Antonio survived these weeks on the Aragón front, but always felt less than heroic. Before the battle was over, along with many others, he fought in the streets of Teruel, engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Until now he had always fired abstractly into the distance but one day he saw his enemy face to face and knew the colour of his eyes.
In that fraction of a second, before the moment of no return, Antonio hesitated.There was a man in front of him, younger than himself, crinkly haired, sharp-boned; they could have been mistaken for cousins. The colour of his shirt was the only clue that told Antonio this man was on the Nationalist side. It was purely a matter of pigment in the dye that instructed him to end this man’s life and if he refrained now, he would probably lose his own.
Antonio discovered that there was nothing more brutalising than to drive a bayonet into another human being, and in this killing he felt part of himself die too. He would never forget the way in which this boy’s look of fear contorted into an expression of pain before petrifying into the gargoyle features of death. It took less than thirty seconds for Antonio to see his victim pass through these stages and to hear the thud of a body landing heavily on the ground in front of him. It was horrifying.
Returning to base that evening, a few men short, Antonio reflected on how arbitrary it all was. For the first time since he had become a fighting man he felt like a pawn on a chessboard. There were lives being sacrificed on the whim of someone most of them would never meet.
The tug of war over Teruel continued until February when the Nationalists took the town back from the Republicans. It had been another campaign with massive waste of life on both sides and little gain. Antonio tried not to see this as a turning point in the conflict, but the one chilling thing it seemed to prove was that Franco’s resources were apparently limitless.
Chapter Thirty
ANTONIO, NOW FEELING very pessimistic, had a few months back in Madrid and was no longer so desperate to join the latest battle against Franco. A new offensive was launched by the Fascists in Aragón with the aim of slicing in half the broad north-south strip of Republican territory on the country’s Mediterranean coast, and by the middle of April 1938, they had successfully made a passageway to the sea, splitting Republican territory into two. Catalonia in the north was now separated from the centre and south.
By mid-summer Francisco had recovered. The unit in which he and Antonio served was once more part of the defence of the city. Until Franco took the capital, the Republicans were determined to fight on.
Everyone now expected Nationalist troops to march north and take Barcelona, where the Republican government had moved in the previous October, but instead of this they turned south towards Valencia.
There were acute shortages of everything for soldiers and civilians alike in both sections of the Republic’s divided territory: not just food and medical supplies, but morale too. There was also a growing sense of panic and fear at the isolation in the separate parts of their territory, and communication between the two areas could only be carried out with difficulty. In the cities, there were still people who had secretly supported the Nationalists since the beginning of the conflict, and these networks of informers added to the sinister threat of unease.
Antonio and Francisco were about to be involved in another battle. It was almost an act of desperation on the part of the Republicans. Their objective was to reunite the two parts of their territory.
‘How do you rate our chances?’ asked Francisco, as he laced up his boots before they went off to this new front on the River Ebro.
‘Why bother to speculate?’ answered Antonio. ‘We’ve got fewer guns and fewer planes, so I’d prefer not to think about it.’
Though he felt pessimistic, they were strong in numbers if not in weapons. A huge Republican army of eighty thousand men had been deployed. Conscription had brought in thousands of boys aged only sixteen as well as middle-aged men. On the night of 24 July, thousands of them crossed the River Ebro from north to south and attacked Nationalist lines.
The surprise nature of the attack gave an initial advantage, but Franco coolly ordered reinforcements. He saw this as his opportunity to annihilate the Republican army.
One of his first actions was to open the dams in the upper reaches of the river in the Pyrenees.This raised the water enough to sweep away the bridges on which the Republican troops were relying in order to receive supplies, and thereafter Franco continued to bomb the bridges, destroying them as regularly as they could be repaired. As well as moving thousands of additional troops into the area, the Nationalists also brought in huge amounts of their air force and for the first few days, the complete absence of defending Republican aircraft allowed German and Italian planes to attack the Republican army.
Temperatures soared to extreme heights in the first month of this engagement, and created an inferno reminiscent of Brunete. The lack of cover was similar too, but the violence was even more intense. For weeks, the Republicans, increasingly dehydrated and starving, were relentlessly bombarded on the ground and from the air. German equipment, particularly aircraft, was limitless and Franco was happy to sacrifice as many of the hundreds of thousands of troops under arms as it took, in order to wipe the Republicans off the face of the earth.
On a blazing afternoon, attempting to find cover in a valley, with the Fascists occupying a ridge above them, Francisco successfully fired on several of the enemy who had proved to be sitting targets.
‘We need to get a lot more of them than that,’ shouted Antonio.
After weeks of anticipating a bullet at any moment, the expectation of it can diminish when it does not come. During those months on the Ebro, Francisco’s sense of immortality grew. Antonio thought it was typically perverse of his friend that, as conditions and prospects had deteriorated, Francisco had become increasingly positive.
