More Excerpts from Another Hill

The man who had pointed out the position introduced himself. "Bill Titus, commander of the Third." He held out his hand. "I've heard good things about you."
   Castle looked more closely at him. His mouth was crooked, but that did not detract from his good looks. Made him look more interesting. His eyes were the color of violets, violets shaded with umber glaze beneath thick, curling lashes. The poncho he wore loosely added little bulk to his slight figure.
   "I don't know what that means," Castle said.
   Titus's hand was warm despite the cold. He swiveled his head to indicate the path down. "If we're going down there we ought to get started."
   The buildings were maybe a kilometer down a dirt road that twisted and disappeared between outcroppings and showed a small stretch of brown here and there in the snow. They looked deserted. The sky was darkening.
   Titus instructed his sentry details to look sharp and not be shooting them when they came back. When they got to where the road began, floating blue shadows were settling into the valley along the road, and in the sky one big fat evening star appeared. Titus recited under his breath, "The road was a ribbon of starlight..."
   The road leveled off as they neared the buildings. The night had come on fast, stars sprouting in clusters in the darkened sky. The sounds of people moving around, the sounds soldiers make, came clearly to them. They approached the first house, a low adobe building standing away from the others. There were men going in and out, and each time the door opened a splash of yellow light spilled out. The men carried their rifles carelessly or leaned them against the walls of the building, getting ready to eat.
   Well, so here they were, crouching in the dark, and it was colder in the valley than it was on top. Damper. Castle shivered. They looked at each other. They should be doing something, he thought.
   "Let's go in and blast them," Titus whispered. (pp. 160-1)

"You know," he said, "This is a good place to be. High and dry. No one knows where we are. The company's good, the conversation's interesting, and the fascists're right down there where we want them." He moved behind the gun, Joe vacating the position without a word. He settled down behind the Maxim. The grips felt big and hard in his hand. He knew they were all thinking that if he fired now, the tank men would spot their location from the muzzle flash and their cannon would have no trouble zeroing in. (p. 258)

Castle held his glass up so that the spritzer tickled his nose, the tiny bubbles releasing the clean, cool fragrance of vermouth. "It was so bad that we ran right past my chabola. I wanted to go back and get the blanket and the letters. But George said 'Castle, what'll we do now?' and I'll be goddamned if he wasn't still smiling, and I guess that brought home the situation to me somewhat. Anyhow, I put the blanket out of my mind. We came up on this little rise - it wasn't a hill, just a place that was higher - and I stopped and said 'Let's make a line here. And who have we got to make it with?' We had Cook and his few men, and George and me. We had some rifles and one light machine gun, so we spread it all out as far as it would go and still keep us in shouting distance of one another. We didn't even dig in, just took whatever cover we could, and measured out our fields of fire. Cook said it wasn't much of a position, but I thought we would stay there and if the fascists kept coming we would do what we could." (pp. 385-6)

Negrin spoke briefly. He promised to go on fighting, and asked that the volunteers be the Paul Reveres of their various countries, sounding the alarm of impending Nazi horror, rallying support for Spain to help make Madrid the tomb of fascism.
   And then, in that gloomy mansion, they cheered him. They broke away from the table and surrounded Lister and Campesino, embracing them, promising a fight to the end. The end - a victory for all the democratic peoples of the world.
   Castle, seeing things his own way - often so different from the way they were seen by others, and too often quite different than the truth - experienced this as certain. It was his own reality, and he had to live by it even if in the end it killed him.
   That was Spain, and an end to Spain, and the end was the beginning. (p. 391)