‘And some.’
‘Hello,’ Alverson exclaimed. ‘Here come reinforcements.’
There was no mistaking the provenance of the approaching column, some hundred men in their black uniforms, and with Drecker at their head it was clear here were members of the Fifth Regiment come to strut their stuff.
‘Not to fight?’ Alverson asked, when Cal mentioned that.
‘They have done precious little fighting up till now. Killing yes, but not anybody who has a gun to point at them.’
The jeers from Laporta’s men were quick to arise and they were sustained as the communists marched past them, accompanied by a raft of rude gestures. Surprisingly, they halted and about-turned before falling out, dispersing into the line of buildings that backed on to what was the present front line, part of the university. Only Drecker stayed in sight, lighting up once more.
‘Maybe they are here to fight, Cal – to show the anarchists they are not the only hope.’
‘Possible, I suppose. Let me go and talk to Napoleon over there and see if I can get him to give you an interview.’
In the gathering gloom, Laporta’s men were lighting fires, and as he approached him, Cal was vaguely aware that the communists were forming up again – it had been, as he had guessed, no more than grandstanding. By the time he joined the man he had just nicknamed ‘Napoleon’ they were in the process of marching off back to the city centre.
Burly, still in his battered leather coat and hat, Laporta was playing the part Cal had assigned to him to perfection, hands on hips, spinning round, as though his eyes could encompass a battlefield he had not a chance of seeing properly without attracting sniper fire. Seeing Cal approach, he grinned and spoke in a loud voice.
‘You examined the enemy position?’ Cal nodded; he had done so through a periscope, which only gave a partial impression of what lay before them. ‘In the morning we will take back the San Fernando Bridge.’
‘Juan Luis, they have machine guns on fixed arcs of fire.’ That got a dismissive shrug. No change there, thought Cal. ‘It is what the Allies faced in the Great War and I think you know how many died.’
‘Mr friend, we must show these communists our mettle.’
‘That would make sense if they were showing theirs alongside you.’
It took some effort to get Florencia back to the Florida that night, but Cal insisted, not with foreboding – you cannot think like that – but people would die on the morrow and he wanted her to himself before they faced that. Awoken when it was still dark, it was a silent pair that dressed and made their way to rejoin what was now known as the ‘Laporta Column’.
At least, this time, everyone had a weapon and the whole of Madrid had been resupplied with ammunition. Also, they were fighting over ground that had already seen much action, so there were lots of craters and dead ground. With what was a sort of bomb squad, he sought to lecture them on how to use that: to crawl from hole to hole until they could get close enough to throw their grenades.
The blowing of loud whistles launched the assault, which was not the only thing that made Cal think of the trenches of the Western Front; likewise the passionate yell as the militiamen and women left cover, the bayonets glinting in the sunlight. Then there came the steady rattle of the machine guns and death for some, terror for others.
The bombing team, the dinamiteros, under his guidance, crept out into the no man’s land between the lines, seeking to stay below the raking fire that had obviously decimated their comrades, following Cal as he inched forward from crater to crater, then doing as he suggested, spreading right and left. It was only a hope that his call was heard, but crouched, he pulled the pin from his first grenade and set it flying forward, dropping down immediately as the ground before him spurted up displaced mud.
The explosions acted like a spring to those rifle-bearing fighters who had got stuck in dead ground; they leapt up and charged and paid a high price in getting to the enemy position. Cal was up and running too, pistol out, inside a series of entrenchments and sandbagged barricades, shooting until his gun was empty, then picking up a discarded rifle and working with the bayonet as he had been taught, all those years ago, in basic training.
The anarchists took the first position, only to find that their enemies had fallen back a second and prepared line of defence, and with their superior training they had taken their heavy weapons with them. Certainly they suffered – the position was full of the dead and dying of both sides – and as a victory it was only a partial one, for they were nowhere near the bridge.
It took all day to get the rest of the column forward and to make this one legionnaires’ trench system their own, to get it ready for the next day’s attack, and to also clear the intervening ground of the dead and wounded. For all they had suffered a hundred dead and five times that number with incapacitating wounds, their spirits were high.
As darkness fell, the main body moved back to the start point, where they could eat and sleep, only a strong piquet left behind. They were eating around the relit fires when they heard the sound of boots, and Drecker appeared once more at the head of his company. This time they stopped and shouldered arms, then listened as their commander read to them from the writing of Lenin, no easy task with the accompanying jeers and whistles. After twenty minutes they about-turned and marched off again.
The next three days were nothing short of a disaster, and nothing an exhausted Cal Jardine could say would get Laporta to call off his increasingly costly attacks. Even with wounded fighters returning they were down to a quarter strength and still the bridge eluded them; they were closer – through a periscope you could see the top of the roadway in the centre – they had forced back their enemies, but the cost, even if they were inflicting heavy losses, was disproportionate.
And, at the end of each day’s fighting, Drecker would come up with his company of the Fifth Regiment, have a short parade, maybe harangue his men, smoke a fag, then march off again, and as he did this it was impossible to miss the reaction of Juan Luis’s face; if he knew he was being goaded it made no difference, even if, on a headcount, there were fewer than four hundred effectives left out of his original three thousand.
The Fifth Company had just marched off, to a lower level of jeers than hitherto, in the main ignored through exhaustion. A near dead-on-his feet Cal Jardine was talking to Alverson and Hemingway, telling them the picture so they could report both on the attacks and the bravery being shown, when the rattle of an automatic weapon broke the stillness.
Cal spun round to see Juan Luis Laporta spin sideways. Worse, Florencia was beside him and she seemed to jerk, then shrink to the ground as he set off towards her as fast as he could. The feeling of the bullet hitting him was like a branding, not a pain, and as it turned him he was vaguely aware that just to his left, bullets were raking the ground; he looked to his right just as one of the firers was upset by panic, and found himself looking to the line of buildings. There was someone there, a vague shape that seemed familiar.
A second bullet took his shoulder, dropping him to his knees, and now he was crawling towards an inert Florencia and Laporta on his hands and knees, his head drooping. All around were cries and shouting, with people running in every direction to what seemed like little purpose. He did get to Florencia and he was sure he said her name, but there was no response and he passed out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The antiseptic smell registered first and then, slowly, he opened his eyes. Above his head was a slow circulating ceiling fan and he knew he was in the Barcelona Ritz, yet when he reached out to touch Florencia, not only was she not there but the edge of the bed was too close to his hand. The stains on the ceiling where water had penetrated were wrong, not the sort of thing to be tolerated by the manager of a luxury hotel; but then, it came back to him, there had been fighting.