Last Orders: The War That Came Early (43 page)

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.

Before handing it to the Republican, General Astray said, “You know I would rather kill you with this than give it to you. I know what you would do to my good men, though, so I will go through with what the two sides have agreed.”

“There has already been enough killing. There has already been too much killing,” the Republican officer said. Newsreel cameras
whirred, recording his image and his words. He went on, “Spain is one once more. The killing is over.”

Millán Astray wagged a finger at him, as if to say they both knew better. And so they did; the Nationalist general had but hours to live. If that bothered him, he didn’t show it. Yes, he had style. With another salute, he presented the revolver to the Republican. Then he asked, “May I have the privilege of addressing my soldiers one last time?”

The Republican general stirred and frowned; maybe that wasn’t in the script to which the two sides had agreed. “Briefly,” the Republican said at last, “and without inflammatory sentiment.”

General Astray’s bow was a skeletal parody of the one a dandy might give. “You have my oath,” he said, and crossed himself to show he meant it.

“Go on, then,” the Republican said gruffly.

Turning, Astray also bowed to the Nationalists standing at wooden attention. “Well, boys, we did the best we could. We thought we’d cut revolution out of Spain the way you cut a cancer from the body. Instead, revolution’s gone and cut us out. You don’t know ahead of time what will happen in a war. You wouldn’t need to fight it if you did. We wouldn’t have given them a big kiss if we’d won. I don’t expect they’ll kiss us, either, now that we’ve lost. You’re men—you’re proved it. Be strong. Sooner or later, you’ll come out the other side.” He saluted them.
“¡Viva la España! ¡Viva la muerte, amigos!”

“¡Viva la muerte!”
the Nationalist soldiers shouted.

Millán Astray turned back to the Republican general. “Do what you want with me—you will anyway,” he said. “Go easy on them. They’re just soldiers.”

“We will do what we will do,” the Republican answered in a voice like iron. Chaim suspected he had a better idea himself of what that would be like than General Astray did. The Nationalists would go through reeducation camps, all of them. The ones who were just soldiers, and not too bright, would get out after a few months. They’d be watched the rest of their lives, of course. They’d have trouble getting good jobs. Their sons wouldn’t be likely to get into good schools. But, after a fashion, they’d get along.

The sergeants, the lieutenants, the captains … They wouldn’t get off so lightly. They’d do hard labor on short rations for a long time. None of them would come out of the camps for years. A lot of them wouldn’t come out at all, unless they did it feet-first.

In Yiddish, he whispered to the Magyar who’d also thought about the barber of Seville: “Those Fascist bastards are gonna have a rough time.”

“After everything they did, they deserve a rough time,” the Hungarian International replied in Bela Lugosi–flavored German.

“Well, yeah.” Chaim couldn’t let such a challenge go unanswered. He was asking to get reported if he did. Then he’d get to find out about reeducation camps from the inside. He found a question to distract from his last comment: “What’ll you do now that the war here is over?”

“Go fight the Nazis
—aber natürlich
,” the Magyar replied. “You?”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Chaim said. “Or maybe I’ll go home, then come back and fight ’em in my own country’s uniform.”

That shut the Hungarian up. Soldiers in
his
country’s uniform marched side by side with Hitler’s men. Pleased with himself, Chaim watched the Nationalists trudge off into captivity.

Vaclav Jezek stood with the rest of the soldiers of the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile as a Spanish Republican brigadier general harangued them. The general spoke no Czech—as far as Vaclav could tell, you could count the number of Spaniards who did speak Czech on the fingers of one hand, and you wouldn’t need to worry about the thumb or the pinkie. The officer delivered his speech in lisping Spanish.

Like most of his countrymen, Vaclav understood at best one word in ten—not even enough to catch the drift. He turned to Benjamin Halévy. “What’s he going on about?” Halévy could make sense of Spanish, along with several other languages.

He could, and he did: “He’s telling us what a bunch of heroes we are. Tigers of valor, he calls us.”

“Does that sound as stupid in Spanish as it does in Czech?” Jezek asked, genuinely curious.

“Just about,” said the Parisian Jew with the parents from Prague. The Republican general gave forth with a gesture straight out of grand opera. It must have signaled a change of subject, because Halévy went on, “Oh—now he’s going on about how many Hitlerite Fascists we’re going to kill once we get to Belgium.”

“Happy day,” Vaclav said. With the fighting in Spain over and done with, the foreign contingents that had fought for the Republic were heading home if their homes happened to be free, or into battle against the Nazis if their homes remained occupied.

“You’ve paid your dues and then some,” Halévy said. “You could probably find a way to get a discharge.”

