The Soccer War (19 page)

The prisoners mumbled. They were stripped to the waist and weak from loss of blood—the first with a belly wound, the second with one to his shoulder, the third with part of his hand shot away. The one with the belly wound didn’t last long. He groaned, turned as if it were a step in a dance and fell to the ground. The remaining two went silent and looked at their colleague with the flat gaze of landed fish.

An officer led us to the garrison commander, who, pale and tired, did not know what to do with us. He ordered that military shirts be given to us. He ordered his aide to bring coffee. The commander was worried that Salvadoran units might arrive any moment. Santa Rosa lay along the enemy’s main line of attack—that is, along the road that connected the Atlantic and the Pacific. El Salvador, lying on the Pacific, dreamed of conquering Honduras, lying on the Atlantic. In this way little El Salvador would become a two-ocean power. The shortest path from El Salvador to the Atlantic ran right where we were—through Ocotepeque, Santa Rosa de Copán, San Pedro Sula, to Puerto Cortés. Advancing Salvadoran tanks had already penetrated deep into Honduran territory. The Salvadorans were moving to order: push through to the Atlantic, then to Europe and then the world!

Their radio repeated: ‘A little shouting and noise and that’s the end of Honduras.’

Weaker and poorer, Honduras was defending itself fiercely. Through the open barracks window we could see the higher-ranking officers preparing their units for the front. Young conscripts stood in scraggly ranks. They were small dark boys, Indians all, with tense faces, terrified—but ready to fight. The officers said something and pointed at the distant horizon. Afterwards a priest appeared and sprinkled holy water on platoons going out towards death.

In the afternoon we left for the front in an open truck. The first forty kilometres passed without incident. The road led through higher and higher country, among green heights covered with thick tropical bush. Empty clay huts, some of them burnt out, clung to the mountain slopes. In one place we passed the inhabitants of an entire village straggling along the edge of the road, carrying bundles. Later, as we drove past, a crowd of peasants in white shirts and sombreros flourished their machetes and shotguns. Artillery fire could be heard far, far away.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the road. We had reached a triangular clearing in the forest where the casualties had been brought. Some were lying on stretchers, and others right on the grass. A few soldiers and two orderlies moved among them. There was no doctor. Four soldiers were digging a hole nearby. The wounded lay there calmly, patiently, and the most amazing thing was patience, the unimaginable superhuman endurance of pain. No one was crying out, no one was calling for help. The soldiers brought them water and the orderlies applied primitive dressings as well as they could. What I saw there staggered me. One of the orderlies, with a lancet in his hand, was going from one casualty to another and digging the bullets out of them, as if he were paring the core out of an apple. The other orderly poured iodine on the wounds and then pressed on the bandage.

A wounded boy arrived in a truck. A Salvadoran. He had
taken a bullet in the knee. He was ordered to lie down on the grass. The boy was barefoot, pale, spattered with blood. The orderly poked around in his knee, looking for the bullet. The boy moaned.

‘Quiet, you poor bastard,’ the orderly said. ‘You’re distracting me.’

He used his fingers to pull out the bullet. Then he poured iodine into the wound and wrapped it in a bandage.

‘Stand up and go to the truck,’ said a soldier from the escort.

The boy picked himself up off the the grass and hobbled to the vehicle. He didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound.

‘Climb in,’ the soldier commanded. We rushed to give the boy a hand, but the soldier waved us away with his rifle. Something was bothering the soldier; he’d been at the front; his nerves were jangly. The boy rested himself on the high tailgate and dragged himself in. His body hit the bed of the truck with a thud. I thought he was finished. But a moment later his grey, naive, quizzical face appeared, waiting humbly for the next stroke of destiny.

‘How about a smoke?’ he asked us in a quiet, hoarse voice. We tossed whatever cigarettes we had into the truck. The vehicle moved off, and the boy was grinning at having enough cigarettes to share with his whole village.

