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Chapter 10
ABOUT midday on 3 May a friend crossing the lounge of the hotel said
casually: 'There's been some kind of trouble at the Telephone Exchange, I hear.'
For some reason I paid no attention to it at the time.
That afternoon, between three and four, I was half-way down the Ramblas when
I heard several rifle-shots behind me. I turned round and saw some youths, with
rifles in their hands and the red and black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists
round their throats, edging up a side--street that ran off the Ramblas
northward. They were evidently exchanging shots with someone in a tall octagonal
tower--a church, I think--that commanded the side-street. I thought instantly:
'It's started!' But I thought it without any very great feeling of surprise--
for days past everyone had been expecting 'it' to start at any moment. I
realized that I must get back to the hotel at once and see if my wife was all
right. But the knot of Anarchists round the opening of the side-street were
motioning the people back and shouting to them not to cross the line of fire.
More shots rang out. The bullets from the tower were flying across the street
and a crowd of panic-stricken people was rushing down the Ramblas, away from the
firing; up and down the street you could hear snap--snap--snap as the
shopkeepers slammed the steel shutters over their windows. I saw two Popular
Army officers retreating cautiously from tree to tree with their hands on their
revolvers. In front of me the crowd was surging into the Metro station in the
middle of the Ramblas to take cover. I immediately decided not to follow them.
It might mean being trapped underground for hours.
At this moment an American doctor who had been with us at the front ran up to
me and grabbed me by the arm. He was greatly excited.
'Come on, we must get down to the Hotel Falcon.' (The Hotel Falcon was a sort
of boarding-house maintained by the P.O.U.M. and used chiefly by militiamen on
leave.) 'The P.O.U.M. chaps will be meeting there. The trouble's starting. We
must hang together.'
'But what the devil is it all about?' I said.
The doctor was hauling me along by the arm. He was too excited to give a very
clear statement. It appeared that he had been in the Plaza de Cataluna when
several lorry-loads of armed Civil Guards had driven up to the Telephone
Exchange, which was operated mainly by C.N.T. workers, and made a sudden assault
upon it. Then some Anarchists had arrived and there had been a general affray. I
gathered that the 'trouble' earlier in the day had been a demand by the
Government to hand over the Telephone Exchange, which, of course, was
refused.
As we moved down the street a lorry raced past us from the opposite
direction. It was full of Anarchists with rifles in their hands. In front a
ragged youth was lying on a pile of mattresses behind a light machine-gun. When
we got to the Hotel Falcon, which was at the bottom of the Ramblas, a crowd of
people was seething in the entrance-hall; there was a great confusion, nobody
seemed to know what we were expected to do, and nobody was armed except the
handful of Shock Troopers who usually acted as guards for the building. I went
across to the Comite Local of the P.O.U.M., which was almost opposite. Upstairs,
in the room where militiamen normally went to draw their pay, another crowd was
seething. A tall, pale, rather handsome man of about thirty, in civilian
clothes, was trying to restore order and handing out belts and cartridge-boxes
from a pile in the corner. There seemed to be no rifles as yet. The doctor had
disappeared--I believe there had already been casualties and a call for doctors
--but another Englishman had arrived. Presently, from an inner office, the tall
man and some others began bringing out armfuls of rifles and handing them round.
The other Englishman and myself, as foreigners, were slightly under suspicion
and at first nobody would give us a rifle. Then a militiaman whom I had known at
the front arrived and recognized me, after which we were given rifles and a. few
clips of cartridges, somewhat grudgingly.
There was a sound of firing in the distance and the streets were completely
empty of people. Everyone said that it was impossible to go up the Ramblas. The
Civil Guards had seized buildings in commanding positions and were letting fly
at everyone who passed. I would have risked it and gone back to the hotel, but
there was a vague idea floating round that the Comite Local was likely to be
attacked at any moment and we had better stand by. All over the building, on the
stairs, and on the pavement outside, small knots of people were standing and
talking excitedly. No one seemed to have a very clear idea of what was
happening. All I could gather was that the Civil Guards had attacked the
Telephone Exchange and seized various strategic spots that commanded other
buildings belonging to the workers. There was a general impression that the
Civil Guards were 'after' the C.N.T. and the working class generally. It was
noticeable that, at this stage, no one seemed to put the blame on the
Government. The poorer classes in Barcelona looked upon the Civil Guards as
something rather resembling the Black and Tans, and it seemed to be taken for
granted that they had started this attack on their own initiative. Once I heard
how things stood I felt easier in my mind. The issue was clear enough. On one
side the C.N.T., on the other side the police. I have no particular love for the
idealized 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I
see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the
policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
A long time passed and nothing seemed to be happening at our end of the town.
