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Chapter 14
THE worst of being wanted by the police in a town like Barcelona is that
everything opens so late. When you sleep out of doors you always wake about
dawn, and none of the Barcelona cafes opens much before nine. It was hours
before I could get a cup of coffee or a shave. It seemed queer, in the barber's
shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were
prohibited. 'The Revolution has struck off our chains,' the notice said. I felt
like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back again if they
didn't look out.
I wandered back to the centre of the town. Over the P.O.U.M. buildings the
red flags had been torn down, Republican flags were floating in their place, and
knots of armed Civil Guards were lounging in the doorways. At the Red Aid centre
on the corner of the Plaza de Gataluna the police had amused themselves by
smashing most of the windows. The P.O.U.M. book-stalls had been emptied of books
and the notice-board farther down the Ramblas had been plastered with an
anti-P.O.U.M. cartoon--the one representing the mask and the Fascist face
beneath. Down at the bottom of the Ramblas, near the quay, I came upon a queer
sight; a row of militiamen, still ragged and muddy from the front, sprawling
exhaustedly on the chairs placed there for the bootblacks. I knew who they were
--indeed, I recognized one of them. They were P.O.U.M. militiamen who had come
down the line on the previous day to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed,
and had had to spend the night in the streets because their homes had been
raided. Any P.O.U.M. militiaman who returned to Barcelona at this time had the
choice of going straight into hiding or into jail--not a pleasant reception
after three or four months in the line.
It was a queer situation that we were in. At night one was a hunted fugitive,
but in the daytime one could live an almost normal life. Every house known to
harbour P.O.U.M. supporters was--or at any rate was likely to be--under
observation, and it was impossible to go to a hotel or boarding-house, because
it had been decreed that on the arrival of a stranger the hotel-keeper must
inform the police immediately. Practically this meant spending the night out of
doors. In the daytime, on the other hand, in a town the size of Barcelona, you
were fairly safe. The streets were thronged by Civil Guards, Assault Guards,
Carabineros, and ordinary police, besides God knows how many spies in plain
clothes; still, they could not stop everyone who passed, and if you looked
normal you might escape notice. The thing to do was to avoid hanging round
P.O.U.M. buildings and going to cafes and restaurants where the waiters knew you
by sight. I spent a long time that day, and the next, in having a bath at one of
the public baths. This struck me as a good way of putting in the time and
keeping out of sight. Unfortunately the same idea occurred to a lot of people,
and a few days later--after I left Barcelona--the police raided one of the
public baths and arrested a number of 'Trotskyists' in a state of nature.
Half-way up the Ramblas I ran into one of the wounded men from the Sanatorium
Maurin. We exchanged the sort of invisible wink that people were exchanging at
that time, and managed in an unobtrusive way to meet in a cafe farther up the
street. He had escaped arrest when the Maurin was raided, but, like the others,
had been driven into the street. He was in shirt-sleeves--had had to flee
without his jacket--and had no money. He described to me how one of the Civil
Guards had torn the large coloured portrait of Maurin from the wall and kicked
it to pieces. Maurin (one of the founders of the P.O.U.M.) was a prisoner in the
hands of the Fascists and at that time was believed to have been shot by
them.
I met my wife at the British Consulate at ten o'clock. McNair and Cottman
turned up shortly afterwards. The first thing they told me was that Bob Smillie
was dead. He had died in prison at Valencia--of what, nobody knew for certain.
He had been buried immediately, and the I.L.P. representative on the spot, David
Murray, had been refused permission to see his body.
Of course I assumed at once that Smillie had been shot. It was what everyone
believed at the time, but I have since thought that I may have been wrong. Later
the cause of his death was given out as appendicitis, and we heard afterwards
from another prisoner who had been released that Smillie had certainly been ill
in prison. So perhaps the appendicitis story was true. The refusal to let Murray
see his body may have been due to pure spite. I must say this, however. Bob
Smillie was only twenty-two years old and physically he was one of the toughest
people I have met. He was, I think, the only person I knew, English or Spanish,
who went three months in the trenches without a day's illness. People so tough
as that do not usually die of appendicitis if they are properly looked after.
