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Chapter 9
FROM Mandalay, in Upper Burma, you can travel by train to Maymyo, the
principal hill-station of the province, on the edge of the Shan plateau. It is
rather a queer experience. You start off in the typical atmosphere of an eastern
city--the scorching sunlight, the dusty palms, the smells of fish and spices and
garlic, the squashy tropical fruits, the swarming dark-faced human beings--and
because you are so used to it you carry this atmosphere intact, so to speak, in
your railway carriage. Mentally you are still in Mandalay when the train stops
at Maymyo, four thousand feet above sea--level. But in stepping out of the
carriage you step into a different hemisphere. Suddenly you are breathing cool
sweet air that might be that of England, and all round you are green grass,
bracken, fir-trees, and hill--women with pink cheeks selling baskets of
strawberries.
Getting back to Barcelona, after three and a half months at the front,
reminded me of this. There was the same abrupt and startling change of
atmosphere. In the train, all the way to Barcelona, the atmosphere of the front
persisted; the dirt, the noise, the discomfort, the ragged clothes the feeling
of privation, comradeship, and equality. The train, already full of militiamen
when it left Barbastro, was invaded by more and more peasants at every station
on the line; peasants with bundles of vegetables, with terrified fowls which
they carried head--downwards, with sacks which looped and writhed all over the
floor and were discovered to be full of live rabbits--finally with a quite
considerable flock of sheep which were driven into the compartments and wedged
into every empty space. The militiamen shouted revolutionary songs which drowned
the rattle of the train and kissed their hands or waved red and black
handkerchiefs to every pretty girl along the line. Bottles of wine and of anis,
the filthy Aragonese liqueur, travelled from hand to hand. With the Spanish
goat-skin water-bottles you can squirt a jet of wine right across a railway
carriage into your friend's mouth, which saves a lot of trouble. Next to me a
black-eyed boy of fifteen was recounting sensational and, I do not doubt,
completely untrue stories of his own exploits at the front to two old
leather-faced peasants who listened open-mouthed. Presently the peasants undid
their bundles and gave us some sticky dark-red wine. Everyone was profoundly
happy, more happy than I can convey. But when the train had rolled through
Sabadell and into Barcelona, we stepped into an atmosphere that was scarcely
less alien and hostile to us and our kind than if this had been Paris or
London.
Everyone who has made two visits, at intervals of months, to Barcelona during
the war has remarked upon the extraordinary changes that took place in it. And
curiously enough, whether they went there first in August and again in January,
or, like myself, first in December and again in April, the thing they said was
always the same: that the revolutionary atmosphere had vanished. No doubt to
anyone who had been there in August, when the blood was scarcely dry in the
streets and militia were quartered in the smart hotels, Barcelona in December
would have seemed bourgeois; to me, fresh from England, it was liker to a
workers' city than anything I had conceived possible. Now the tide had rolled
back. Once again it was an ordinary city, a little pinched and chipped by war,
but with no outward sign of working-class predominance.
The change in the aspect of the crowds was startling. The militia uniform and
the blue overalls had almost disappeared; everyone seemed to be wearing the
smart summer suits in which Spanish tailors specialize. Fat prosperous men,
elegant women, and sleek cars were everywhere. (It appeared that there were
still no private cars; nevertheless, anyone who 'was anyone' seemed able to
command a car.) The officers of the new Popular Army, a type that had scarcely
existed when I left Barcelona, swarmed in surprising numbers. The Popular Army
was officered at the rate of one officer to ten men. A certain number of these
officers had served in the militia and been brought back from the front for
technical instruction, but the majority were young men who had gone to the
School of War in preference to joining the militia. Their relation to their men
was not quite the same as in a bourgeois army, but there was a definite social
difference, expressed by the difference of pay and uniform. The men wore a kind
of coarse brown overalls, the officers wore an elegant khaki uniform with a
tight waist, like a British Army officer's uniform, only a little more so. I do
not suppose that more than one in twenty of them had yet been to the front, but
all of them had automatic pistols strapped to their belts; we, at the front,
could not get pistols for love or money. As we made our way up the street I
noticed that people were staring at our dirty exteriors. Of course, like all men
who have been several months in the line, we were a dreadful sight. I was
conscious of looking like a scarecrow. My leather jacket was in tatters, my
woollen cap had lost its shape and slid perpetually over one eye, my boots
consisted of very little beyond splayed-out uppers. All of us were in more or
less the same state, and in addition we were dirty and unshaven, so it was no
wonder that the people stared. But it dismayed me a little, and brought it home
to me that some queer things had been happening in the last three months.
