The Soccer War

THE SOCCER WAR

Luis Suarez said there was going to be a war, and I believed whatever Luis said. We were staying together in Mexico. Luis was giving me a lesson in Latin America: what it is and how to understand it. He could foresee many events. In his time he had predicted the fall of Goulart in Brazil, the fall of Bosch in the Dominican Republic and of Jimenez in Venezuela. Long before the return of Perón he believed that the old caudillo would again become president of Argentina; he foretold the sudden death of the Haitian dictator François Duvalier at a time when everybody said Papa Doc had many years left. Luis knew how to pick his way through Latin politics, in which amateurs like me got bogged down and blundered helplessly with each step.

This time Luis announced his belief that there would be a war after putting down the newspaper in which he had read a report on the soccer match between the Honduran and Salvadoran national teams. The two countries were playing for the right to take part in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

The first match was held on Sunday 8 June 1969, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.

Nobody in the world paid any attention.

The Salvadoran team arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and spent a sleepless night in their hotel. The team could not sleep because it was the target of psychological warfare waged by the Honduran fans. A swarm of people encircled the hotel. The crowd threw stones at the windows and beat sheets of tin and empty barrels with sticks. They set off one string of firecrackers after another. They leaned on the horns of cars parked in front of the hotel. The fans whistled, screamed and sent up hostile chants. This went on all night. The idea was that a sleepy, edgy, exhausted team would be bound to lose. In Latin America these are common practices.

The next day Honduras defeated the sleepless El Salvador squad one-nil.

Eighteen-year-old Amelia Bolanios was sitting in front of the television in El Salvador when the Honduran striker Roberto Cardona scored the winning goal in the final minute. She got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart. ‘The young girl could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees,’ wrote the Salvadoran newspaper El Nacional the next day. The whole capital took part in the televised funeral of Amelia Bolanios. An army honour guard marched with a flag at the head of the procession. The president of the republic and his ministers walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Behind the government came the Salvadoran soccer eleven who, booed, laughed at, and spat on at the Tegucigalpa airport, had returned to El Salvador on a special flight that morning.

But the return match of the series took place in San Salvador, the beautifully named Flor Blanca stadium, a week later. This time it was the Honduran team that spent a sleepless night. The screaming crowd of fans broke all the windows in the hotel and threw rotten eggs, dead rats and stinking rags inside. The players were taken to the match in armoured cars of the First Salvadoran Mechanized Division — which saved them from revenge and bloodshed at the hands of the mob that lined the route, holding up portraits of the national heroine Amelia Bolanios.

The army surrounded the ground. On the pitch stood a cordon of soldiers from a crack regiment of the Guardia Nacional, armed with sub-machine-guns. During the playing of the Honduran national anthem the crowd roared and whistled. Next, instead of the Honduran flag — which had been burnt before the eyes of the spectators, driving them mad with joy — the hosts ran a dirty, tattered dishrag up the flag-pole. Under such conditions the players from Tegucigalpa did not, understandably, have their minds on the game. They had their minds on getting out alive. ‘We’re awfully lucky that we lost,’ said the visiting coach, Mario Griffin, with relief.

El Salvador prevailed, three-nil.

The same armoured cars carried the Honduran team straight from the playing field to the airport. A worse fate awaited the visiting fans. Kicked and beaten, they fled towards the border. Two of them died. Scores landed in hospital. One hundred and fifty of the visitors’ cars were burned. The border between the two states was closed a few hours later.

Luis read about all of this in the newspaper and said that there was going to be a war. He had been a reporter for a long time and he knew his beat.

In Latin America, he said, the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team. Players on the losing team are denounced in the press as traitors. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico, an exiled Brazilian colleague of mine was heartbroken: ‘The military right wing,’ he said, ‘can be assured of at least five more years of peaceful rule.’ On the way to the title, Brazil beat England. In an article with the headline ‘Jesus Defends Brazil’, the Rio de Janeiro paper Jornal dos Sportes explained the victory thus: ‘Whenever the ball flew towards our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out of the clouds and cleared the ball.’ Drawings accompanied the article, illustrating the supernatural intervention.

