"And to live under that sort of discipline we should die?"
"Without discipline everyone will die anyway."
"There is one kind of discipline and another kind of discipline," the Extremaduran said. "Listen to me. In February we were here where we are now and the fascists attacked. They drove us from the hills that you Internationals tried to take today and that you could not take. We fell back to here; to this ridge. Internationals came up and took the line ahead of us."
"I know that," I said.
"But you do not know this," he went on angrily. "There was a boy from my province who became frightened during the bombardment, and he shot himself in the hand so that he could leave the line because he was afraid."
The other soldiers were all listening now. Several nodded.
"Such people have their wounds dressed and are returned at once to the line," the Extremaduran went on. "It is just."
"Yes," I said. "That is as it should be."
"That is as it should be," said the Extremaduran. "But this boy shot himself so badly that the bone was all smashed and there surged up an infection and his hand was amputated."
Several soldiers nodded.
"Go on, tell him the rest," said one.
"It might be better not to speak of it," said the cropped-headed, bristly-faced man who said he was in command.
"It is my duty to speak," the Extremaduran said.
The one in command shrugged his shoulders. "I did not like it either," he said. "Go on, then. But I do not like to hear it spoken of either."
"This boy remained in the hospital in the valley since February," the Extremaduran said. "Some of us have seen him in the hospital. All say he was well liked in the hospital and made himself as useful as a man with one hand can be useful. Never was he under arrest. Never was there anything to prepare him."
The man in command handed me the cup of wine again without saying anything. They were all listening; as men who cannot read or write listen to a story.
"Yesterday, at the close of day, before we knew there was to be an attack. Yesterday, before the sun set, when we thought today was to be as any other day, they brought him up the trail in the gap there from the flat. We were cooking the evening meal and they brought him up. There were only four of them. Him, the boy Paco, those two you have just seen in the leather coats and the caps, and an officer from the brigade. We saw the four of them climbing together up the gap, and we saw Pace's hands were not tied, nor was he bound in any way.
"When we saw him we all crowded around and said, 'Hello, Paco. How are you, Paco? How is everything, Paco, old boy, old Paco?'
"Then he said, 'Everything's all right. Everything is good except this'- and showed us the stump.
"Paco said, 'That was a cowardly and foolish thing. I am sorry that I did that thing. But I try to be useful with one hand. I will do what I can with one hand for the Cause.'"
"Yes," interrupted a soldier. "He said that. I heard him say that."
"We spoke with him," the Extremaduran said. "And he spoke with us. When such people with the leather coats and the pistols come it is always a bad omen in a war, as is the arrival of people with map cases and field glasses. Still we thought they had brought him for a visit, and all of us who had not been to the hospital were happy to see him, and as I say, it was the hour of the evening meal and the evening was clear and warm."
"This wind only rose during the night," a soldier said.
"Then," the Extremaduran went on somberly, "one of them said to the officer in Spanish, 'Where is the place?'
"'Where is the place this Paco was wounded?' asked the officer."
"I answered him," said the man in command. "I showed the place. It is a little further down than where you are."
"Here is the place," said a soldier. He pointed, and I could see it was the place. It showed clearly that it was the place.
"Then one of them led Paco by the arm to the place and held him there by the arm while the other spoke in Spanish. He spoke in Spanish, making many mistakes in the language. At first we wanted to laugh, and Paco started to smile. I could not understand all the speech, but it was that Paco must be punished as an example, in order that there would be no more self-inflicted wounds, and that all others would be punished in the same way.
"Then, while the one held Paco by the arm; Paco, looking very ashamed to be spoken of this way when he was already ashamed and sorry; the other took his pistol out and shot Paco in the back of the head without any word to Paco. Nor any word more."
The soldiers all nodded.
"It was thus," said one. "You can see the place. He fell with his mouth there. You can see it."
I had seen the place clearly enough from where I lay.
"He had no warning and no chance to prepare himself," the one in command said. "It was very brutal."
"It is for this that I now hate Russians as well as all other foreigners," said the Extremaduran. "We can give ourselves no illusions about foreigners. If you are a foreigner, I am sorry. But for myself, now, I can make no exceptions. You have eaten bread and drunk wine with us. Now I think you should go."
"Do not speak in that way," the man in command said to the Extremaduran. "It is necessary to be formal."
"I think we had better go," I said.
