This Life

There is movement near a large beech tree, and Walter Kestrel, the socialist writer, aims his machinegun at the Nationalist soldier.  It is a Sunday morning in Madrid, on a cold November day in 1936, and the Englishman – until yesterday, a reporter covering The Spanish Civil War – is about to kill his first human being.  The thought makes him simultaneously feel both sick and frightened. 

    Walter is in the Casa de Campo Park, with a small group of young Republican men waiting to kill for the first time, too.  He wonders if he is as pale in the face as they are.  The Nationalist soldier disappears from view behind the trunk of the tree.  Walter waits for him to re-emerge.

    Behind him, and the other Republican fighters, in the hastily constructed barricade, the Czech photographer Willard Levhart – now assuming the mantle of an American – and his French cohort Catalina Chebyshev, are laughing about some nonsense.  They cannot have seen what is happening, even though the background sounds of battle should be alerting them to the approaching attack.

    The Englishman wants to turn away from what he must do, to listen to his new friends, to find out what they are finding so amusing amidst such building tension.  Walter believes they are immersed in the love of youth – he is at least ten years older than Willard – and there is a tremendous feeling of envy surging through his body.

    He just wishes the enemy would open fire in his direction and take away the responsibility of him initiating death.

    They don’t.

    So, instead of conversation, he stares down the barrel and tracks to where the man he is expected to kill will appear.  The Nationalist soldier reaches around the tree and pulls himself up a small rise.  His action reveals more of himself as he creeps forward.  The shot will be easier.

    Walter forces himself to try to relax his breathing.

    It doesn’t seem to work, and a surge of panic shivers its way through his body.  He begs his brain to find some strength.  He wants to stop the look of sadness he can remember seeing in his mother’s eyes when she caught him shooting sparrows as a child with an air rifle

    “That’s not necessary,” she said.  “We won’t eat them.  I’m disappointed in you, Walt.  Who gave you permission to kill them?”

    His brain offers a solution.  Another image springs into Walter’s head.  He is back on the banks of the upper reaches of the River Tees in the North of England, last year, when he was living the life of a tramp.  He was doing it to understand the situation those in poverty endure and thus give his writing authority.  He had been on the road since the New Year.  It was a hot summer’s day, when the penury of the winter had been forgotten, and he was sitting high up on a ridge, gazing down at two couples playing in the pool below Cauldron Snout waterfall.  The swimmers were all naked.

    Walter had passed an expensive car parked on the verge of the road and the group had obviously originally gone to the spot for a picnic.  Their damp clothes, and the upturned hamper, lay scattered about twenty yards downstream on a collection of flat rocks.  It was easy for him to envisage some high-jinks between the boys that resulted in them tumbling into the river, followed by laughter from the girls – prompting them to be pulled into the water themselves.  And then a spontaneous decision by people finding themselves out of the clutches of the rules.  They had removed their clothes.  Who could it harm?

    The peat-stained river cascaded down the staircase of dark grey rocks, and they splashed water over each other.  The girls screamed with laughter, the boys bellowed exuberant ape-like affirmations of their joy, and they all took every opportunity to find ways to touch their respective partners.

    It had struck him that, whatever privilege they enjoyed on a regular basis, as of that moment, they could have been anyone, and they did not care.  Walter himself had rebelled against the affluence he had been born into by seeking out those who had not enjoyed his advantages.  It was because he saw the workers as the ground upon which society was based, and he was certain that in a few years the swimmers would adopt the customary aloof identities their wealth enabled.  But, as they frolicked, they were Everyman and Everywoman.  Their world was those stolen minutes, and the future arched away like some mystic road, albeit one they subconsciously knew they would eventually have to travel, but something to be temporarily ignored.

    They were finding life was an adventure to be built on memories.

    Walter slipped away before he was discovered.  The men would have felt obliged to be upset, the women, ashamed.

    As he watches the Nationalist soldier, he thinks that everyone deserves a chance of experiencing such moments.  Even enemies.

    Walter wonders at a person’s power to influence lives.

    He then sees that the soldier is repeatedly checking his rifle and licking his lips.  Walter knows the taste of fear and decides to let him have one more second of this precious life.

    Just one more.

    And another.

    And another.

    But then the reason they are both here, at this making of history, with their different beliefs and different passions, beats into his head and he knows what he must do.

    But just one more second.

    The man represents everything that Walter detests.

    Now …

    The noise of the machinegun firing is tremendous.  Walter is horrified to see daylight appearing in the ever-widening hole the bullets are creating in the man’s midriff.  And then he sees the soldier’s face.  The man is terrified.  There is no sense of pain in his expression, just abject horror.

    The machinegun follows Walter’s gaze and the bullets traverse upwards.

    Walter Kestrel slays his first human being, and the world moves on.