‘Read? You were talking to a newspaper?’
‘I was talking to the organ of my party and they will spread the news.’
‘That will spread a lie.’
Drecker smiled, a cold thin-lipped expression that reminded Cal of a particularly supercilious schoolmaster he had endured, one who never ever accepted he could be in the wrong, then spun on his heel to leave, his words delivered over one shoulder.
‘The cause for which we fight does not need truth, Herr Jardine, what it requires is the right propaganda targeted at the needs of the cause, words that will make the proletariat rise up and fight.’
Complaining to Laporta did not achieve much, he just shrugged and suggested you could expect no less from such a canaille; it was months before Cal Jardine found out that he had done exactly the same as Drecker, phoning in to the anarchist newspapers in Barcelona an account of the column’s progress and the battle for Albatàrrec which made no mention of foreign Olympians, but extolled the furious bravery of his own men and their indifference to losses. Communists were likewise not mentioned.
The column pulled out as the heat went out of the sun in the late afternoon, this time at least aware of both the name and distance to their next stopping point, a village where they found that, unlike previous encounters, their enemy had not stopped to exact a blood price, but had driven straight through without halting. During the night, a motorcycle messenger arrived with a set of maps, querulous because, as Florencia explained, he had not thought he would have to come so far.
Under lantern light Cal studied the maps, seeking to establish the places where between their present position and Saragossa the Falangists could stop to make a stand, none of which, unless they were reinforced, he thought they could hold. Not that he discounted the possibility of meeting stronger opposition – where had the cannon the column now possessed come from?
Speed was the key, giving them no time to settle and build defences, and if they could get to Saragossa and it was lightly held, the city might be taken back by a quick coup. The same map showed why such a recapture was important: Saragossa stood on the Ebro, the largest river in Spain, and it served as an important rail and road communication centre in all directions, especially north and south. It was thus a vital artery for the lateral movement of troops.
It was also a vital connection for the Republic to the north-west of Spain, to the provinces of Cantábrica, the Asturias, as well as the Basque region and Galicia; held, and the corridor extended to the Atlantic Coast, it would also cut off the Carlists of Navarre from the Nationalist centres of Burgos and Valladolid. More importantly, it blocked the road south to Madrid.
The next few days took on the nature of a race, with constant reports sent back to Colonel Villabova naming the places taken and bypassed, with requests that he support the Barcelona column. Finally they arrived before the walls of Saragossa, to find it held by a force strong enough to repulse their first feeble attack; how could it be anything else with nothing but waves of human bodies to throw at the defences and only one piece of artillery?
Worse, there was no sign of any support, and by the time Villabova was persuaded of his error in taking territory instead of towns, it was too late to effect even a siege that stood any chance of success. Worse, the defenders, reinforced, were not content to stay within the confines of the city; they came out to fight and in numbers that drove the Republican forces back until the battle lines sank into a rigidity that lasted weeks, while around the country things went from bad to worse for the Republican cause. Communications, being in touch with the rear areas and news of what was happening elsewhere, turned into a mixed blessing.
The advantage, as it had from the outset, lay with the rebellious generals, the only hope of an immediate collapse the possibility of a divided army command – that the generals would fall out amongst themselves. Such a possibility was dashed when it seemed they had settled on the former army chief of staff, General Francisco Franco, to lead them.
As the man who commanded the colonial forces, as well as, it transpired, the backing of Berlin and Rome, he emerged as the most potent voice in the Nationalist cause and he came to prominence with the Republic in chaos, struggling in the north-west provinces, bogged down in Aragón, with an ineffectual navy lacking in officers so that no blockade could be enforced, and the capital city incapable of defending itself from a determined thrust.
His Army of Africa columns swung up from Seville to attack the old fortress town of Badajoz, taken, but at a high cost in experienced troops. For all the losses of trained men, that capture linked the two halves of the Nationalist forces and cut the Republicans off from their confrères in the west. It also gave Franco the Portuguese border, over which the Nationalists were able to receive support from the openly fascist dictator, António Salazar.
Following the Badajoz assault Franco should have headed straight for Madrid, it was there for the taking, but instead he turned aside to lift a siege of the huge barracks and magazine known as the Alcázar, in the strategic as well as emotionally vital city of Toledo, more to cement his position than for any real strategic gain, thus allowing time for the defences of the capital to be strengthened.
Throughout August and into September other important centres fell to bloody reprisals, the Nationalists using every weapon in the modern armoury, including naval bombardment and massed artillery, to take the cities. But the key to their rapid success lay in what came to them from abroad. German bombers to terrorise civilians and pulverise troop concentrations, and fighters to strafe their fleeing enemies.
For the first time, the names of German pilots crept into news reports, the fiction that the planes supplied by Hitler were being flown by Spaniards the same kind of lie as that propagated by Manfred Drecker; the war in Spain was moving from a purely native fight between two political ideologies to become a cockpit for an international war by proxy.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The arrival of the main body of militias outside Saragossa, nearly three thousand strong and made up of members of the POUM as well as the CNT-FAI, had severely diminished the position of Juan Luis Laporta, who now found himself relegated to being one of a number of leaders instead of in sole control of his men. It did not, however, improve matters in the military sphere.
None of the new arrivals seemed capable of the kind of agreement that would enhance the needs of the Republic, which demanded a rapid advance into the Nationalist heartlands in order to force them to divert their efforts from elsewhere. Comfortably headquartered in an abandoned monastery by the River Ebro, the military hierarchy seemed like the Café de Tranquilidad all over again: endless argument which led to bad compromises, ineffective tactics, and futile mass assaults which burdened the militias with serious casualties.
As before, the need to dig in was scoffed at, which led to an even greater loss when the enemy counter-attacked, the only sector not to suffer the one held by the fully entrenched Olympians, simply because, wisely, the Nationalists, having carried out a thorough recce, came nowhere near it. Yet that secure position had to be abandoned due to the retreat of the main body.
It was obvious that on the Saragossa Front things were going nowhere, so Cal Jardine was not sorry when it came to his attention that time had run out for many of those he led. The young athletes had come to Spain for a period of three weeks – two to train and one to compete – and were now approaching a third month.
As aware as the men who led them of the faults of the Republican leadership, they now found a pressing need to get home to jobs and, in one or two cases, families of their own. Those who elected to stay, twelve in number, would mostly only be returning to the dole queue, but it was obvious that, numerically, they were too small to be useful.