"You are not angry?" the man in command said. "You can stay in this shelter as long as you wish. Are you thirsty? Do you wish more wine?"
"Thank you very much," I said. "I think we had better go."
"You understand my hatred?" asked the Extremaduran.
"I understand your hatred," I said.
"Good," he said and put out his hand. "I do not refuse to shake hands. And that you, personally, have much luck."
"Equally to you," I said. "Personally, and as a Spaniard."
I woke the one who took the pictures and we started down the ridge toward brigade headquarters. The tanks were all coming back now and you could hardly hear yourself talk for the noise.
"Were you talking all that time?"
"Listening."
"Hear anything interesting?"
"Plenty."
"What do you want to do now?"
"Get back to Madrid."
"We should see the general."
"Yes," I said. "We must."
The general was coldly furious. He had been ordered to make the attack as a surprise with one brigade only, bringing everything up before daylight. It should have been made by at least a division. He had used three battalions and held one in reserve. The French tank commander had got drunk to be brave for the attack and finally was too drunk to function. He was to be shot when he sobered up.
The tanks had not come up in time and finally had refused to advance, and two of the battalions had failed to attain their objectives. The third had taken theirs, but it formed an untenable salient. The only real result had been a few prisoners, and these had been confided to the tank men to bring back and the tank men had killed them. The general had only failure to show, and they had killed his prisoners.
"What can I write on it?" I asked.
"Nothing that is not in the official communique. Have you any whisky in that long flask?"
"Yes."
He took a drink and licked his lips carefully. He had once been a captain of Hungarian Hussars, and he had once captured a gold train in Siberia when he was a leader of irregular cavalry with the Red Army and held it all one winter when the thermometer went down to forty below zero. We were good friends and he loved whisky, and he is now dead.
"Get out of here now," he said. "Have you transport?"
"Yes."
"Did you get any pictures?"
"Some. The tanks."
"The tanks," he said bitterly. "The swine. The cowards. Watch out you don't get killed," he said. "You are supposed to be a writer."
"I can't write now."
"Write it afterwards. You can write it all afterwards. And don't get killed. Especially, don't get killed. Now, get out of here."
He could not take his own advice because he was killed two months later. But the oddest thing about that day was how marvelously the pictures we took of the tanks came out. On the screen they advanced over the hill irresistibly, mounting the crests like great ships, to crawl clanking on toward the illusion of victory we screened.
The nearest any man was to victory that day was probably the Frenchman who came, with his head held high, walking out of the battle. But his victory only lasted until he had walked halfway down the ridge. We saw him lying stretched out there on the slope of the ridge, still wearing his blanket, as we came walking down the cut to get into the staff car that would take us to Madrid.
Nobody Ever Dies.
THE HOUSE WAS BUILT OF ROSE-COLORED plaster that had peeled and faded with the dampness and from its porch you could see the sea, very blue, at the end of the street. There were laurel trees along the sidewalk that grew high enough to shade the upper porch and in the shade it was cool. A mockingbird hung in a wicker cage at a corner of the porch, and it was not singing now, nor even chirping, because a young man of about twenty-eight, thin, dark, with bluish circles under his eyes and a stubble of beard, had just taken off a sweater that he wore and spread it over the cage. The young man was standing now, his mouth slightly open, listening. Someone was trying the locked and bolted front door.
As he listened he heard the wind in the laurels close beside the porch, the horn of a taxi coming along the street and the voices of the children playing in a vacant lot. Then he heard a key turn again in the lock of the front door. He heard it unlock the door, heard the door pulled against the bolt, and then the lock being turned again. At the same time he heard the sound of a bat against a baseball and shrill shouting in Spanish from the vacant lot. He stood there, moistening his lips, and listened while someone tried the back door.
The young man, who was named Enrique, took off his shoes and, putting them down carefully, moved softly along the tiling of the porch until he could look down at the back door. There was no one there. He slipped back to the front of the house and, keeping out of sight, looked down the street.
A Negro in a narrow-brimmed flat-topped straw hat and a gray alpaca coat and black trousers was walking along the sidewalk under the laurel trees. Enrique watched, but there was no one else. He stood there for some time watching and listening, then he took his sweater off the bird cage and put it on.
