But I do not agree.»
So now André Marty sat working over his map at the bare table with the raw light on the unshaded electric light bulb over his head, the overwide beret pulled forward to shade his eyes, referring to the mimeographed copy of the orders for the attack and slowly and laboriously working them out on the map as a young officer might work a problem at a staff college.
He was engaged in war. In his mind he was commanding troops; he had the right to interfere and this he believed to constitute command. So he sat there with Robert Jordan’s dispatch to Golz in his pocket and Gomez and Andrés waited in the guard room and Robert Jordan lay in the woods above the bridge.
It is doubtful if the outcome of Andrés’s mission would have been any different if he and Gomez had been allowed to proceed without André Marty’s hindrance. There was no one at the front with sufficient authority to cancel the attack. The machinery had been in motion much too long for it to be stopped suddenly now. There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and movement is under way they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.
But on this night the old man, his beret pulled forward, was still sitting at the table with his map when the door opened and Karkov the Russian journalist came in with two other Russians in civilian clothes, leather coats and caps. The corporal of the guard closed the door reluctantly behind them. Karkov had been the first responsible man he had been able to communicate with.
«Tovarich Marty,» said Karkov in his politely disdainful lisping voice and smiled, showing his bad teeth.
Marty stood up. He did not like Karkov, but Karkov, coming from ‘Pravda’ and in direct communication with Stalin, was at this moment one of the three most important men in Spain.
«Tovarich Karkov,» he said.
«You are preparing the attack?» Karkov said insolently, nodding toward the map.
«I am studying it,» Marty answered.
«Are you attacking? Or is it Golz?» Karkov asked smoothly.
«I am only a commissar, as you know,» Marty told him.
«No,» Karkov said. «You are modest. You are really a general. You have your map and your field glasses. But were you not an admiral once, Comrade Marty?»
«I was a gunner’s mate,» said Marty. It was a lie. He had really been a chief yeoman at the time of the mutiny. But he thought now, always, that he had been a gunner’s mate.
«Ah. I thought you were a first-class yeoman,» Karkov said. «I always get my facts wrong. It is the mark of the journalist.»
The other Russians had taken no part in the conversation. They were both looking over Marty’s shoulder at the map and occasionally making a remark to each other in their own language. Marty and Karkov spoke French after the first greeting.
«It is better not to get facts wrong in ‘Pravda’,» Marty said. He said it brusquely to build himself up again. Karkov always punctured him. The French word is ‘dégonfler’ and Marty was worried and made wary by him. It was hard, when Karkov spoke, to remember with what importance he, André Marty, came from the Central Committee of the French Communist Party. It was hard to remember, too, that he was untouchable. Karkov seemed always to touch him so lightly and whenever he wished.
Now Karkov said, «I usually correct them before I send them to ‘Pravda’, I am quite accurate in ‘Pravda’. Tell me, Comrade Marty, have you heard anything of any message coming through for Golz from one of our ‘partizan’ groups operating toward Segovia? There is an American comrade there named Jordan that we should have heard from. There have been reports of fighting there behind the fascist lines. He would have sent a message through to Golz.»
«An American?» Marty asked. Andrés had said an ‘Inglés’. So that is what it was. So he had been mistaken. Why had those fools spoken to him anyway?»
«Yes,» Karkov looked at him contemptuously, «a young American of slight political development but a great way with the Spaniards and a fine ‘partizan’ record. Just give me the dispatch, Comrade Marty. It has been delayed enough.»
«What dispatch?» Marty asked. It was a very stupid thing to say and he knew it. But he was not able to admit he was wrong that quickly and he said it anyway to delay the moment of humiliation, not accepting any humiliation. «And the safe-conduct pass,» Karkov said through his bad teeth.
André Marty put his hand in his pocket and laid the dispatch on the table. He looked Karkov squarely in the eye. All right. He was wrong and there was nothing he could do about it now but he was not accepting any humiliation. «And the safe-conduct pass,» Karkov said softly.
Marty laid it beside the dispatch.
«Comrade Corporal,» Karkov called in Spanish.
The corporal opened the door and came in. He looked quickly at André Marty, who stared back at him like an old boar which has been brought to bay by hounds. There was no fear on Marty’s face and no humiliation. He was only angry, and he was only temporarily at bay. He knew these dogs could never hold him.
«Take these to the two comrades in the guard room and direct them to General Golz’s headquarters,» Karkov said. «There has been too much delay.»
The corporal went out and Marty looked after him, then looked at Karkov.
«Tovarich Marty,» Karkov said, «I am going to find out just how untouchable you are.»
Marty looked straight at him and said nothing.
«Don’t start to have any plans about the corporal, either,» Karkov went on. «It was not the corporal. I saw the two men in the guard room and they spoke to me» (this was a lie). «I hope all men always will speak to me» (this was the truth although it was the corpora! who had spoken). But Karkov had this belief in the good which could come from his own accessibility and the humanizing possibility of benevolent intervention. It was the one thing he was never cynical about.
«You know when I am in the U.S.S.R. people write to me in ‘Pravda’ when there is an injustice in a town in Azerbaijan. Did you know that? They say ‘Karkov will help us.»
André Marty looked at him with no expression on his face except anger and dislike. There was nothing in his mind now but that Karkov had done something against him. All right, Karkov, power and all, could watch out.
«This is something else,» Karkov went on, «but it is the same principle. I am going to find Out just how untouchable you are, Comrade Marty. I would like to know if it could not be possible to change the name of that tractor factory.»
André Marty looked away from him and back to the map.
«What did young Jordan say?» Karkov asked him.
«I did not read it,» André Marty said. «‘Et maintenant fiche moi la paix’, Comrade Karkov.»
«Good,» said Karkov. «I leave you to your military labors.»
He stepped out of the room and walked to the guard room. Andrés and Gomez were already gone and he stood there a moment looking up the road and at the mountain tops beyond that showed now in the first gray of daylight. We must get on up there, he thought. It will be soon, now.
Andrés and Gomez were on the motorcycle on the road again and it was getting light. Now Andrés, holding again to the back of the seat ahead of him as the motorcycle climbed turn after switchback turn in a faint gray mist that lay over the top of the pass, felt the motorcycle speed under him, then skid and stop and they were standing by the motorcycle on a long, down-slope of road and in the woods, on their left, were tanks covered with pine branches.
There were troops here all through the woods. Andrés saw men carrying the long poles of stretchers over their shoulders. Three staff cars were off the road to the right, in under the trees, with branches laid against their sides and other pine branches over their tops.
Gomez wheeled the motorcycle up to one of them. He leaned it against a pine tree and spoke to the chauffeur who was sitting by the car, his back against a tree.
«I’ll take you to him,» the chauffeur said. «Put thy ‘moto’ out of sight and cover it with these.» He pointed to a pile of cut branches.
With the sun just starting to come through the high branches of the pine trees, Gomez and Andrés followed the chauffeur, whose name was Vicente, through the pines across the road and up the slope to the entrance of a dugout from the roof of which signal wires ran on up over the wooded slope. They stood outside while the chauffeur went in and Andrés admired the construction of the dugout which showed only as a hole in the hillside, with no dirt scattered about, but which he could see, from the entrance, was both deep and profound with men moving around in it