Anyone at the stadium can lose his life. Take the match that Mexico lost to Peru, two-one. An embittered Mexican fan shouted in an ironic tone, ‘Viva Mexico!’ A moment later he was dead, massacred by the crowd. But sometimes the heightened emotions find an outlet in other ways. After Mexico beat Belgium one-nil, Augusto Mariaga, the warden of a maximum-security prison in Chilpancingo (Guerrero State, Mexico), became delirious with joy and ran around firing a pistol into the air and shouting, ‘Viva Mexico!’ He opened all the cells, releasing 142 dangerous hardened criminals. A court acquitted him later, as, according to the verdict, he had ‘acted in patriotic exaltation.’

‘Do you think it’s worth going to Honduras?’ I asked Luis, who was then editing the serious and influential weekly Siempre.

‘I think it’s worth it,’ he answered. ‘Something’s bound to happen.’

I was in Tegucigalpa the next morning.

At dusk a plane flew over Tegucigalpa and dropped a bomb. Everybody heard it. The nearby mountains echoed its violent blast so that some said later that a whole series of bombs had been dropped. Panic swept the city. People fled home; merchants closed their shops. Cars were abandoned in the middle of the street. A woman ran along the pavement, crying, ‘My child! My child!’ Then silence fell and everything became still. It was as if the city had died. The lights went out and Tegucigalpa sank into darkness.

I hurried to the hotel, burst into my room, fed a piece of paper into the typewriter and tried to write a dispatch to Warsaw. I was trying to move fast because I knew that at that moment I was the only foreign correspondent there and that I could be the first to inform the world about the outbreak of the war in Central America. But it was pitch dark in the room and I couldn’t see anything. I felt my way downstairs to the reception desk, where I was lent a candle. I went back upstairs, lit the candle and turned on my transistor radio. The announcer was reading a communiqué from the Honduran government about the commencement of hostilities with El Salvador. Then came the news that the Salvadoran army was attacking Honduras all along the front line.

I began to write:

TEGUCIGALPA (HONDURAS) PAP JULY 14 VIA TROPICAL RADIO RCA TODAY AT 6 PM WAR BEGAN BETWEEN EL SALVADOR AND HONDURAS SALVADORAN AIR FORCE BOMBARDED FOUR HONDURAN CITIES STOP AT SAME TIME SALVADORAN ARMY CROSSED HONDURAN BORDER ATTEMPTING TO PENETRATE DEEP INTO COUNTRY STOP IN RESPONSE TO AGGRESSION HONDURAN AIR FORCE BOMBARDED IMPORTANT SALVADORAN INDUSTRIAL AND STRATEGIC TARGETS AND GROUND FORCES BEGAN DEFENSIVE ACTION

At this moment someone in the street started shouting ‘Apaga la luz!’ (‘Turn off the light!’) over and over, more and more loudly with increasing agitation. I blew out the candle. I went on typing blind, by touch, striking a match over the keys every now and then.

RADIO REPORTS FIGHTING UNDERWAY ALONG FULL LENGTH OF FRONT AND THAT HONDURAN ARMY IS INFLICTING HEAVY LOSSES ON SALVADORAN ARMY STOP GOVERNMENT HAS CALLED WHOLE POPULATION TO DEFENCE OF ENDANGERED NATION AND APPEALED TO UN FOR CONDEMNATION OF ATTACK

I carried the dispatch downstairs, found the owner of the hotel and began asking him to find someone to lead me to the post office. It was my first day there and I did not know Tegucigalpa at all. It is not a big city — a quarter of a million people — but it lies among hills and has a maze of crabbed streets. The owner wanted to help but he had no one to send with me and I was in a hurry. In the end he called the police. Nobody at the police station had time. So he called the fire department. Three firemen arrived in full gear, wearing helmets and carrying axes. We greeted each other in the dark; I could not see their faces. I begged them to lead me to the post office. I know Honduras well, I lied, and know that its people are renowned for their hospitality. I was sure they would not refuse me. It was very important that the world find out the truth about who started the war, who shot first and I could assure them that I had written the honest truth. The main thing now was time, and we had to hurry.