‘We’ve come this far,’ he said optimistically. ‘I don’t think anything will get us now.’ Having survived near fatal illness he was not going to be beaten by anything else.
It had not been possible to dig trenches in the solid ground, and their unit had built up a small makeshift fortress from rocks and boulders. They were having an hour of rare respite from enemy shelling and there was welcome shade behind the wall that they had made for themselves. Five of them, leaning almost comfortably, sat smoking.
‘Think of it this way, Antonio. Franco has to get the help of the Germans and Italians,’ Francisco quipped.‘We’re fighting them alone. A bit of Russian support maybe . . .’
‘But look at what’s happening to our numbers, Francisco . . . We’re being systematically wiped out. Swatted like flies.’
‘How do we know for sure?’
‘Maybe you should believe some things you’re told,’said Antonio wearily.
That afternoon, the Granadinos were separated when they were suddenly under attack. From a hill above, the enemy pounded them and for an hour or so shells poured down in a relentless storm.There was nowhere to take cover and the shriek of bullets drowned out any instructions they were given. In occasional moments of silence, cries of agony could be heard.
When Francisco’s end came, he felt no pain. He was quite literally swept away by the force of the shell that landed beside him and there was little left to recognise. Antonio, who was fifty or so metres away at the time, identified what remained of the body. A gold ring worn distinctively on the middle finger of his right hand put any doubt aside. It sickened him to do so, but Antonio carefully removed the ring from the incongruously icy severed hand and replaced the hand by the rest of the body. As he drew a blanket over Francisco, he realised that his eyes were dry. Sometimes grief is too great for tears.
It was now late September and within a fortnight, the battle would be over for Antonio too.
It was getting dark and fighting would soon be over for the day.
‘It’s very quiet out there,’ said a fellow militia. ‘Maybe they’re retreating.’
‘Some chance,’ replied Antonio
, reloading his rifle.
He spotted some movement in a copse above them and raised his weapon. Before he had the chance to fire he felt a sudden, shocking pain in his side. He sank to the ground, slowly, unable to cry out or shout for help, and his comrade thought he had tripped over one of the rocks that littered the hard, treeless terrain they were crossing. Antonio felt light-headed, detached. Was he dead? Why was someone leaning over him, a kindly, muffled voice asking him something he could not understand . . . ?
When he came round, the excruciating agony of it all was more than Antonio could bear. He was delirious with the pain and bit down, hard, on his own arm to suppress the need to scream aloud. Supplies of chloroform were running out in the medical tent and the air was thick with screams.There was little more than brandy to anaesthetise these men, whether it was from shrapnel wounds or amputation that they so desperately needed relief. Days or perhaps weeks later, detached from both time and place, he watched himself being eased on to a stretcher and slotted into a compartment of a train specially adapted for the wounded.
A while later, emerging slowly from this dream state, he found himself in Barcelona which, though under attack, had still not fallen to Franco. The train had trundled north from the Ebro to take the wounded to safety, the red cross on its roof a plea for clemency to the Fascist pilots that prowled the skies.
The process of recovery for Antonio was like the transition from darkness to light. As the weeks went by, the pain gradually decreased, his breathing became deeper, his strength returned; it was like a slow but magnificent dawn. When his eyes remained open for more than a few minutes at a time, he realised that the figures that constantly moved around him were women, not angels.
‘So you’re real,’ he said to the girl who held his wrist to take a pulse. For the first time he could feel the cool pressure of her fingers.
‘Yes, I’m real,’ she replied, smiling down at him. ‘And so are you.’
She had watched the life in this skeletal figure ebb and flow in the past few weeks. It was the same for most of the patients here. It was a matter of luck and the efforts of the nurses, who did their very best as each day more of the dying had arrived to fill the wards to overflowing. The lack of medicine meant that many died unnecessarily.Their malnourished state gave them little resistance to any infection and there were men who had lived through the onslaught of the Ebro, only to be wiped out by gangrene or even typhoid in their hospital beds.
Antonio knew nothing of the previous few months’ events but as he emerged once more into the world, he learned of them.The Battle of the Ebro was over. At the end of November, three months after they should have admitted the complete failure of the entire initiative and retreated, the Republican leadership had finally withdrawn what remained of their army. Massively outnumbered and outmanoeuvred at every stage, they had been too stubborn to admit defeat until thirty thousand of their own men lay dead and more than the same number again had been wounded.
It was rarely quiet in the ward. Apart from the sheer volume of patients, the sound of conflict infiltrated almost continually. It was quieter than the battlefield, but the bombardment was continual and the thundering cracks of anti-aircraft fire punctuated the occasional moment of peace. As Antonio became more conscious of these sounds, he pondered what was to come next. He was walking a little each day now and gaining strength by the hour, and it was nearly time to leave the confines of this ward, which had become his home. If only he could go to his real home to see his mother. He yearned for sight of her, and his father too, but of this there was no question. Nor was there any possibility of rejoining what remained of his militia. He did not have the strength yet.