It did not occur to me that I could ring up the hotel and find out whether my
wife was all right; I took it for granted that the Telephone Exchange would have
stopped working--though, as a matter of fact, it was only out of action for a
couple of hours. There seemed to be about three hundred people in the two
buildings. Predominantly they were people of the poorest class, from the
back-streets down by the quays; there was a number of women among them, some of
them carrying babies, and a crowd of little ragged boys. I fancy that many of
them had no notion what was happening and had simply fled into the P.O.U.M.
buildings for protection. There was also a number of militiamen on leave, and a
sprinkling of foreigners. As far as I could estimate, there were only about
sixty rifles between the lot of us. The office upstairs was ceaselessly besieged
by a crowd of people who were demanding rifles and being told that there were
none left. The younger militia boys, who seemed to regard the whole affair as a
kind of picnic, were prowling round and trying to wheedle or steal rifles from
anyone who had them. It was not long before one of them got my rifle away from
me by a clever dodge and immediately made himself scarce. So I was unarmed
again, except for my tiny automatic pistol, for which I had only one clip of
cartridges.
It grew dark, I was getting hungry, and seemingly there was no food in the
Falcon. My friend and I slipped out to his hotel, which was not far away, to get
some dinner. The streets were utterly dark and silent, not a soul stirring,
steel shutters drawn over all the shop windows, but no barricades built yet.
There was a great fuss before they would let us into the hotel, which was locked
and barred. When we got back I learned that the Telephone Exchange was working
and went to the telephone in the office upstairs to ring up my wife.
Characteristically, there was no telephone directory in the building, and I did
not know the number of the Hotel Continental; after a searching from room to
room for about an hour I came upon a guide-book which gave me the number. I
could not make contact with my wife, but I managed to get hold of John McNair,
the I.L.P. representative in Barcelona. He told me that all was well, nobody had
been shot, and asked me if we were all right at the Comite Local. I said that we
should be all right if we had some cigarettes. I only meant this as a joke;
nevertheless half an hour later McNair appeared with two packets of Lucky
Strike. He had braved the pitch-dark streets, roamed by Anarchist patrols who
had twice stopped him at the pistol's point and examined his papers. I shall not
forget this small act of heroism. We were very glad of the cigarettes.
They had placed armed guards at most of the windows, and in the street below
a little group of Shock Troopers were stopping and questioning the few
passers-by. An Anarchist patrol car drove up, bristling with weapons. Beside the
driver a beautiful dark-haired girl of about eighteen was nursing a
sub-machine-gun across her knees. I spent a long time wandering about the
building, a great rambling place of which it was impossible to learn the
geography. Everywhere was the usual litter, the broken furniture and torn paper
that seem to be the inevitable products of revolution. All over the place people
were sleeping; on a broken sofa in a passage two poor women from the quayside
were peacefully snoring. The place had been a cabaret-theatre before the
P.O.U.M. took it over. There were raised stages in several of the rooms; on one
of them was a desolate grand piano. Finally I discovered what I was looking for
--the armoury. I did not know how this affair was going to turn out, and I badly
wanted a weapon. I had heard it said so often that all the rival parties,
P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., and C.N.T.-F.A.I. alike, were hoarding arms in Barcelona,
that I could not believe that two of the principal P.O.U.M. buildings contained
only the fifty or sixty rifles that I had seen. The room which acted as an
armoury was unguarded and had a flimsy door; another Englishman and myself had
no difficulty in prizing it open. When we got inside we found that what they had
told us was true--there were no more weapons. All we found there were about two
dozen small-bore rifles of an obsolete pattern and a few shot--guns, with no
cartridges for any of them. I went up to the office and asked if they had any
spare pistol ammunition; they had none. There were a few boxes of bombs,
however, which one of the Anarchist patrol cars had brought us. I put a couple
in one of my cartridge-boxes. They were a crude type of bomb, ignited by rubbing
a sort of match at the top and very liable to go off of their own accord.
People were sprawling asleep all over the floor. In one room a baby was
crying, crying ceaselessly. Though this was May the night was getting cold. On
one of the cabaret-stages the curtains were still up, so I ripped a curtain down
with my knife, rolled myself up in it, and had a few hours' sleep. My sleep was
disturbed, I remember, by the thought of those beastly bombs, which might blow
me into the air if I rolled on them too vigorously. At three in the morning the
tall handsome man who seemed to be in command woke me up, gave me a rifle, and
put me on guard at one of the windows. He told me that Salas, the Chief of
Police responsible for the attack on the Telephone Exchange, had been placed
under arrest. (Actually, as we learned later, he had only been deprived of his
post. Nevertheless the news confirmed the general impression that the Civil
Guards had acted without orders.) As soon as it was dawn the people downstairs
began building two barricades, one outside the Comite Local and the other
outside the Hotel Falcon. The Barcelona streets are paved with square cobbles,
easily built up into a wall, and under the cobbles is a kind of shingle that is
good for filling sand-bags. The building of those barricades was a strange and
wonderful sight; I would have given something to be able to photograph it. With
the kind--of passionate energy that Spaniards display when they have definitely
decided to begin upon any job of work, long lines of men, women, and quite small
children were tearing up the cobblestones, hauling them along in a hand-cart
that had been found somewhere, and staggering to and fro under heavy sacks of
sand. In the doorway of the Comite Local a German-Jewish girl, in a pair of
militiaman's trousers whose knee--buttons just reached her ankles, was watching
with a smile. In a couple of hours the barricades were head-high, with riflemen
posted at the loopholes, and behind one barricade a fire was burning and men
were frying eggs.
