He might speak perfect French, but he mouthed German propaganda. “I wish they’d drop leaflets with that garbage printed on them,” Demange said. “With leaflets, at least we could get the shit off our asses.”
The French loudspeakers shouted back a few minutes later. Plenty of anti-Nazi German-speakers, Jews and others, had taken refuge in France. Demange’s German was sketchy, but he got the drift here. They were going on about how even the German people couldn’t stand Hitler any more, so what was the point of stopping a bullet for him?
“Is that true, sir?” Émile asked. “Are the Germans really up in arms against the Nazis?”
“Beats me,” Demange answered cheerfully. “Our papers say they are, and of course you know everything you read in the goddamn newspaper’s got to be the straight goods, right?”
“Mais certainement,” Émile said, cynically enough to squeeze a short chuckle out of Demange.
“All right, then,” the lieutenant said. “But I’ll tell you this-as long as both sides want to fight the war with loudspeakers, that’s fine by me. Yeah, they’re annoying as shit. But even if you shoot a loudspeaker full of holes, it won’t squirt blood all over the place and it won’t start screaming for its mama.”
The poilu contemplated that. “Well, you aren’t wrong,” he said in due course. “Uh, sir.”
Truth to tell, Demange barely noticed his near-omission of the courtesy. He felt happier about Émile’s measured praise than he had about anything in … he couldn’t remember when. I’m getting soft, he thought. He barked at some other soldier the way a man might kick a dog after quarreling with his wife.
Before too long, the powers that be on one side or the other-for all Demange knew, it might have been the powers that be on both sides-decided war by loudspeaker was too peaceable to suit them. Howitzers and mortars started hitting the front-line trenches.
Huddling in the mud-the springtime mud-Demange called down curses on his generals’ heads. Artillery duels always hurt the French worse than the Boches. As they had been in the last war, the Germans were masters of field fortifications. His own countrymen … weren’t.
And the Nazis had been sitting on Belgium for years. The Belgian frontier had been the effective border between Germany and France since their unsuccessful truce and alliance against the USSR. What German soldiers took refuge in around here hardly deserved the insulting name of field fortifications. They’d had enough thought and reinforced concrete poured into them to be something else again, something more on the order of the Maginot Line.
Somebody not far enough away started shrieking. He kept on shrieking till the stretcher-bearers carried him away. French fieldworks were just that: scratchings in the dirt. The French brass didn’t think their men would stay in any one set very long, so they didn’t bother strengthening or improving them. Poilus got carved up for their stupidity.
After the sun went down, the Germans staged a trench raid half a kilometer south of Demange’s position. They shot half a dozen men and captured half a dozen more for grilling. “We would’ve chased ’em off if they tried that here,” Émile said stoutly.
“Peut-être,” Demange answered. Maybe was the most he could say. He tried to keep his men alert, and more afraid of him than they were of the Boches. But anybody could get caught with his pants around his ankles.
Those captured soldiers were probably singing like nightingales. Demange hoped they didn’t know too much. The Germans should have grabbed some generals, he thought. Generals never know anything at all.
Spaniards were big on ceremonies. Chaim Weinberg had had to get used to that when he came over here. Americans went the other way. They did up Independence Day and Memorial Day and Armistice Day after a fashion, but only after a fashion. A ceremony over something that didn’t already have a day set aside for it? Americans mostly didn’t bother.
With Spaniards, though, if something wasn’t celebrated and wasn’t seen to be celebrated, it might as well not have happened. Maybe it had to do with the Mass and other Catholic rites. Any which way, the Nationalists didn’t just surrender. They and their Republican counterparts staged an elaborate ceremonial to show they were surrendering.
Chaim got invited to the surrender (which took place outside of Seville, the last major city the Nationalists held) because he was one of the longest-serving American Internationals still in Spain. So they told him, anyhow. He wondered whether La Martellita had anything to do with the invitation. He would rather she’d invited him back into her bed, but that wouldn’t happen. Little by little, he’d got resigned to the idea. Oh, well-it sure had been fun while it lasted!
He rode a bus down to Seville. All the way there, he wondered whether he ought to go into town and find a barber. When he finally came out with that, most of the other Internationals on the bus groaned. But two of them-a Magyar and an Estonian-said they’d been thinking the same thing. That made Chaim feel better. Other people could be crazy some of the same ways he was.
It wasn’t a perfect surrender ceremony, even if the Nationalist soldiers stood there in neat ranks under the old red-and-gold Spanish flag. They’d stacked their arms in front of those ranks. The rifle barrels gleamed in the bright sunshine.
The men were there, yes. Most officers above the rank of major weren’t. They’d slipped over the border to General Salazar’s Fascist Portugal … or they’d been captured, tried at summary courts-martial, and died-for the most part with exemplary courage-in front of Republican firing squads.
Still, the Nationalists did have a general at their head. Millán Astray had founded the Spanish Foreign Legion, which held many of the other side’s toughest troops. He was the one who’d given them their Long live death! motto. He himself had paid death on the installment plan. He was missing his left arm and his right eye.
But he was here, where so many of his comrades had chosen exile. He had the courage of his convictions, all right. He was bound to know what would happen after he gave himself up to the Republicans. He could expect no more mercy than he would have given had he won.
He was the bull in this arena, not the matador. He had not even the bull’s chance to gore. Yet there he stood, sour, hateful, and brave. Peering at him, Chaim saw that he’d even donned a red-and-gold patch over his empty eye socket for the occasion. Was that loyalty to the cause? Or was it just mockery of the victors? Either way, Chaim found himself reluctantly admiring the tough, mutilated little man. Millán Astray might be a son of a bitch, but he was a son of a bitch with style.
A Republican color guard advanced toward him. The flag of the Spanish Republic-red, yellow, and purple-flew from a taller staff than that of the vanquished Nationalist banner. No one was going to miss any symbolic tricks today.
Some of the Republican bigwigs following the color guard wore uniforms not very different from those of the rebels. Others clung to the overalls that had been a de facto Republican uniform for so long. That was revolutionary chic. General Astray glowered at them, but he could do no more than glower.
He glowered again when the Republican military band played the Internationale. The Spanish Foreign Legion went into battle singing songs like “Death’s Fiancé!” This was a different tune both literally and metaphorically.
Once the music stopped, a Republican general strode up to Astray. The Nationalist commander saluted. The Republican returned the compliment. Millán Astray reached into his holster and pulled out the pistol it held: no fancy automatic with mother-of-pearl grips, but a beat-up revolver that had plainly seen much use.