The orderlies were giving glucose intravenously to a dying soldier, who had drawn many interested onlookers. Some were sitting around the stretcher where he was lying, and others were leaning on their rifles. He might have been, say, twenty. He had taken eleven rounds. An older, weaker man hit by those eleven rounds would have been dead long ago. But the bullets had ripped into a young body, strong and powerfully built, and death was meeting resistance. The wounded man lay unconscious, already on the other side of existence, but some remnant of life was putting up a last desperate fight. The soldier was stripped to the waist, and
everyone could see his muscles contracting and the sweat beading up on his sallow skin. The tense muscles and streams of sweat showed the ferocity of battle, when life goes against death. Everybody was interested in it because everybody wanted to know how much strength there was in life and how much there was in death. Everybody wanted to see how long life could hold off death and whether a young life that’s still there and doesn’t want to give up would be able to outlast death.

‘Maybe he’ll make it,’ one of the soldiers ventured.

‘No way,’ the orderly replied, holding the bottle of glucose at arm’s length above the casualty.

There was a gloomy silence. The casualty inhaled violently, as if he had just finished a long hard run.

‘Doesn’t anybody know him?’ one of the soldiers asked eventually.

The wounded man’s heart was working at maximum effort; we felt its feverish thumping.

‘Nobody,’ another soldier answered.

A truck was climbing the road, its motor complaining. Four soldiers were digging a hole down in the woods.

‘Is he ours or theirs?’ a soldier sitting by the stretcher asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ said the orderly after a moment’s quiet.

‘He’s his mother’s,’ a soldier standing nearby said.

‘He’s God’s now,’ added another after a pause. He took off his cap and hung it on the barrel of the rifle.

The casualty shivered, and his muscles pulsed under his glossy yellowish skin.

‘Life is so strong,’ a soldier leaning on his rifle said in astonishment. ‘It’s still there, still there.’

Everyone was absorbed, silent, concentrating on the sight of the wounded man. He was drawing breath more slowly now, and his head had tilted back. The soldiers sitting near
him grasped their hands around their knees and hunched up, as if the fire was burning low and the cold creeping in. In the end—it was a while yet—somebody said: ‘He’s gone. All he was is gone.’

They stayed there for some time, looking fearfully at the dead man and afterwards, when they saw that nothing else would happen, they began walking away.

We drove on. The road snaked through forested mountains, past the village of San Francisco. A series of curves began, one after another, and suddenly around one curve we ran into the maw of the war. Soldiers were running and firing, bullets whizzed overhead, long bursts of machine-gun fire ripped along both sides of the road. The driver braked suddenly and at that instant a shell exploded in front of us. Sweet Jesus, I thought, this is it. What felt like the wing of a typhoon swept through the truck. Everybody dived for it, one on top of another, just to make it to the ground, to hit the ditch, to vanish. Out of the corner of my eye, on the run, I could see the fat French TV cameraman scrambling along the road looking for his equipment. Somebody shouted, ‘Take cover!’ and when he heard that order—grenades going off and the bark of automatic rifles hadn’t fazed him—he hugged the road like a dead man.

I lunged in the direction that seemed to be the most quiet, threw myself into the bushes, down, down, as far as I could get from the curve where the shell had hit us, downhill, along bare ground, skating across slick clay, and then into the bush, deep into the bush, but I didn’t run far because suddenly there was shooting right in front of me—bullets flying around, branches fluttering, a machine-gun roaring. I fell and crouched on the ground.

When I opened my eyes I saw a piece of soil and ants crawling over it.

They were walking along their paths, one after another,
in various directions. It wasn’t the time for observing ants, but the very sight of them marching along, the sight of another world, another reality, brought me back to consciousness. An idea came into my head: if I could control my fear enough to stop my ears for a moment and look only at these insects, I could begin to think with some sort of sense. I lay among the thick bushes plugging my ears with all my might, nose in the dirt and I watched the ants.

I don’t know how long this went on. When I raised my head, I was looking into the eyes of a soldier.

I froze. Falling into the hands of the Salvadorans was what I feared most, because then the only thing to look forward to was certain death. They were a brutal army, blind with fury, shooting whomever they got hold of in the madness of the war. In any case, this was what I thought, having been fed Honduran propaganda. An American or an Englishman might have a chance, although not necessarily. In Nacaome the day before we had been shown an American missionary killed by the Salvadorans. And El Salvador did not even maintain diplomatic relations with Poland, so I would count for nothing.

