By the time winter had settled in, Eve Anders was a heavy-vehicle driver stationed in Madrid. General Franco’s forces were now occupying more than fifty per cent of what had been the Democratic Republic of Spain. They also now had the Canary and most of the Balearic Islands and Spanish Morocco.
One by one, during 1937, foreign governments recognized the occupied territories as a Francoist state.
The League of Nations was at long last forced to recognize that the policy of non-intervention had failed the Republic of Spain, one of its democratically elected members.
Arms now flowed in: from Portugal, Germany and Italy for the invading army; and from the Soviet Union for the Republic.
By the time Eve had been to the Auto-Parc to collect her big truck, the invading armies were surging across the country.
The Nationalists had set up headquarters in Burgos, and it was from there that the conquered part of Spain was governed.
The Vatican had blessed the fascist crusade.
Britain had diplomats and businessmen in Burgos.
The Texas Oil Company was supplying petroleum openly against the policy of non-intervention in the civil war.
Outside the frontiers of Republican Spain, the world was sure that the end was near. The people within the Republic would not accept that.
The Republic’s problem was that there were weevil grubs gnawing at its roots. As General Franco had boasted when asked if four columns were sufficient to take Madrid: ‘It is the fifth column within that will bring victory to the crusade.’
David Hatton sat at the desk of a journalist friend who worked on the Daily Herald, a Labour newspaper. He was looking closely at a series of pictures: a group of young men and women, looking for the most part ill-at-ease, receiving some sort of official send-off. He compared them with a passport photograph of Eve Anders. The friend, Archibald Archer, had provided the pictures from the photo archives of his paper. David had provided the passport photo.
Spreading the photos around again, David Hatton said, ‘Do you believe in the Fates, Archie?’
‘Coincidence and luck are more my line. Is that her?’
‘Yes, without doubt. Look.’ He ran a magnifying glass over the pictures of the group, holding it so that his old school-friend could see.
‘I say, a real looker, Hatton. Not surprising you want to trace her.’
‘Not me, Archie, LOLO wants her. You know LOLO, of course?’
‘Yes, I do, but what, for God’s sake, does it stand for?’
‘Los orejas los ojos. Ears and eyes.’
‘Oh, yes, a very subtle title for an information-gathering set-up.’
‘You’re not supposed to be privy to that information, so button up, Archie.’
The Hattons and Archibald Archer had been boarders at the same public school. It espoused, but did not necessarily adhere to, a gentlemanly code, but Archie was as good a man as they came, and David knew that tit-for-tat was a good way of trading in the information business.
‘Looks as though she’s traced, then. Trouble?’
‘No. Somebody in LOLO wants her credentials checked.’
‘For LOLO?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘And…?’
‘Can’t tell you that. But I did know her once. I first met her quite by chance. I was covering a TUC meeting in Bournemouth, went into a dance-hall for a bit of a break to get away from you lot…’
‘What do you mean “we lot”?’
‘You know what I mean – reporters and journalists as a bunch can only be taken in small doses, and Malou French was there all over me like a bag of fleas.’
‘You have a turn of phrase, Hatton. Ever think of taking up this branch of journalism?’
‘I can produce the equivalent of a novel in a single picture or a few yards of movie film.’
‘Still as modest as ever.’
‘About my work, of course. Anyway, to tell you what I know of her, I had most of what I wanted in the can, so I went for a drive along Bournemouth sea-front and I heard the siren call of a dance-hall. And there she was. Totally beautiful, hardly more than a girl, sitting at a table alone, itching to dance. As I now know, she was used to going dancing alone, but that place really wasn’t the cream. If I hadn’t have asked her to dance, some chancer would have.’
‘Lucky girl, Dave. How long ago was that?’
‘A couple of years, I suppose.’
‘And you recognize this woman as the girl?’
‘Damned sure I do, Archie. I’ve met her since but…’
‘But what?’