But when you saw what the Spanish jails were like--the makeshift jails used for
political prisoners--you realized how much chance there was of a sick man
getting proper attention. The jails were places that could only be described as
dungeons. In England you would have to go back to the eighteenth century to find
anything comparable. People were penned together in small rooms where there was
barely space for them to lie down, and often they were kept in cellars and other
dark places. This was not as a temporary measure--there were cases of people
being kept four and five months almost without sight of daylight. And they were
fed on a filthy and insufficient diet of two plates of soup and two pieces of
bread a day. (Some months later, however, the food seems to have improved a
little.) I am not exaggerating; ask any political suspect who was imprisoned in
Spain. I have had accounts of the Spanish jails from a number of separate
sources, and they agree with one another too well to be disbelieved; besides, I
had a few glimpses into one Spanish jail myself. Another English friend who was
imprisoned later writes that his experiences in jail 'make Smillie's case easier
to understand'. Smillie's death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was
this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in
order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done
his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could
find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected
animal. I know that in the middle of a huge and bloody war it is no use making
too much fuss over an individual death. One aeroplane bomb in a crowded street
causes more suffering than quite a lot of political persecution. But what angers
one about a death like this is its utter pointlessness. To be killed in battle--
yes, that is what one expects; but to be flung into jail, not even for any
imaginary offence, but simply owing to dull blind spite, and then left to die in
solitude--that is a different matter. I fail to see how this kind of thing--
and it is not as though Smillie's case were exceptional--brought victory any
nearer.
My wife and I visited Kopp that afternoon. You were allowed to visit
prisoners who were not incommunicado, though it was not safe to do so more than
once or twice. The police watched the people who came and went, and if you
visited the jails too often you stamped yourself as a friend of 'Trotskyists'
and probably ended in jail yourself. This had already happened to a number of
people.
Kopp was not incommunicado and we got a permit to see him without difficulty.
As they led us through the steel doors into the jail, a Spanish militiaman whom
I had known at the front was being led out between two Civil Guards. His eye met
mine; again the ghostly wink. And the first person we saw inside was an American
militiaman who had left for home a few days earlier; his papers were in good
order, but they had arrested him at the frontier all the same, probably because
he was still wearing corduroy breeches and was therefore identifiable as a
militiaman. We walked past one another as though we had been total strangers.
That was dreadful. I had known him. for months, had shared a dug-out with him,
he had helped to carry me down the line when I was wounded; but it was the only
thing one could do. The blue--clad guards were snooping everywhere. It would be
fatal to recognize too many people.
The so-called jail was really the ground floor of a shop. Into two rooms each
measuring about twenty feet square, close on a hundred people were penned. The
place had the real eighteenth-century Newgate Calendar appearance, with its
frowsy dirt, its huddle of human bodies, its lack of furniture--just the bare
stone floor, one bench, and a few ragged blankets--and its murky light, for the
corrugated steel shutters had been drawn over the windows. On the grimy walls
revolutionary slogans--'Visca P.O.U.M.!' 'Viva la Revolucion!' and so forth--
had been scrawled. The place had been used as a dump for political prisoners for
months past. There was a deafening racket of voices. This was the visiting hour,
and the place was so packed with people that it was difficult to move. Nearly
all of them were of the poorest of the working-class population. You saw women
undoing pitiful packets of food which they had brought for their imprisoned
men-folk. There were several of the wounded men from the Sanatorium Maurin among
the prisoners. Two of them had amputated legs; one of them had been brought to
prison without his crutch and was hopping about on one foot. There was also a
boy of not more than twelve; they were even arresting children, apparently. The
place had the beastly stench that you always get when crowds of people are
penned together without proper sanitary arrangements.