They had taken my rifle away again, and there seemed to be nothing that one
could usefully do. Another Englishman and myself decided to go back to the Hotel
Continental. There was a lot of firing in the distance, but seemingly none in
the Ramblas. On the way up we looked in at the food-market. A very few stalls
had opened; they were besieged by a crowd of people from the working-class
quarters south of the Ramblas. Just as we got there, there was a heavy crash of
rifle--fire outside, some panes of glass in the roof were shivered, and the
crowd went flying for the back exits. A few stalls remained open, however; we
managed to get a cup of coffee each and buy a wedge of goat's-milk cheese which
I tucked in beside my bombs. A few days later I was very glad of that
cheese.
At the street-corner where I had seen the Anarchists begin. firing the day
before a barricade was now standing. The man behind it (I was on the other side
of the street) shouted to me to be careful. The Civil Guards in the church tower
were firing indiscriminately at everyone who passed. I paused and then crossed
the opening at a run; sure enough, a bullet cracked past me, uncomfortably
close. When I neared the P.O.U.M. Executive Building, still on the other side of
the road, there were fresh shouts of warning from some Shock Troopers standing
in the doorway--shouts which, at the moment, I did not understand. There were
trees and a newspaper kiosk between myself and the building (streets of this
type in Spain have a broad walk running down the middle), and I could not see
what they were pointing at. I went up to the Continental, made sure that all was
well, washed my face, and then went back to the P.O.U.M. Executive Building (it
was about a hundred yards down the street) to ask for orders. By this time the
roar of rifle and machine-gun fire from various directions was almost comparable
to the din of a battle. I had just found Kopp and was asking him what we were
supposed to do when there was a series of appalling crashes down below. The din
was so loud that I made sure someone must be firing at us with a field-gun.
Actually it was only hand-grenades, which make double their usual noise when
they burst among stone buildings.
Kopp glanced out of the window, cocked his stick behind his back, said: 'Let
us investigate,' and strolled down the stairs in his usual unconcerned manner, I
following. Just inside the doorway a group of Shock Troopers were bowling bombs
down the pavement as though playing skittles. The bombs were bursting twenty
yards away with a frightful, ear-splitting crash which was mixed up with the
banging of rifles. Half across the street, from behind the newspaper kiosk, a
head--it was the head of an American militiaman whom I knew well--was sticking
up, for all the world like a coconut at a fair. It was only afterwards that I
grasped what was really happening. Next door to the P.O.U.M. building there was
a cafe with a hotel above it, called the Cafe Moka. The day before twenty or
thirty armed Civil Guards had entered the cafe and then, when the fighting
started, had suddenly seized the building and barricaded themselves in.
Presumably they had been ordered to seize the cafe as a preliminary to attacking
the P.O.U.M. offices later. Early in the morning they had attempted to come out,
shots had been exchanged, and one Shock Trooper was badly wounded and a Civil
Guard killed. The Civil Guards had fled back into the cafe, but when the
American came down the street they had opened fire on him, though he was not
armed. The American had flung himself behind the kiosk for cover, and the Shock
Troopers were flinging bombs at the Civil Guards to drive them indoors
again.
Kopp took in the scene at a glance, pushed his way forward and hauled back a
red-haired German Shock Trooper who was just drawing the pin out of a bomb with
his teeth. He shouted to everyone to stand back from the doorway, and told us in
several languages that we had got to avoid bloodshed. Then he stepped out on to
the pavement and, in sight of the Civil Guards, ostentatiously took off his
pistol and laid it on the ground. Two Spanish militia officers did the same, and
the three of them walked slowly up to the doorway where the Civil Guards were
huddling. It was a thing I would not have done for twenty pounds. They were
walking, unarmed, up to men who were frightened out of their wits and had loaded
guns in their hands. A Civil Guard, in shirt-sleeves and livid with fright, came
out of the door to parley with Kopp. He kept pointing in an agitated manner at
two unexploded bombs that were lying on the pavement. Kopp came back and told us
we had better touch the bombs off. Lying there, they were a danger to anyone who
passed. A Shock Trooper fired his rifle at one of the bombs and burst it, then
fired at the other and missed. I asked him to give me his rifle, knelt down and
let fly at the second bomb. I also missed it, I am sorry to say.