We left the hotel. It was a dark night. I could see only the outlines of the street. I do not know why we spoke in whispers. I tried to remember the way and counted my steps. I was close to a thousand when the firemen stopped and one of them knocked on a door. A voice from inside asked what we wanted. Then the door opened, but only for an instant so that the light wouldn’t be seen. I was inside. They ordered me to wait: there is only one telex machine in Honduras, and the president was using it. He was engaged in an exchange with his ambassador in Washington, who would be applying to the American government for military assistance. This went on for a long time, since the president and the ambassador were using uncommonly flowery language and, besides, the connection kept breaking every so often.

After midnight I finally made contact with Warsaw. The machine typed out the number TL 813480 PAP VARSOVIA. I leapt up joyfully. The operator asked, ‘Is Varsovia some country?’

‘It’s not a country. It’s a city. The country is called Polonia.’

‘Polonia, Polonia,’ he repeated, but I could see that the name didn’t actually interest him.

He asked Warsaw, ‘HOW RECEIVED MSG BIBI?’

And Warsaw answered, ‘RECEIVED OK OK GREE FOR RYSIEK TKS TKS!’

I put my arms around the operator, told him I hoped he got through the war in one piece and started back to the hotel. Barely had I set foot in the street when I realized I was lost. I found myself in terrible darkness — thick and clotted and impenetrable, as if a heavy black grease had been smeared over my eyes, and I could see nothing, not even, literally, my hands when I stretched them out in front of me. The sky must have clouded over, because the stars had disappeared and there was no light anywhere. I was alone in an unfamiliar city that, as I couldn’t see it, might well have disappeared into the earth. The silence was piercing — not a voice anywhere, not a sound. I moved forward like a blind man, feeling the walls, the drainpipes and the mesh shutters over the shop windows. When I realized that my footsteps were sounding like drumbeats I went up on tiptoe. Suddenly the wall at my fingertips ended; I would have to turn into a side street. Or was it the beginning of a plaza? Or was I on a high escarpment with a long drop in front of me? I tested the ground ahead with my feet. Asphalt! I was in the middle of the street. I moved sideways and bumped into another wall. I no longer knew where the post office could be, let alone the hotel; I was floundering, but I kept going. Suddenly there was a powerful boom! I was losing my footing and was being thrown to the pavement.

I had upset a tin garbage can.

The street must have been on a slope, because the garbage can rolled away with a frightful din. In an instant I heard windows snapping open on all sides above me and hysterical, terrified whispers: ‘Silencio! Silencio!’ A city that wanted the world to forget it for one night, that wanted to be alone in silence and darkness, was defending itself against being given away. As the empty garbage can clattered down the hill, more and more windows kept opening as it passed with plaintive, insistent whispers: ‘Silencio! Silencio!’ But there was no way to stop the metal monster, it was like something possessed, banging against the cobblestones, smashing into lamp-posts, thundering and booming. I lay on the pavement, hugging it, frightened, sweating. I was afraid that someone would open fire in my direction. I had committed an act of treason: the enemy, unable to find the city in this darkness and silence, could now locate it by the racket of the garbage can. I had to make tracks and run. I got to my feet and found that my head was throbbing — I had struck it on the pavement when I fell — and I sprinted like a madman until I stumbled over something and fell on my face, the taste of blood in my mouth. I picked myself up and leaned against a wall. The wall arched above my head and I had to stand hunched over, feeling more and more imprisoned by a city I could not see. I watched for the light of a lantern: somebody must be looking for me, this intruder who had violated the military order not to go out at night. But there was nothing, only sepulchral silence and unviolated darkness. I crept along with my hands stretched out in front of me, bruised now and bleeding and bloody in a tattered shirt, lost in this labyrinth of walls. Centuries could have passed; I might have reached the end of the world. Suddenly a violent tropical deluge broke. Lightning illuminated the nightmare city for an instant. Standing among unknown streets I glimpsed a decrepit townhouse, a wooden shed, a street-lamp, cobble-stones. It vanished in a second. I could hear only the gush of rain and, from time to time, the whistle of wind. I was freezing, soaked, shivering all over. I felt the recess of a doorway and took cover from the downpour. Jammed between the wall and the door I tried to sleep, but without success.

