‘Not too good,’ Vince whispered in Cal’s ear as they observed the endless attempts of the Spanish NCOs to properly dress the untidy line. ‘I don’t think we’re going to see Trooping the Colour, guv.’
‘It’s a mess, Vince, but have a gander at the bloke in command.’
Cal passed over the binoculars and watched as Vince focused in on the fat sod he had indicated, sat on his charger, huffing and puffing in frustration, his sword twitching as though he was dying to run through one of his own men as an example. Red-faced and with bulbous eyes, he reminded Cal Jardine of the military donkeys he had met too often in the British army, aged majors and colonels full of grub and port, erroneously too sure of their own military genius to be left in charge of a pisspot, never mind a company or regiment.
Their sole function in life, when not making the life of their juniors a misery, seemed set on blocking any chance of promotion for anyone with half an unaddled brain. He had often said that his leaving of the army was due to such idiots and there was some truth in the level of frustration he had felt, but the final straw that had him sending in his papers had been the indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi villages and the killing of women and children under the banner of putting down an Arab insurrection.
He had been part of an army with tanks, trucks and artillery, plus a vast advantage in firepower, facing committed insurgents with rifles, and still they could not prevail, for their enemies had possessed a willingness to die for that in which they believed. The Arabs felt betrayed by a combination of powers, French and British, who had promised them full self-determination when seeking their aid in throwing off their Turkish overlords, only to find they had a new oppressor when the Great War guns fell silent.
The excuses to mask what was naked greed were not long in coming. The locals were no good at governance; left alone the area would descend into chaos. In truth, the sandy desert was rich in oil. His had been a lone voice in the mess when it came to condemnation of both the enforcement of the League of Nations mandate, something to which the unrepresented Arabs had not been allowed to object, and of the methods of control, most tellingly the bombing — to most of his fellow soldiers, officers and other ranks, airmen included, it had been the proper way to make war on folk they saw as lesser mortals.
The overweight bugger Vince was examining had, no doubt, exactly the same attitude: the men and women opposing him were scum; he was an officer, a gentleman and he had a God-given right to both his position and the blood he was sure he was about to spill. Maybe if he had had good troops under him he might have succeeded; he did not, he had command of what was now, clearly, a uniformed rabble.
‘They’re getting ready to move,’ Vince said, passing the binoculars back.
‘At least set up your machine guns,’ Cal spat, exasperated.
‘You sound as if you want them to win.’
‘You know me, Vince, I’m all heart.’
As in all fights, the people who did battle on the side of the Republican government only saw the action before their eyes, and for what happened elsewhere that Sunday a severe filter to boasting was required to sort fact from fiction, yet the nature of this fight seemed to have been replicated throughout. Released from any other care, the workers of Barcelona, both sexes, in their hundreds outside the Parque Barracks, in their thousands throughout the city, inflicted total defeat on the army over a long and sultry day of continuous combat.
Every military column was halted and very often quickly thrown back. Others were forced to seek shelter themselves by throwing up hasty barricades or retreating into buildings in which they became besieged. On the ground, it was the sheer fury of the counter-attacks; from the rooftops the riflemen could pick their targets early and thin the advancing units, while others rained down on them home-made bombs that caused numerous casualties as they pressed forward.
In the plaza below the Olympians, once the soldiers eventually began a slow advance, they marched into a maelstrom. Having driven off the initial assault, their officers no doubt thought progress would be easy. They had no idea of the numbers they now faced or the arms they possessed and, having made no attempt to find out, they, as well as the men they led, paid a prohibitive price.
Vince had the discus thrower from the Olympiad hurling the dynamite sticks on which he had trimmed and lit the fuses, causing more confusion than casualties given the distance from landing to flesh, but once the massed workers had debouched from the various side streets, they had to desist, for they risked killing their own, now a dense and screaming mass hurling themselves forward.
The infantry were first checked by that, then driven into a disordered retreat, many throwing down their weapons — those, and this was risible in the midst of a bloody battle, to be embraced by folk who had been intent on killing them a few seconds before, while another comrade snatched up their weapon and turned it on their fellows.
No such leniency was afforded the Falange blueshirts, exposed by the break-up of the rankers who had shielded them. It had to be admitted they sought no mercy, fighting with as much fervour as those they faced, killing many, but eventually either forced to retreat or die. The Spanish officers were glad of their horses, which gave them the speed to escape certain slaughter, and if it shamed them to abandon their men, there was little evidence of it.
Those that did stay loyal to their commanders retreated back towards the barrack gate slowly, and in many cases bravely and in reasonable order, downing their opponents as they went, while the more intelligent had secured and withdrawn the carts carrying the machine guns and mortars.
From being dotted with bodies the plaza was now full of the wounded and the slain, while before the barrack gates they lay in a mass, the price of facing bayonets with nothing but naked flesh and empty weapons, as well as the sustained fire of those not willing to surrender, men who knew how to reload on the move.
‘You must come, you are needed elsewhere.’
Florencia, having received the message from a runner, had been required to tug hard at his sleeve to get his attention — with so many weapons being discharged the air was full of noise, but there was another reason he was concentrating; from this vantage point Cal could see that a pair of machine guns were being set up on the walls of the barracks on either side of the gates — there had to be a proper parapet there — and they would sweep the plaza and make it a killing zone as deadly as any wartime no man’s land.
‘Vince,’ he shouted, shrugging her off.
Carrying his rifle, Vince was with him in seconds, taking the proffered binoculars, through which it took only a couple more for him to see the problem. Without another word both men set themselves to steady their aim, taking as a target one machine gun each. There was no blasting off, it was one round at a time, with tiny adjustments made for a fresh aim as stone chips began to fly around the gunners, who were just getting ready to fire.
The reaction was immediate; the weapons swung to aim at them, not an easy shot, but given the rate of fire and the range of under a thousand yards, potentially deadly. Vince rolled behind a chimney, Cal had to grab a half-standing Florencia and drag her down as the air cracked with passing shot. Now it was their turn to be splattered with dislodged stone as, crouched down, they quickly reloaded, shouting for others to be ready to join them, waiting for the belt of both machine guns to run through.
A trained man can change an ammunition belt in under half a minute, but that is an eternity if you are faced with accurate and quick rifle fire. If the Spaniards had been sensible they would have employed one machine gun at a time so as not to be caught exposed, but, smarting from the drubbing they had just received, they had run the belts right through and were cack-handed in replacing them, there being a very strong possibility that it was not the usual gunners manning the weapons, indeed a couple seemed to be blueshirts.