From then on it was buses back to Madrid, where he met Tyler Alverson in the bar of the Hotel Florida and, to the sound of shelling and the rattle of gunfire, he told him the story he so badly wanted to hear.

‘What now, brother?’

‘Home.’

AUTHOR’S NOTE

One of the joys of writing fiction is the ability to not only imagine real and invented characters but to place them where and when you want. Facts are important but they, like the individuals who populate a novel, are there to facilitate the story not the other way round.

Of all the wars of the twentieth century, the Spanish Civil War must rank as the most complex, one in which the lines of battle between the Nationalists and the Republicans were clearly drawn, yet behind those fluid fronts, certainly in the case of the latter, other conflicts based on ideology raged and they were as bloody and unforgiving as anything that happened in battle.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but there were many voices at the time, and not all of them on the left, who pointed out that to stand back and plead the farce of non-intervention, while letting the fascist dictatorships supply Franco and his army, was a mistake for which we paid a high price in the subsequent decade.

It was a tragedy that the only friend to the Republic was the Soviet Union, made greater by an ideology – seemingly alien to us now – that the end justifies the means, even if it means killing those on your own side. In the end, that friend ensured the elected government of Spain would lose.

What I set out to do in this novel was to try and make sense of the aforementioned complexity. This is a story, not a history, though there is much of that laced through the narrative; where there are minor deviations, they are in place to facilitate and to entertain in a subject about which one could write a dozen books and still not cover it all.

By Jack Ludlow

THE ROADS TO WAR SERIES

The Burning Sky

A Broken Land

THE REPUBLIC SERIES

The Pillars of Rome

The Sword of Revenge

The Gods of War

THE CONQUEST SERIES

Mercenaries

Warriors

Conquest

Written as David Donachie

THE JOHN PEARCE SERIES

By the Mast Divided

A Shot Rolling Ship

An Awkward Commission

A Flag of Truce

The Admirals’ Game

An Ill Wind

Blown Off Course

Enemies at Every Turn

Copyright

Allison & Busby Limited

13 Charlotte Mews

London W1T 4EJ

www.allisonandbusby.com

First published Great Britain in 2011.

This ebook edition first published in 2011.

Copyright © 2011 by DAVID DONACHIE

(writing as JACK LUDLOW)

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–0–7490–4076–5