A Broken Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

barricades were designed to cope with such assaults. At the same time, lorries and cars, horns blaring, flags flying, armed men on top, were racing around the city carrying food, some already with makeshift armour plating fixed to windscreens and sides.
    All had big white letters painted on their bodywork to denote which of the myriad left-wing organisations they belonged to: UGT, POUM, PSOE, PCE, and the biggest and most numerous, the group of which Florencia was a member, the syndicalists and purist anarchists of the CNT-FAI, two groups who had fallen out over political purity and had recently come together again.
    The Spanish left, not too dissimilar to those on the right they opposed, consisted of a plethora of shifting unions, cooperatives, labour fronts and political affiliations too confusing for a mere visitor to comprehend, despite Florencia’s best efforts at enlightenment, accompanied, when not praising her own CNT-FAI colleagues, with spitting insults, the most vehement against the Popular Front government in Madrid, made up of lily-livered socialist democrats and far-left backsliders seduced by power.
    They all hated each other with a passion, as groups sure their brand of socialism was the route to some political utopia, and each tried to poach members from the other, which did nothing for inter-union rivalry. The Trotskyists of the POUM saw themselves as the true heirs to Karl Marx and loathed the Stalinists and Moscow lackeys of the communist PCE. Both laughed at the far-left trade union outfit called the UGT, big in Madrid and at one time part of the government, who stood as the main rival to the equally union-based anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT.
    The Federación Anarquista Ibérica , to which Florencia belonged through the women’s organisation the Mujeres Libres , preached pure, unadulterated anarchism as voiced by Mikhail Bakunin: no money, no government, no police, no judges and no prisons, each person responsible for and contributing to the greater good. The POUM believed in a Spanish form of communism that had nothing to learn from Leninism or the Communist International, which gave instructions to their rivals, orders that came straight from the Kremlin.
    The social democrats believed in liberal capitalism, and in amongst that and just to complicate matters, many, of whatever hue, were, in Barcelona, Catalan Nationalists seeking regional autonomy from Madrid. Yet faced with a fascist revolt, all their differences would be put aside to face what they knew to be a common enemy.
    Florencia led Cal and Vince to the main meeting place of the members of both the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica . Nothing could have been more inappropriately named that day than the Café de Tranquilidad . It wasn’t tranquil now, it was like a very busy and disturbed hive, crowded, noisy and bordering on mayhem, with bees arriving to yell bits of news, or departing to carry instructions to some part of the city where their leaders expected they would need to act, and all the while, to add to the air of unreality, waiters swanned through bearing platters of food or trays of beer or coffee.
    Florencia was nothing if not determined and nor, Cal later found out, was she shy in exaggeration when she got a hearing from the faction leaders. He thought he had not told her much about his past, but over two weeks of being constantly in each other’s company, walking, dining and pillow talk, it amounted to more than he could recall.
    She blew up what he had imparted about his military experience out of all relation to the truth, so that far from being a peripheral figure seeking information as to how he and the Olympiad athletes could help, he was soon surrounded by eager faces and, named by Florencia as a famous military genius, bombarded with questions about what these inexperienced fighters should do.
    Language was a real problem, not aided by the fact that no one who posed a question