David Hatton leaned over and took a cigarette from an open box of a hundred on his friend’s desk. ‘I knew her as Louise, not Eve Anders. She would never tell me her surname, nor where she lived, or anything about herself at all. Honestly, Archie, she was so wonderful I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Twice, until now, she turned up in my life. The second time I couldn’t chance losing touch again so, although she wouldn’t agree to me getting in touch with her – maybe I frightened her off being too eager – I did squeeze out of her a promise that she would telephone me.’
‘And…?’
‘She did, but I didn’t take the call and I didn’t know about it until too late. She left a terribly brief note that eventually got to me at the H + H office. I’ve been trying to find her ever since but it’s difficult these days, Spain takes up most of my time. Yet here she is. And her name is Eve Anders.’
‘Evelyn, do you suppose?’
‘That’s what I am hoping that you will be able to discover. It shouldn’t be difficult for you, Archie. Your archives will show when this medical team went out. All that you need to do is to follow up on where she went, and which unit she is attached to, and where she is now.’
‘And her background, her antecedents, her family, friends, what she was doing before she went out to Spain, etcetera. I know the drill, old man.’
‘Well, yes, everything LOLO asks for. But once you have the first bit of information, the rest will be easy.’
‘I’d have thought you would have wanted to do this one yourself, Hatton.’
‘Can’t be done, Archie. Plane leaves this afternoon. The loyalists are on the offensive for once. Teruel. Know it?’
‘Yeah, read it on the tapes this morning. It’d be a shot in the arm for the Republican army, it’s been too long on the defensive.’
‘I know. I came across my brother recently. You remember Rich?’
‘Of course, the great Hatton Senior by fifteen minutes.’
‘Right. Well, later I got to thinking about his way of opposing the blackshirts, compared with mine… ours. My brother’s way is uncomplicated, he knows who the enemy is and goes out to kill them.’
‘Uncomplicated, except that he’ll never get at the real enemy.’
‘Off your soapbox, Archie. We agreed to differ and I told him that I’ll fight my own way. You’ll do it, Archie?’
‘Leave it to me. You be off and catch your plane.’
‘Good lad.’ David Hatton gave his colleague a friendly slap on the back. ‘Not too long, eh, Archie? It’s going to be worse than ever now I know who she is.’
‘Don’t count your chickens, Hatton, she probably wrote you off the day you didn’t take her telephone call.’
‘I know, I know, and she might not prove to be either Louise or Eve Anders.’
‘Funny thing, Hatton, the name seems familiar.’
David Hatton frowned. ‘In what connection?’
‘I can’t think. Recent, though. Hold on.’ He pressed a button on an internal telephone. ‘Phil, name of Anders ring a bell? Of course. Of course! I knew I’d seen something. Real name? OK, Phil, if you can find it, I’d be grateful. Yes, now. Within a few minutes if you’re able. Bye.’ David Hatton waited expectantly. ‘Well now, Hatton old man. E. V. Anders is some sort of a writer, been sending over a few pieces on Spain. Not the usual stuff but, you know, “A Day in the Life Of” kind of style. Daily Worker published two short pieces, a bit light for them, but good. They were sent on to me suggesting we might consider taking them. Not Herald stuff really. Ah, Phil, that was quick, thanks. Your dad going to sign him up?’
Phil had brought in a couple of sheets of paper.
‘She’s a her, Archie. E.V. stands for Eve, I think. Let’s have the copy back when you’ve done,’ he said and went back to his own desk.
Archie Archer skimmed one of the hand-written sheets, then handed it to David who read it quickly. ‘That’s not half bad, Archie.’
‘Fresh at any rate.’
‘Fresh be damned. E. V. Anders has the makings of a good journalist. Look to your laurels, old man.’
‘On the strength of that piece alone I’d say your LOLO person shouldn’t have any doubts about the loyalty of her protegee. That’s always supposing that your woman and this one are the same.’
‘I’m off, Archie. Do what you can to find out.’