The soldier was taken by surprise, too. Crawling through the bush, he hadn’t noticed me until the last moment. He adjusted his helmet, which was adorned with grass and leaves. He had a dark, skinny, furrowed face. In his hands there was an old Mauser.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘And what army are you from?’

‘Honduras,’ he said, because he could tell right off that I was a foreigner, neither his nor theirs.

‘Honduras! Dear brother!’ I rejoiced and pulled the piece of paper out of my pocket. It was the document from the Honduran high command, from Colonel Ramirez Ortega,
to the units at the front permitting me to enter the region of military activity. Each of us had been given the same document in Tegucigalpa before leaving for the front.

I told the soldier that I had to get to Santa Rosa and then to Tegucigalpa so that I could send a dispatch to Warsaw. The soldier was happy because he was already calculating that with an order from the general staff (the documents commanded all subordinates to assist me) he could withdraw to the rear along with me.

‘We will go together,
señor
,’ the soldier said. ‘
Señor
will say that he has commanded me to accompany him.’

He was a recruit, a dirt farmer; he had been called up a week ago, he didn’t know the army; the war meant nothing to him. He was trying to figure out how to survive it.

Shells were slamming around us. Far, far away we could hear shooting. Cannons were firing. The smell of powder and smoke was in the air. There were machine-guns behind us and on both sides.

His company had been crawling forward among the bushes, up this hill, when our truck came around the corner and drove into the turmoil of war and was abandoned. From where we lay pressing against the ground we could see the thick-ribbed gum soles of his company, only their soles, as the men crawled through the grass. Then the soles of their boots stopped, then they moved ahead, one-two, one-two, a few metres forward, and then they stopped again.

The soldier nudged me:
‘Señor, mire cuantos zapatos!’
(‘Look at all those shoes!’)

He kept looking at the shoes of the other members of his company as they crawled forward. He blinked, weighed something in his mind and at last said hopelessly,
‘Toda mi familia anda descalzada.’
(‘My whole family goes barefoot.’)

We started crawling through the forest.

The shooting let up for a moment and the soldier, fatigued, stopped. In a hushed voice he told me to wait where I was because he was going back to where his company had been fighting. He said that the living had certainly moved forward—their orders were to pursue the enemy to the very border—but the dead would remain on the battlefield and, for them, their boots were now superfluous. He would strip a few of the dead of their boots, hide them under a bush and mark the place. When the war was over, he would return and have enough boots for his whole family. He had already calculated that he could trade one pair of army boots for three pairs of children’s shoes, and there were nine little ones back home.

It crossed my mind that he was going mad, so I told him that I was putting him under my orders and that we should keep crawling. But the soldier did not want to listen. He was driven by thoughts of footwear and he would throw himself into the front line in order to secure the property lying there in the grass, rather than let it be buried with the dead. Now the war had meaning for him, a point of reference and a goal. He knew what he wanted and what he had to do. I was certain that if he left me we would be separated and never meet again. The last thing I wanted was to be left alone in that forest: I did not know who controlled it or which army was where or which direction I should set off in. There is nothing worse than finding yourself alone in somebody else’s country during somebody else’s war. So I crawled after the soldier towards the battlefield. We crept to where the forest stopped and a new scene of combat could be observed through the stumps and bushes. The front had moved off laterally now: shells were bursting behind an elevation that rose up to the left of us, and somewhere to the right—underground, it seemed, but it must have been in a ravine—machine-guns were muttering.
An abandoned mortar stood in front of us, and in the grass lay dead soldiers.

I told my companion that I was going no further. He could do what he had to do, as long as he didn’t get lost and returned quickly. He left his rifle with me and bolted ahead. I was so worried that someone would catch us there or pop up from behind the bushes or throw a grenade that I couldn’t watch him. I felt sick lying there with my head on the wet dirt, smelling of rot and smoke. If only we don’t get encircled, I thought, if only we can crawl closer to a peaceful world. This soldier of mine, I thought, is satisfied now. The clouds have parted above his head and the heavens are raining manna—he will return to the village, dump a sackful of boots on the floor and watch his children jump for joy.