Under Mosquito Crest by Volunteer Staff
The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 3, January 29, 1938
A ghost story of the war has come our way. Readers may interpret it as they please; the comrade who tells it offers no explanation, nor shall we. Here it is. .
Comrade C. went into the Brunete offensive with the British Battalion. Villanueva de la Canada was taken, and the Battalion moved forward to positions under Mosquito Crest. C. found cover for himself, and crouched down. He was lying alone.
Presently he noticed that somebody else was lying a short distance away. It surprised him, for he had seen nobody arrive. The man wore a scarf that was immediately familiar to C. The colors and pattern were unmistakable. It belonged to an American friend who had bought it when he had gland trouble. The impression was completed by the man’s helmet, which had a certain shape and marks which C. also connected with his friend. Something in the way the man was lying aroused C’s suspicions, and he decided to crawl across.
It took him some time to edge over the intervening space. When he arrived, he found that this was his friend as he had supposed, and he was dead. Evidence showed that he had died very recently. C. was puzzled, since to his knowledge the Americans were in a different part of the battle, and this man had no reason to be here. He decided to take any papers that might be in his friend’s pockets, in case there was anything be would have liked to have preserved. Before he could do so, a bullet hit the ground close to him, and another followed. It was too dangerous to stay where he was, so he made his way back without the papers. Shortly afterwards he was wounded and was taken away to a hospital.
Some weeks later, when being moved from one hospital to another, he was waiting on a station platform for a train. He saw someone he knew walking down the platform, and following a little behind, a man wearing the scarf he had last seen on his friend’s dead body. As they drew level, he was astonished to find that the wearer of the scarf was its original owner, the man he had found dead beneath Mosquito Crest.
This man had never been in the Brunete action. He was on an entirely different front at the time.