Kopp elbowed his way through the crowd to meet us. His plump fresh--coloured
face looked much as usual, and in that filthy place he had kept his uniform neat
and had even contrived to shave. There was another officer in the uniform of the
Popular Army among the prisoners. He and Kopp saluted as they struggled past one
another; the gesture was pathetic, somehow. Kopp seemed in excellent spirits.
'Well, I suppose we shall all be shot,' he said cheerfully. The word 'shot' gave
me a sort of inward shudder. A bullet had entered my own body recently and the
feeling of it was fresh in my memory; it is not nice to think of that happening
to anyone you know well. At that time I took it for granted that all the
principal people in the P.O.U.M., and Kopp among them, would be shot. The first
rumour of Nin's death had just filtered through, and we knew that the P.O.U.M.
were being accused of treachery and espionage. Everything pointed to a huge
frame-up trial followed by a massacre of leading 'Trotskyists.' It is a terrible
thing to see your friend in jail and to know yourself impotent to help him. For
there was nothing that one could do; useless even to appeal to the Belgian
authorities, for Kopp had broken the law of his own country by coming here. I
had to leave most of the talking to my wife; with my squeaking voice I could not
make myself heard in the din. Kopp was telling us about the friends he had made
among the other prisoners, about the guards, some of whom were good fellows, but
some of whom abused and beat the more timid prisoners, and about the food, which
was 'pig-wash'. Fortunately we had thought to bring a packet of food, also
cigarettes. Then Kopp began telling us about the papers that had been taken from
him when he was arrested. Among them was his letter from the Ministry of War,
addressed to the colonel commanding engineering operations in the Army of the
East. The police had seized it and refused to give it back; it was said to be
lying in the Chief of Police's office. It might make a very great difference if
it were recovered.
I saw instantly how important this might be. An official letter of that kind,
bearing the recommendation of the Ministry of War and of General Pozas, would
establish Kopp's bona fides. But the trouble was to prove that the letter
existed; if it were opened in the Chief of Police's office one could be sure
that some nark or other would destroy it. There was only one person who might
possibly be able to get it back, and that was the officer to whom it was
addressed. Kopp had already thought of this, and he had written a letter which
he wanted me to smuggle out of the jail and post. But it was obviously quicker
and surer to go in person. I left my wife with Kopp, rushed out, and, after a
long search, found a taxi. I knew that time was everything. It was now about
half past five, the colonel would probably leave his office at six, and by
tomorrow the letter might be God knew where--destroyed, perhaps, or lost
somewhere in the chaos of documents that was presumably piling up as suspect
after suspect was arrested. The colonel's office was at the War Department down
by the quay. As I hurried up the steps the Assault Guard on duty at the door
barred the way with his long bayonet and demanded 'papers'. I waved my discharge
ticket at him; evidently he could not read, and he let me pass, impressed by the
vague mystery of' papers'. Inside, the place was a huge complicated warren
running round a central courtyard, with hundreds of offices on each floor; and,
as this was Spain, nobody had the vaguest idea where the office I was looking
for was. I kept repeating: 'El coronet--, jefe de ingenieros, Ejercito de Este!'
People smiled and shrugged their shoulders gracefully. Everyone who had an
opinion sent me in a different direction; up these stairs, down those, along
interminable passages which turned out to be blind alleys. And time was slipping
away. I had the strangest sensation of being in a nightmare: the rushing up and
down flights of stairs, the mysterious people coming and going, the glimpses
through open doors of chaotic offices with papers strewn everywhere and
typewriters clicking; and time slipping away and a life perhaps in the
balance.
However, I got there in time, and slightly to my surprise I was granted a
hearing. I did not see Colonel--, but his aide-de-camp or secretary, a little
slip of an officer in smart uniform, with large and squinting eyes, came out to
interview me in the ante-room. I began to pour forth my story. I had come on
behalf of my superior officer. Major Jorge Kopp, who was on an urgent mission to
the front and had been arrested by mistake. The letter to Colonel--was of a
confidential nature and should be recovered without delay. I had served with
Kopp for months, he was an officer of the highest character, obviously his
arrest was a mistake, the police had confused him with someone else, etc., etc.,
etc. I kept piling it on about the urgency of Kopp's mission to the front,
knowing that this was the strongest point. But it must have sounded a strange
tale, in my villainous Spanish which elapsed into French at every crisis. The
worst was that my voice gave out almost at once and it was only by violent
straining that I could produce a sort of croak. I was in dread that it would
disappear altogether and the little officer would grow tired of trying to listen
to me. I have often wondered what he thought was wrong with my Voice--whether
he thought I was drunk or merely suffering from a guilty conscience.