He had been sweating heavily while he had been listening and now he was cold in the shade and the cool northeast wind. The sweater covered a leather shoulder holster, the leather ringed and salt-whitened with perspiration, that he wore with a forty-five-caliber Colt pistol which, by its constant pressure, had given him a boil a little below his armpit. He lay down on a canvas cot now close to the wall of the house. He was still listening.
The bird chirped and hopped about the cage and the young man looked up at it. Then he got up and unhooked the door of the cage and opened it. The bird cocked his head at the open door and drew it back, then jerked his head forward again, his bill pointing at an angle.
"Go on," the young man said softly. "It's not a trick."
He put his hand into the cage and the bird flew against the back, fluttering against the withes.
"You're silly," the young man said. He took his hand out of the cage. "I'll leave it open."
He lay face down on the cot, his chin on his folded arms, and he was still listening. He heard the bird fly out of the cage and then he heard him sing in one of the laurel trees.
"It was foolish to keep the bird if the house is supposed to be empty," he thought. "It is just such foolishness that makes all the trouble. How can I blame others when I am that stupid?"
In the vacant lot the boys were still playing baseball and it was quite cool now. The young man unbuckled the leather shoulder holster and laid the big pistol by his leg. Then he went to sleep.
When he woke it was dark and the street light on the comer shone through the leaves of the laurels. He stood up and walked to the front of the house and, keeping in the shadow and the shelter of the wall, looked up and down the street. A man in a narrow-brimmed, flat-topped straw hat stood under a tree on the comer. Enrique could not see the color of his coat or trousers, but he was a Negro.
Enrique went quickly to the back of the porch but there was no light there except that which shone on the weedy field from the back windows of the next two houses. There could be any number of people in the back. He knew that, since he could no longer really hear as he had in the afternoon, because a radio was going in the second house away.
Suddenly there came the mechanical crescendo of a siren and the young man felt a prickling wave go over his scalp. It came as suddenly as a person blushes, it felt like prickly heat, and it was gone as quickly as it came. The siren was on the radio; it was part of an advertisement, and the announcer's voice followed, "Gavis tooth paste. Unaltering, insuperable, the best."
Enrique smiled in the dark. It was time someone should be coming now.
After the siren on the recorded announcements came a crying baby which the announcer said would be satisfied with Malta-Malta, and then there was a motor horn and a customer who demanded green gas. "Don't tell me any stories. I asked for green gas. More economical, more mileage. The best."
Enrique knew all the advertisements by heart. They had not changed in the fifteen months that he had been away at war; they must still be using the same discs in the broadcasting station, and still the siren had deceived him and given him that thin, quick prickle across the scalp that was as definite a reaction to danger as a bird dog stiffening to the warm scent of quail.
He had not had that prickle when he started. Danger and the fear of it had once made him feel empty in his stomach. They had made him feel weak as you are weak with a fever, and he had known the inability to move; when you must force movement forward by legs that feel as dead as though they were asleep. That was all gone now, and he did without difficulty whatever he should do. The prickling was all that remained of the vast capacity for fear some brave men start with. It was his only remaining reaction to danger except for the perspiring which, he knew, he would always have, and now it served as a warning and nothing more.
As he stood, looking out at the tree where the man with the straw hat sat now, on the curb, a stone fell on the tiled floor of the porch. Enrique looked for it against the wall but did not find it. He passed his hands under the cot but it was not there. As he knelt, another pebble fell on the tiled floor, bounced and rolled into the corner toward the side of the house and into the street. Enrique picked it up. It was a smooth-feeling ordinary pebble and he put it in his pocket and went inside the house and down the stairs to the back door.
He stood to one side of the door and took the Colt out of the holster and held it, heavy in his right hand.
"The victory," he said very quietly in Spanish, his mouth disdaining the word, and shifted softly on his bare feet to the other side of the door.
"To those who earn it," someone said outside the door. It was a woman's voice, giving the second half of the password, and it spoke quickly and unsteadily.
Enrique drew back the double bolt on the door and opened it with his left hand, the Colt still in his right.
There was a girl there in the dark, holding a basket. She wore a handkerchief over her head.
"Hello," he said and shut the door and bolted it. He could hear her breathing in the dark. He took the basket from her and patted her shoulder.
"Enrique," she said, and he could not see the way her eyes were shining nor the look on her face.
"Come upstairs," he said. "There is someone watching the front of the house. Did he see you?"
"No," she said. "I came across the vacant lot."
"I will show him to you. Come up to the porch."