This was the only shot I fired during the disturbances. The pavement was
covered with broken glass from the sign over the Cafe Moka, and two cars that
were parked outside, one of them Kopp's official car, had been riddled with
bullets and their windscreens smashed by bursting bombs.
Kopp took me upstairs again and explained the situation. We had got to defend
the P.O.U.M. buildings if they were attacked, but the P.O.U.M. leaders had sent
instructions that we were to stand on the defensive and not open fire if we
could possibly avoid it. Immediately opposite there was a cinematograph, called
the Poliorama, with a museum above it, and at the top, high above the general
level of the roofs, a small observatory with twin domes. The domes commanded the
street, and a few men posted up there with rifles could prevent any attack on
the P.O.U.M. buildings. The caretakers at the cinema were C.N.T. members and
would let us come and go. As for the Civil Guards in the Cafe Moka, there would
be no trouble with them; they did not want to fight and would be only too glad
to live and let live. Kopp repeated that our orders were not to fire unless we
were fired on ourselves or our buildings attacked. I gathered, though he did not
say so, that the P.O.U.M. leaders were furious at being dragged into this
affair, but felt that they had got to stand by the C.N.T.
They had already placed guards in the observatory. The next three days and
nights I spent continuously on the roof of the Poliorama, except for brief
intervals when I slipped across to the hotel for meals. I was in no danger, I
suffered from nothing worse than hunger and boredom, yet it was one of the most
unbearable periods of my whole life. I think few experiences could be more
sickening, more disillusioning, or, finally, more nerve-racking than those evil
days of street warfare.
I used to sit on the roof marvelling at the folly of it all. From the little
windows in the observatory you could see for miles around--vista after vista of
tall slender buildings, glass domes, and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant
green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea--the
first glimpse of the sea that I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole
huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a
nightmare of noise without movement. The sunlit streets were quite empty.
Nothing was happening except the streaming of bullets from barricades and
sand-bagged windows. Not a vehicle was stirring in the streets; here and there
along the Ramblas the trams stood motionless where their drivers had jumped out
of them when the fighting started. And all the while the devilish noise, echoing
from thousands of stone buildings, went on and on and on, like a tropical
rainstorm. Crack-crack, rattle--rattle, roar--sometimes it died away to a few
shots, sometimes it quickened to a deafening fusillade, but it never stopped
while daylight lasted, and punctually next dawn it started again.
What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom, and who was winning, was
at first very difficult to discover. The people of Barcelona are so used to
street-fighting and so familiar with the local geography that they knew by a
kind of instinct which political party will hold which streets and which
buildings. A foreigner is at a hopeless disadvantage. Looking out from the
observatory, I could grasp that the Ramblas, which is one of the principal
streets of the town, formed a dividing line. To the right of the Ramblas the
working-class quarters were solidly Anarchist; to the left a confused fight was
going on among the tortuous by-streets, but on that side the P.S.U.C. and the
Civil Guards were more or less in control. Up at our end of the Ramblas, round
the Plaza de Cataluna, the position was so complicated that it would have been
quite unintelligible if every building had not flown a party flag. The principal
landmark here was the Hotel Colon, the headquarters of the P.S.U.C., dominating
the Plaza de Cataluna. In a window near the last 0 but one in the huge 'Hotel
Colon' that sprawled across its face they had a machine-gun that could sweep the
square with deadly effect. A hundred yards to the right of us, down the Ramblas,
the J.S.U., the youth league of the P.S.U.C. (corresponding to the Young
Communist League in England), were holding a big department store whose
sandbagged side-windows fronted our observatory. They had hauled down their red
flag and hoisted the Catalan national flag. On the Telephone Exchange, the
starting-point of all the trouble, the Catalan national flag and the Anarchist
flag were flying side by side. Some kind of temporary compromise had been
arrived at there, the exchange was working uninterruptedly and there was no
firing from the building.
In our position it was strangely peaceful. The Civil Guards in the Cafe Moka
had drawn down the steel curtains and piled up the cafe furniture to make a
barricade. Later half a dozen of them came on to the roof, opposite to
ourselves, and built another barricade of mattresses, over which they hung a
Catalan national flag. But it was obvious that they had no wish to start a
fight. Kopp had made a definite agreement with them: if they did not fire at us
we would not fire at them. He had grown quite friendly with the Civil Guards by
this time, and had been to visit them several times in the Cafe Moka. Naturally
they had looted everything drinkable the cafe possessed, and they made Kopp a
present of fifteen bottles of beer. In return Kopp had actually given them one
of our rifles to make up for one they had somehow lost on the previous day.