However, he heard me patiently, nodded his head a great number of times, and
gave a guarded assent to what I said. Yes, it sounded as though there might have
been a mistake. Clearly the matter should be looked into. Manana--I protested.
Not manana! The matter was urgent; Kopp was due at the front already. Again the
officer seemed to agree. Then came the question I was dreading:
'This Major Kopp--what force was he serving in?'
The terrible word had to come out: 'In the P.O.U.M. militia.'
'P.O.U.M.!'
I wish I could convey to you the shocked alarm in his voice. You have got to
remember how the P.O.U.M. was regarded at that moment. The spy--scare was at its
height; probably all good Republicans did believe for a day or two that the
P.O.U.M. was a huge spying organization in German pay. To have to say such a
thing to an officer in the Popular Army was like going into the Cavalry Club
immediately after the Red Letter scare and announcing yourself a Communist. His
dark eyes moved obliquely across my face. Another long pause, then he said
slowly:
'And you say you were with him at the front. Then you were serving in the
P.O.U.M. militia yourself?'
'Yes.'
He turned and dived into the colonel's room. I could hear an agitated
conversation. 'It's all up,' I thought. We should never get Kopp's letter back.
Moreover I had had to confess that I was in the P.O.U.M. myself, and no doubt
they would ring up the police and get me arrested, just to add another
Trotskyist to the bag. Presently, however, the officer reappeared, fitting on
his cap, and sternly signed to me to follow. We were going to the Chief of
Police's office. It was a long way, twenty minutes' walk. The little officer
marched stiffly in front with a military step. We did not exchange a single word
the whole way. When we got to the Chief of Police's office a crowd of the most
dreadful-looking scoundrels, obviously police narks, informers, and spies of
every kind, were hanging about outside the door. The little officer went in;
there was a long, heated conversation. You could hear voices furiously raised;
you pictured violent gestures, shrugging of the shoulders, hangings on the
table. Evidently the police were refusing to give the letter up. At last,
however, the officer emerged, flushed, but carrying a large official envelope.
It was Kopp's letter. We had won a tiny victory--which, as it turned out, made
not the slightest difference. The letter was duly delivered, but Kopp's military
superiors were quite unable to get him out of jail.
The officer promised me that the letter should be delivered. But what about
Kopp? I said. Could we not get him released? He shrugged his shoulders. That was
another matter. They did not know what Kopp had been arrested for. He would only
tell me that the proper inquiries would be made. There was no more to be said;
it was time to part. Both of us bowed slightly. And then there happened a
strange and moving thing. The little officer hesitated a moment, then stepped
across, and shook hands with me.
I do not know if I can bring home to you how deeply that action touched me.
It sounds a small thing, but it was not. You have got to realize what was the
feeling of the time--the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, the lies
and rumours circulating everywhere, the posters screaming from the hoardings
that I and everyone like me was a Fascist spy. And you have got to remember that
we were standing outside the Chief of Police's office, in front of that filthy
gang of tale-bearers and agents provocateurs, any one of whom might know that I
was 'wanted' by the police. It was like publicly shaking hands with a German
during the Great War. I suppose he had decided in some way that I was not really
a Fascist spy; still, it was good of him to shake hands.
I record this, trivial though it may sound, because it is somehow typical of
Spain--of the flashes of magnanimity that you get from Spaniards in the worst
of circumstances. I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few
bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with
a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong
myself. They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that
do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope
that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few
Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern
totalitarian state needs. There had been a queer little illustration of this
fact a few nights earlier, when the police had searched my wife's room. As a
matter of fact that search was a very interesting business, and I wish I had
seen it, though perhaps it is as well that I did not, for I might not have kept
my temper.