During the next few days I discovered by innumerable signs that my first
impression had not been wrong. A deep change had come over the town. There were
two facts that were the keynote of all else. One was that the people--the civil
population--had lost much of their interest in the war; the other was that the
normal division of society into rich and poor, upper class and lower class, was
reasserting itself.
The general indifference to the war was surprising and rather disgusting. It
horrified people who came to Barcelona from Madrid or even from Valencia. Partly
it was due to the remoteness of Barcelona from the actual fighting; I noticed
the same thing a month later in Tarragona, where the ordinary life of a smart
seaside town was continuing almost undisturbed. But it was significant that all
over Spain voluntary enlistment had dwindled from about January onwards. In
Catalonia, in February, there had been a wave of enthusiasm over the first big
drive for the Popular Army, but it had not led to any great increase in
recruiting. The war was only six months old or thereabouts when the Spanish
Government had to resort to conscription, which would be natural in a foreign
war, but seems anomalous in a civil war. Undoubtedly it was bound up with the
disappointment of the revolutionary hopes with which the war had started. The
trade union members who formed themselves into militias and chased the Fascists
back to Zaragoza in the first few weeks of war had done so largely because they
believed themselves to be fighting for working-class control; but it was
becoming more and more obvious that working-class control was a lost cause, and
the common people, especially the town proletariat, who have to fill the ranks
in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain apathy. Nobody
wanted to lose the war, but the majority were chiefly anxious for it to be over.
You noticed this wherever you went. Everywhere you met with the same perfunctory
remark:' This war--terrible, isn't it? When is it going to end?' Politically
conscious people were far more aware of the internecine struggle between
Anarchist and Communist than of the fight against Franco. To the mass of the
people the food shortage was the most important thing. 'The front' had come to
be thought of as a mythical far-off place to which young men disappeared and
either did not return or returned after three or four months with vast sums of
money in their pockets. (A militiaman usually received his back pay when he went
on leave.) Wounded men, even when they were hopping about on crutches, did not
receive any special consideration. To be in the militia was no longer
fashionable. The shops, always the barometers of public taste, showed this
clearly. When I first reached Barcelona the shops, poor and shabby though they
were, had specialized in militiamen's equipment. Forage-caps, zipper jackets,
Sam Browne belts, hunting-knives, water-bottles, revolver-holsters were
displayed in every window. Now the shops were markedly smarter, but the war had
been thrust into the background. As I discovered later, when buying my kit
before going back to the front, certain things that one badly needed at the
front were very difficult to procure.
Meanwhile there was going on a systematic propaganda against the party
militias and in favour of the Popular Army. The position here was rather
curious. Since February the entire armed forces had theoretically been
incorporated in the Popular Army, and the militias were, on paper, reconstructed
along Popular Army lines, with differential pay-rates, gazetted rank, etc., etc.
The divisions were made up of 'mixed brigades', which were supposed to consist
partly of Popular Army troops and partly of militia. But the only changes that
had actually taken place were changes of name. The P.O.U.M. troops, for
instance, previously called the Lenin Division, were now known as the 29th
Division. Until June very few Popular Army troops reached the Aragon front, and
in consequence the militias were able to retain their separate structure and
their special character. But on every wall the Government agents had stencilled:
'We need a Popular Army', and over the radio and in the Communist Press there
was a ceaseless and sometimes very malignant jibing against the militias, who
were described as ill-trained, undisciplined, etc., etc.; the Popular Army was
always described as 'heroic'. From much of this propaganda you would have
derived the impression that there was something disgraceful in having gone to
the front voluntarily and something praiseworthy in waiting to be conscripted.
