torn to
ribbons by the splinters of the burst cartridge--case. It was our first
casualty, and, characteristically, self--inflicted.
In the afternoon we did our first guard and Benjamin showed us round the
position. In front of the parapet there ran a system of narrow trenches hewn out
of the rock, with extremely primitive loopholes made of piles of limestone.
There were twelve sentries, placed at various points in the trench and behind
the inner parapet. In front of the trench was the barbed wire, and then the
hillside slid down into a seemingly bottomless ravine; opposite were naked
hills, in places mere cliffs of rock, all grey and wintry, with no life
anywhere, not even a bird. I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to
find the Fascist trench.
'Where are the enemy?'
Benjamin waved his hand expansively. 'Over zere.' (Benjamin spoke English--
terrible English.)
'But where?'
According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a
hundred yards away. I could see nothing--seemingly their trenches were very
well concealed. Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin was pointing;
on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away at the
very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag--the
Fascist position. I was indescribably disappointed. We were nowhere near them!
At that range our rifles were completely useless. But at this moment there was a
shout of excitement. Two Fascists, greyish figurines in the distance, were
scrambling up the naked hill-side opposite. Benjamin grabbed the nearest man's
rifle, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Click! A dud cartridge; I thought it a
bad omen.
The new sentries were no sooner in the trench than they began firing a
terrific fusillade at nothing in particular. I could see the Fascists, tiny as
ants, dodging to and fro behind their parapet, and sometimes a black dot which
was a head would pause for a moment, impudently exposed. It was obviously no use
firing. But presently the sentry on my left, leaving his post in the typical
Spanish fashion, sidled up to me and began urging me to fire. I tried to explain
that at that range and with these rifles you could not hit a man except by
accident. But he was only a child, and he kept motioning with his rifle towards
one of the dots, grinning as eagerly as a dog that expects a pebble to be
thrown. Finally I put my sights up to seven hundred and let fly. The dot
disappeared. I hope it went near enough to make him jump. It was the first time
in my life that I had fired a gun at a human being.
Now that I had seen the front I was profoundly disgusted. They called this
war! And we were hardly even in touch with the enemy! I made no attempt to keep
my head below the level of the trench. A little while later, however, a bullet
shot past my ear with a vicious crack and banged into the parados behind. Alas!
I ducked. All my life I had sworn that I would not duck the first time a bullet
passed over me; but the movement appears to be instinctive, and almost everybody
does it at least once.
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