It is too cold, he thought. That the Inglés should come and that I should not have to kill in this of the posts. These four Gallegos and their corporal are for those who like the killing. The Inglés said that. I will do it if it is my duty but the Inglés said that I would be with him at the bridge and that this would be left to others. At the bridge there will be a battle and, if I am able to endure the battle, then I will have done all that an old man may do in this war. But let the Inglés come now, for I am cold and to see the light in the mill where I know that the Gallegos are warm makes me colder still. I wish that I were in my own house again and that this war were over. But you have no house now, he thought. We must win this war before you can ever return to your house.
Inside the sawmill one of the soldiers was sitting on his bunk and greasing his boots. Another lay in his bunk sleeping. The third was cooking and the corporal was reading a paper. Their helmets hung on nails driven into the wall and their rifles leaned against the plank wall.
“What kind of country is this where it snows when it is almost June?” the soldier who was sitting on the bunk said.
“It is a phenomenon,” the corporal said.
“We are in the moon of May,” the soldier who was cooking said. “The moon of May has not yet terminated.”
“What kind of a country is it where it snows in May?” the soldier on the bunk insisted.
“In May snow is no rarity in these mountains,” the corporal said. “I have been colder in Madrid in the month of May than in any other month.”
“And hotter, too,” the soldier who was cooking said.
“May is a month of great contrasts in temperature,” the corporal said. “Here, in Castile, May is a month of great heat but it can have much cold.”
“Or rain,” the soldier on the bunk said. “In this past May it rained almost every day.”
“It did not,” the soldier who was cooking said. “And anyway this past May was the moon of April.”
“One could go crazy listening to thee and thy moons,” the corporal said. “Leave this of the moons alone.”
“Any one who lives either by the sea or by the land knows that it is the moon and not the month which counts,” the soldier who was cooking said. “Now for example, we have just started the moon of May. Yet it is coming on June.”
“Why then do we not get definitely behind in the seasons?” the corporal said. “The whole proposition gives me a headache.”
“You are from a town,” the soldier who was cooking said. “You are from Lugo. What would you know of the sea or of the land?”
“One learns more in a town than you analfabetos learn in thy sea or thy land.”
“In this moon the first of the big schools of sardines come,” the soldier who was cooking said. “In this moon the sardine boats will be outfitting and the mackerel will have gone north.”
“Why are you not in the navy if you come from Noya?” the corporal asked.
“Because I am not inscribed from Noya but from Negreira, where I was born. And from Negreira, which is up the river Tambre, they take you for the army.”
“Worse luck,” said the corporal.
“Do not think the navy is without peril,” the soldier who was sitting on the bunk said. “Even without the possibility of combat that is a dangerous coast in the winter.”
“Nothing can be worse than the army,” the corporal said.
“And you a corporal,” the soldier who was cooking said. “What a way of speaking is that?”
“Nay,” the corporal said. “I mean for dangers. I mean the endurance of bombardments, the necessity to attack, the life of the parapet.”
“Here we have little of that,” the soldier on the bunk said.
“By the Grace of God,” the corporal said. “But who knows when we will be subject to it again? Certainly we will not have something as easy as this forever!”