in matters that do not concern you!’
Lloyd helped Heinz to his feet. He was groaning in pain and covered in blood.
‘You people can’t just march in and start beating people up!’ Lloyd said to the scrawny man. ‘Where’s your authority?’
‘This German is a Trotsky-Fascist spy!’ the man screeched.
Volodya said: ‘Shut up, Ilya.’
Ilya took no notice. ‘He has been photographing documents!’ he said.
‘Where is your evidence?’ Lloyd said calmly.
Ilya clearly did not know or care about the evidence. But Volodya sighed and said: ‘Look in his kitbag.’
Lloyd nodded to Mario Rivera, a corporal. ‘Go and check,’ he said.
Corporal Rivera ran to the boathouse and disappeared inside.
But Lloyd had a dreadful feeling Volodya was telling the truth. He said: ‘Even if you’re right, Ilya, you could use a little courtesy.’
Ilya said: ‘Courtesy? This is a war, not an English tea party.’
‘It might save you from getting into unnecessary fights.’
Ilya said something contemptuous in Russian.
Rivera emerged from the building carrying a small, expensive-looking camera and a sheaf of official papers. He showed them to Lloyd. The top document was yesterday’s general order for deployment of troops ahead of the coming assault. The paper bore a wine stain of familiar shape, and Lloyd realized with a shock that it was his own copy, and must have been purloined from his shed.
He looked at Heinz, who straightened, gave the Fascist salute, and said: ‘
Ilya looked triumphant.
Volodya said: ‘Well, Ilya, you have now ruined the prisoner’s value as a double agent. Another coup for the NKVD. Congratulations.’ And he walked off.
Lloyd went into battle for the first time on Tuesday 24 August.
His side, the elected government, had 80,000 men. The antidemocratic rebels had fewer than half that. The government also had two hundred aircraft against the rebels’ fifteen.
To make the most of this superiority, the government advanced over a wide front, a north–south line sixty miles long, so that the rebels could not concentrate their limited numbers.
It was a good plan – so why, Lloyd asked himself two days later, was it not working?
It had started well enough. On the first day, the government had taken two villages north of Saragossa and two to the south. Lloyd’s group, in the south, had overcome fierce resistance to take a village called Codo. The only failure was the central push, up the river valley, which had stalled at a place called Fuentes de Ebro.
Before the battle, Lloyd had been scared, and he spent the night awake, imagining what was to come, as he sometimes did before a boxing match. But once the fighting started he was too busy to worry. The worst moment was advancing across the barren scrubland, with no cover but stunted bushes, while the defenders fired from inside stone buildings. Even then, what he had felt was not fear but a kind of desperate cunning, zigzagging as he ran, crawling and rolling when the bullets came too near, then getting up and running, bent double, a few more yards. The main problem was shortage of ammunition: they had to make every shot count. They took Codo by force of numbers, and Lloyd, Lenny and Dave ended the day unhurt.
The rebels were tough and brave – but so were the government forces. The foreign brigades were made up of idealistic volunteers who had come to Spain knowing they might have to give their lives. Because of their reputation for courage they were often chosen to spearhead attacks.
The assault began to go wrong on the second day. The northern forces had stayed put, reluctant to advance because of lack of intelligence about rebel defences – a feeble excuse, Lloyd thought. The central group still could not take Fuentes de Ebro, despite being reinforced on the third day, and Lloyd was appalled to hear that they had lost nearly all their tanks to devastating defensive fire. In the south, Lloyd’s group, instead of pushing forward, was directed to make a sideways move, to the riverside village of Quinto. Once again, they had to overcome determined defenders in house-to-house fighting. When the enemy surrendered, Lloyd’s group took a thousand prisoners.
Now Lloyd sat in the evening light outside a church that had been wrecked by artillery fire, surrounded by the smoking ruins of houses and the strangely still bodies of the recently dead. A group of exhausted men gathered around him: Lenny, Dave, Joe Eli, Corporal Rivera, and a Welshman called Muggsy Morgan. There were so many Welshmen in Spain that someone had made up a limerick poking fun at the similarity in their names:
The men were smoking, waiting quietly to see whether there would be any dinner, too weary even to banter with Teresa, who was, remarkably, still with them, as the transport due
