Skimming Stones Across The Ebro

Skimming Stones Across The Ebro

"Permite Esumpa Piedras A Treves Del Ebro Mi Amour."

     "Porque? "

          "Enseneme, Yoquiero Aprender."



There is no bullet with your name on it. He knew that now. The 7.65 millimetre round that had entered the base of his spine and had erupted at the lowest part of his stomach had not been etched along its brass casing before being fired with the name William Hurst on it. Nor had it found its way some 800 meters across open ground on the Serra De Pandols and into his back with the knowing sense that it had always meant to have been there, rather it was the arbitrary decision of the Nationalist sniper who had patiently lay in wait among the undergrowth and dust on the Terra Alta, the sun scorching his sweating, louse riddled body. There he waited for the right moment, choosing his target. That target was him. No name was necessary upon the round fired. Only the stillness of the snipers hand and the sureness of his sight.


Then there was silence. The next sound he heard was the minute hand of his watch as it ticked gently. Silence returned. He was grateful for the chance to sleep at last.

•  

By the riverbank the old man bent down and picked up three different stones, rubbing the dried dirt off of them and turning them individually in his enormous hand and carefully inspecting each one before throwing two to the ground and opening his clenched fingers for the boy to see the remaining pebble nestling in his heavily lined palm. The old man looked over at the young boy who lay in front of him by the river bank, lifting his arm towards him; the mystery of flight and water held in his enormous hand.

"You want 'em like this Billy: smooth, no edges. They need to glide when they hit the water "

Then the old man pulled his head slightly back, beckoning him over in an unspoken gesture which he would also use to call one of his dogs when working with them out on the land. Like his dogs, the boy obeyed and came to heel by his side.

The trickling sounds of the gentle flow of the river which ran towards a small wooded island before thinning out towards the pastures that led to his family home, comforted the boy. The river's levels had been diminished by the summer drought that was now in its third month. As he stared at the old man, the harsh sun burnt down on the boy's head and neck. His eyes stung until they watered from the brightness.

The old man sat the stone between his thumb and fore fingers and presented it directly in front of the boy's face as if he was about to make the gift of a priceless precious gem to him.

"It needs weighing up before you throw it Billy," the old man told him.

 "If you want it to fly you have to be patient lad. You need to listen to the water before letting it go."

The old man turned and left the boy watching him as he walked slowly along the waters edge before stopping and staring across the river towards the fields ahead. It seemed to the boy that the skies above had no end. It’s boundaries perhaps finally meeting the rolling pastures below. Stopping at the waters edge, the old man then lifted his arm to just below his shoulder height. The boy watched as the old man's breathing began to slow. Each breath rising and falling from beneath his jacket, the rays of the sun caught clipping his frame as he stood concentrating on his aim. The boy almost mesmerised by the pebble in the old mans fist.

Unable to stop himself, the boy blinked against the harsh mid day glare. Without warning or sound, the old man's arm spun forward releasing the small stone from his grip. It glided across the water in a series of short, sharp bursts of energy, finally disappearing from his sight. Then the old man fell to his knees as if the stone he had just thrown had dragged the very life from his being.

•  

August 17th 1938 - Hill 705 - The Ebro River

He stood protected, he thought, by dense pine trees on the cota. He took the grenade from his belt and readied himself to prime it. Without hesitation he pulled the pin. The clip pinged across his face as he tore it from the arm of the grenade and prepared to hurl it into the gully below him. Raising his arm, he flung the primed armament into the faceless North African moors below. Rather than take cover to protect himself from the imminent blast, he watched and followed the grenade in flight. To his astonishment it was not the explosive device that he saw leaving his grasp but a small stone that had left his hand and began to skip across clear blue waters rather than the heat baked mountainside he stood upon. Then without warning, a fierce white heat hit his back, the ground fell away from his feet, the stale breath sucked from his body, then momentarily, silence before the echoes of ticking brought the veils of night to him.

•  

They had met whilst he had been given three days leave during a respite in the fighting. He had travelled to Barcelona by bus with two other men from the battalion. They found a small bar in a side street off of the Rambalas and gorged themselves on rabbit paella and drank Andalusian sherry in large quantities. She had waited on their table. Her beauty captivated him immediately; she had given him the occasional smile and sometimes glanced over towards him as she worked during the night. When they finally paid and left he had decided to wait until she had finished her shift. He introduced himself and in his pigeon Spanish drew laughter from her as they tentatively spoke, each occasionally correcting the others pronunciation in languages uncommon to both of them. Later they walked through the streets barely uttering a word to each other. All thoughts of the war were at that time a distant memory. There was calm and he felt safe. She asked where he intended to sleep that night and he sheepishly pointed towards the coast road that indicated he would find a place to bed down on the beach. He needed a secluded spot away from Nationalist troops or local police. She had allowed him to sleep on a threadbare couch in the room she rented from the owner of the bar who she worked for. He spent the next two days with her, each barely leaving the others side. His return to the battalion the hardest thing he had ever done. Their subsequent meetings were rare and lasted never more than twenty four hours. They often spent time by the Beso's river where he tried to teach her to skim stones as he had so often done as a child. One evening in mid July, as they sat together on an old wooden bench on the Carrer de Pallars, she took from her bag a small black satin box and gave it to him. Her eyes never once caught his. He took it from her hand, her head bowed as she stared silently at the pavement.