An army patrol found me at dawn.

‘Silly man,’ a sleepy sergeant said. ‘Where were you strolling on a wartime evening?’ He looked me over suspiciously and wanted to take me to city headquarters. Fortunately I was carrying my papers and managed to explain what had happened. They led me to my hotel and on the way mentioned that the battle at the front had gone on all night, but that it was so far away that you couldn’t hear the shooting in Tegucigalpa.

Since early morning people had been digging trenches, erecting barricades — preparing for a siege. Women were stocking up supplies and criss-crossing their windows with masking tape. People rushed through the streets directionless; an atmosphere of panic reigned. Student brigades were painting outsized slogans on walls and fences. A bubble full of graffiti had burst over Tegucigalpa, covering the walls with thousands of verses.

ONLY AN IMBECILE WORRIES

NOBODY BEATS HONDURAS

OR:

PICK UP YOUR GUNS AND LET’S GO GUYS

CUT THOSE SALVADORANS DOWN TO SIZE

WE SHALL AVENGE THREE-NIL

PORFIRIO RAMOS SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF HIMSELF FOR LIVING WITH A SALVADORAN WOMAN

ANYONE SEEING RAIMUNDO GRANADOS CALL THE POLICE HE’S A SALVADORAN SPY

Latins are obsessed with spies, intelligence conspiracies and plots. In war, everyone is a fifth-columnist. I was not in a particularly comfortable situation: official propaganda on both sides blamed communists for every misfortune, and I was the only correspondent in the region from a socialist country. Even so, I wanted to see the war through to the end.

I went to the post office and asked the telex operator to join me for a beer. He was terrified, because, although he had a Honduran father, his mother was a citizen of El Salvador. He was a mixed national and thus among the suspects. He did not know what would happen next. All morning the police had been herding Salvadorans into provisional camps, most often set up in stadiums. Throughout Latin America, stadiums play a double role: in peacetime they are sports venues; in war they turn into concentration camps.

His name was José Malaga, and we had a drink in a restaurant near the post office. Our uncertain status had made brothers of us. Every so often José phoned his mother, who was sitting locked in her house, and said, ‘Mama, everything’s OK. They haven’t come for me; I’m still working.’

By the afternoon the other correspondents arrived from Mexico, forty of them, my colleagues. They had flown into Guatemala and then hired a bus, because the airport in Tegucigalpa was closed. They all wanted to drive to the front. We went to the Presidential Palace, an ugly, bright blue turn-of-the-century building in the centre of the town, to arrange permission. There were machine-gun nests and sandbags around the palace, and anti-aircraft guns in the courtyard. In the corridors inside, soldiers were dozing or lolling around in full battledress.

People have been making war for thousands of years, but each time it is as if it is the first war ever waged, as if everyone has started from scratch.

A captain appeared and said he was the army press spokesman. He was asked to describe the situation and he stated that they were winning all along the front and that the enemy was suffering heavy casualties.

‘OK,’ said the AP correspondent. ‘Let’s see the front.’

The Americans, the captain explained, were already there. They always go first because of their influence — and because they commanded obedience and could arrange all sorts of things. The captain said we could go the next day, and that everyone should bring two photographs.

We drove to a place where two artillery pieces stood under some trees. Cannons were firing and stacks of ordnance were lying around. Ahead of us we could see the road that led to El Salvador. Swamp stretched along both sides of the road, and dense green bush began past the belt of swamp.

The sweaty, unshaven major charged with holding the road said we could go no further. Beyond this point both armies were in action, and it was hard to tell who was who or what belonged to which side. The bush was too thick to see anything. Two opposing units often noticed each other only at the last moment, when, wandering through the overgrowth, they met face to face. In addition, since both armies wore the same uniforms, carried the same equipment, and spoke the same language, it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe.

