Fifth Regiment

The Fifth Regiment enters the narrative not through a battlefield scene but through a book repurposed as a code key. A copy of its Bailén edition, obtained by Pepe Moya, helps turn a deliberately obscure letter into a message identifying the narrator and his hospital. The reference links the Regiment’s political and military past to the practical ingenuity of wartime secrecy.

A book used as a cipher

After Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez was reported dead on 17 January 1938, a letter reached the Secretariat of the Presidency of the Government several days later. Its unusual return address named the San Carlos Hospital transfusion service and the Sierra Pambley Foundation. The text was unintelligible until decoded with a system based on the Bailén edition of the Fifth Regiment, which Pepe Moya had procured.

The message and its passage

Once deciphered, the letter gave the narrator’s surname and the name of his hospital. It travelled to Valencia through the special mail available to the Madrid Defense Council. The narrator had arranged for it to be treated as a report on the hospital’s mobile transfusion service; a doctor who knew him accepted that explanation and placed it in outgoing mail without scrutinizing the return address. The coded text thus crossed an official channel under cover of legitimate medical correspondence.

Narrative significance

The episode gives the Fifth Regiment a specific function within the novel’s network of covert communication: its printed edition supplies the shared reference needed to conceal and recover information. The mechanism depends on an ordinary physical book, a trusted intermediary, and a plausible institutional pretext. The Regiment’s name consequently connects political history with the quieter work of making a message legible only to those who possess the right key.