Last Citadel - [World War II 03] (12 page)

The man’s eyes were as red as the blood on Luis’s dagger.

‘Father, a de Vega killed the bull. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m ashamed you saw that. I wanted it to be the best bull, for your first day in the
corrida
.’

‘Then it was the best bull. Because you wanted it to be. Thank you.’

His father looked at the knife. He sniffled and smiled at once, a wonderful maneuver.

‘You were fearless out there,’ Ramon told his son.

‘Because,’ Luis said, ‘you wanted me to be.’

An hour later, Ramon de Vega engaged his second bull, the final and the greatest of the six in that day’s
corrida
, and he was magnificent. He won the crowd again and was awarded two severed ears from the wonderfully dead bull. Circling the ring, Ramon held up the ears to the roaring crowd. Luis walked behind him gathering off the ruffled dirt the tossed roses, wineskins, hats, cigars, and ladies’ fans.

The year was 1934. Luis intensified his apprenticeship under his father, learning all the passes, and perfecting his courage as a
banderillero
. He would become the next generation of great
matadors
in the de Vega lineage. One day he came home and told his father his friends had come up with a nickname for him, The Dagger.

But around him, boiling about his family and the bullrings, across Barcelona and all of Spain, was civil unrest. The elected Republican government had for several years begun to unravel the ancient influences of the Church in Spain. Luis’s father despised the Republicans as socialists and middle-class reformers, handmaidens of the Communists. Ramon told Luis many times the government wanted to sweep away old Spain, a society built on Catholicism, monarchy, and the military, buttressed by birthright and honor. The Republicans wanted to reform the country into a little model of Russia, where there was fake equality among men, all were laborers, there were no peasants, no noblemen, and there was no God for anyone.

In Barcelona, a Republican bastion in Catalonia, Luis watched the violence grow. Priests were murdered - he saw a mob force a priest to lie on the ground with his arms spread in the shape of the cross before they chopped his arms off - nuns violated, and churches desecrated. Brawls spilled into the streets, it was the old and the new come to blows. Labor groups became vigilantes in what was known as the Red Terror, they rounded up suspected opponents and held midnight courts and dawn executions. Luis was kept away from the fights and the virulent politics by his father. But revolution was brewing. Even practicing his passes with the
muleta
and his thrusts with the dagger and the
estoque
, Luis saw the revolt coming.

In 1936, the Republican Catalonian governor shut down the bullrings, claiming the events were anti-Socialist. The energies of the people would be better spent building the new Spanish culture, not hewing to old, violent traditions. Ramon de Vega saw no hope for peace; a delirium was in Spain and it had to be thrashed out between the Soviet-backed Republicans and the unyielding supporters of old Spain, the Nationalists. He sent his son away from the bulls, into the Nationalist army, to serve in Spanish Morocco under his old friend, General Francisco Franco.

Within four months, the uprising in Spain erupted. Franco needed his army to come quickly from Morocco, and he got the help he needed from the German
Führer
Hitler. Luis boarded a German airplane with the rest of Franco’s loyal army and headed over the Straits of Gibraltar for the mainland.

For the next three years, Luis Ruiz de Vega fought in the armored division. His tanks were supplied by the Nazis and the Italians. They were all lightly protected, creaky playthings and pitifully gunned. Mussolini sent his CV-35, Hitler his Panzer Mark Is. Neither could withstand a direct hit from the smallest anti-tank guns of the Republicans, and neither stood a chance against the fast Russian
T-26s
with their 45 mm guns. Luis learned to be sly in his tanks, to come from the flank and behind, to dodge the horns of the enemy, always relying on speed and cunning more than strength. He earned promotions to squad and platoon leader, then company commander, leading as many as a dozen tanks into battle.

In the three years of the Spanish Civil War, Luis became an ace,
la Daga
, destroying more than fifty Republican tanks in the battles for Madrid, Malaga, Bilbao, Segovia, and finally, his homeland, Catalonia. He fought alongside the German Condor Legion, and began his study of their language. Fighting on the side of the Republicans were English and French, and Luis hardened his heart against these nations for supporting the Communist enemy. Franco’s alliance with Hitler led Luis to follow the events outside Spain in greater Europe. In March of 1938, Nazi Germany stormed into Austria. In October, Germany captured Czechoslovakia. Luis had no real love for the creed of the Nazis - their fascism and its required dictator, this would not be right for Spain; his own land needed the Church and its older, perhaps more backward ways - but Hitler had been a good ally and his troops were superb. In March of ‘39, Madrid fell at last to the Nationalists and Generalissimo Franco assumed power to end the Civil War, reuniting the country. Luis went home to Barcelona and his father. He was convinced that the New Order in Spain was going to flow from Franco; he knew, too, the new face of greater Europe would be Hitler’s.

Luis told his father he’d made up his mind to remain in the military. This was where fresh glory for the de Vega family would arise, not from the bulls. Surely Hitler would conquer Europe. How could he not? Who would stop him? The English and the French had not lifted a finger to hinder Germany’s expansions. Nor had the Americans. The Russians had been whipped with German help right there in Spain, for all to see. When the European war came, Luis intended to help the Germans. When that war was won, he would return to Barcelona a hero, a powerful man, a de Vega with a debt from Hitler himself. Luis stood before his father a decorated veteran, a man in every right. Ramon took his son into the courtyard, gripped the handles of the old bull-barrow and rushed at him. After a half hour, the
matador
laughed. ‘So, you’ve lost your skills as a
banderillero
.’ Ramon gave his blessing for Luis to stay a soldier.

