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BARBASTRO, though a long way from the front line, looked bleak and chipped. Swarms of militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and down the streets, trying to keep warm. On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that ‘six handsome bulls’ would be killed in the arena on such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked! Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.
They sent my company by lorry to Sietamo, then westward to Alcubierre, which was just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. Sietamo had been fought over three times before the Anarchists finally took it in October, and parts of it were smashed to pieces by shell-fire and most of the houses pockmarked by rifle-bullets. We were 1500 feet above sea-level now. It was beastly cold, with dense mists that came swirling up from nowhere. Between Sietamo and Alcubierre the lorry— driver lost his way (this was one of the regular features of the war) and we were wandering for hours in the mist. It was late at night when we reached Alcubierre. Somebody shepherded us through morasses of mud into a mule-stable where we dug ourselves down into the chaff and promptly fell asleep. Chaff is not bad to sleep in when it is clean, not so good as hay but better than straw. It was only in the morning light that I discovered that the chaff was full of breadcrusts, torn newspapers, bones, dead rats, and jagged milk tins.
We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the
characteristic smell of war — in my experience a smell of
excrement and decaying food. Alcubierre had never been shelled and
was in a better state than most of the villages immediately behind
the line. Yet I believe that even in peacetime you could not travel
in that part of Spain without being struck by the peculiar squalid
misery of the Aragonese villages. They are built like fortresses, a
mass of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling round the
church, and even in spring you see hardly a flower anywhere; the
houses have no gardens, only back-yards where ragged fowls skate
over the beds of mule-dung. It was vile weather, with alternate
mist and rain. The narrow earth roads had been churned into a sea
of mud, in places two feet deep, through which the lorries
struggled with racing wheels and the peasants led their clumsy
carts which were pulled by strings of mules, sometimes as many as
six in a string, always pulling tandem. The constant come-and-go of
troops had reduced the village to a state of unspeakable filth. It
did not possess and never had possessed such a thing as a lavatory
or a drain of any kind, and there was not a square yard anywhere
where you could tread without watching your step. The church had
long been used as a latrine; so had all the (...)
(......)
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