For the time being, however, the militias were holding the line while the
Popular Army was training in the rear, and this fact had to be advertised as
little as possible. Drafts of militia returning to the front were no longer
marched through the streets with drums beating and flags flying. They were
smuggled away by train or lorry at five o'clock in the morning. A few drafts of
the Popular Army were now beginning to leave for the front, and these, as
before, were marched ceremoniously through the streets; but even they, owing to
the general waning of interest in the war, met with comparatively little
enthusiasm. The fact that the militia troops were also, on paper. Popular Army
troops, was skilfully used in the Press propaganda. Any credit that happened to
be going was automatically handed to the Popular Army, while all blame was
reserved for the militias. It sometimes happened that the same troops were
praised in one capacity and blamed in the other.
But besides all this there was the startling change in the social atmosphere
--a thing difficult to conceive unless you have actually experienced it. When I
first reached Barcelona I had thought it a town where class distinctions and
great differences of wealth hardly existed. Certainly that was what it looked
like. 'Smart' clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters
and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you 'comrade'.
I had not grasped that this was mainly a mixture of hope and camouflage. The
working class believed in a revolution that had been begun but never
consolidated, and the bourgeoisie were scared and temporarily disguising
themselves as workers. In the first months of revolution there must have been
many thousands of people who deliberately put on overalls and shouted
revolutionary slogans as a way of saving their skins. Now things were returning
to normal. The smart restaurants and hotels were full of rich people wolfing
expensive meals, while for the working-class population food-prices had jumped
enormously without any corresponding rise in wages. Apart from the expensiveness
of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of
course, always hit the poor rather than the rich. The restaurants and hotels
seemed to have little difficulty in getting whatever they wanted, but in the
working-class quarters the queues for bread, olive oil, and other necessaries
were hundreds of yards long. Previously in Barcelona I had been struck by the
absence of beggars; now there were quantities of them. Outside the delicatessen
shop at the top of the Ramblas gangs of barefooted children were always waiting
to swarm round anyone who came out and clamour for scraps of food. The
'revolutionary' forms of speech were dropping out of use. Strangers seldom
addressed you as tu and camarada nowadays; it was usually senor and usted.
Buenos dias was beginning to replace salud. The waiters were back in their
boiled shirts and the shop-walkers were cringing in the familiar manner. My wife
and I went into a hosiery shop on the Ramblas to buy some stockings. The shopman
bowed and rubbed his hands as they do not do even in England nowadays, though
they used to do it twenty or thirty years ago. In a furtive indirect way the
practice of tipping was coming back. The workers' patrols had been ordered to
dissolve and the pre-war police forces were back on the streets. One result of
this was that the cabaret show and high-class brothels, many of which had been
closed by the workers' patrols, had promptly reopened. [Note 8, below] A small but
significant instance of the way in which everything was now orientated in favour
of the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage. For the mass of
the people the shortage of tobacco was so desperate that cigarettes filled with
sliced liquorice-root were being sold in the streets. I tried some of these
once. (A lot of people tried them once.) Franco held the Canaries, where all the
Spanish tobacco is grown; consequently the only stocks of tobacco left on the
Government side were those that had been in existence before the war. These were
running so low that the tobacconists' shops only opened once a week; after
waiting for a couple of hours in a queue you might, if you were lucky, get a
three-quarter-ounce packet of tobacco. Theoretically the Government would not
allow tobacco to be purchased from abroad, because this meant reducing the
gold-reserves, which had got to be kept for arms and other necessities. Actually
there was a steady supply of smuggled foreign cigarettes of the more expensive
kinds. Lucky Strikes and so forth, which gave a grand opportunity for
profiteering. You could buy the smuggled cigarettes openly in the smart hotels
and hardly less openly in the streets, provided that you could pay ten pesetas
(a militiaman's daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was for the benefit of
wealthy people, and was therefore connived at. If you had enough money there was
nothing that you could not get in any quantity, with the possible exception of
bread, which was rationed fairly strictly. This open contrast of wealth and
poverty would have been impossible a few months earlier, when the working class
still were or seemed to be in control. But it would not be fair to attribute it
solely to the shift of political power. Partly it was a result of the safety of
life in Barcelona, where there was little to remind one of the war except an
occasional air-raid. Everyone who had been in Madrid said that it was completely
different there. In Madrid the common danger forced people of almost all kinds
into some sense of comradeship. A fat man eating quails while children are
begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when
you are within sound of the guns.