The news coming into London that December indicated that the Popular Front of the Republic, although now united and disciplined, was constantly being undermined by hostility between its own factions – anarchists, communists and socialists – as they jostled for position and power. Persecution and assassination were commonplace. Subversives were, as General Franco had said, his secret army, his fifth column serving fascism within the city of Madrid. The communists, due to their greater discipline and rigid chain of authority, were in the ascendancy that winter.
The offensive strategy was, as David Hatton had told Archie Archer, essential to give the Republic a much needed boost to its morale, but no matter what season had been chosen for the fight to retake the town of Teruel, conditions would still have been bad for both sides. Teruel is situated at an altitude of 915 metres. It has hot, dry summers, and extremely cold winters.
Captain Ken Wilmott, his ears plugged with bits of chewed paper against the constant bombardment, made his way from blasted building to blasted building. Like a bloody ant, he thought, as he recalled the stop-go and zig-zag route an ant takes to reach its goal. One of 40,000 Popular Front ants. Rumour had it that there were less than half that number trying to hold on to the provincial capital. The street-fighting was bitter, fiercer than any Ken Wilmott had ever experienced, and the sub-zero temperatures were even harder to take than the sun. At least in Teruel there was no thirst to drive men mad enough to suck filthy mud; here in Teruel your own breath could freeze on your eyebrows. Here in the streets of Teruel, snow fell fast and thick and lay deep and treacherous.
With his platoon close behind him, using a ruined building for cover, Ken Wilmott waited for the next opportunity to advance another street length. What the hell am I supposed to do? He had gained officer rank by virtue of being next in line when others were killed or injured. If I get out of this, I’m going to get officer training, or give it up. Having tasted leadership, he liked its flavour.
‘I thought this was supposed to be a walk-over,’ a voice called from behind him.
The captain grinned. ‘Still alive aren’t you, Grimble?’
‘Can’t rightly say at the moment, Captain. I think I’ve got brass monkey trouble.’
Somebody else shouted: ‘Stick a glove on it.’
‘What, and have my fingers drop off?’
‘Trust Grimble to make the intelligent choice, you can’t fire a rifle with your prick.’
A voice with an American accent joined in. ‘Can’t you Limeys do anything about your sense of humour?’
‘Nah, Yank, if we wasn’t all idiots we’d be back home putting up the holly and mistletoe.’
‘OK, my lot. Here we go again, “Out in the cold, cold snow-ow-ow…”’
Along with a burst of machine-gun fire came the blast and crump of a bomb or an artillery shell. Ken Wilmott was in no position to know which, for the roof of the burnt-out ruin he and six others had been using as a vantage point fell in on him. Had he not been the leader and already racing to the next bit of cover, he too might have been buried beneath many feet of rubble. As it was, he was blown clear.
Ken lay in the bitter snow for, it seemed to him, a very long time. At last, dazed and chilled to the point of strangeness, he was helped to a first-aid station set up in a shattered school some way back from the fighting. Scavenged wood was alight in an iron stove giving out a fierce heat from its sides. The walking wounded clustered around it, their faces burning, their backs freezing. From time to time they would rotate themselves like meat on a spit and roast the other side.
Ken Wilmott eased off his boots and socks, looked at the toes of his left foot and knew that this was frost-bite. He had already seen dozens of cases. A contingent of Republican troops had been sent directly from fighting in a warmer sector and were still kitted out in summer clothing. As he was trying to pull on a sock, a man, his left hand wrapped in a bloody field dressing, said, ‘I say, old man, like to have a couple of these footie things? My grandmother sends me them. You wear them next to the skin, socks on top.’
‘Thanks, they look all right.’
‘They are, warm as toast. She makes them herself, buys skiver leathers and keeps her men-folk supplied. She recommends them for grouse shoots on the Scottish moors.’ His laugh was strained and a bit unnatural. ‘Grouse shooting. All that damned waste of shot, bloody birds never did any harm. I come from a long line of bird-shooters. The family’s name’s Gore. Gore bloody Gore, rotten to the core.’ His laugh ended in on an hysterical cackle.