Nevertheless, it was a queer feeling sitting on that roof. Sometimes I was
merely bored with the whole affair, paid no attention to the hellish noise, and
spent hours reading a succession of Penguin Library books which, luckily, I had
bought a few days earlier; sometimes I was very conscious of the armed men
watching me fifty yards away. It was a little like being in the trenches again;
several times I caught myself, from force of habit, speaking of the Civil Guards
as 'the Fascists'. There were generally about six of us up there. We placed a
man on guard in each of the observatory towers, and the rest of us sat on the
lead roof below, where there was no cover except a stone palisade. I was well
aware that at any moment the Civil Guards might receive telephone orders to open
fire. They had agreed to give us warning before doing so, but there was no
certainty that they would keep to their agreement. Only once, however, did
trouble look like starting. One of the Civil Guards opposite knelt down and
began firing across the barricade. I was on guard in the observatory at the
time. I trained my rifle on him and shouted across:
'Hi! Don't you shoot at us!'
'What?'
'Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!'
'No, no! I wasn't firing at you. Look--down there!'
He motioned with his rifle towards the side-street that ran past the bottom
of our building. Sure enough, a youth in blue overalls, with a rifle in his
hand, was dodging round the corner. Evidently he had just taken a shot at the
Civil Guards on the roof.
'I was firing at him. He fired first.' (I believe this was true.) 'We don't
want to shoot you. We're only workers, the same as you are.'
He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned. I shouted across:
'Have you got any more beer left?'
'No, it's all gone.'
The same day, for no apparent reason, a man in the J.S.U. building farther
down the street suddenly raised his rifle and let fly at me when I was leaning
out of the window. Perhaps I made a tempting mark. I did not fire back. Though
he was only a hundred yards away the bullet went so wide that it did not even
hit the roof of the observatory. As usual, Spanish standards of marksmanship had
saved me. I was fired at several times from this building.
The devilish racket of firing went on and on. But so far as I could see, and
from all I heard, the fighting was defensive on both sides. People simply
remained in their buildings or behind their barricades and blazed away at the
people opposite. About half a mile away from us there was a street where some of
the main offices of the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were almost exactly facing one
another; from that direction the volume of noise was terrific. I passed down
that street the day after the fighting was over and the panes of the
shop-windows were like sieves. (Most of the shopkeepers in Barcelona had their
windows criss-crossed with strips of paper, so that when a bullet hit a pane it
did not shiver to pieces.) Sometimes the rattle of rifle and machine-gun fire
was punctuated by the crash of hand-grenades. And at long intervals, perhaps a
dozen times in all, there were tremendously heavy explosions which at the time I
could not account for; they sounded like aerial bombs, but that was impossible,
for there were no aeroplanes about. I was told afterwards--quite possibly it
was true--that agents provocateurs were touching off masses of explosive in
order to increase the general noise and panic. There was, however, no
artillery-fire. I was listening for this, for if the guns began to fire it would
mean that the affair was becoming serious (artillery is the determining factor
in street warfare). Afterwards there were wild tales in the newspapers about
batteries of guns firing in the streets, but no one was able to point to a
building that had been hit by a shell. In any case the sound of gunfire is
unmistakable if one is used to it.
Almost from the start food was running short. With difficulty and under cover
of darkness (for the Civil Guards were constantly sniping into the Ramblas) food
was brought from the Hotel Falcon for the fifteen or twenty militiamen who were
in the P.O.U.M. Executive Building, but there was barely enough to go round, and
as many of us as possible went to the Hotel Continental for our meals. The
Continental had been 'collectivized' by the Generalite and not, like most of the
hotels, by the C.N.T. or U.G.T., and it was regarded as neutral ground. No
sooner had the fighting started than the hotel filled to the brim with a most
extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political
suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government,
various Communist agents, including a fat, sinister-looking Russian, said to be
an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his
waist-band a revolver and a neat little bomb, some families of well--to-do
Spaniards who looked like Fascist sympathizers, two or three wounded men from
the International Column, a gang of lorry drivers from. some huge French lorries
which had been carrying a load of oranges back to France and had been held up by
the fighting, and a number of Popular Army officers. The Popular Army, as a
body, remained neutral throughout the fighting, though a few soldiers slipped
away from the barracks and took part as individuals; on the Tuesday morning I
had seen a couple of them at the P.O.U.M. barricades. At the beginning, before
the food-shortage became acute and the newspapers began stirring up hatred,
there was a tendency to regard the whole affair as a joke. This was the kind of
thing that happened every year in Barcelona, people were saying. George Tioli,
an Italian journalist, a great friend of ours, came in with his trousers
drenched with blood. He had gone out to see what was happening and had been
binding up a wounded man on the pavement when someone playfully tossed a
hand-grenade at him, fortunately not wounding him seriously. I remember his
remarking that the Barcelona paving-stones ought to be numbered; it would save
such a lot of trouble in building and demolishing barricades. And I remember a
couple of men from the International Column sitting in my room at the hotel when
I came in tired, hungry, and dirty after a night on guard. Their attitude was
completely neutral. If they had been good party-men they would, I suppose, have
urged me to change sides, or even have pinioned me and taken away the bombs of
which my pockets were full; instead they merely commiserated with me for having
to spend my leave in doing guard-duty on a roof. The general attitude was: 'This
is only a dust-up between the Anarchists and the police--it doesn't mean
anything.' In spite of the extent of the fighting and the number of casualties I
believe this was nearer the truth than the official version which represented
the affair as a planned rising.
