Andrés now passing them truck after truck, Gomez still keeping successfully ahead of the following staff car, did not think any of this about their faces. He only thought, «What an army. What equipment. What a mechanization. ‘Vaya gente!’ Look at such people. Here we have the army of the Republic. Look at them. Camion after camion. All uniformed alike. All with casques of steel on their heads. Look at the ‘máquinas’ rising from the trucks against the coming of planes. Look at the army that has been builded!»
And as the motorcycle passed the high gray trucks full of troops, gray trucks with high square cabs and square ugly radiators, steadily mounting the road in the dust and the flicking lights of the pursuing staff car, the red star of the army showing in the light when it passed over the tail gates, showing when the light came onto the sides of the dusty truck bodies, as they passed, climbing steadily now, the air colder and the road starting to turn in bends and switchbacks now, the trucks laboring and grinding, some steaming in the light flashes, the motorcycle laboring now too, and Andrés clinging tight to the front seat as they climbed, Andrés thought this ride on a motorcycle was mucho, mucho.
He had never been on a motorcycle before and now they were climbing a mountain in the midst of all the movement that was going to an attack and, as they climbed, he knew now there was no problem of ever being back in time for the assault on the posts. In this movement and confusion he would be lucky to get back by the next night. He had never seen an offensive or any of the preparations for one before and as they rode up the road he marvelled at the size and power of this army that the Republic had built.
Now they rode on a long slanting, rising stretch of road that ran across the face of the mountain and the grade was so steep as they neared the top that Gomez told him to get down and together they pushed the motorcycle up the last steep grade of the pass. At the left, just past the top, there was a loop of road where cars could turn and there were lights winking in front of a big stone building that bulked long and dark against the night sky.
«Let us go to ask there where the headquarters is,» Gomez said to Andrés and they wheeled the motorcycle over to where two sentries stood in front of the closed door of the great stone building. Gomez leaned the motorcycle against the wall as a motorcyclist in a leather suit, showing against the light from inside the building as the door opened, came out of the door with a dispatch case hung over his shoulder, a wooden-holstered Mauser pistol swung against his hip. As the light went off, he found his motorcycle in the dark by the door, pushed it until it sputtered and caught, then roared off up the road.
At the door Gomez spoke to one of the sentries. «Captain Gomez of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade,» he said. «Can you tell me where to find the headquarters of General Golz commanding the ThirtyFifth Division?»
«It isn’t here,» the sentry said.
«What is here?»
«The Comandancia.»
«What comandancia?»
«Well, the Comandancia.»
«The comandancia of what?»
«Who art thou to ask so many questions?» the sentry said to Gomez in the dark. Here on the top of the pass the sky was very clear with the stars out and Andrés, out of the dust now, could see quite clearly in the dark. Below them, where the road turned to the right, he could see clearly the outline of the trucks and cars that passed against the sky line.
«I am Captain Rogelio Gomez of the first battalion of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade and I ask where is the headquarters of General Golz,» Gomez said.
The sentry opened the door a little way. «Call the corporal of the guard,» he shouted inside.
Just then a big staff car came up over the turn of the road and circled toward the big stone building where Andrés and Gomez were standing waiting for the corporal of the guard. It came toward them and stopped outside the door.
A large man, old and heavy, in an oversized khaki beret, such as ‘chasseurs a pied’ wear in the French Army, wearing an overcoat, carrying a map case and wearing a pistol strapped around his greatcoat, got out of the back of the car with two other men in the uniform of the International Brigades.
He spoke in French, which Andrés did not understand and of which Gomez, who had been a barber, knew only a few words, to his chauffeur telling him to get the car away from the door and into shelter.
As he came into the door with the other two officers, Gomez saw his face clearly in the light and recognized him. He had seen him at political meetings and he had often read articles by him in Mundo Obrero translated from the French. He recognized his bushy eyebrows, his watery gray eyes, his chin and the double chin under it, and he knew him for one of France’s great modern revolutionary figures who had led the mutiny of the French Navy in the Black Sea. Gomez knew this man’s high political place in the International Brigades and he knew this man would know where Golz’s headquarters were and be able to direct him there.
He did not know what this man had become with time, disappointment, bitterness both domestic and political, and thwarted ambition and that to question him was one of the most dangerous things that any man could do. Knowing nothing of this he stepped forward into the path of this man, saluted with his clenched fist and said, «Comrade Marty, we are the bearers of a dispatch for General Golz. Can you direct us to his headquarters? It is urgent.»
The tall, heavy old man looked at Gomez with his outthrust head and considered him carefully with his watery eyes. Even here at the front in the light of a bare electric bulb, he having just come in from driving in an open car on a brisk night, his gray face had a look of decay. His face looked as though it were modelled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion.
«You have what, Comrade?» he asked Gomez, speaking Spanish with a strong Catalan accent. His eyes glanced sideways at Andrés, slid over him, and went back to Gomez.
«A dispatch for General Golz to be delivered at his headquarters, Comrade Marty.»
«Where is it from, Comrade?»
«From behind the fascist lines,» Gomez said.
André Marty extended his hand for the dispatch and the other papers. He glanced at them and put them in his pocket.
«Arrest them both,» he said to the corporal of the guard. «Have them searched and bring them to me when I send for them.»
With the dispatch in his pocket he strode on into the interior of the big stone house.
Outside in the guard room Gomez and Andrés were being searched by the guard.
«What passes with that man?» Gomez said to one of the guards.
«‘Está loco’,» the guard said. «He is crazy.»
«No. He is a political figure of great importance,» Gomez said. «He is the chief commissar of the International Brigades.»
«‘Apesar de eso, está loco’,» the corporal of the guard said. «All the same he’s crazy. What do you behind the fascist lines?»
«This comrade is a guerilla from there,» Gomez told him while the man searched him. «He brings a dispatch to General Golz. Guard well my papers. Be careful with that money and that bullet on the string. It is from my first wound at Guadarama.»
«Don’t worry,» the corporal said. «Everything will be in this drawer. Why didn’t you ask me where Golz was?»
«We tried to. I asked the sentry and he called you.»
«But then came the crazy and you asked him. No one should ask him anything. He is crazy. Thy Golz is up the road three kilometers from here and to the right in the rocks of the forest.»
«Can you not let us go to him now?»
«Nay. It would be my head. I must take thee to the crazy. Besides, he has thy dispatch.»
«Can you not tell some one?»
«Yes,» the corporal said. «I will tell the first responsible one I see. All know that he is crazy.»
«I had always taken him for a great figure,» Gomez said. «For one of the glories of France.»
«He may be a glory and all,» the corporal said and put his hand on Andrés’s shoulder. «But he is crazy as a bedbug. He has a mania for shooting people.»
«Truly shooting them?»
«‘Como lo oyes’,» the corporal said. «That old one kills more than the bubonic plague. ‘Mata más que la peste bubonica’. But he doesn’t kill fascists like we do. ‘Qué va’. Not in joke. ‘Mata bichos raros’. He kills rare things. Trotzkyites. Divagationers. Any type of rare beasts.»
Andrés did not understand any of this.
«When we were at Escorial we shot I don’t know how many for him,» the corporal said. «We always furnish the firing party. The men of the Brigades would not shoot their own men. Especially the French. To avoid difficulties it is always us who do it. We shot