[Note 8. The workers' patrols are said to have closed 75 per cent of the
brothels.]
A day or two after the street-fighting I remember passing through one of the
fashionable streets and coming upon a confectioner's shop with a window full of
pastries and bonbons of the most elegant kinds, at staggering prices. It was the
kind of shop you see in Bond Street or the Rue de la Paix. And I remember
feeling a vague horror and amazement that money could still be wasted upon such
things in a hungry war-stricken country. But God forbid that I should pretend to
any personal superiority. After several months of discomfort I had a ravenous
desire for decent food and wine, cocktails, American cigarettes, and so forth,
and I admit to having wallowed in every luxury that I had money to buy. During
that first week, before the street-fighting began, I had several preoccupations
which interacted upon one another in a curious way. In the first place, as I
have said, I was busy making myself as comfortable as I could. Secondly, thanks
to over-eating and over-drinking, I was slightly out of health all that week. I
would feel a little unwell, go to bed for half a day, get up and eat another
excessive meal, and then feel ill again. At the same time I was making secret
negotiations to buy a revolver. I badly wanted a revolver--in trench-fighting
much more useful than a rifle--and they were very difficult to get hold of. The
Government issued them to policemen and Popular Army officers, but refused to
issue them to the militia; you had to buy them, illegally, from the secret
stores of the Anarchists. After a lot of fuss and nuisance an Anarchist friend
managed to procure me a tiny 26-mm. automatic pistol, a wretched weapon, useless
at more than five yards but better than nothing. And besides all this I was
making preliminary arrangements to leave the P.O.U.M. militia and enter some
other unit that would ensure my being sent to the Madrid front.
I had told everyone for a long time past that I was going to leave the
P.O.U.M. As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to
join the Anarchists. If one became a member of the C.N.T. it was possible to
enter the F.A.I. militia, but I was told that the F.A.I. were likelier to send
me to Teruel than to Madrid. If I wanted to go to Madrid I must join the
International Column, which meant getting a recommendation from a member of the
Communist Party. I sought out a Communist friend, attached to the Spanish
Medical Aid, and explained my case to him. He seemed very anxious to recruit me
and asked me, if possible, to persuade some of the other I.L.P. Englishmen to
come with me. If I had been in better health I should probably have agreed there
and then. It is hard to say now what difference this would have made. Quite
possibly I should have been sent to Albacete before the Barcelona fighting
started; in which case, not having seen the fighting at close quarters, I might
have accepted the official version of it as truthful. On the other hand, if I
had been in Barcelona during the fighting, under Communist orders but still with
a sense of personal loyalty to my comrades in the P.O.U.M., my position would
have been impossible. But I had another week's leave due to me and I was very
anxious to get my health back before returning to the line. Also--the kind of
detail that is always deciding one's destiny--I had to wait while the
boot-makers made me a new pair of marching boots. (The entire Spanish army had
failed to produce a pair of boots big enough to fit me.) I told my Communist
friend that I would make definite arrangements later. Meanwhile I wanted a rest.
I even had a notion that we--my wife and I--might go to the seaside for two or
three days. What an idea! The political atmosphere ought to have warned me that
that was not the kind of thing one could do nowadays.
