“So did I,” someone else growled. “And if we heard about it, you sure as hell know Franco’s boys have.”
Empty trucks, coming from the opposite direction, were becoming increasingly more numerous. And they passed a half dozen mud-colored tanks in a grove of trees. The tanks were covered with branches, in way of camouflage. Their 45-mm guns jutted out horizontally beyond them. The tank crews, gunners and drivers, wore ridged helmets and leather coats and were sitting around smoking, leaning up against tree trunks or sleeping on the ground.
“We’re getting near the front,” Dan Whiteley said. “Those tanks are probably in reserve. French Renaults. The wop Fiats are faster but not as heavily armed or armored. It’s the goddamned German tanks that are the best. Even most of our antitank guns hardly dent them.” He added grudgingly, “The Russians aren’t bad either, but there’s not enough of them. That son of a bitch Stalin sends us just enough to keep us going.”
One of the men on the floor said, “You oughtn’t to talk about Comrade Stalin like that.”
“Fuck off, you stupid Commie.”
They were beginning to hear the rumble of guns up ahead, a rumble that increased geometrically as they progressed. Then heavier explosions. Aircraft bombs?
Half a dozen large four-engined monoplanes flew over them at a considerably greater altitude than the fighters that had zipped over earlier.
Whiteley said, “Topolev TB-three bombers. Ours, again. They’re better than the German three-motor Ju- fifty-two. Are you taking all this in?”
“What?” Tracy said.
“For Christ’s sakes, you think I’m talking to hear myself talk? When I told you those were Renault tanks back there it was so you’d know one when you saw one. You have to know your own equipment as well as the enemy’s. You have to know when to hit the dirt and when you don’t have to.”
The trucks ground to a halt and a shout came from up forward which Tracy didn’t make out.
Dan Whiteley said, “Okay, men, this is it. Everybody pile out.”
Throwing their packs before them, the men vaulted out over the tailboard and grouped to one side of, the road, looking apprehensively in the direction of the explosions.
Dan Whiteley said, “Are any of the rest of you greenies?” He looked at one in particular. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before.”
The soldier, who was gray of face and couldn’t have been more than twenty, said, “Yeah, Sergeant, I came in just yesterday along with Tracy. Sidney Simon.”
Whiteley said to the big Negro, “Jim, you and Harry take him under your wing.”
“Sure thing,” Jim said, and then to Simon, “You stick near to me, white boy.”
It was becoming increasingly lighter. A small group of officers and noncoms were forming up ahead about a hundred yards and to one side of the road. Dan Whiteley trotted up to join them.
Jim said gloomily, staring off in the direction of the artillery fire, “I shoulda stood in Harlem.”
The one Whiteley had called Harry said, “Why didn’t you?”
Jim pretended to be indignant. “What’d’ya mean? I’m here fighting for mother-fucking democracy.”
Dan Whiteley came back in about fifteen minutes, his face drawn. The group of officers had broken up and returned to their units.
Whiteley said, “All right. We’re moving in. Crowd around and I’ll tell you what little I know.”
They gathered around him.
He said, “The rumors we heard in Madrid are right, damn it. We’ve got two army corps here under supreme command of Miaja. We’re with the Fifth Corps under Modesto. The first objective is Brunete, which is about ten kilometers to the south. We’ve got to take it before the damned German Condor Legion can get down here from the north with its heavy artillery. In front of us we’ve got the Falangist Seventy-first Division and about a thousand Moroccans.”
He looked in particular at Tracy and the other new replacement named Simon and said, “If it looks as though you’re going to be captured by Italians, okay. By Spanish, okay. Even by Germans. But if it’s Moroccans, don’t be.”
Tracy Cogswell said, confused, “Well, what can you do?”
Dan Whiteley looked at him. “About fifty percent of them are queer as chicken shit. For a nice boy like you, who looks like he doesn’t have to shave more than about once a week, the message is, don’t be captured by the Moroccans.”
He looked around at the others. “Any questions?”
Jim said, “Yeah. Which way is Madrid? I’m going over the hill.”
Some of the others laughed sourly, even as they took up their packs, shrugged into them, and under Whiteley’s orders formed a ragged double rank. Bud Whiteley and Tracy were side by side, immediately behind Bud’s brother. They began to trudge forward. Behind them, the empty trucks were turning to head to the rear.
Tracy was wounded in combat in the next three days.
As an infantryman, he had only a vague idea of what was going on. It seemed mostly marching, countermarching, digging, hiding. He fired at the enemy and was fired on, usually at quite a distance. He saw Jim and Sidney go down in a burst of machine gun fire. Bud Whiteley lobbed a grenade into the machine gun nest, taking a hit in his own stomach as a result, since he had to expose himself. Two medics hauled him off in a stretcher. Dan Whiteley looked after him anxiously, but Bud only grinned.
It was a mess-up, Dan Whiteley told Cogswell. The battle, fought on the parched Castilian plain during the height of the summer, assumed a chaotic, bloody character. They took Brunete on schedule but then were thrown back when the Falangists brought in fresh elements, tanks and what seemed to be flocks of Heinkel He-51’s of the Condor Legion. They didn’t seem to have the speed and maneuverability of the Russian Chatos and Moscas, but they were all over the sky.
When the front finally stabilized with both sides dug in, the Republicans had gained an area five kilometers deep along a fifteen-mile front. They paid for it. The Abraham Lincoln Battalion and the George Washington Battalion took so many casualties that they had to be merged into one. The George Washington Battalion even lost their commander, Olive Law, a Negro excorporal of the U.S. Army. The British fared worse, and their battalion was reduced to eighty men.
Looking back at it from his present situation, Tracy wondered that he had ever survived the war. There had been some twenty-eight hundred Americans in all in the brigades and about nine-hundred of these were killed and at least an equal number were badly wounded. Bud Whiteley, who had recovered from his belly wound, had fallen on the Ebro only three days before the International Brigades had been pulled out and sent over the border into France. There were only fifty-four on hand to leave. Some of the others had refused to go and remained to fight in Catalonia.
Tracy Cogswell and Dan Whiteley were among the fifty-four. They had both had a bellyful of the Commie conduct of the war. Indebted to the Soviets for its munitions, planes, tanks, and artillery, the Spanish state had fallen under the control of Stalin’s representatives from Moscow. And that had been the kiss of death.
By that time, Tracy and Dan Whiteley were the closest of friends.
Chapter Four
There came a knock at the door. Tracy got up and went over to it.
It was Betty. She smiled and said, “Lunch is on, Tracy.” She couldn’t have looked prettier, he thought.
The academician was already at the table, but Jo Edmonds was nowhere in sight when Betty and Tracy issued forth onto the terrace where meals were usually taken. Evidently, these people spent as much of their time in the sun as they could. The house was so constructed as to allow for that.
Tracy looked about and said, “Where’s Jo?”
Walter Stein said, “Over in Gibraltar looking up a potential member of our organization.”
“Your underground organization, eh?” Tracy took a chair. He was on familiar ground now. “Does the government give you much of a hard time? In my day, some countries tolerated the existence of the movement, but