It was about Wednesday (5 May) that a change seemed to come over things. The
shuttered streets looked ghastly. A very few pedestrians, forced abroad for one
reason or another, crept to and fro, flourishing white handkerchiefs, and at a
spot in the middle of the Ramblas that was safe from bullets some men were
crying newspapers to the empty street. On Tuesday Solidaridad Obrera, the
Anarchist paper, had described the attack on the Telephone Exchange as a
'monstrous provocation' (or words to that effect), but on Wednesday it changed
its tune and began imploring everyone to go back to work. The Anarchist leaders
were broadcasting the same message. The office of La Batalla, the P.O.U.M.
paper, which was not defended, had been raided and seized by the Civil Guards at
about the same time as the Telephone Exchange, but the paper was being printed,
and a few copies distributed, from another address. I urged everyone to remain
at the barricades. People were divided in their minds and wondering uneasily how
the devil this was going to end. I doubt whether anyone left the barricades as
yet, but everyone was sick of the meaningless fighting, which could obviously
lead to no real decision, because no one wanted this to develop into a
full-sized civil war which might mean losing the war against Franco. I heard
this fear expressed on all sides. So far as one could gather from what people
were saying at the time the C.N.T. rank and file wanted, and had wanted from the
beginning, only two things: the handing back of the Telephone Exchange and the
disarming of the hated Civil Guards. If the Generalite had promised to do these
two things, and also promised to put an end to the food profiteering, there is
little doubt that the barricades would have been down in two hours. But it was
obvious that the Generalite was not going to give in. Ugly rumours were flying
round. It was said that the Valencia Government was sending six thousand men to
occupy Barcelona, and that five thousand Anarchist and P.O.U.M. troops had left
the Aragon front to oppose them. Only the first of these rumours was true.
Watching from the observatory tower we saw the low grey shapes of warships
closing in upon the harbour. Douglas Moyle, who had been a sailor, said that
they looked like British destroyers. As a matter of fact they were British
destroyers, though we did not learn this till afterwards.
That evening we heard that on the Plaza de Espana four hundred Civil Guards
had surrendered and handed their arms to the Anarchists; also the news was
vaguely filtering through that in the suburbs (mainly working-class quarters)
the C.N.T. were in control. It looked as though we were winning. But the same
evening Kopp sent for me and, with a grave face, told me that according to
information he had just received the Government was about to outlaw the P.O.U.M.
and declare a state of war upon it. The news gave me a shock. It was the first
glimpse I had had of the interpretation that was likely to be put upon this
affair later on. I dimly foresaw that when the fighting ended the entire blame
would be laid upon the P.O.U.M., which was the weakest party and therefore the
most suitable scapegoat. And meanwhile our local neutrality was at an end. If
the Government declared war upon us we had no choice but to defend ourselves,
and here at the Executive building we could be certain that the Civil Guards
next door would get orders to attack us. Our only chance was to attack them
first. Kopp was waiting for orders on the telephone; if we heard definitely that
the P.O.U.M. was outlawed we must make preparations at once to seize the Cafe
Moka.
I remember the long, nightmarish evening that we spent in fortifying the
building. We locked the steel curtains across the front entrance and behind them
built a barricade of slabs of stone left behind by the workmen who had been
making some alterations. We went over our stock of weapons. Counting the six
rifles that were on the roof of the Poliorama opposite, we had twenty-one
rifles, one of them defective, about fifty rounds of ammunition for each rifle,
and a few dozen bombs; otherwise nothing except a few pistols and revolvers.