The police conducted the search in the recognized Ogpu or Gestapo style. In
the small hours of the morning there was a pounding on the door, and six men
marched in, switched on the light, and immediately took up various positions
about the room, obviously agreed upon beforehand. They then searched both rooms
(there was a bathroom attached) with inconceivable thoroughness. They sounded
the walls, took up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under
the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every
garment and held it up to the light. They impounded all papers, including the
contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They
were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French
translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found
our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein
Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of
Stalin's pamphlet. Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers,
which reassured them somewhat. In one drawer there was a number of packets of
cigarette papers. They picked each packet to pieces and examined each paper
separately, in case there should be messages written on them. Altogether they
were on the job for nearly two hours. Yet all this time they never searched the
bed. My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been
half a dozen sub--machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library
of Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to
touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. I cannot believe that this is a
regular feature of the Ogpu routine. One must remember that the police were
almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist
Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out
of bed was a little too much for them. This part of the job was silently
dropped, making the whole search meaningless.
That night McNair, Cottman, and I slept in some long grass at the edge of a
derelict building-lot. It was a cold night for the time of year and no one slept
much. I remember the long dismal hours of loitering about before one could get a
cup of coffee. For the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to have a
look at the cathedral--a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous
buildings in the world. It has four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock
bottles. Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the
revolution--it was spared because of its 'artistic value', people said. I think
the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance,
though they did hang a red and black banner between its spires. That afternoon
my wife and I went to see Kopp for the last time. There was nothing that we
could do for him, absolutely nothing, except to say good-bye and leave money
with Spanish friends who would take him food and cigarettes. A little while
later, however, after we had left Barcelona, he was placed incommunicado and not
even food could be sent to him. That night, walking down the Ramblas, we passed
the Cafe Moka, which the Civil Guards were still holding in force. On an impulse
I went in and spoke to two of them who were leaning against the counter with
their rifles slung over their shoulders. I asked them if they knew which of
their comrades had been on duty here at the time of the May fighting. They did
not know, and, with the usual Spanish vagueness, did not know how one could find
out. I said that my friend Jorge Kopp was in prison and would perhaps be put on
trial for something in connexion with the May fighting; that the men who were on
duty here would know that he had stopped the fighting and saved some of their
lives; they ought to come forward and give evidence to that effect. One of the
men I was talking to was a dull, heavy-looking man who kept shaking his head
because he could not hear my voice in the din of the traffic. But the other was
different. He said he had heard of Kopp's action from some of his comrades; Kopp
was buen chico (a good fellow). But even at the time I knew that it was all
useless. If Kopp were ever tried, it would be, as in all such trials, with faked
evidence. If he has been shot (and I am afraid it is quite likely), that will be
his epitaph: the buen chico of the poor Civil Guard who was part of a dirty
system but had remained enough of a human being to know a decent action when he
saw one.
It was an extraordinary, insane existence that we were leading. By night we
were criminals, but by day we were prosperous English visitors--that was our
pose, anyway. Even after a night in the open, a shave, a bath, and a shoe-shine
do wonders with your appearance. The safest thing at present was to look as
bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the
town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants, and were
very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing
things on walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had 'Visca
P.O.U.M.!' scrawled on them as large as I could write it. All the while, though
I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing
seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that' they' cannot
arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have
during a political pogrom. There was a warrant out for McNair's arrest, and the
chances were that the rest of us were on the list as well. The arrests, raids,
searchings were continuing without pause; practically everyone we knew, except
those who were still at the front, was in jail by this time. The police were
even boarding the French ships that periodically took off refugees and seizing
suspected 'Trotskyists'.