For under the surface-aspect of the town, under the luxury and growing
poverty, under the seeming gaiety of the streets, with their flower--stalls,
their many-coloured flags, their propaganda-posters, and thronging crowds, there
was an unmistakable and horrible feeling of political rivalry and hatred. People
of all shades of opinion were saying forebodingly: 'There's going to be trouble
before long.' The danger was quite simple and intelligible. It was the
antagonism between those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who
wished to check or prevent it--ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists.
Politically there was now no power in Catalonia except the P.S.U.C. and their
Liberal allies. But over against this there was the uncertain strength of the
C.N.T., less well-armed and less sure of what they wanted than their
adversaries, but powerful because of their numbers and their predominance in
various key industries. Given this alignment of forces there was bound to be
trouble. From the point of view of the P.S.U.C.-controlled Generalite, the first
necessity, to make their position secure, was to get the weapons out of the
C.N.T. workers' hands. As I have pointed out earlier, the move to break up the
party militias was at bottom a manoeuvre towards this end. At the same time the
pre-war armed police forces. Civil Guards, and so forth, had been brought back
into use and were being heavily reinforced and armed. This could mean only one
thing. The Civil Guards, in particular, were a gendarmerie of the ordinary
continental type, who for nearly a century past had acted as the bodyguards of
the possessing class. Meanwhile a decree had been issued that all arms held by
private persons were to be surrendered. Naturally this order had not been
obeyed; it was clear that the Anarchists' weapons could only be taken from them
by force. Throughout this time there were rumours, always vague and
contradictory owing to newspaper censorship, of minor clashes that were
occurring all over Catalonia. In various places the armed police forces had made
attacks on Anarchist strongholds. At Puigcerda, on the French frontier, a band
of Carabineros were sent to seize the Customs Office, previously controlled by
Anarchists and Antonio Martin, a well-known Anarchist, was killed. Similar
incidents had occurred at Figueras and, I think, at Tarragona. In Barcelona
there' had been a series of more or less unofficial brawls in the working-class
suburbs. C.N.T. and U.G.T. members had been murdering one another for some time
past; on several occasions the murders were followed by huge, provocative
funerals which were quite deliberately intended to stir up political hatred. A
short time earlier a C.N.T. member had been murdered, and the C.N.T. had turned
out in hundreds of thousands to follow the cortege. At the end of April, just
after I got to Barcelona, Roldan, a prominent member of the U.G.T., was
murdered, presumably by someone in the C.N.T. The Government ordered all shops
to close and staged ah enormous funeral procession, largely of Popular Army
troops, which took two hours to pass a given point. From the hotel window I
watched it without enthusiasm. It was obvious that the so-called funeral was
merely a display of strength; a little more of this kind of thing and there
might be bloodshed. The same night my wife and I were woken by a fusillade of
shots from the Plaza de Cataluna, a hundred or two hundred yards away. We
learned next day that it was a C.N.T. man being bumped off, presumably by
someone in the U.G.T. It was of course distinctly possible that all these
murders were committed by agents provocateurs. One can gauge the attitude of the
foreign capitalist Press towards the Communist-Anarchist feud by the fact that
Roldan's murder was given wide publicity, while the answering murder was
carefully unmentioned.
The 1st of May was approaching, and there was talk of a monster demonstration
in which both the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were to take part. The C.N.T. leaders,
more moderate than many of their followers, had long been working for a
reconciliation with the U.G.T.; indeed the keynote of their policy was to try
and form the two blocks of unions into one huge coalition. The idea was that the
C.N.T. and U.G.T. should march together and display their solidarity. But at the
last moment the demonstration was called off. It was perfectly clear that it
would only lead to rioting. So nothing happened on 1 May. It was a queer state
of affairs. Barcelona, the so-called revolutionary city, was probably the only
city in non-Fascist Europe that had no celebrations that day. But I admit I was
rather relieved. The I.L.P. contingent was expected to march in the P.O.U.M.
section of the procession, and everyone expected trouble. The last thing I
wished for was to be mixed up in some meaningless street-fight. To be marching
up the street behind red flags inscribed with elevating slogans, and then to be
bumped off from an upper window by some total stranger with a sub-machine-gun--
that is not my idea of a useful way to die.
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