Within five months of the Spanish Civil War’s end, Hitler invaded Poland. France and England declared war on Germany. Franco kept Spain neutral. Hitler came to Spain seeking repayment for the debt of blood won by his legions, his tanks and planes in Franco’s service during the Civil War. But the Generalissimo refused even to let German troops march across Spain to attack the British garrison in Gibraltar. After their conference, Hitler was quoted as saying, ‘I’d rather have three or four teeth out than meet that man again.’ Luis agreed with Franco; Spain had suffered enough in the previous three years. Over a half-million Spaniards had died fighting or by the executions. War had gorged on Spain, it was time to feed elsewhere. That place was to be Russia.

Franco paid his debt to Hitler in another manner. He raised the Blue Division, twenty thousand strong. Their colors were that of the Nationalist Falange Party, they wore red berets and dark blue shirts. By handing the Blue Division to Hitler, Franco averted the threat of Axis invasion across the Pyrenees. The Blue Division, like the soldiers in every army who go to battle on foreign soil, was made up of every kind of man, with every sort of reason. Many were fervid anti-Communists or pro-German. Some were adventurers, others were starving in Franco’s new Spain and joined for the food and clothes. Most were professional soldiers in the Spanish army and war was their craft. The youngest ones of these, like Luis, went to invade Russia to coat themselves in glory for their return to Spain, or to find death instead.

The Blue Division left Madrid in July 1941, for training in Germany Luis, because of his combat experience and ability to speak German, was made a captain. In October, the Blue Division was shipped across the Russian frontier.

Luis fought to the gates of Leningrad. His Latin troops were brave and loyal, but were treated badly by their German superiors. The Blue Division was given poor equipment and worse support in the field, and their strength ebbed. America entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s
blitz
ground to a halt at the approach to Moscow. By February of 1942, Franco began to press for the withdrawal of his gift to Hitler. The Blue Division became the butt of jokes in Spain while its men suffered on the frozen Eastern Front.

Luis did not want to go home. He believed the war on Russia could still be won by Germany. He needed to hold on to his chance to be as great as his father; he would change from Falange blue to starched black linen and silver eagles, to match the gold suits of Ramon. He would win with his own courage, not applause and flung wineskins, but power, that was the spoil with which he intended to return to Barcelona, a conqueror of Russia and Europe. He and his father would compare wounds, gored by bulls or bullets, and they would be equals. Luis asked to transfer into the
Waffen
SS, in order to stay in the war when the Blue Division was called home. Luis was accepted into the SS division
Leibstandarte
, retaining his captain’s rank, and given a Mark IV tank to command. He served with the SS for six months and in that time became convinced the German soldier was the most potent weapon in the world. They possessed Europe already. And they surely would not lose to the Russians.

Then came his wound.

While Luis lay in a hospital - cut open and closed again, a chunk of him in a bucket and tossed away - the world saw Stalingrad and the Soviet counteroffensive that shoved the German army all the way west beyond Kursk. While he convalesced, the Germans occupied their territories with death camps and slaves and showed themselves brutes, as bad as the Communists. While Luis learned again to swallow and walk, while his body dissipated, the war soured against Germany. He could have left the hospital and gone home, and he might have.

But not the way he healed, not with the flesh and time he’d lost. What did he have to take with him back to Spain? He’d not even told his father yet in his letters what happened to him. No. The only hope for Luis Ruiz de Vega was if the Americans would hold off their invasion in Europe, if the German assault on Kursk would go well, then he could get his hands on what he came to Russia for the first time with the Blue Division, and why he was here again with the SS on this train, rumbling across the border in the pit of night, late, tired, and once more hungry, talking with this fat officer.

To return with honor - to become the hero so he can become again the son and the Spaniard.

He did not say this to Major Grimm. But the German listened keenly and nodded, and knew it.

* * * *

CHAPTER 5

June 31

1010 hours

a Luftwaffe JU-52

altitude fifty-seven hundred meters above Rakovo, Soviet Union

over the German front lines

Abram Breit folded to his hands and knees. He crawled out onto the thick, clear pane in the nose of the plane. Breit wobbled, unsteady even on all fours.

A reconnaissance photographer lay flat on his stomach across the swath of clarity. The man ignored Breit creeping up at his side. A blue and green eternity yawned beneath them. Only wispy pads of clouds seemed to separate them from the planet. Breit laid flat, too, and he thought they looked like riders on an invisible magic carpet.

The photographer snapped pictures of the army on the staging zone below. He plugged his headphones into a jack in the fuselage beside him. Instantly his earphones came alive. He heard the pilot laughing at him.

Breit looked back up the companionway to the cockpit. The pilot quieted.

The photographer took shot after shot, flipping the film advance on his big camera. Breit finally looked down now. His chest squeezed. He laid his palms flat on the big plastic sheet to remind himself that it was there.

The JU-52 flew as high as it could go. Below, a tan and green immensity spread to every compass point; this was the Russian steppe, a vast ocean of grasses. Breit had been told about the dirt of the steppe, how it was rich black beneath the grasses and little forests. Dark telltales of turned soil marred the ground, betraying where German tanks, artillery, trucks, and tractors churned over the Soviet plain. The photographer recorded these scratches in the earth, the telltales of the German movement forward, this unprecedented concentration of men and weapons for Citadel, scheduled to begin in a few days.