Raising a glass in the Line of Fire

It’s a quarter past midnight with no moon.

Crouching in the dark, motionless and silent, the eighteen women of the communications section are watching the dense crowd of shadows filing past towards the riverbank.

Not a voice can be heard, not a whisper. The only sound is of footsteps, hundreds of them, on the earth dampened by evening dew; and occasionally, the light sound of metal on metal, from rifles, bayonets, steel helmets and water bottles.

It’s the moment, on 25 July 1938, 83 years ago today, when 18 women and 2890 men of the Eleventh Mixed Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army are about to cross the river Ebro, to establish a bridgehead in the village of Castellets del Segre. They don’t know it, but the operation is only a diversion from the main lines of attack across the river, in what is to become the longest battle ever fought on Spanish soil. It was the last, massive and tragically doomed attempt by the Republic to defend itself against the uprising being led by Francisco Franco. He, supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, is about to instal a personal dictatorship which will last until his death in 1975.

The words I quote are the opening of Linea de Fuego (Line of Fire), a novel by Arturo Perez Reverte. As he points out, in reality there never was an Eleventh Mixed Brigade and there’s no such place as Castellets del Segre. Like the nationalist forces he describes confronting them, they are pure fictions. But, speaking to his Spanish readers, he points out that:

… though the military units, the places and the characters who appear are all fictitious, the events and names that inspired them are not. It was exactly like this that the parents, grandparents, and relatives of many readers of this book fought on each side during those days and those tragic years.

Republican soldiers crossing the Ebro on a pontoon bridge

Perez Reverte, who was a war correspondent for 20 years (and, yes, there are war correspondents in the book), knows what a war is like. He repeatedly describes the filth and the smells, often the sewer smell of fields where large numbers of men are penned for days on end. And he understands that everyone underwent the same suffering and terrors, whatever side they were on.

We see men – and on the Republican side, mere boys, the teenagers who were called up in the government’s dying days – whose commitment goes from the enforced service of the compulsorily mobilised to the dedication of the driven ideologue. With all the gradations in between: the professionals for whom fighting turns out to be a vocation, perhaps even to their own surprise, the Moroccans with the Nationalists fighting for their living as well as their beliefs, or with the Republicans, the men (and women) who believe they’re fighting for the proletarian revolution under the leadership of the Soviet Union, or the convinced Democrats who believe in a nation where many tendencies can live together and peacefully contest for power.

That last group, by the way, is very much on the wane. Perez Reverte brings powerfully alive the sense in which the Republican side is losing its democratic character, falling increasingly under the control of highly disciplined and effective Communist cadres. Indeed, one of the most sympathetic characters (he struck me as Perez Reverte’s projection of himself into his novel) is a battalion commander who knows he’s in trouble with the (Communist) Political Commissar of the Brigade. Even if he survives this fighting, it may only be to face a firing squad of his own side’s.

That’s one of the saddest aspects of the Spanish Civil War. By the end, with only the Soviet Union backing the Republic and the democracies – Britain, France and the United States in particular – staying well out of the way, the choice was only going to be between dictatorships, of the Right or the Left, whichever came out on top.

In the end, it was the Right that won. Soviet aid was niggardly and came with a huge price tag (financial as well as political). Germany and Italy poured in resources. Franco, who turned out to be a terrible general, throwing men at Republican positions in this final battle with no thought to their safety and losing tens of thousands for no gain in the process, would win because he could afford the losses, knowing they would always be made good. That wastage of lives is another powerful theme of the novel.

Above all, though, what the novel makes clear is the harrowing nature of civil war itself. In the words of the sympathetic battalion commander:

There’s a complicated moment when you discover that a civil war isn’t, as you initially believed, a struggle of good against evil… It’s just one horror confronting another horror.

Arturo Perez Reverte: an excellent novelist, well worth reading

A remarkable novel. Now, because I’m desperate to master the language of my adopted nation, I’ve taken to listening to books or reading them in Spanish. Linea de fuego is available on Kindle and Audible in Spanish, and that’s how I got to know the book (the translations here are my own, so blame just me for any shortcomings). However, the novel was only published in 2020, so I suspect the absence of an English translation is only a matter of the time it takes to produce one.

But, whether you can enjoy it now or have to wait a little longer, I strongly recommend Line of Fire to you. In the meantime, on the 83rd anniversary of the start of that terrible battle, why don’t we raise a glass this evening to the memory of those who suffered through it? With an added wish that none should ever have to suffer that hell again.