Ken Wilmott was intent only on his own state of mind as he pulled on the soft, chamois sock, followed by the two woollen ones. Two of his toes still felt dead, but at least he might not lose any more while he was waiting to get the bad ones seen to. ‘That’s better. Thank your gran when you write to her.’ They touched fingers in lieu of a handshake. ‘Ken Wilmott, acting Captain, Fifteenth Brigade.’
‘Rich Hatton, British Battalion, but God only knows which bit of it. We keep re-forming.’
‘Where were you?’
‘La Granja. Brunete. Belchite. Now Teruel.’
‘It looks as though we’ve been following one another around. Were you at “Mosquito Hill”?’
‘What brigader wasn’t at “Mosquito Hill”? God, the stink! I thought I’d never get it out of my nostrils. If I had the talent I’d paint a huge canvas and call it “Still Life with Maggots”.’
‘I got used to corpses years ago, part of the job before I came to Spain. Worst thing for me on “Mosquito Hill” was the thirst.’ With the care of an old soldier, Ken smoothed out the creases in his socks.
‘Why corpses? Were you a coroner, doctor or something?’
‘No, nothing posh, I’m a time-served undertaker. I never got to be able to ignore that smell, but after the first couple of weeks it never turned my stomach. There were times when we would get a really bad one, a run-away from a mental home died in hiding, you know, that wasn’t too sweet. When I was old enough to do pall-bearing, I could never hear that bit about “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” without it going through my mind that before it ever gets to dust it’s got some pretty foul stages of decomposition to go through first.’
‘First undertaker I’ve ever met. Interesting. Not for me, though. Poacher turned gamekeeper, is that it? Or the other way round.’ He grinned, almost a grimace. ‘Sorry, thought I was about to say something witty about your association with the dead. Not funny. Sorry.’
‘It might be funny when you think about it. What did you do prior to joining the Internationals?’
‘Photographer and film-maker. Factual stuff, not Hollywood.’
‘I know another chap who does that, came across him a couple of times. Last time was when I was having a wound treated in Madrid, this chap was doing some photos for Picture Post. I asked him to send one to my brother. It was the Madrileño women coming back from the front line.’
‘Hatton. David Hatton. That’s who it would be.’
‘You’re right, it was.’
‘I’m his older brother, by fifteen minutes.’
‘You’re twins?’
Richard Hatton frowned. ‘You don’t own a mirror, I suppose, Captain?’
‘Just a bit of polished steel. My stuff’s been blown up so many times, there isn’t much I do have these days. Want to borrow it?’
Richard Hatton studied his reflection for about thirty seconds. ‘Well, and no wonder. Davey and I aren’t identical, but there’s never been any mistaking that we’re twins.’ He handed back the little polished plate and grinned. ‘You married or anything, old son?’
‘No. Just as well when you see.’
‘I’ve got a… she’s… if you’ve got a Spanish girl who… you can’t imagine what they do to dissident women. They keep them around for a while before they execute them.’ He held up his wounded hand. ‘That’s my fucking trigger-finger gone. No more grouse shoots for Hatton Senior.’ Tears were trickling down his face. He swiped them away with the dressing which left a gory smear right across his face. ‘When they execute the women, they rape them first. The Republic’s done for. You know that. I know that. Every man jack of us knows that. Even pregnant women… the Moors… the bloody Moors. You know what they do? They’ll execute white women and rape them after. Every man jack of us knows…’
‘On your feet, Private Hatton. Come on, man. Up! Up!’
Heads turned, but none of the walking wounded huddled around the fire could raise any real curiosity. Richard Hatton stood, his wounded hand held inside his coat. The captain picked up his own and the other’s belongings and led the way outside. Ken had seen this before. It was one of the signs of breaking down. They called it shellshock in the last war: men at the end of their tether, men who had looked over the edge and into the abyss. Often they didn’t try to draw away.