The major advised us to return to Tegucigalpa, because advancing might mean getting killed without even knowing who had done it. (As if that mattered, I thought.) But the television cameramen said they had to push forward, to the front line, to film soldiers in action, firing, dying. Gregor Straub of NBC said he had to have a close-up of a soldier’s face dripping sweat. Rodolfo Carillo of CBS said he had to catch a despondent commander sitting under a bush and weeping because he had lost his whole unit. A French cameraman wanted a panorama shot with a Salvadoran unit charging a Honduran unit from one side, or vice versa. Somebody else wanted to capture the image of a soldier carrying his dead comrade. The radio reporters sided with the cameramen. One wanted to record the cries of a casualty summoning help, growing weaker and weaker, until he breathed his last breath. Charles Meadows of Radio Canada wanted the voice of a soldier cursing war amid a hellish racket of gunfire. Naotake Mochida of Radio Japan wanted the bark of an officer shouting to his commander over the roar of artillery — using a Japanese field telephone.

Many others also decided to go forward. Competition is a powerful incentive. Since American television was going, the American wire services had to go as well. Since the Americans were going, Reuters had to go. Excited by patriotic ambition, I decided, as the only Pole on the scene, to attach myself to the group that intended to make the desperate march. Those who said they had bad hearts, or professed to be uninterested in particulars since they were writing general commentaries, we left behind, under a tree.

There might have been twenty of us who set out along an empty road bathed in intense sunlight. The risk, or even the madness, of the march lay in the fact that the road ran along the top of an embankment: we were perfectly visible to both of the armies hiding in the bush that began about a hundred yards away. One good burst of machine-gun fire in our direction would be enough.

At the beginning everything went well. We heard intense gunfire and the detonation of artillery shells but it was a mile or so away. To keep our spirits up we were all talking (nervously and without necessarily making sense). But soon fear began to take its toll. It is, indeed, a rather unpleasant feeling to walk with the awareness that at any moment a bullet can find you. No one, however, acknowledged fear openly. First, somebody simply proposed we take a rest. So we sat down and caught our breath. Then, when we started again, two began lagging behind — apparently immersed in conversation. Then somebody spotted an especially interesting group of trees that deserved long, careful inspection. Then two others announced that they had to go back because they had forgotten the filters they needed for their cameras. We took another rest. We rested more and more often, and the pauses grew longer. There were ten of us left.

In the meantime, nothing was happening in our vicinity. We were walking along an empty road in the direction of El Salvador. The air was wonderful. The sun was setting. That very sun helped us extricate ourselves. The television men suddenly pulled out their light metres and declared that it was already too dark to film. Nothing could be done — not long shots, or close-ups, or action-shots, or stills. And it was a long way to the front line yet. By the time we got there it would be night.

The whole group started back. The ones who had heart trouble, who were going to write general commentaries, who had turned back earlier because they had been talking or had forgotten their filters, were waiting for us under the tree beside the two artillery pieces.

The sweaty, unshaven major had organized an army truck to carry us to our billets for the night, at a village behind the line called Nacaome. There we held a conference and decided that the Americans would phone the president immediately to request an order for us to see the whole front, to have us transported into the very midst of the fighting, into the hell of gunfire, on to ground soaked with blood.

In the morning an airplane arrived to take us to the far end of the front, where heavy fighting was in progress. Overnight rain had turned the grass airstrip at Nacaome into a quagmire, and the dilapidated old DC-3, black with exhaust smoke, stuck up out of the water like a hydroplane. It had been shot up the day before by a Salvadoran fighter; the holes in its fuselage were patched with rough boards. The sight of these ordinary, simple boards of wood frightened those who said they had bad hearts. They stayed behind and returned later to Tegucigalpa.

We were to fly to Santa Rosa de Copán at the other extreme of the front. As it was taking off the plane trailed as much smoke and flame as a rocket starting for the moon. In the air it screeched and groaned and reeled like a drunk swept along in an autumn gale. It plunged maniacally earthwards and then clambered desperately for altitude. Never level, never in a straight line. The cabin — the plane usually carried freight — contained no seats or benches of any kind. We gripped curved metal handholds to avoid being thrown against the walls. The wind blowing in through the gaping holes was enough to tear our heads off. The two pilots, carefree youngsters, grinned at us the whole time in the cockpit mirror as if they enjoyed some private joke.