Thanks to the kindness of the British consul, who must have had a very trying
time during that week, we had managed to get our passports into order. The
sooner we left the better. There was a train that was due to leave for Port Bou
at half past seven in the evening and might normally be expected to leave at
about half past eight. We arranged that my wife should order a taxi beforehand
and then pack her bags, pay her bill, and leave the hotel at the last possible
moment. If she gave the hotel people too much notice they would be sure to send
for the police. I got down to the station at about seven to find that the train
had already gone--it had left at ten to seven. The engine--driver had changed
his mind, as usual. Fortunately we managed to warn my wife in time. There was
another train early the following morning. McNair, Cottman, and I had dinner at
a little restaurant near the station and by cautious questioning discovered that
the restaurant--keeper was a C.N.T. member and friendly. He let us a
three-bedded room and forgot to warn the police. It was the first time in five
nights that I had been able to sleep with my clothes off.
Next morning my wife slipped out of the hotel successfully. The train was
about an hour late in starting. I filled in the time by writing a long letter to
the Ministry of War, telling them about Kopp's case--that without a doubt he
had been arrested by mistake, that he was urgently needed at the front, that
countless people would testify that he was innocent of any offence, etc., etc.,
etc. I wonder if anyone read that letter, written on pages torn out of a
note-book in wobbly handwriting (my fingers were still partly paralysed) and
still more wobbly Spanish. At any rate, neither this letter nor anything else
took effect. As I write, six months after the event, Kopp (if he has not been
shot) is still in jail, untried and uncharged. At the beginning we had two or
three letters from him, smuggled out by released prisoners and posted in France.
They all told the same story--imprisonment in filthy dark dens, bad and
insufficient food, serious illness due to the conditions of imprisonment, and
refusal of medical attention. I have had all this confirmed from several other
sources, English and French. More recently he disappeared into one of the
'secret prisons' with which it seems impossible to make any kind of
communication. His case is the case of scores or hundreds of foreigners and no
one knows how many thousands of Spaniards.
In the end we crossed the frontier without incident. The train had a first
class and a dining-car, the first I had seen in Spain. Until recently there had
been only one class on the trains in Catalonia. Two detectives came round the
train taking the names of foreigners, but when they saw us in the dining-car
they seemed satisfied that we were respectable. It was queer how everything had
changed. Only six months ago, when the Anarchists still reigned, it was looking
like a proletarian that made you respectable. On the way down from Perpignan to
Cerberes a French commercial traveller in my carriage had said to me in all
solemnity: 'You mustn't go into Spain looking like that. Take off that collar
and tie. They'll tear them off you in Barcelona.' He was exaggerating, but it
showed how Catalonia was regarded. And at the frontier the Anarchist guards had
turned back a smartly dressed Frenchman and his wife, solely--I think--because
they looked too bourgeois. Now it was the other way about; to look bourgeois was
the one salvation. At the passport office they looked us up in the card--index
of suspects, but thanks to the inefficiency of the police our names were not
listed, not even McNair's. We were searched from head to foot, but we possessed
nothing incriminating, except my discharge--papers, and the carabineros who
searched me did not know that the 29th Division was the P.O.U.M. So we slipped
through the barrier, and after just six months I was on French soil again. My
only souvenirs of Spain were a goatskin water-bottle and one of those tiny iron
lamps in which the Aragon peasants bum olive oil--lamps almost exactly the
shape of the terra-cotta lamps that the Romans used two thousand years ago--
which I had picked up in some ruined hut, and which had somehow got stuck in my
luggage.
After all, it turned out that we had come away none too soon. The very first
newspaper we saw announced McNair's arrest for espionage. The Spanish
authorities had been a little premature in announcing this. Fortunately,
'Trotskyism'is not extraditable.
I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at
war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy
as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets. Then we all
went to the buffet and had a cup of tea, the first tea with fresh milk in it
that we had had for many months. It was several days before I could get used to
the idea that you could buy cigarettes whenever you wanted them. I always
half-expected to see the tobacconists' doors barred and the forbidding notice
'No hay tabaco' in the window.
