‘In three days’ time.’
Volodya could see that his father was trying desperately to think of a reason to keep him at home, but finding none. Volodya himself was excited. Spain! He thought of blood-red wine, black-haired girls with strong brown legs, and hot sunshine instead of Moscow snow. It would be dangerous, of course, but he had not joined the army to be safe.
Grigori said: ‘Well, Volodya, what do you think?’
Volodya knew his father wanted him to come up with an objection. The only drawback he could think of was that he would not have time to get to know the stunning Zoya. ‘It is a wonderful opportunity,’ he said. ‘I’m honoured to have been chosen.’
‘Very well,’ said his father.
‘There is one small problem,’ Lemitov said. ‘It has been decided that Army Intelligence will investigate but not actually carry out the arrests. That will be the prerogative of the NKVD.’ His smile was humourless. ‘I’m afraid you will be working with your friend Dvorkin.’
It was amazing, Lloyd Williams thought, how quickly you could come to love a place. He had been in Spain for only ten months, but already his passion for the country was almost as strong as his attachment to Wales. He loved to see a rare flower blooming in the scorched landscape; he enjoyed sleeping in the afternoon; he liked the way there was wine to drink even when there was nothing to eat. He had experienced flavours he had never tasted before: olives, paprika, chorizo, and the fiery spirit they called orujo.
He stood on a rise, staring across a heat-hazed landscape with a map in his hand. There were a few meadows beside a river, and some trees on distant mountainsides, but in between was a barren, featureless desert of dusty soil and rock. ‘Not much cover for our advance,’ he said anxiously.
Beside him, Lenny Griffiths said: ‘It’s going to be a bloody hard battle.’
Lloyd looked at his map. Saragossa straddled the Ebro River about a hundred miles from its Mediterranean end. The town dominated communications in the Aragon region. It was a major crossroads, a rail junction, and the meeting of three rivers. Here the Spanish army confronted the antidemocratic rebels across an arid no-man’s-land.
Some people called the government forces Republicans and the rebels Nationalists, but these were misleading names. Many people on both sides were republicans, in that they did not want to be ruled by a king. And they were all nationalist, in that they loved their country and were willing to die for it. Lloyd thought of them as the government and the rebels.
Right now Saragossa was held by Franco’s rebels, and Lloyd was looking towards the town from a vantage point fifty miles south. ‘Still, if we can take the town, the enemy will be bottled up in the north for another winter,’ he said.
‘If,’ said Lenny.
It was a grim prognosis, Lloyd thought gloomily, when the best he could wish for was that the rebel advance might be halted. But no victory was in sight this year for the government.
All the same, a part of Lloyd was looking forward to the fight. He had been in Spain for ten months, and this would be his first taste of action. Until now he had been an instructor in a base camp. As soon as the Spaniards had discovered that he had been in Britain’s Officer Training Corps, they had sped him through his induction, made him a lieutenant, and put him in charge of new arrivals. He had to drill them until obeying orders became a reflex, march them until their feet stopped bleeding and their blisters turned to calluses, and show them how to strip down and clean what few rifles were available.
But the flood of volunteers had now slowed to a trickle, and the instructors had been moved to fighting battalions.
Lloyd wore a beret, a zipped blouson with his badge of rank roughly hand-sewn to the sleeve, and corduroy breeches. He carried a short Spanish Mauser rifle, firing 7mm ammunition that had presumably been stolen from some Civil Guard arsenal.
Lloyd, Lenny and Dave had been split up for a while, but the three had been reunited in the British battalion of the 15th International Brigade for the coming battle. Lenny now had a black beard and looked a decade older than his seventeen years. He had been made a sergeant, though he had no uniform, just blue dungarees and a striped bandana. He looked more like a pirate than a soldier.
Now Lenny said: ‘Anyway, this attack has nothing to do with bottling up the rebels. It’s political. This region has always been dominated by the anarchists.’
Lloyd had seen anarchism in action during a brief spell in Barcelona. It was a cheerfully fundamentalist form of communism. Officers and men got the same pay. The dining rooms of the grand hotels had been turned into canteens for the workers. Waiters would hand back a tip, explaining amiably that the practice of tipping was demeaning. Posters everywhere condemned prostitution as exploitation of female comrades. There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.
Lenny went on: ‘Now the government has brought Communist troops from the Madrid area and amalgamated us all into the new Army of the East – under overall Communist command, of course.’
This kind of talk made Lloyd despair. The only way to win was for all the left-wing factions to work together, as they had – in the end, at least – at the Battle of Cable Street. But anarchists and Communists had been fighting each other in the streets of Barcelona. He said: ‘Prime Minister Negrin isn’t a Communist.’
‘He might as well be.’
‘He understands that without the support of the Soviet Union we’re finished.’
‘But does that mean we abandon democracy and let the Communists take over?’