‘The main thing,’ Antonio Rodriguez of the Spanish news agency EFE hollered to me over the roar of the propellors and the wind, ‘is for the motors to hold out. Mama mía, let the motors hold out!’

In Santa Rosa de Copán, a sleepy hamlet filled then only with soldiers, a truck carried us through muddy streets to the barracks, which stood in the old Spanish fort, surrounded by a grey wall swollen from the damp. Once inside we heard three wounded prisoners in the courtyard.

‘Talk!’ the interrogating officer was shouting at them. ‘Tell me everything!’

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.

The soldier came back dragging his conquest and hid it in the bushes. He wiped the sweat off his face and looked around to fix the spot in his mind. We moved back into the depth of the forest. It was drizzling and fog lay in the clearing. We walked in no specific direction but kept as far as possible from the commotion of the war. Somewhere, not far from there, must have been Guatemala. And further, Mexico. And further still, the United States. But for us at that moment, all those countries were on another planet. The inhabitants there had their own lives and thought about entirely different problems. Perhaps they did not know that we had a war here. No war can be conveyed over a distance. Somebody sits eating dinner and watching television: pillars of earth blown into the air; cut—the tracks of a charging tank; cut—soldiers falling and writhing in pain;—and the man watching television gets angry and curses because while he was gaping at the screen he oversalted his soup. War becomes a spectacle, a show, when it is seen from a distance and expertly re-shaped in the cutting room. In reality a soldier sees no further than his own nose, has his eyes full of sand or sweat, shoots at random and clings to the ground like a mole. Above all, he is frightened. The front line soldier says little: if questioned he might not answer at all, or might respond only by shrugging his shoulders. As a rule he walks around hungry and sleepy, not knowing what the next order will be or what will become of him in an hour. War makes for a constant familiarity with death and the experience of it sinks deep into the memory. Afterwards, in old age, a man reaches back more and more to his war memories, as if recollections of the front expand with time, as if he had spent his whole life in a foxhole.

Stealing through the forest, I asked the soldier why they were fighting with El Salvador. He replied that he did not know, that it was a government affair. I asked him how he could fight when he did not know why he was spilling blood. He answered that when you live in a village it’s better not to ask questions because questions arouse the suspicions of the village mayor, and then the mayor would volunteer him for the road gang, and, on the road gang, he would have to neglect his farm and his family, and then the hunger waiting for him on his return would be even greater. And isn’t the everyday poverty enough as it is? A man has to live in such a way that his name never reaches the ears of authorities. If it does, they write it down immediately and then that man is in for a lot of trouble later. Government matters are not fit for the mind of a village farmer, because the government understands such things but nobody’s going to let a dirt farmer do anything.

Walking through the woods at sunset and straightening our backs because it was getting quieter all the time, we hit a small village plastered together out of clay and straw: Santa Teresa. An infantry battalion, decimated in the all-day battle, was billeted there. Exhausted and stunned by the experience of the front line, soldiers wandered among the huts. It was drizzling continuously and everybody was dirty, smeared with clay.

The people at the guardpost led us to the battalion commander. I showed him my documents and asked for transportation to Tegucigalpa. That worthy man offered me a car but ordered me to stay put until morning because the roads were soaked and mountainous and ran along the edges of cliffs, and at night, without lights, would be impassable. The commander sat in an abandoned hut listening to the radio. The announcer was reading a string of communiqués from the front. Next we heard that a wide range of governments, the countries of Latin America, along with many from Europe and Asia, wanted to bring the war between Honduras and El Salvador to an end, and had already issued statements about it. The African countries were expected to take a stand presently. Communiqués from Australia and Oceania were also expected. China was silent, which was provoking interest, and so, too, was Canada. The Canadian reticence could be explained by the fact that a Canadian correspondent, Charles Meadows, was at the front and his situation might be complicated or made more dangerous by a statement now.

