28.ª División de Granaderos Valones

The 28.ª División de Granaderos Valones is the Waffen-SS formation that receives Alfonso Navarro after he refuses to return to Spain when the Blue Legion is dissolved. Its appearance in the Berlin fighting reveals how closely Navarro’s wartime path has come to resemble that of Adrián Gallardo, his rival: each has continued the war in a different foreign volunteer formation, and their coincidental reunion turns those parallel histories into an immediate personal confrontation.

Formation and Context

The novel identifies the 28.ª División de Granaderos Valones as the counterpart to the Flemish Legion, a unit founded in southern Belgium by Léon Degrelle. The distinction matters because Navarro and Gallardo reach the Berlin position by related but separate routes: Navarro serves with the Walloon formation, while Gallardo has ended up in the Flemish Legion.

A Walloon SS volunteer named Robert explains Navarro’s route to Gallardo. In March 1944, after Francisco Franco dissolved the Blue Legion, Degrelle appealed to the Spaniards who preferred to keep fighting rather than go home. Navarro accepted that invitation and joined the Walloon formation. The unit therefore represents the continuation of his service after the Spanish contingent was dissolved, not a return to Spain.

Navarro and Gallardo at the Berlin Position

The division enters the story through the circumstances of the pair’s encounter. Gallardo learns that Navarro’s way there has been almost an exact replica of his own, even though they have served in different formations. The similarity makes their meeting feel at first like an accident of wartime movement; Gallardo understands the coincidence differently only later, after meeting Agneta Müller.

At the position, the men face an advancing Soviet force and are fortifying a crater five metres across. Gallardo works on the opposite side from Navarro and his companions. He has anticipated that he and Navarro might settle their old account by fighting, but instead an unplanned confession leaves him at ease. The danger of the position and the rivalry between the two men give the Walloon unit’s brief appearance its narrative weight: it is the setting in which their parallel military histories converge, even as Gallardo temporarily avoids resolving their conflict through violence.

Narrative Significance

The formation is presented through an individual volunteer’s explanation rather than an account of its organization or battlefield record. Robert’s testimony establishes the division’s relation to the Flemish Legion and clarifies how Navarro came to serve alongside Walloon volunteers. That concise explanation also corrects Gallardo’s initial sense that the reunion was simply chance: the fighters’ distinct affiliations conceal a strikingly similar sequence of choices.

The 28.ª División de Granaderos Valones thus functions as a link in the novel’s network of foreign units and displaced combatants. Its contrast with the Flemish Legion preserves the difference between Navarro’s and Gallardo’s service, while their mirrored routes bring the former rivals into the same threatened position at the end of the war.