And sleepy Villar might never have seen a train since the beginning of time. A few small boys stared at the Internationals as they slogged up to the yawningly empty depot. None of the other locals seemed to want to show their faces. Chaim would have been angrier had he believed the officers' promises to begin with. He'd been in Spain too long to trust anybody or anything any more.
The train did show up…fourteen hours later, in the middle of the night. The locals had emerged by then, to offer food and drink at inflated prices. The Internationals proposed a different bargain: if they got fed, they wouldn't sack the town. Upon hasty consideration, the people of Villar agreed. "God protect us from our friends," Wladimir said, and Chaim nodded.
When somebody shook him awake, he didn't want to get up. He really didn't want to get on another train. As usual, nobody cared what he wanted. He managed to snag another seat. It was hard and cramped and uncomfortable, but inside of ten minutes he was snoring again.
He dozed till an hour past sunup. Not even artillery bursts around the station as the Internationals disembarked in Madrid got him very excited. It was a big city, and it already looked like hell. The Nationalists had battered it with guns and bombs ever since the war was young.
But the International Brigades were here to do what they'd done before-to help make sure Madrid stayed with the Republic. And, somewhere, Chaim would find a warm place to sleep.
Joaquin Delgadillo didn't know what to make of Major Bernardo Uribe. His new battalion commander was recklessly brave. You had to be, to keep going forward into the shelling the British laid down in their defense of Gibraltar. Uribe hadn't hung back. He'd even won Sergeant Carrasquel's grudging respect-and Carrasquel gave no other kind.
But if the major wasn't a maricon, Joaquin had never seen anybody who was. Uribe smelled of rose water regardless of the hour. He was always shaved smooth as a woman-this among soldiers for whom scruffiness was a mark of pride. And he exaggerated the Castilian lisp into something beyond both effeminacy and self-parody.
If he ever tries rubbing up against me, I'll break my rifle over his head, by God! Delgadillo thought. But Uribe never did. Virile machismo virtually defined the Nationalist cause. Major Uribe cared nothing for machismo-unless it made him hot-but in his own strange way he was worth more to Marshal Sanjurjo than a lot of hard-drinking, hardwenching officers.
"We are going back to Madrid," he told his soldiers, flouncing atop a kitchen table he was using for a podium. "We are. We'll take it away from the Republican beasts once and for all this time. And do you know what I've heard? Have you got any idea, my dears?" He waited expectantly, one hand cupped behind his ear.
"What is it, Senor?" the soldiers chorused, Joaquin loud among them.
"I've heard the International Brigades are back in Madrid. Isn't that jolly?" the major shrilled.
"No, por Dios," Sergeant Carrasquel muttered beside Joaquin. "They may be a bunch of fucking Reds, but they can fight. I ran up against those cocksuckers in '36, and once was plenty, thank you very much."
Up on his rickety platform, Uribe turned the sergeant's argument upside down and inside out: "People say they make good soldiers, and I guess that's true. But they're a pack of filthy, godless Communists. They kill priests and they rape nuns for the fun of it. The sooner we kill every one of them, the sooner we make Spain a clean place to live again."
Some of the Nationalist soldiers cheered. Most of those, Joaquin saw, were men new to the battalion. How much did they know about hard fighting? Sergeant Carrasquel, who knew as much as anybody in the world these days, did some more muttering: "That's all great, but how many of us are those assholes going to kill?"
"Victory will be ours," Major Uribe insisted. "Ours! Spain's! Germany and Italy have other scores to settle. But we-the honest people of Spain, the pious people of Spain-we will give the Red Republic what it deserves.?Muerte a la Republica!?Viva la muerte!"
"?Viva la muerte!" the troops shouted back. Long live death!-the battle cry of the Spanish Foreign Legion-sounded ferocious when they yelled it. In Major Uribe's full-lipped mouth, it seemed more like an endearment.
Uribe, of course, was not speaking for himself alone. He was passing on orders he'd got from the officers above him. If those officers said the battalion was going to Madrid, to Madrid it would go. The only other choice was desertion. And if Marshal Sanjurjo's men caught you after you sneaked away or-ever so much worse-went over to the Republic…They wouldn't waste a cigarette on you before they stood you against the closest wall. They might not even waste a firing squad's worth of bullets on you. Why should they, when they could bash in your skull with a brick or hang you upside down, cut your throat, and bleed you like a stuck pig?
Joaquin didn't want to go over to the Republic. He hated Communists and anarchists and freethinkers, and he had a low opinion of Catalans, too. Even if he hadn't hated all those people when the war started, all the fighting he'd done would have turned his heart to stone against them. And deserting was too risky. A healthy man of military age, without papers to prove he really ought to be a civilian, wouldn't last long.
And so, resignedly, Delgadillo climbed aboard a beat-up train with the rest of the men in the battalion and clattered north from Gibraltar. Sergeant Carrasquel checked the soldiers off one by one as they got on in front of him. Trying to skedaddle with the sergeant's beady black eyes on you was worse than hopeless. If you started thinking about getting out of line, Carrasquel knew it before you did.
Hillsides were starting to turn green. Down in the south, spring came early. The calendar insisted it was still winter. Up on the far side of the Pyrenees-maybe even up in Madrid-it would be. But the warm breezes blowing up from Africa made the southern coast of Spain almost tropical.
"You wait," somebody said. "When we get over the mountains, it'll be raining." Sure as the devil, it was-and a cold, nasty rain at that. Yes, winter still ruled most of Europe.
The closer they got to Madrid, the more Sergeant Carrasquel fidgeted. "Damned Russian planes shot us up last time I was here," he said. "They shot us and bombed us, and not a fucking thing we could do about it but pray."
"Will they do it again?" Joaquin asked. Getting attacked from the air was even more terrifying than moving up under artillery fire. He thought so while no one was shelling him, anyhow.
Sergeant Carrasquel only shrugged and lit a Canaria. Like everything else, the local brand wasn't what it had been before the war. He blew out a stream of smoke before answering, "I'm sure God knows, amigo, but He hasn't told me yet. When He does, I promise I'll pass it along."
Ears burning, Joaquin shut up. The train rattled along. One good thing about the rain: those gray clouds scudding along overhead meant enemy aircraft couldn't get off the ground no matter how much their pilots might want to. They also meant Marshal Sanjurjo's planes couldn't fly, but that didn't worry Joaquin so much.
The train came in after dark, so it got closer to the city-closer to the Promised Land, so to speak-than he'd thought it could. Rain still pattered down, but it wasn't the only reason he couldn't see the great city he'd come to take. Both sides observed a stringent blackout. If anyone showed a light, someone else would fire at it.
Even in the absence of light, the Republicans' artillery lobbed a few shells at the train. Somebody asked Carrasquel how they could know where it was. He gave the poor naive fellow the horse laugh. "Did your mamacita tell you where babies come from?" he jeered. "They've got spies, same as we do. Sometimes I think every fourth guy in Spain is a spy for one side or the other-or maybe both."