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Winter in Madrid

(2006)

A novel by

C J Sansom

To the memory of

the thousands of children of Republican parents

who disappeared into the orphanages of

Franco’s Spain

Prologue

The Jarama Valley, Spain, February 1937

BERNIE HAD LAIN at the foot of the knoll for hours, half conscious.

The British Battalion had been brought up to the front two days before, rattling across the bare Castilian plain in an ancient locomotive; they had marched by night to the front line. The Battalion had a few older men, veterans of the Great War, but most of the soldiers were working-class boys without even the Officer Training Corps experience that Bernie and the smattering of other public-school men possessed. Even here in their own war the working class stood at a disadvantage.

The Republic had held a strong position, on top of a hill that sloped down steeply to the Jarama river valley, dotted with little knolls and planted with olive trees. In the far distance the grey smudge of Madrid was visible, the city that had withstood the Fascists since the generals’ uprising last summer. Madrid, where Barbara was.

Franco’s army had already crossed the river. There were Moroccan colonial troops down there, experts at using every fold in the ground as cover. The Battalion was ordered into position to defend the hill. Their rifles were old, there was a shortage of ammunition and many did not fire properly. They had been issued with French steel helmets from the Great War that the old soldiers said weren’t bullet-proof.

Despite the Battalion’s ragged fire, the Moors slipped gradually up the hill as the morning advanced, hundreds of silent deadly bundles in their grey ponchos, appearing and disappearing again among the olive trees, coming ever closer. Shelling from the Fascist positions began, the yellow earth around the Battalion positions exploding in huge fountains to the terror of the raw troops. Then in the afternoon the order to retreat came. Everything turned to chaos.

As they ran, Bernie saw the ground between the olive trees was strewn with books the soldiers had thrown from their packs to lighten them – poetry and Marxist primers and pornography from the Madrid street markets.

That night the Battalion survivors crouched exhausted in an old sunken road on the meseta. There was no news of how the battle had gone elsewhere along the line. Bernie slept from sheer exhaustion.

In the morning the Russian staff commander ordered the remnants of the Battalion to advance again. Bernie saw Captain Wintringham arguing with him, their heads outlined against a cold sky turning from purple-pink to blue as the sun rose. The Battalion was exhausted, outnumbered; the Moors were dug in now and had brought up machine guns. But the Russian was adamant, his face set.

The men were ordered to line up, huddling against the lip of the sunken road. The Fascists had begun firing again with the dawn and the noise was already tremendous, loud rifle cracks and the stutter of the machine guns. Standing waiting for the order to go over, Bernie was too tired to think. The phrase ‘fucking done for, fucking done for’ went round and round in his head, like a metronome. Many of the men were too exhausted to do anything but stare blindly ahead; others shook with fear.