He gently lifted the Vacheron Patek watch from its navy blue lined box. The champagne coloured dial and elegant black hour and minute hands stared back at him
as he quietly admired the gift. He looked at her but did not know what to say.

“You like?”

She asked the question with trepidation in her voice, fearful of his reply.

"It's beautiful... how, where did you?"

She lifted her finger to his lips to prevent his questioning, knowing she could not provide the answers he would believe. She took the watch from his hand and held it
to her chest its steady movement beating quietly as if aligned to the rhythm of her breathing. Then attaching it to his wrist, she took his face into her hands, just as his mother had done when he was a child. The warmth of her lips reminding him again of the water. His eyes closed. He did not witness the tear fall from her cheek.

•  

Sweat trickled down his face as he lay, unable to move. The butt of the Degtyarev machine gun was still propped up against the wall where he had rested it before throwing the grenade. The residue of cordite and the rancid stench of a rotting mule close by were all he could smell. Although unable to see his injury, he could feel the wetness of his clothing, the seeping blood, urine and the ruptured remains of his intestines clinging to his groin and thighs. The intensity of pain, the likes of which he had never known, would follow shortly. Now for the briefest of moments shock held his suffering at bay. He stretched out his right arm and tried to reach for the gun, his fingers cupped to grasp at the rifle's sling to draw it to him, but he found nothing to hold. Sweat drenched his face and body. The darkness again took his hand and led him towards the waters edge where she waited for him. 

•  

January 12th 1937

The English channel was calm on his crossing over, but sea grey and unwelcoming.

"We’ve around another 75 miles to Dieppe. Be there in just under and hour and a half I'd say. When we reach port your on your bloody own my son."

The skipper of the rusting but sea worthy Dalmacia, a Welton and Gemmell steam trawler, built in the early 1900's, had agreed to get me to France on the understanding that if the French port authority or worst still the Royal Navy decided to come aboard during the crossing he was to sling himself over the side and hope for the best. Attempting to travel to Spain was a precarious and difficult undertaking. Having waited for over six months, the lengthy organising of his clandestine departure and the complicated arrangements for contacting the few he could rely on after arriving in France. He had no intention of returning to England with his tail between his legs.

"Why the bloody hell do you want to fight in their pissing war?" the skipper had asked him.

That same question had been asked of him so many times before leaving for Spain. He had joined the communist party in 1926, not simply because it was anti fascist but because its manifesto spoke directly to his heart.  He was born in Stepney, his Father an elderly and alcoholic brewery drayman had been killed in a pub brawl when he was three years old. His Mother, who had then brought him up single handed for the next 12 years after his fathers death died of pneumonia. Now at 15 he was alone and it had been that way ever since. He was given a roof over his head by the foreman of the engineering factory that his mother had worked in before her death. He had joined the small workforce reluctantly. Never wanting to spend his days turning metals at a lathe, he found solace in the Union meetings at the local secular hall and the teachings of Marx.

Always aware of the deprivations around him, the poor social housing, the squalor of the working classes, he had never been afraid to speak his mind at the social injustices he witnessed. He continued to forged head in his need to demonstrate, the outpouring of his strong beliefs sometimes ended in fist fights with the bigots and capitalist right he despised so. Always prepared to speak out against the injustices of those who he felt had no voice. He'd had run in's with Oswald Mosely's blackshirts and marched against the anti Semitic bigotry in the East End of London. He'd always found trouble. But it was the right trouble to be in. He feared little and thought less of the consequences of the forthcoming armed struggles he would become immersed in.


The French coastline came into clear view as he stood on the deck of the fishing boat that had brought him, now so close to its shores from Newhaven. From Dieppe he hitched a ride to Paris. The capital had become a well known city to those seeking to enlist with the International Brigades. Upon his arrival he was he met by a French contact Thierry Abelin, a member of an underground activities group in the city which was involved in supporting Spain's cause. They found a week’s lodgings in the back bedroom of a grocer in the Parisian suburb of Banlieue. Later they were to be joined on their journey by Sebastien Favre, a teacher from Picardy and Teddy Woodward, a Liverpudlian docker.

They left Paris by train for Perpignan where they met up with a lorry driven by an elderly Catalonian man called Merce, who fed them bread, blood sausage and rough red wine. That night the journey recommenced and they were taken tenuously over the Pyrenees into Spain to a rambling old farmhouse in the foothills, near a village called Taull. Some ten days later they all found themselves in the larger town of Albacete which had been chosen has the HQ of what had become the International Brigades. During the next three weeks they were given the rudimentary training in the use of weaponry which was to be implemented in their fight to free Spain of its fascistic oppressors.