About a dozen men, mostly Germans, had volunteered for the attack on the Cafe
Moka, if it came off. We should attack from the roof, of course, some time in
the small hours, and take them by surprise; they were more numerous, but our
morale was better, and no doubt we could storm the place, though people were
bound to be killed in doing so. We had no food in the building except a few
slabs of chocolate, and the rumour had gone round that 'they' were going to cut
off the water supply. (Nobody knew who 'they' were. It might be the Government
that controlled the waterworks, or it might be the C.N.T.--nobody knew.) We
spent a long time filling up every basin in the lavatories, every bucket we
could lay hands on, and, finally, the fifteen beer bottles, now empty, which the
Civil Guards had given to Kopp.
I was in a ghastly frame of mind and dog-tired after about sixty hours
without much sleep. It was now late into the night. People were sleeping all
over the floor behind the barricade downstairs. Upstairs there was a small room,
with a sofa in it, which we intended to use as a dressing-station, though,
needless to say, we discovered that there was neither iodine nor bandages in the
building. My wife had come down from the hotel in case a nurse should be needed.
I lay down on the sofa, feeling that I would like half an hour's rest before the
attack on the Moka, in which I should presumably be killed. I remember the
intolerable discomfort caused by my pistol, which was strapped to my belt and
sticking into the small of my back. And the next thing I remember is waking up
with a jerk to find my wife standing beside me. It was broad daylight, nothing
had happened, the Government had not declared war on the P.O.U.M., the water had
not been cut off, and except for the sporadic firing in the streets everything
was normal. My wife said that she had not had the heart to wake me and had slept
in an arm-chair in one of the front rooms.
That afternoon there was a kind of armistice. The firing died away and with
surprising suddenness the streets filled with people. A few shops began to pull
up their shutters, and the market was packed with a huge crowd clamouring for
food, though the stalls were almost empty. It was noticeable, however, that the
trams did not start running. The Civil Guards were still behind their barricades
in the Moka; on neither side were the fortified buildings evacuated. Everyone
was rushing round and trying to buy food. And on every side you heard the same
anxious questions: 'Do you think it's stopped? Do you think it's going to start
again?' 'It'--the fighting--was now thought of as some kind of natural
calamity, like a hurricane or an earthquake, which was happening to us all alike
and which we had no power of stopping. And sure enough, almost immediately--I
suppose there must really have been several hours' truce, but they seemed more
like minutes than hours--a sudden crash of rifle-fire, like a June cloud-burst,
sent everyone scurrying; the steel shutters snapped into place, the streets
emptied like magic, the barricades were manned, and 'it' had started again.
I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated disgust and
fury. When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a
small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical
character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always
outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct
'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of
miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of
this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of
sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing
worse and worse--for none of us had had a proper meal since Monday. It was in
my mind all the while that I should have to go back to the front as soon as this
business was over. It was infuriating. I had been a hundred and fifteen days in
the line and had come back to Barcelona ravenous for a bit of rest and comfort;
and instead I had to spend my time sitting on a roof opposite Civil Guards as
bored as myself, who periodically waved to me and assured me that they were
'workers' (meaning that they hoped I would not shoot them), but who would
certainly open fire if they got the order to do so. If this was history it did
not feel like it. It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were
short and we had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one
just had to stay at one's post, bored, dropping with sleep, and completely
uninterested as to what it was all about.
Inside the hotel, among the heterogeneous mob who for the most part had not
dared to put their noses out of doors, a horrible atmosphere of suspicion had
grown up. Various people were infected with spy mania and were creeping round
whispering that everyone else was a spy of the Communists, or the Trotskyists,
or the Anarchists, or what-not. The fat Russian agent was cornering all the
foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an
Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that
I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies--unless one counts
journalists. There was something repulsive in the parody of smart hotel life
that was still going on behind shuttered windows amid the rattle of rifle-fire.
The front dining-room had been abandoned after a bullet came through the window
and chipped a pillar, and the guests were crowded into a darkish room at the
back, where there were never quite enough tables to go round. The waiters were
reduced in numbers--some of them were C.N.T. members and had joined in the
general strike--and had dropped their boiled shirts for the time being, but
meals were still being served with a pretence of ceremony. There was, however,
practically nothing to eat. On that Thursday night the principal dish at dinner
was one sardine each. The hotel had had no bread for days, and even the wine was
running so low that we were drinking older and older wines at higher and higher
prices. This shortage of food went on for several days after the fighting was
over. Three days running, I remember, my wife and I breakfasted off a little
piece of goat's-milk cheese with no bread and nothing to drink. The only thing
that was plentiful was oranges. The French lorry drivers brought quantities of
their oranges into the hotel. They were a tough--looking bunch; they had with
them some flashy Spanish girls and a huge porter in a black blouse. At any other
time the little snob of a hotel manager would have done his best to make them
uncomfortable, in fact would have refused to have them on the premises, but at
present they were popular because, unlike the rest of us, they had a private
store of bread which everyone was trying to cadge from them.
