Banks said simply, 'I'll do the best I can.'
Wally said he was going now to talk to the jurors, fill in their picture books, that he'd be back in a half-hour. Banks found a chair in a corner, and even in a crowded room he was alone with his notebook.
5 March 1937
I feel it tonight, so strongly that it is hard to describe — I have not shared it with Ralph but I do not doubt he has the same emotions as me — but I will try to express it.
There is around us an atmosphere of evil. It is suspicion and fear. The commissars tell us that treachery is all around us. We are infiltrated by Fascist spies and Trotskyist agents. Ralph has heard that some of the brigadiers speak of this obsession with betrayal as 'Russian Syphilis'.
I am hesitant of writing where I could be seen. Only Ralph knows that I have my diary. There are many English lads in our unit but I would not let them know that I have the notebook and my thoughts.
It has rained very heavily in the Jarama valley and our trenches are flooded. We have three inches of water in our bunker. We try to bail the water out each night before we sleep but it is useless because the water comes in faster than we can clear it. It is a place of misery.
The British company is now attached to the French battalion, and alongside us were the Americans from the Lincoln brigade…I think they started the Jarama campaign with a force of 500 men. Ralph says that they have lost 120 dead and 175 wounded. They have a song that they sing, and the commissars permit it because they are Russians and do not understand the words: 'There's a valley in Spain called Jarama, It's a place that we all know too well, For 'tis there that we wasted our manhood, And most of our old age as well. ' It is two days now since the Americans — they are younger than us, mostly students and very naïve, but honest — were pulled out of the line. They had mutinied.
They had refused to go forward.
Their officers said they would not advance because they had poor kit and were only given impossible targets to capture.
They refused the order from the staff. We could not see this, but word of it had spread by the evening. They formed up, their backs to the enemy, and set off for the rear, marching in step. Within a mile they were blocked. Machine-guns and an armoured car were across their road. They were told that if they took another step forward they would all be killed. They retreated: they had no choice.
What sort of war is this? Machine-guns at your front and at your back.
Commissars at the rear order us forward for offensives and tell us not to retreat, 'not a metre', when we are attacked by aircraft and tanks and the Moors. But they always stay safe and are distant from the battles. Their skins are not risked.
What sort of war is this?
Last week the commanding officer of the French battalion — they call it the 'Marseillaise'—was arrested and accused of incompetence and cowardice, and of being a Fascist spy. He was put before a court martial and found guilty. On the same day as his arrest and trial, he was executed. He knelt, and showed no fear, and was shot in the back of the head.
It is that sort of war.
I do not know whether it is better to die facing the enemy, or facing those who are supposed to be colleagues, comrades in arms.
Tomorrow we are told that the film star, Errol Flynn, will visit us. Maybe he will come far enough forward to get mud on his shoes, and then he will be able to return to his hotel in Madrid and tell people that he has shared our hardships.
There is no retreat. A volunteer in the German battalion shot himself in the foot and thought it would be sufficient to have him sent to the rear. A self-inflicted wound is an offence and he was shot by a firing squad. There is no way out of this hell.
I thank God each day that Ralph is beside me.
It is raining again, heavier, and I must bale some more.
The call was answered. Dickie Naylor held the telephone close to his ear and mouth. Mary Reakes was at her desk in the outer office and he thought she strained to learn who he called, why, and with what message. He whispered, 'Is that Xavier Boniface or Donald Clydesdale? It's so long, I can't remember your voices — what, five years?…Ah, Xavier. It's Mr Naylor.…Yes, I'm well, I'm fine. Xavier, there might be work to be done, for both of you…Not certain, but if you were willing I'd like to put you both on stand-by. Can't say more, not on this phone…It'll be this week if it happens. So grateful. Regards to you both.'
The wail of seagulls was in his ear, the rumble of the sea and the wind's whine.
He returned the telephone to its cradle.
Probably in response to a message on her screen, Mary stood, then used her handbag mirror to check her hair or her lipstick, and was gone.
The photograph of the young man, the son of an electrical-goods salesman, stared smilingly back at him. He had fastened it, with Sellotape, to the glass panelling at the side of his office door. The smile seemed to mock him because it had the power to corrupt. He was a defender of the realm, and the proof of it was on the head of every sheet of notepaper he used, with its Latin words. As a defender he was able, if he twisted morality to a degree that Mary Reakes would not, to justify corruption. The Service, to an old-school warrior with a week's work ahead of him — then forgotten oblivion
was above morality and legal processes…and he had orders. It's a different war and we may have to dirty our hands. A man such as Dickie Naylor needed an order and required leadership, was always happy when given a little nudge forward. I'm sure you know what's necessary. He was a functionary. Men such as Naylor — in uniform and in civilian dress, in democracies and in dictatorships — had always sat behind desks and received orders, had believed that the threat to the state outweighed moral and legal niceties. He was not a Gestapo man, God, no. And not an NKVD official…He heard tapping. It had a regular rhythm and was far down the corridor and came closer…Perhaps he was a man who could justify to himself the bending of due processes.
He had not lost sleep over it in the Aden Protectorate, or in the holding cells of Castlereagh or the barracks at Portadown. Men screamed, blood dripped, bruises coloured — and the likes of Mary Reakes would have wet their knickers — but information had been gained. Information saved the lives of innocents. He did not need a tumbler of whisky or a pill to help him sleep. So he had telephoned a distant island and put two men from his past, proven as reliable, on stand-by to come south…The tapping intruded into his thoughts, was loud, the beat of a stick on the corridor's walls.
Mary Reakes came into the outer office.
A man used one hand to hold her arm, and in the other was a white-painted stick He used Mary and the stick as his guides, and swung the stick forcefully in front of his legs and hers. It rapped the door jambs, desk legs, the backs of chairs. The man was weathered from sunshine, stooped, and had thinning grey hair; he wore tinted glasses.
At Naylor's door, Mary said, 'I've brought up Mr Hegner. I told you he was coming. Mr Josiah Hegner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, their Riyadh station.'
'I'm Joe,' the voice growled. 'How d'you do?'
Naylor was on his feet. He saw the creases in the clothes, and thought the agent must have come straight from the airport, not cared to take the time to change from what he'd slept in. He was starting forward to move a chair to a more accessible place, but backed off in the face of the swinging stick. A chair leg was whacked. The hand that had been on Mary's arm was loosed and found the chair's back, and the man dropped down into its seat. This was the expert, and he was blind.