My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy Read Online Free PDF Page B

I left England, instructions in the use of the code were committed to a tiny piece of substance resembling rice-paper, which I habitually kept in the ticket-pocket of my trousers. It was this tiny object that nearly brought me face to face with the firing squad.
    After a few busy weeks in Seville and the surrounding countryside, my eye fell on a poster advertising a bull-fight to be held on the following Sunday in Córdoba. The front line then ran just twenty-five miles east of Córdoba, between Montoro and Andújar, and the chance of seeing a bull-fight so close to a front which I had not yet visited seemed too good to be missed. I decided to spend along weekend at Córdoba, including attendance at the Sunday corrida . I went to the Capitania , the military headquarters in Seville, to get the necessary pass, but a friendly major waved me away. A pass was not required for Córdoba, he said. All I had to do was get on the train and go.
    On the Friday before the bull-fight, I boarded the morning train at Seville, sharing a compartment with a group of Italian infantry officers. Always on the job, as the saying goes, I asked them to have dinner with me in Córdoba, but they explained courteously that they would not have time. They would be too busy in the brothels before moving up to the front next day. I took a room in the Hotel del Gran Capitan, enjoyed a solitary meal, and walked the scented streets in a happy daze until about midnight when I returned to the hotel and went to bed.
    I was aroused from a deep sleep by thunderous hammering on the door. When I opened, two Civil Guards stamped into the room. They told me to pack my bag and accompany them to headquarters. To my question why, the senior of the two, a corporal, answered simply, “ Ordenes .”
    I slept heavily in those days. Besides, I was at the disadvantage of confronting, in my pyjamas, two heavily booted men with rifles and revolvers. Half asleep and half scared, my brain reacted with less than the speed of light. I was conscious that something might have to be done about the tell-tale paper tucked away in my trousers; but how to get rid of it? My mind moved vaguely in the direction of bathrooms, but I had taken a room without a bath. By the time I had dressed and packed, and the Civil Guards had turned over my bedclothes, I had got no further than a sluggish resolve to get rid of my scrap of paper somehow on the way from the hotel to Civil Guard headquarters.
    When we got into the street, I found that it was not going to be easy. I had only one free hand; the other gripped my suitcase. My escort, evidently well trained, kept a steady pace behind me all the way, watching me, for all I knew, like hawks. So the incriminating material was still on me when I was shown into an office lit by asingle bright naked bulb shining on a large, well-polished table. Opposite me stood an undersized major of the Civil Guard, elderly, bald and sour. With eyes fixed to the table, he listened perfunctorily to the report of the corporal who had brought me in.
    The major examined my passport at length. “Where,” he asked me, “is your permission to visit Córdoba?” I repeated what I had been told at the Capitania in Seville, but he brushed my words aside. Impossible, he said flatly; everyone knew that a permit was necessary for Córdoba. Why had I come to Córdoba? To see the bull-fight? Where was my ticket? I hadn’t got one? I had only just arrived and was going to buy one in the morning? A likely story! And so on. With every fresh outburst of scepticism, I became aware, with growing unease, that my interrogator was a confirmed Anglophobe. There were plenty of Anglophobes in those days in Spain, on both sides of the line. But by this time my brain was beginning to work normally, and I began to see possibilities in that wide expanse of gleaming table.
    With an air of utter disbelief, the major and the two men who had arrested me turned to my suitcase. With unexpected delicacy,