McNair and Cottman were going on to Paris. My wife and I got off the train at
Banyuls, the first station up the line, feeling that we would like a rest. We
were not too well received in Banyuls when they discovered that we had come from
Barcelona. Quite a number of times I was involved in the same conversation: 'You
come from Spain? Which side were you fighting on? The Government? Oh!'--and
then a marked coolness. The little town seemed solidly pro-Franco, no doubt
because of the various Spanish Fascist refugees who had arrived there from time
to time. The waiter at the cafe I frequented was a pro-Franco Spaniard and used
to give me lowering glances as he served me with an aperitif. It was otherwise
in Perpignan, which was stiff with Government partisans and where all the
different factions were caballing against one another almost as in Barcelona.
There was one cafe where the word 'P.O.U.M.' immediately procured you French
friends and smiles from the waiter.
I think we stayed three days in Banyuls. It was a strangely restless time. In
this quiet fishing-town, remote from bombs, machine-guns, food-queues,
propaganda, and intrigue, we ought to have felt profoundly relieved and
thankful. We felt nothing of the kind. The things we had seen in Spain did not
recede and fall into proportion now that we were away from them; instead they
rushed back upon us and were far more vivid than before. We thought, talked,
dreamed incessantly of Spain. For months past we had been telling ourselves that
'when we get out of Spain' we would go somewhere beside the Mediterranean and be
quiet for a little while and perhaps do a little fishing, but now that we were
here it was merely a bore and a disappointment. It was chilly weather, a
persistent wind blew off the sea, the water was dull and choppy, round the
harbour's edge a scum of ashes, corks, and fish-guts bobbed against the stones.
It sounds like lunacy, but the thing that both of us wanted was to be back in
Spain. Though it could have done no good to anybody, might indeed have done
serious harm, both of us wished that we had stayed to be imprisoned along with
the others. I suppose I have failed to convey more than a little of what those
months in Spain meant to me. I have recorded some of the outward events, but I
cannot record the feeling they have left me with. It is all mixed up with
sights, smells, and sounds that cannot be conveyed in writing: the smell of the
trenches, the mountain dawns stretching away into inconceivable distances, the
frosty crackle of bullets, the roar and glare of bombs; the clear cold light of
the Barcelona mornings, and the stamp of boots in the barrack yard, back in
December when people still believed in the revolution; and the food-queues and
the red and black flags and the faces of Spanish militiamen; above all the faces
of militiamen--men whom I knew in the line and who are now scattered Lord knows
where, some killed in battle, some maimed, some in prison--most of them, I
hope, still safe and sound. Good luck to them all; I hope they win their war and
drive all the foreigners out of Spain, Germans, Russians, and Italians alike.
This war, in which I played so ineffectual a part, has left me with memories
that are mostly evil, and yet I do not wish that I had missed it. When you have
had a glimpse of such a disaster as this--and however it ends the Spanish war
will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter
and physical suffering--the result is not necessarily disillusionment and
cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but
more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given
is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can
be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what
you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone
writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book
I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the
distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And
beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of
the Spanish war.
Because of the feeling that we ought to be doing something, though actually
there was nothing we could do, we left Banyuls earlier than we had intended.
With every mile that you went northward France grew greener and softer. Away
from the mountain and the vine, back to the meadow and the elm. When I had
passed through Paris on my way to Spain it had seemed to me decayed and gloomy,
very different from the Paris I had known eight years earlier, when living was
cheap and Hitler was not heard of. Half the cafes I used to know were shut for
lack of custom, and everyone was obsessed with the high cost of living and the
fear of war. Now, after poor Spain, even Paris seemed gay and prosperous. And
the Exhibition was in full swing, though we managed to avoid visiting it.
And then England--southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the
world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are
peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train
carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere.
Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the
milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out
on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery
hidden by the curve of the earth's surface. Down here it was still the England I
had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the
deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving
streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the
cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the
barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket
matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar
Square, the red buses, the blue policemen--all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of
England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked
out of it by the roar of bombs.
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