Up ahead and to the left, a brief firefight broke out: rifles and a Tommy gun or two. Chaim trotted toward it. If cleaning up the Fascists and cleaning them out was easier than it had been, he wanted all the more to get in on it. But the shooting had stopped by the time he drew near.
A Republican with one of those Tommy guns led three gloomy Nationalists toward the rear. Their hands stayed high. The Republican grinned at Weinberg. “We’ll reeducate these putos,” he said. “Or I’ll finish them now if they want to run.”
“Bueno,” Chaim answered, and gave a thumbs-up. It wouldn’t be so good for the captured Fascists, though. Republican reeducation camps owed a lot to their models in the USSR. The only thing the Spaniards couldn’t duplicate was Siberian weather. Up in the mountains, they even came within screaming distance of that.
He scurried along a communications trench toward the rear. It wasn’t straight-nobody in his right mind left a long, straight stretch of trench waiting to be raked by small-arms fire or lethal fragments from a shellburst-but it didn’t have enough bends to make him happy. He hoped nobody from the other side would lob any artillery this way. He hadn’t heard the Nationalists’ big guns at all today. He didn’t miss them a bit.
The ground at the far end of the trench was as full of shell holes as a sixteen-year-old’s face was full of pimples. A sixteen-year-old’s face, however, didn’t present the spectacle of a burnt-out truck that had taken a direct hit. It didn’t have bushes growing on it, either, only peach fuzz that was trying to turn into whiskers.
One of the other Abe Lincolns waved to him. Chaim waved back. “Hey, Luis!” he called. Luis was from Madrid. He was a pretty good guy. He’d joined the Americans a couple of years ago now, and had picked up a lot of English.
“We’ve got the fuckers by the short hairs,” he said now. When you learned English from soldiers, that was the kind of English you learned.
“Bet your ass we do,” Chaim said. “Now we twist.” He illustrated with a graphic gesture. Luis laughed. So did Chaim, but only for a moment. Then his face clouded. “I wish like hell Mike woulda lived to see the day.”
“Sí.” Luis nodded. “Señor Carroll, he was a good comrade.”
“The best,” Chaim said. He and Mike had been in Spain together since not long after the civil war broke out. They’d saved each other’s skins more times than anybody could count. Chaim remembered his buddy every time he did anything with his smashed and much-repaired left hand. Sometimes remembering was all you had left. Too goddamn often, in fact.
“Only thing we can do now is pay back the cocksuckers,” Luis said. “Pay them back for what they do to Señor Mike, pay them back for what they do to the whole country. We pay them plenty.”
Through long stretches of the fighting here, neither Republicans nor Nationalists had bothered taking prisoners. Spaniards were in terrible earnest when they fought. They weren’t always good at it, but sincerity and ferocity did duty for skill. Maybe reeducation camps were a mercy by comparison. On the other hand, maybe they weren’t.
Behind the smashed truck were two hastily dug graves. One of them had a cross made from two boards nailed together at right angles. Only a bayoneted rifle thrust into the ground with a helmet on the stock marked the other. That surprised Chaim. They talked about people who were more royal than the king. Well, the Nationalists were more Catholic, or more ostentatiously Catholic, than the Pope.
Before too long, Chaim and the rest of the advancing Republicans got into hill country their artillery had hardly touched. He gave the neat, prosperous-looking farmhouses fishy stares. Anybody could hide in places like that, and you wouldn’t know it till he started shooting at you from a window or something.
Other men saw the problem, too. They solved it with revolutionary directness: they torched farmhouses and barns and even chicken coops. Farmers and their wives and children stared with terrible eyes as smoke and fire rose from their homes.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Chaim asked a Spaniard with a torch. “You’ll make the people hate you.”
“Screw the people in these parts,” the Republican answered, scowling. “They’re all Fascist sympathizers, anyhow. Who do you think they’ve been selling their produce to?”
“But it will all be one country-your country-again pretty soon, I hope,” Chaim said. “Shouldn’t you make peace with somebody who wasn’t actually trying to kill you?”
All he got was a nastier scowl from the other man. “You sound like a counterrevolutionary,” the fellow said suspiciously.
“Oh, fuck you.” Chaim held up his left hand. Wounds and surgical scars made it enough of a twisted horror to widen the Spaniard’s eyes no matter how hard he tried to hold his face straight. Chaim went on, “When you’ve got a souvenir like this, you can bitch about my ideology. Till then, just shut up, you hear?”
In the Republic, everybody said tu to everybody else all the time. The familiar you was egalitarian. Usted, the formal word, signaled class discrimination and pro-Fascist politics. But tu was also the word you used with dogs, with children, with servants, and with people you wanted to insult. Chaim used it here in the last sense. It was all in the tone of voice. He might not have a great handle on Spanish grammar, but insult he could handle.
The Spaniard flushed. He angrily turned away from Chaim. That didn’t stop him from tossing the torch into a pile of hay next to the barn here. The hay began to burn. Before long, so did the barn. If the farmer didn’t like it, what could he do? Count himself lucky the men from the Republic hadn’t shot him and gang-raped his wife.
Or he could find a hatchet, wait in the trees, and kill the next Republican soldier who came by. Chaim wouldn’t have done that, or he didn’t think he would. He came from a long line of people who’d survived pogrom after pogrom without getting their own back … till the Russian Revolution, anyhow. And his folks were in the States by then. Spaniards were different. They took vengeance seriously, and often killed without calculating cost.
He was sure the Spanish Republic was worth fighting for, worth dying for. He never would have come here if he weren’t. Whether it would be worth living in after victory came, that didn’t seem so clear. But he had an advantage over the Spaniards. If he didn’t like it, he could go home. They already were home, and stuck with whatever the Republic dished out to them.
Machine guns chattered. Rifles yelled. Alistair Walsh nerved himself to dash around a stone fence taller than a man. The English had pushed forward a couple of hundred yards, into a Belgian village. By the way things worked these days, that was good progress. Anything could be waiting on the far side of that fence, though. Anything at all.
And anything, around here, would include men in field-gray uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets. They would have Mausers and Schmeissers and MG-42s. Well, no help for it. This was one of those times that made him wish he were back in Wales, hundreds of feet underground, grubbing away at a coal seam with a pick.
“Ready, boys?” he asked the soldiers who huddled in a smashed-up house with him. Nobody said no. It was too late for that, however much they might wish it weren’t.
He held a Mills bomb in his right hand. He’d already pulled the grenade’s pin. He kept his thumb on the detonator. They told you not to do that-you could ruin yourself by mistake. But they weren’t here, and he was. All kinds of rules went out the window in wartime.
“Let’s go, then,” he said. He sprinted, all hunched over, to the end of that wall. He chucked the Mills bomb around behind it without showing his hand for more than a split second. As soon as the bomb burst, he sprayed the other side with bullets fired blindly from his Sten gun. That only added to the guttural cries there.