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And two dark figures spilling out from it, one with a rifle at the hip.

‘Arreste! Qui est?’

The rifle was pointing just above their heads, held loose enough that Fitz could almost see it dropping level and firing casually.

Fitz slowed, pausing midstep, and letting his eyes take in if there was anywhere to dive to in the narrow pass. Sasha still moved forward, his hands out, held near his shoulders.

‘Bonjour monsieur.’

In the still pale light, the colours were drained, grey. Fitz hung back slightly, ensuring Sasha was shielding him. Let him do the talking, just keep quiet and alert. He raised his hands in mimicry, hoping he looked suitably pitiful to be a refugee. The other guard gestured for them to move closer and, as they did so, Fitz glimpsed red at the man’s neck, a scarf tied and almost hidden by the upturned collar.

‘Buenos dias, comrade. You turned back?’

They must be the men who had brought the volunteers up to this narrow gateway into the chaos, Fitz realised. They would bring up a truckload, pass them on to a guide and wait overnight to see how many turned back at the prospect of the freezing climb across to the war. They had probably ferried up the men Sasha had given the truck to on the other side. Sasha was talking. ‘No, no. We have just come out. We need to get to Perpignan. We have trains to catch.’

* * *

Alberto sat on the veranda of the hospital, reading a well-thumbed newspaper. He struggled to turn the page, what with having one arm bound up against his chest. The sandy-haired man sat next to him, his knee stiff in front of him, leaned over.

‘Here, let me get that for you, man.’

Alberto smiled and let the Scot fold the pages over. ‘Thank you, Jorges.’

‘Ah, s’no problem.’

The other man handed the paper back and went back to his novel. Alberto returned to reading the report on Guernica. He was extremely bothered by it. At first, when the news had drifted along the line, his centuria had presumed that the Basque town had been levelled in a Nationalist air strike, just as Durango had been. Then other stories started to be whispered. Franco had claimed the town was razed by the Republicans as they retreated. That was obviously propagandist lies. Except...

He’d been out of the trench, crawling about on his stomach pulling up potatoes for them to cook. Normally, the Nationalist line left them to do it. But for once they opened fire. Alberto had been lucky: the bullet had shattered his humerus but not hit anything vital. He’d been carted, literally, back to a field hospital where he had been patched up and then sent on to a town hospital to recover. And there he had got the latest newspapers, seen newsreels. Talked to other volunteers from other fronts, like Jorges, who had come back shot up. And it seemed their initial presumption had been wrong. The haunting ghostlike images of Guernica had been created when fires were started. And it looked increasingly like those fires had been started deliberately. There were too many witness accounts, too much evidence.

It was hard to accept that the Nationalists had been right about this, hard to accept his own side had not been truthful. They were supposed to be the new, uncorrupted future of Spain. He continued to read the report: an eyewitness account by a priest. Ordinarily, he would dismiss it. The church tended to side with the Nationalists except Father de Onaindía who was a close friend of Aguirre, the Basque leader. He had travelled to Paris, was spreading his version widely outside Spain and the account was plausible, believable. They had firebombed their own town rather than let it stand for the enemy to capture.

It was a barbarity.

He folded the paper up, laboriously, and tucked it into the knapsack at his feet. The truck would be here soon. He was being sent back to Barcelona on leave.

* * *

It took a day for the paperwork to be sorted out, then they parted at the station. Sasha handed over the papers and gave Fitz a lengthy list of instructions and advice.