“Sure—I could go to a whorehouse,” Vaclav said. The Jew sent him a severe look. Ignoring it, he continued, “What I really want to do most is go home. And that’s the one thing I can’t manage.”

He’d grown up in Prague. His family had lived there for as long as anybody could remember. And Prague had lain under the Germans’ muscular thumb for the past five and a half years. Of all the lands Hitler had overrun, Bohemia and Moravia would be the last ones he coughed up. The Red Army might march into Berlin before it marched into Prague. And even if it did march into Prague, the Russians would make landlords almost as nasty as the pigdogs with the swastika-clutching eagles on their tunics.

Benjamin Halévy set a hand on his shoulder in mute sympathy. A moment later, Vaclav jerked off the hand, not from anger but from surprise. The Republican general had just come out with a very Spanish version of his name. He wouldn’t have recognized it if he hadn’t heard the like before.

“What’s he want?” he hissed to Halévy.

“Go up to him,” the Jew answered, also sotto voce.

Vaclav did. The Spaniard shook his hand and did the double cheek-brush so beloved by Latins (and by old-fashioned Austrians and Magyars pining for the lost days of the Dual Monarchy). Then the man switched from his own language to trilled, lisped German: “Can you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Vaclav said.

“Good. You are much to thank for our victory. You shot the enemy
of the people, Franco. Then you shot the bigger enemy of the people, Sanjurjo. Spain never forgets you for this.”

“Thank you very much, sir.”

“Remember, we make you for this an honorary citizen of Spain. If you ever need help, a Spanish ambassador gives it to you, same as if you were born here.”

“I do remember, and I thank you for that, too, sir,” Vaclav replied. It might even actually mean something, especially since the brigadier handed him a scroll and a passport that made it highly official. Czechoslovakia, these days, was more a defiant state of mind than anything else. Having connections with a country that really existed could be useful, all right.

His own countrymen gave him three cheers as he returned to the ranks. The Republican general went back to Spanish to finish his speech. Most of it, Vaclav realized, was for local consumption. The Republic was showing its own people how nice it was to its foreign allies.

When they got on the train that would take them up to France, the Republic showed its gratitude in a real way. It put them in second-class cars with padded seats, not on the hard benches of third class. Vaclav wiggled in his. “I could get used to this,” he said.

“Don’t,” Halévy told him. “As soon as we cross the border, it’s liable to be 8 HORSES OR 36 MEN.”

“A box car!” Jezek made a face. That was what the French painted on the sides of each one so nobody could mess up the carrying capacity. “They really know how to show they care, don’t they?”

“They care that we can kill some
Boches
for them. They care that they can use you up—and me, too—instead of some genuine Frenchmen,” Halévy told him. “Don’t worry about it,
mon vieux
. Pretty soon, the Spaniards won’t care, either.”

“You know how to make me feel good, don’t you?” Vaclav answered his own question before the Jew could: “Nah. If you were a blonde with no morals, then you’d know how to make me feel good.”

“Funny guy.” Halévy glanced over at the antitank rifle leaning against the wood paneling of the second-class car’s wall. “I wish Hitler would come within a couple of kilometers of the front. Then you could
do unto him as you did unto Sanjurjo. But from what I hear, Hitler didn’t take chances like that even before you plugged the Marshal.”

“Too bad.” Vaclav cocked his head to one side and studied Halévy. “How do you hear shit like that?”

“I keep my eyes open.” Halévy paused for effect. “My nose sees all kinds of interesting things, too.”

“Will it see my fist if I punch it?” Vaclav didn’t bother to find out. He was just joking around.

When they got to the border in the Pyrenees, a Spanish military band played a farewell for them even though it was the middle of the night. The French soldiers on the other side seemed much less interested. They herded the Czechs to the next train. They didn’t thrust them into box cars smelling greenly of horseshit. They did give them third-class cars with hard benches jammed too close together. Vaclav would have been more annoyed had he been more surprised.

No one on the French side of the border cared at all about the Czechs’ Spanish rank badges and medals. The French attitude was that foreign badges on foreign men meant nothing in their country. Three officers with fancy kepis did take Benjamin Halévy off to one side and question him for more than an hour before they finally let the troop train roll out of the station.

“What was
that
all about?” Vaclav asked. “They think you were smuggling hashish or something?”

“Worse than that—much worse.” Halévy rolled his eyes. “They said I was wearing rank badges I wasn’t entitled to. That a sergeant should become an officer while they weren’t looking … Not so long ago, it would have been a matter for Devil’s Island. We spoke of this before, and about how they wouldn’t let me stay promoted.”