The presenter then read that the Apollo 11 rocket had been launched from Cape Kennedy. Three astronauts, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, were flying to the moon. Man was drawing closer to the stars, opening new worlds, soaring into the infinite galaxies. Congratulations were pouring into Houston from all corners of the world, the presenter informed us, and all humanity was rejoicing at the triumph of reason and precise thinking.

My soldier was dozing in a corner. At dawn I woke him up and said we were leaving. An exhausted battalion driver, still half-asleep, took us to Tegucigalpa in a jeep. To save time, we drove straight to the post office, where, on a borrowed typewriter, I wrote the dispatch that was later printed in the newspapers at home. José Malaga let the dispatch go out before all the others waiting to be sent and released it without the approval of the military censors (it was, after all, written in Polish).

My colleagues were returning from the front. They arrived one by one, because everyone had got lost after we drove into the artillery fire at that turning in the road!.’ Enrique Amado had run into a Salvadoran patrol, three members of the Guardia Rural, the private gendarmerie maintained by the Salvadoran latifundistas and recruited from among the criminal element. Very dangerous types. They ordered Enrique to stand up to be executed. He played for time, praying at great length and then asking to be allowed to relieve himself. The guardistas obviously loved the sight of a man in terror. In the end they ordered him to make his final preparations and were taking aim when a series of shots rang out from the bushes. One of the patrol fell, hit, and the other two were taken prisoner.

The soccer war lasted one hundred hours. Its victims: 6,000 dead, more than 12,000 wounded. Fifty thousand people lost their homes and fields. Many villages were destroyed.

The two countries ceased military action because Latin American states intervened, but to this day there are exchanges of gunfire along the Honduras-El Salvador border, and people die, and villages are burned.

These are the real reasons for the war: El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, has the greatest population density in the western hemisphere (over 160 people per square kilometre). Things are crowded, and all the more so because most of the land is in the hands of fourteen great landowning clans. People even say that El Salvador is the property of fourteen families. A thousand latifundistas own exactly ten times as much land as their hundred thousand peasants. Two thirds of the village population owns no land. For years a part of the landless poor has been emigrating to Honduras, where there are large tracts of unimproved land. Honduras (12,000 square kilometres) is almost six times as large as El Salvador, but has about half as many people (2,500,000). This was illegal emigration but was kept hushed-up, tolerated by the Honduran government for years.

Salvadoran peasants settled in Honduras, established villages, and grew accustomed to a better life than the one they had left behind. They numbered about 300,000.

In the 1960s, unrest began among the Honduran peasantry, which was demanding land, and the Honduras government passed a decree on agricultural reform. But since this was an oligarchical government, dependent on the United States, the decree did not break up the land of either the oligarchy or the large banana plantations belonging to the United Fruit Company. The government wanted to re-distribute the land occupied by the Salvadoran squatters, meaning that the 300,000 Salvadorans would have to return to their own country, where they had nothing, and where, in any event, they would be refused by the Salvadoran government, fearing a peasant revolution.

Relations between the two countries were tense. Newspapers on both sides waged a campaign of hate, slander and abuse, calling each other Nazis, dwarfs, drunkards, sadists, spiders, aggressors and thieves. There were pogroms. Shops were burned.

In these circumstances the match between Honduras and El Salvador had taken place.

The war ended in a stalemate. The border remained the same. It is a border established by sight in the bush, in mountainous terrain that both sides claim. Some of the émigrés returned to El Salvador and some of them are still living in Honduras. And both governments are satisfied: for several days Honduras and El Salvador occupied the front pages of the world press and were the object of interest and concern. The only chance small countries from the Third World have of evoking a lively international interest is when they decide to shed blood. This is a sad truth, but so it is.

The deciding game of the best-of-three series was held on neutral ground, in Mexico (El Salvador won, three-two). The Honduran fans were placed on one side of the stadium, the Salvadoran fans on the other side, and down the middle sat 5,000 Mexican police armed with thick clubs.