The Walking Dead

13 July 1937

It is called the battle of Brunete, and within four days our offensive has failed.

Brunete is a village, but it is worthless. Every building in it has been destroyed by our artillery, by their artillery and bombing. We advanced to within two miles of it and were halted. I do not understand how our commanders could have ordered its capture and been prepared to sacrifice so many lives in the attack.

I have asked Ralph how it was justified, but he will not answer me. Each time I question him he turns away. I have relied on Ralph so often to lift me — he is so strong in dedication and purpose — but here he will not…

Our battalion was ordered to capture a long ridge of ground that was completely bare of cover. We reached it. We have called the ridge Mosquito. Hill. We gave it this name because the bullets buzz round us like the swarms of those damned insects, but the bite is worse and so many have been bitten, for nothing.

Huge forces have been used by our side, but we have not made the breakthrough that the commissars assured us was inevitable…and this evening we buried our gallant Major George Nathan. He was a wonderful man and we have followed him through every hell that the commissars have sent us into. (The commissars are never with us in the heat of the fighting.) He always carried a gold-tipped baton, and none of us ever saw him flinch or show fear. He was hit by splinters from a bomb. At the time he was wounded, grievously, we were under attack from the new German Messerschmitt 109s and also a formation of the Heinkel ills. I have never been so frightened. Our own aircraft, Russian, abandoned us.

Major Nathan's last order to us was that we sing to him. As he moved towards death, in a shell-hole, we crouched round him and he had the final company of our voices. I could hear Ralph's above all others. After our major had gone, slipped away, we knocked together a crude coffin from planks, gouged out a shallow pit in the ground at the bottom of the hole, and there were olive trees — broken by the enemy's shell-fire but still standing — and we left him where there was a view, at some different time, of the dried course of the Guadarrama river. We never had a better officer, nor ever will.

This afternoon we were ordered to dig trenches, which is always the sign that the offensive is finished. It is impossible to dig. Not even with pickaxes can we break the ground. (We covered the earth on the Major's coffin with stones, so that foxes and rats would not get inside it.) There is no water here. Even if we could get to the river, which is under the enemy's guns, we would find no running water in it. The Americans to our right have taken so many casualties that their two battalions are now joined as one, and that is under strength; they have no water for their wounded.

It is as hot, now, on Mosquito Hill as at any time since I came to Spain. The bodies out in front of us are already swollen, their skin is black and the flies swarm on them. Our mouths cry out for water — not cry, my error, but croak. When we sang for Major Nathan it was a supreme effort, and my throat is now as sore as if I had rubbed it with a carpenter's rough paper. It is rumoured that we have captured only twenty square miles, but at a cost of more than twenty thousand casualties. If God exists, He has not come near to Mosquito Hill.

Is it the heat, the thirst or the suffering around me, but I wonder now if I will ever leave this country? If I am ever permitted to go home to you, dear Enid, I believe — accept my promise that the force of the sun breeds delirium in us — that I would take the trolley-bus into the City and go to the office where Mr Rammage is and I would beg him, on my knees, to accept me back. But I think the sun and the death that is everywhere have affected my mind.

It hurts so much that Ralph will not talk to me.

But as I write by the moonlight — and at last the guns are quiet, as if the mosquitoes have been swatted away — I think he watches me, and I sense that he believes me a fool to have committed my thoughts to these pages.

We are so isolated from all past experiences. We wait for death to choose us. Death is an end that may be preferable to living. Is a man who is dead in pain from a parched throat? Does he yell, a crow's call, in the night for water? Is he at peace? Does he lie in the arms of his girl? Maybe I should try to write a poem — like Sassoon or Rosenberg, Owen or Graves — and hope that it will be read, one day, when the Poetry Group meets, if any there remember me. No, it is a delusion.

I think I ramble. I am, I realize it, gripped with arrogance. I am no Owen, but a wretch with a dried-out throat and a shattered mind. I am of the Doomed Youth that was the 'Anthem' of Owen. I say his words, but soundlessly: 'What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons.' I am wrong…cattle in a slaughterhouse die better than we do.

Soon it will be dawn.

We are lost souls, and the dream has forsaken us.

Dear Enid, I have to try to sleep. The 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' was written for me, and I am walking towards hell and am alone, and I have forgotten what cause it was that brought me to die 'while in a foreign land', here or somewhere else.

The dawn comes quickly, too fast.