When the Fascists’ assault on Barcelona intensified, Antonio moved into a hostel. He was with many others just like himself who had been displaced and weakened but who hoped to take up arms again in the future. They were still soldiers.
The New Year crept in. 1939. There was no cause for celebration. A sense of the inevitable permeated the streets. The shops had been stripped of food, fuel had run out and the last desperate calls for resistance echoed around empty streets. Barcelona was fatally wounded and nothing could save her now. On 26 January Fascist troops marched in and occupied the almost deserted city.
Chapter Thirty-one
WHEN BARCELONA FELL, half a million began their journey into exile, all of them weak from months of undernourishment and many recovering from injury.
Antonio found himself in the company of another member of the militia,Victor Alves, a young Basque, who had been conscripted at the age of seventeen. Untrained in the use of a rifle, he had been wounded on his first day on the Ebro; his family had left a few weeks earlier for France and he hoped to be reunited with them.
There were two possible routes into France and the two men had to weigh them up. The first was over the Pyrenees. For Antonio and Victor, recovering from wounds, the craggy terrain would not be the only problem. Snow would impede them every step of the way. Antonio had heard that children were almost waist deep in it in some places, and the elderly and infirm regularly lost their sticks in the deep drifts. Many slipped and stumbled on the ice and the going was painfully slow.
In addition to this, though Antonio and Victor might have had very little to take with them, there were few who had resisted the urge to take some possessions and their discarded chattels buried in the snow created further invisible hazards for those behind them. In the springtime, when the mountain’s white blanket had melted away, there would be a curious trail of bric-a-brac uncovered in the thaw. Useless but sentimental items - a precious perfume bottle or a religious icon - and useful but unsentimental things - a metal cooking pot or a small chair - were scattered along the way.
The alternative to the treacherous mountain route was the coast road, though the danger there was the border control.They agreed that they had no alternative but the latter, and set off, part of a huge column of people making their way north.
Everyone struggled with household items, blankets, bundles of clothes and anything else they had considered essential for their journey to another life. Women on their own with several children had the most difficulties. Antonio often tried to help. He had brought nothing with him but his rifle. He had no other possessions and was used to living in the same clothes for weeks on end. There were many others, though, who had packed as much into a bag as they could fit and now struggled.
‘Let me help you,’ he insisted to one woman, whose own child carried a baby while she fought tearfully with a bag whose handles had snapped under the strain. A third child tripped along next to them, snugly shrouded in several blankets. Between them, Antonio and Victor carried both baby and baggage and soon they were distracting the little boy with a marching song. Antonio thought back to his journey out of Granada with the band of militia when they had sung to boost morale. It had worked then and it worked now.
Even Antonio, who had seen the most appalling sights on the battlefield, was still occasionally shocked by what he saw on the way.Women gave birth while female relatives gathered round them to shield with their skirts the mystical moment of entry into the world.
‘What a dangerous time to be born,’ muttered Antonio as he heard the plaintive cry of a new-born.
It was a two-hundred-kilometre trek, and after a week of walking Antonio finally reached the border at Cerbère. He looked across towards the sea and for a moment felt a flicker of optimism pass through him. The Mediterranean caught the shafts of sunlight that penetrated the heavy February clouds, and in the patches of leaden grey water there were expanses of silvery light. There before them was France, another country. Perhaps they would find a fresh beginning there. In this great exodus, the trail of the ragged and forlorn had to believe in a new start, a promised land. There were some who were indifferent now to their own country, a place where they had neither family nor home nor hope.
Though most in this queue had given up their burdens, soldiers clung on to their rifles. There wa
s nothing else they required. Working on the stiff catches through long nights of boredom, they were now confident that these battered Russian weapons would keep them safe.
‘What’s happening up ahead?’ asked Victor.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Antonio, craning to see over the forest of a thousand mostly behatted heads. ‘Maybe they’ve closed it again.’
It had been rumoured that the French had shut the border for a while. They had been overwhelmed by the numbers. The crush of people was now building up behind, but everyone seemed subdued, no one was impatient. They had come this far and just a few metres in front of them was their destination.
After an hour or so they began to move forward. Antonio could see the border control and heard the unfamiliar sound of French voices. The harsh tone was not what they had expected.
‘Mettez-les ici!’
The words may have meant nothing but the gesticulation and the pile of guns and possessions to one side of the road said everything. The French were making their message clear. Before they left Spain, the weary exiles were expected to leave their arms behind, and many were being forced to dump their possessions too. A few metres ahead of them, Antonio noticed an old man engaged in a furious altercation. That would be a mistake, he thought to himself, to start a fight with the border guard, especially when you were as frail as this old warrior.What ensued was worse.