He spoke briskly as he helped the distraught brigader. ‘I can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t report you. Talk like that is treason. Do you want to end up dead by one of our own bullets? We are going to help these people hang on to their bloody country if it kills us.’ It had only taken a minute standing in the blizzard for them to become snow-covered. His feet half-afire, half-numb, made him stumble, but he put a kindly arm around Richard Hatton’s neck. ‘Oh, come on, man, you look fit to drop. You’ve probably lost more blood than you realize. You’re talking such crap. Come on, I’ll see if I can get somebody to take a look at you.’
The captain, hefting all the bags and moving unsteadily on his frozen feet, led the way to where the field-hospital was set up. A nurse, her white apron hanging below an army greatcoat, was just disappearing through a canvas hanging. Ken called after her in his halting Spanish.
She turned, her Red Cross scarf, white against her black skin, sprouted incongruously from beneath a knitted cap. ‘It’s OK, Captain, I speak English real good.’ When she smiled, it seemed to the captain that her large, dark eyes glowed warm enough to unfreeze him.
‘He’s a bit off his rocker,’ Ken explained.
‘An emergency? Yeah, you both look all-in. You want to let me take a look at that hand?’ She threw the blanket she had been carrying around Richard Hatton’s shoulders and then looked briefly at his blood-soaked dressing. ‘OK, what say you come through to… just lean on me and we’ll get one of the doctors. Like to sit and wait there, Captain? I’ll be back in a couple a’ shakes. Don’t put your feet close to the stove.’ Again that same smile of warmth and confidence.
The smell of death hadn’t reached here yet, but the smells that preceded it – ether, carbolic and blood running, dripping and oozing away – pervaded the cold air. Ken Wilmott sat on the bags and wondered about his toes. If they were too far gone, they’d have to come off. If they came off, then he’d be out of the war, though not necessarily, unlike the other bloke whose trigger-finger was probably not there. There was always the field-kitchen. I wouldn’t want to be behind the lines. Better the hole in the ground in Aragon, or the frozen trench he’d just vacated than the cook-house. This was not the first time that his subconscious mind had sneaked in the question: Are you getting addicted to rifles and ammunition?
The nurse came back. ‘Is he one of your men?’
‘No, we just happened to be seated together over there, you know, where the walking wounded are waiting. I just know his name. I think he’s with the Fifteenth Battalion. Is he badly hurt?’
‘He should be OK, depends. Did he say when it happened?’
‘No.’
‘It looks a day or two old to me, could be infected. Dr Vogel is attending to it.’
‘How bad? Will he have to go back home?’
‘Two fingers are already gone, the thumb doesn’t look too good, he’s lost a great deal of blood, but there are supplies of whole blood at the hospital. We’ll get him there as soon as we can. Does some of that stuff belong to him? Guess I’d better get somebody to put it on his stretcher.’
‘Right. Thanks, nurse. I hope he’ll be all right.’
‘At least he has another hand, that isn’t always the case.’ She made another note. ‘Say, what about you, didn’t you say you were over in the waiting-room?’
Ken Wilmott smiled. ‘You mean the one without the roof and no windows?’
She smiled back. ‘The one with the central heating. You waiting for treatment?’
He shrugged. ‘Probably. Not urgent, I think I got frost-bite.’
He noticed that she wore a shiny new ring on her wedding finger. The gold band wavered and went out of focus. He might have guessed, they were always married, the ones who attracted him most. Maria Sanchez – not married, but betrothed, promised. Such a repressive and archaic practice in a country that was living its own revolution, that was giving women freedom. ‘I am promised to Jose. Jose is gone to the front.’ Perhaps he should have behaved with less decency and more passion. He had known hardly any black women; there was Lizzie Naylor who had been in the girls’ part of the school. Frizzy Lizzie. A hundred years ago he had been at school with Frizzy Lizzie Naylor. Queer not ever thinking of Lizzie as being black, just as having all that hair.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Ken Wilmott became unconscious.