With no uniform to wear, he then joined the British Battalion at Aragon.  During the coming weeks food and water became a rarity and the gift of a Russian rifle given to him by a commissary made in 1926 which was to become a constant companion during the daily conflicts. Teddy Woodward was killed at Teruel after being shot in the throat. He never saw the Frenchman, Favre again after they left the pyrenean farm earlier that winter.

He had seen action in the subsequent months and gained a reputation with his fellow brigaders as a man to be trusted and at times almost fearless in his ability to fight. He had not feared death at first, believing as he did in no afterlife, Elysium or Supreme Being to comfort his end. Waking each morning to the knowledge that, what will be, will simply be. For many months during skirmishes and battle he saw his fair share of the inhumanity of a civil war fought by many like minded comrades against an enemy willing to destroy those that opposed a people’s freedom and unity.

He had taken the lives of an enemy intent on taking his. He had killed at first reluctantly, now that was not the case, each days fighting brought a hardening of the heart and a coldness that clouded his memories of hope. The stains of war drenched his spirit and the purity of his beliefs. He sometimes struggled to remember the reasons why he was fighting and at times of cruel extremity why he had travelled to Spain at all. Had war really taken all that he believed so strongly in away so quickly and worse still had the ever constant sense of cowardice he had begun to feel after the daily fire fights tainted his desire for combat and victory? Had these fears and reluctance to fight, this forever reaching arm of being so close to death, now rocked his beliefs totally?  If he too was wounded during battle, would anyone tend to him, would there be medical aid? In the past months he had seen so many of the injured go without morphine. No first aid orderly to apply battle dressings or offer water. Had these thoughts subliminally crept into his being after surviving the horrors of Belchite, Cordoya and Saragosa? Was it death he truly feared or the loss of future moments he would miss with those he could leave behind, those he loved? Unknowingly his hand wrapped itself around the watch on his left arm. He could feel the pulsing of its movement throbbing through his sweating palm. Had his unwavering belief in the Republican cause now faltered, become insecure and unworthy because of her? 

Whenever possible he would wash in streams and rivers. He did this not to remove the detritus of the non living from his body, the blood and ash or the stink of decay and death. He did it to be close to the water, to her. He did it to remember who he really was.

•  

It was not a sense of waking that he felt; rather it was the awareness of living that had brought some of his senses back to him. Despite the heat of the day he was cold. He could not feel anything below his chest. The sound of artillery shelling was constant as well as rifle and small arms fire erupting occasionally from all angles as he lay in the ochre tinged dirt. Had he really known this day would come? Was it fate that had finally played its part? Had there been a bullet with his name on? One that had ripped through his torso just as a spiteful reminder that even decent men in an indecent time meet their ends as if written by the gods he had never believed in?  Alone and with no one to tend to his wounds he again closed his eyes, now unable to use his arms to shield his face from the burning rays of the powerful mid day sun.  How many times in the last year had he witnessed the daily suffering of others and done nothing? How many fallen men, women, even a child had he ignored or walked over in fields, roadsides and burnt out villages? The draining away of the lives of others had been all around him, their bodies torn to pieces, the cries from the dying for mothers to hold the hands of the petrified in their remaining moments. These were to become a haunting mantra for him during nights of rare rest. He feared death. Now the sweeping social injustices of the past were unimportant, the politics, morality and youthful courage that he once held so dear had become hidden amid the chaos of each day.

•  

The cicadas’ song hummed around him, their tymbals comforting, hypnotic. It was said that their hymn when heard by the dying was a sign of granting immortality or reincarnation. He doubted he would find either. But something was different.

Where were the harsh, cruel sounds of battle? Had the creatures in the trees around him drowned out the misery with their calling which was always at its loudest during the hottest time of an already hot day? The low chanting which was omitted from the abdominal base of the insects now seemed to connect with his paralyzed body, the pulsating of their calls flowed through him reaching deep inside, finally taking rest besides the ticking of the watch around his wrist.

He was no longer alone. The air around him was still.

She sat by his side, her legs tucked underneath a long flowing skirt. She gently played with his hair, rolling strands of his blond fringe through her fingers. She did not speak, but simply smiled at him. He felt no pain and the silentiary atmosphere was both tranquil and serene. Where was fear now? What of the black, murky spectre of death that had so preoccupied his solitary thoughts for all those months?

She stood and held out her hand to him, gently taking it he raised himself to his feet and turned to face the languor of the azure waters that she now guided him towards. The rivers halcyon flow was drawing him to its edge. Standing on the other side of the river bank stood the old man, his untroubled look reassuring him. She let go of his hand and stroked the side of his cheek with the backs of her long fingers.

"Let’s skim stones across the Ebro my love, teach me again how it is done" She said.


The boy knelt to the ground to search for a stone, his fingers reassured by the moisture of the earth. The rays of the afternoon sun, warming his hands.