We were to fly to Santa Rosa de Copán at the other extreme of the front. As it was taking off the plane trailed as much smoke and flame as a rocket starting for the moon. In the air it screeched and groaned and reeled like a drunk swept along in an autumn gale. It plunged maniacally earthwards and then clambered desperately for altitude. Never level, never in a straight line. The cabin — the plane usually carried freight — contained no seats or benches of any kind. We gripped curved metal handholds to avoid being thrown against the walls. The wind blowing in through the gaping holes was enough to tear our heads off. The two pilots, carefree youngsters, grinned at us the whole time in the cockpit mirror as if they enjoyed some private joke.
‘The main thing,’ Antonio Rodriguez of the Spanish news agency EFE hollered to me over the roar of the propellors and the wind, ‘is for the motors to hold out. Mama mía, let the motors hold out!’
In Santa Rosa de Copán, a sleepy hamlet filled then only with soldiers, a truck carried us through muddy streets to the barracks, which stood in the old Spanish fort, surrounded by a grey wall swollen from the damp. Once inside we heard three wounded prisoners in the courtyard.
‘Talk!’ the interrogating officer was shouting at them. ‘Tell me everything!’
The prisoners mumbled. They were stripped to the waist and weak from loss of blood — the first with a belly wound, the second with one to his shoulder, the third with part of his hand shot away. The one with the belly wound didn’t last long. He groaned, turned as if it were a step in a dance and fell to the ground. The remaining two went silent and looked at their colleague with the flat gaze of landed fish.
An officer led us to the garrison commander, who, pale and tired, did not know what to do with us. He ordered that military shirts be given to us. He ordered his aide to bring coffee. The commander was worried that Salvadoran units might arrive any moment. Santa Rosa lay along the enemy’s main line of attack — that is, along the road that connected the Atlantic and the Pacific. El Salvador, lying on the Pacific, dreamed of conquering Honduras, lying on the Atlantic. In this way little El Salvador would become a two-ocean power. The shortest path from El Salvador to the Atlantic ran right where we were — through Ocotepeque, Santa Rosa de Copán, San Pedro Sula, to Puerto Cortés. Advancing Salvadoran tanks had already penetrated deep into Honduran territory. The Salvadorans were moving to order: push through to the Atlantic, then to Europe and then the world!
Their radio repeated: ‘A little shouting and noise and that’s the end of Honduras.’
Weaker and poorer, Honduras was defending itself fiercely. Through the open barracks window we could see the higher-ranking officers preparing their units for the front. Young conscripts stood in scraggly ranks. They were small dark boys, Indians all, with tense faces, terrified — but ready to fight. The officers said something and pointed at the distant horizon. Afterwards a priest appeared and sprinkled holy water on platoons going out towards death.
In the afternoon we left for the front in an open truck. The first forty kilometres passed without incident. The road led through higher and higher country, among green heights covered with thick tropical bush. Empty clay huts, some of them burnt out, clung to the mountain slopes. In one place we passed the inhabitants of an entire village straggling along the edge of the road, carrying bundles. Later, as we drove past, a crowd of peasants in white shirts and sombreros flourished their machetes and shotguns. Artillery fire could be heard far, far away.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the road. We had reached a triangular clearing in the forest where the casualties had been brought. Some were lying on stretchers, and others right on the grass. A few soldiers and two orderlies moved among them. There was no doctor. Four soldiers were digging a hole nearby. The wounded lay there calmly, patiently, and the most amazing thing was patience, the unimaginable superhuman endurance of pain. No one was crying out, no one was calling for help. The soldiers brought them water and the orderlies applied primitive dressings as well as they could. What I saw there staggered me. One of the orderlies, with a lancet in his hand, was going from one casualty to another and digging the bullets out of them, as if he were paring the core out of an apple. The other orderly poured iodine on the wounds and then pressed on the bandage.
A wounded boy arrived in a truck. A Salvadoran. He had taken a bullet in the knee. He was ordered to lie down on the grass. The boy was barefoot, pale, spattered with blood. The orderly poked around in his knee, looking for the bullet. The boy moaned.
‘Quiet, you poor bastard,’ the orderly said. ‘You’re distracting me.’
He used his fingers to pull out the bullet. Then he poured iodine into the wound and wrapped it in a bandage.
‘Stand up and go to the truck,’ said a soldier from the escort.
The boy picked himself up off the the grass and hobbled to the vehicle. He didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound.
‘Climb in,’ the soldier commanded. We rushed to give the boy a hand, but the soldier waved us away with his rifle. Something was bothering the soldier; he’d been at the front; his nerves were jangly. The boy rested himself on the high tailgate and dragged himself in. His body hit the bed of the truck with a thud. I thought he was finished. But a moment later his grey, naive, quizzical face appeared, waiting humbly for the next stroke of destiny.
‘How about a smoke?’ he asked us in a quiet, hoarse voice. We tossed whatever cigarettes we had into the truck. The vehicle moved off, and the boy was grinning at having enough cigarettes to share with his whole village.
The orderlies were giving glucose intravenously to a dying soldier, who had drawn many interested onlookers. Some were sitting around the stretcher where he was lying, and others were leaning on their rifles. He might have been, say, twenty. He had taken eleven rounds. An older, weaker man hit by those eleven rounds would have been dead long ago. But the bullets had ripped into a young body, strong and powerfully built, and death was meeting resistance. The wounded man lay unconscious, already on the other side of existence, but some remnant of life was putting up a last desperate fight. The soldier was stripped to the waist, and everyone could see his muscles contracting and the sweat beading up on his sallow skin. The tense muscles and streams of sweat showed the ferocity of battle, when life goes against death. Everybody was interested in it because everybody wanted to know how much strength there was in life and how much there was in death. Everybody wanted to see how long life could hold off death and whether a young life that’s still there and doesn’t want to give up would be able to outlast death.
‘Maybe he’ll make it,’ one of the soldiers ventured.
‘No way,’ the orderly replied, holding the bottle of glucose at arm’s length above the casualty.
There was a gloomy silence. The casualty inhaled violently, as if he had just finished a long hard run.
‘Doesn’t anybody know him?’ one of the soldiers asked eventually.
The wounded man’s heart was working at maximum effort; we felt its feverish thumping.
‘Nobody,’ another soldier answered.
A truck was climbing the road, its motor complaining. Four soldiers were digging a hole down in the woods.