At least, this time, everyone had a weapon and the whole of Madrid had been resupplied with ammunition. Also, they were fighting over ground that had already seen much action, so there were lots of craters and dead ground. With what was a sort of bomb squad, he sought to lecture them on how to use that: to crawl from hole to hole until they could get close enough to throw their grenades.

The blowing of loud whistles launched the assault, which was not the only thing that made Cal think of the trenches of the Western Front; likewise the passionate yell as the militiamen and women left cover, the bayonets glinting in the sunlight. Then there came the steady rattle of the machine guns and death for some, terror for others.

The bombing team, the dinamiteros, under his guidance, crept out into the no man’s land between the lines, seeking to stay below the raking fire that had obviously decimated their comrades, following Cal as he inched forward from crater to crater, then doing as he suggested, spreading right and left. It was only a hope that his call was heard, but crouched, he pulled the pin from his first grenade and set it flying forward, dropping down immediately as the ground before him spurted up displaced mud.

The explosions acted like a spring to those rifle-bearing fighters who had got stuck in dead ground; they leapt up and charged and paid a high price in getting to the enemy position. Cal was up and running too, pistol out, inside a series of entrenchments and sandbagged barricades, shooting until his gun was empty, then picking up a discarded rifle and working with the bayonet as he had been taught, all those years ago, in basic training.

The anarchists took the first position, only to find that their enemies had fallen back a second and prepared line of defence, and with their superior training they had taken their heavy weapons with them. Certainly they suffered – the position was full of the dead and dying of both sides – and as a victory it was only a partial one, for they were nowhere near the bridge.

It took all day to get the rest of the column forward and to make this one legionnaires’ trench system their own, to get it ready for the next day’s attack, and to also clear the intervening ground of the dead and wounded. For all they had suffered a hundred dead and five times that number with incapacitating wounds, their spirits were high.

As darkness fell, the main body moved back to the start point, where they could eat and sleep, only a strong piquet left behind. They were eating around the relit fires when they heard the sound of boots, and Drecker appeared once more at the head of his company. This time they stopped and shouldered arms, then listened as their commander read to them from the writing of Lenin, no easy task with the accompanying jeers and whistles. After twenty minutes they about-turned and marched off again.

The next three days were nothing short of a disaster, and nothing an exhausted Cal Jardine could say would get Laporta to call off his increasingly costly attacks. Even with wounded fighters returning they were down to a quarter strength and still the bridge eluded them; they were closer – through a periscope you could see the top of the roadway in the centre – they had forced back their enemies, but the cost, even if they were inflicting heavy losses, was disproportionate.

And, at the end of each day’s fighting, Drecker would come up with his company of the Fifth Regiment, have a short parade, maybe harangue his men, smoke a fag, then march off again, and as he did this it was impossible to miss the reaction of Juan Luis’s face; if he knew he was being goaded it made no difference, even if, on a headcount, there were fewer than four hundred effectives left out of his original three thousand.

The Fifth Company had just marched off, to a lower level of jeers than hitherto, in the main ignored through exhaustion. A near dead-on-his feet Cal Jardine was talking to Alverson and Hemingway, telling them the picture so they could report both on the attacks and the bravery being shown, when the rattle of an automatic weapon broke the stillness.

Cal spun round to see Juan Luis Laporta spin sideways. Worse, Florencia was beside him and she seemed to jerk, then shrink to the ground as he set off towards her as fast as he could. The feeling of the bullet hitting him was like a branding, not a pain, and as it turned him he was vaguely aware that just to his left, bullets were raking the ground; he looked to his right just as one of the firers was upset by panic, and found himself looking to the line of buildings. There was someone there, a vague shape that seemed familiar.

A second bullet took his shoulder, dropping him to his knees, and now he was crawling towards an inert Florencia and Laporta on his hands and knees, his head drooping. All around were cries and shouting, with people running in every direction to what seemed like little purpose. He did get to Florencia and he was sure he said her name, but there was no response and he passed out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The antiseptic smell registered first and then, slowly, he opened his eyes. Above his head was a slow circulating ceiling fan and he knew he was in the Barcelona Ritz, yet when he reached out to touch Florencia, not only was she not there but the edge of the bed was too close to his hand. The stains on the ceiling where water had penetrated were wrong, not the sort of thing to be tolerated by the manager of a luxury hotel; but then, it came back to him, there had been fighting.

Turning his head he saw not blonde, tousled hair but another head swathed in bandages a few feet away, in a bed that was near to touching his own; the same on the other side, though the man in that was lying, eyes closed, in seeming contented sleep. That was when the first of the pain kicked in, a dull throb in his shoulder, and there was another, less significant, in his belly. Confused, the head of the nurse, leaning over him and smiling, was what finally told Callum Jardine he was in hospital, and one that was very crowded.

* * *

‘You nearly didn’t make it, old buddy; you lost a lot of blood and it was touch and go if they could get enough back into you to keep you alive. I couldn’t carry you, and if I had not had Ernie Hemingway to help me you would be meat. He’s a big strong guy and not too many people seemed to care about you – they were trying to save their own.’

Tyler Alverson said this to a patient now sitting in a state of some shock; the first question he asked the American got a slow and sad shake of the head – Florencia had been dead on arrival at the forward dressing station, and it took some time for that to sink in and to ask about Juan Luis Laporta. He had died on the operating table from a single bullet that had passed though his chest and lungs.

Both bodies had been taken back to Barcelona for burial in the cemetery at Montjuïc. The whole of the city did not turn out for Florencia, the great crowd came to bury Juan Luis Laporta, but she basked in the glory of every anarchist who could walk being at her graveside too, and many of the flowers were split between the two plots.

‘The official story is it was accidental discharge, a weapon going off that shouldn’t, some schmuck forgetting to put on his safety catch.’

‘You believe that?’

‘If I don’t, Cal, I’m in no position to do anything about it.’

‘You could tell the world.’

‘And get thrown out of Spain for something I’m not sure of? No thanks. Besides, it might have just been someone who didn’t want to die. You said yourself the attacks Laporta was pressing on with were crazy. OK, a lot of people would have been happy to see him dead, but there are too many conspiracies out there to go adding another one, and that would be about someone, I hate to remind you, the world knows nothing about.’