Jacinta almost smiled. “She is spitting back at the Fascists. They think they have given her a sickness, but they have given her a weapon, to turn back on the Fascists.” She added something in Catalan, but I had no trouble with her meaning. Alma had gone to the front.
I was sitting on a gun crate in a trench, the notebook and pencil in my hand part of my ruse. I was posing as a lady correspondent in pursuit of a story and a friend. We were a hundred yards as the crow flies from the line of Fascist redoubts. I had learned that Alma, when she had stopped here, had claimed a sister was working in a brothel in Huesca, a town three miles inside the Fascist lines. She had convinced them to let her pass, so she could find her sister and bring her back.
One of the soldiers fed a dried rosemary branch to the fire in the middle of the trench. Overhead, between the planks supporting the trench, the dark indigo sky was thickening to black. I watched three men climb out of the trench, to go dig for potatoes in no-man’s-land. I waited fifteen more minutes and then told a comrade who was laboring over a cookfire that I was crawling to the next trench, to continue “my story.” She gave me two ovoid objects, a little larger than goose eggs, which turned out to be bombs. She showed me how they had two pins, a stiff one to be removed shortly before the approach of danger and a loose one to be removed seven seconds before detonation. She advised me to crawl all the way.
I shouldered my rucksack, then clambered up the ladder and slithered over the sandbags of the parapet, onto the ground. Even in the dark, I could sense that the valley between me and the Fascist lines was a wasteland: bullet-chipped stones, forlorn weeds, a few dwarfed and withered oaks. I could just make out the flag of the Fascist redoubt. The road to Huesca was off to the right of that, I’d been told. I started crawling.
I had gone only a few yards when I noticed an awful, fecal smell. I was burrowing into soil little cleaner than a latrine. In no-man’s-land, I found my special, private fear, a dread of nightsoil and festerment. There was no reason to be here, I told myself. I could take the train to Toulouse and then down into Fascist Spain. I lay there without motion and actually considered doing this. My fear that Alma was demented got me moving again. She needed me. She’d better need me. I would keep her from staying too long in one place. We would work one village and then another, moving on just before the Fascists realized that we were turning their men into traitors.
I had covered ten more yards, perhaps, when I realized how cold the night was. The chill seemed to be falling from the sky and rising from the ground. I glanced up and saw the stars wink out: clouds. I could see a dry Spanish oak, low and spreading, maybe ten paces from me, but beyond that, I could see nothing. Somewhere in the direction I was tending, a gun fired. I saw the distant greenish bloom of what I presumed was a rifle flash. Then blackness. The memory of the rifle flash was all I had to fix my position on. I stood up. Crawling had been a noisy business anyway. Surely it was only sound I had to worry about now. I took a step, then listened. I could feel the bombs in my jacket pocket, not as a physical presence, but as my personal angel of death.
I had covered another forty yards or so when I heard a low grunt of laughter. I dropped to my face, too terrified at first to even worry if I’d somehow disturbed the bombs. Every muscle in my back spasmed, bunching against the bullet I was sure was on its way. But then I heard the sound of digging and remembered about the expedition to recover what potatoes remained from the prewar crop. In my mind, I could hear the song the men had gone out singing:
Heaven only knew what they’d make of me. They’d probably shoot me for a spy. I scrambled away from them, heading for an outcropping of boulders. In the murky night, the stones looked like a fist, thrust up from the earth.
I decided to stay where I was for the moment. They couldn’t dig potatoes all night. I estimated that I was not more than seventy-five yards from the Fascists. If I continued tending toward the east of where I’d seen the rifle flash, then that should take me to the ridge. From there I might be able to see the lights of Huesca.
Over the next few minutes, the clouds seemed to thin slightly. I could make out a large stand of reeds some thirty yards away. A little stupid from my exertions, I found it too easy to let my mind wander, to imagine that the grasses were sugar cane and that I was on a tropical holiday. It seemed entirely natural that the grasses should be swaying, even though there was not a whisper of wind. The night was as silent as a jewel.
The grasses were dividing, separating. The shadows within merged into a single, many-limbed juggernaut, pointing a forest of spikes at the sky. They were men, I realized, with rifles and bayonets. I buried my face into the soil but found I could not keep my gaze away from them. I almost fainted with relief when I saw that the phalanx was not advancing toward me but to the other side of the outcropping in which I cowered.
But the potato diggers would still be there. Infinitely slowly, I dragged myself to a gap in the stones. I could see the men, still stabbing at the ground with their crude sticks. I wanted to scream but could not make myself do it. I saw the three men at the front of the phalanx lower their rifles, pointing them at the Loyalists. But they did not fire.
Before the men could scream, the juggernaut was upon them. Bayonets sliced across throats. With a strength that could not be human, the enemy swarmed over the men, tearing heads from bodies as if they were snapping wings off a chicken. Not a bullet was wasted, not a sound made. The men gathered themselves into a juggernaut again, into a unitary, martial force, a single spearhead aimed at the Loyalist line.
I lay there, motionless, protesting against my inner voice before I even realized what it was telling me. I’m not a soldier, I pleaded. You have to warn them, it said. I got up and took the bombs out of my pockets. I pulled the stiff pin out of each one, twisting them out as the camarada had shown me. I whirled around, panicked because I could not see the knot of men. Then I did see them near the oak I had noticed earlier. I made myself walk forward. The beast did not look back, but moved forward, relentless as a machine. If I could warn the Loyalists at the right time, I thought, then the Fascists would be in range of their machine gun. But what was a machine gun’s range? I had no idea.
When it seemed that I was two-thirds of the way back up the slope on the Loyalist side, I took out the bombs and held them both in one hand, my fingers aching as they splayed to grasp the weapons. I pulled one pin out and lobbed the bomb at the nest of men. It exploded near the group, provoking an instant burst of machine-gun fire, so immediate it sounded spontaneous. I did not wait to be sprayed as well. I ran back down the hill, barely having the presence of mind to disarm the other bomb.
I didn’t want merely to run, I wanted to take wing, to get to Huesca and Alma and have it all over with. I plunged through squalls of mist that swallowed then disgorged me. The enemy may have been following me, or maybe not. I didn’t care. Death would almost be a mercy, I thought; for then it would be over.
Suddenly I was falling, my feet knocked out from under me. I landed hard on my sternum and realized, after considerable kicking and flailing, that I’d tripped over a wire. Then I saw the parapet of a Fascist redoubt. I leapt to my feet, ready to run as fast as my legs could carry me.