No Greater Love : A Story of the Spanish Civil War

by Lock, Robert

• ISBN13: 9781440140389
• ISBN10: 1440140383
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-19
• Publisher: Textstream

Excerpts

A few beginning lines from the opening chapter: You are the luckiest bastard to be alive. Jose Maria Martinez Garcia heard those words scornfully pitched at him as he lurched forward, hands over his head. Behind him strode a soldier cradling a loaded rifle, spouting contempt. Who are you, anyway? I'm ordered to take you to a barracks ahead, not to the Plaza de Toros beyond. All I know is you one fortunate son-of-a-bitch. Jose was in no position to make any objection to his fate as a prisoner or to the aspersions cast upon the circumstances of his birth. Nor dare he wipe away the trickle of blood that ran down the side of his face, a bullet having grazed him ever so slightly as it whizzed by. Not seeing a stretch of rough ground, he staggered nearly falling to his knees, bringing a stinging smack from the soldier's rifle butt. Don't do that again! bellowed the command. The prisoner resumed his halting gait. The limp in his walk had come from a slithering piece of shrapnel that nicked the flesh in his left leg. I guess I am lucky, thought Jose. If that metal had struck inches closer, I'd be back there waiting for a bullet through my brains. His mind went through the disasters of the day. Inside the walls of the city, Jose and his compatriots watched a legion of trucks in the distance disgorging thousands of troops and weaponry of the invading rebel army. Government militia, workers, and peasants waited for the inevitable assault; it started with artillery raining a steady stream of shells upon the town. Loud speakers urged surrender which was answered by obscenities and gunfire. Heavier bombardment pounded sandbagged gates and fortified towers. With rifles and fixed bayonets, the attacking insurgents finally stormed the gates. The first charge was repulsed with appalling loss of life on both sides. Fallen bodies lay rotting in the late afternoon sun. The wounded writhed in forlorn misery; a lull in the fighting made their groans audible. Despite these ghastly sounds, the stillness suggested siesta. A second charge was launched using armored cars to create an opening. The invaders slashed their way through defenders at the gates. Other columns scaled walls. Combat carried into houses and the main plaza. The rebels ran into barricades, their voices crying Viva la Muerte! (Long live Death). As Jose's militia fell back, his scarred memory recorded only the flash of knives glistening in the sun and the jarring rattle of machine guns spreading lethal destruction.