I spent that final night on the roof, and the next day it did really look as
though the fighting was coming to an end. I do not think there was much firing
that day--the Friday. No one seemed to know for certain whether the troops from
Valencia were really coining; they arrived that evening, as a matter of fact.
The Government was broadcasting half-soothing, half-threatening messages, asking
everyone to go home and saying that after a certain hour anyone found carrying
arms would be arrested. Not much attention was paid to the Government's
broadcasts, but everywhere the people were fading away from the barricades. I
have no doubt that it was mainly the food shortage that was responsible. From
every side you heard the same remark:' We have no more food, we must go back to
work.' On the other hand the Civil Guards, who could count on getting their
rations so long as there was any food in the town, were able to stay at their
posts. By the afternoon the streets were almost normal, though the deserted
barricades were still standing; the Ramblas were thronged with people, the shops
nearly all open, and--most reassuring of all--the trams that had stood so long
in frozen blocks jerked into motion and began running. The Civil Guards were
still holding the Cafe Moka and had not taken down their barricades, but some of
them brought chairs out and sat on the pavement with their rifles across their
knees. I winked at one of them as I went past and got a not unfriendly grin; he
recognized me, of course. Over the Telephone Exchange the Anarchist flag had
been hauled down and only the Catalan flag was flying. That meant that the
workers were definitely beaten; I realized--though, owing to my political
ignorance, not so clearly as I ought to have done--that when the Government
felt more sure of itself there would be reprisals. But at the time I was not
interested in that aspect of things. All I felt was a profound relief that the
devilish din of firing was over, and that one could buy some food and have a bit
of rest and peace before going back to the front.
It must have been late that evening that the troops from Valencia first
appeared in the streets. They were the Assault Guards, another formation similar
to the Civil Guards and the Carabineros (i.e. a formation intended primarily for
police work), and the picked troops of the Republic. Quite suddenly they seemed
to spring up out of the ground; you saw them everywhere patrolling the streets
in groups of ten--tall men in grey or blue uniforms, with long rifles slung
over their shoulders, and a sub-machine-gun to each group. Meanwhile there was a
delicate job to be done. The six rifles which we had used for the guard in the
observatory towers were still lying there, and by hook or by crook we had got to
get them back to the P.O.U.M. building. It was only a question of getting them
across the street. They were part of the regular armoury of the building, but to
bring them into the street was to contravene the Government's order, and if we
were caught with them in our hands we should certainly be arrested--worse, the
rifles would be confiscated. With only twenty-one rifles in the building we
could not afford to lose six of them. After a lot of discussion as to the best
method, a red-haired Spanish boy and myself began to smuggle them out. It was
easy enough to dodge the Assault Guard patrols; the danger was the Civil Guards
in the Moka, who were well aware that we had rifles in the observatory and might
give the show away if they saw us carrying them across. Each of us partially
undressed and slung a rifle over the left shoulder, the butt under the armpit,
the barrel down the trouser-leg. It was unfortunate that they were long Mausers.
Even a man as tall as I am cannot wear a long Mauser down his trouser-leg
without discomfort. It was an intolerable job getting down the corkscrew
staircase of the observatory with a completely rigid left leg. Once in the
street, we found that the only way to move was with extreme slowness, so slowly
that you did not have to bend your knees. Outside the picture-house I saw a
group of people staring at me with great interest as I crept along at
tortoise-speed. I have often wondered what they thought was the matter with me.
Wounded in the war, perhaps. However, all the rifles were smuggled across
without incident.
Next day the Assault Guards were everywhere, walking the streets like
conquerors. There was no doubt that the Government was simply making a display
of force in order to overawe a population which it already knew would not
resist; if there had been any real fear of further outbreaks the Assault Guards
would have been kept in barracks and not scattered through the streets in small
bands. They were splendid troops, much the best I had seen in Spain, and, though
I suppose they were in a sense 'the enemy', I could not help liking the look of
them. But it was with a sort of amazement that I watched them strolling to and
fro. I was used to the ragged, scarcely-armed militia on the Aragon front, and I
had not known that the Republic possessed troops like these. It was not only
that they were picked men physically, it was their weapons that most astonished
me. All of them were armed with brand-new rifles of the type known as 'the
Russian rifle' (these rifles were sent to Spain by the U.S.S.R., but were, I
believe, manufactured in America). I examined one of them. It was a far from
perfect rifle, but vastly better than the dreadful old blunderbusses we had at
the front. The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an
automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between
fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them
illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the
same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the
front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it
is the same in all wars--always the same contrast between the sleek police in
the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line. On the whole the Assault Guards
got on very well with the population after the first day or two. On the first
day there was a certain amount of trouble because some of the Assault Guards--
acting on instructions, I suppose--began behaving in a provocative manner.
Bands of them boarded trams, searched the passengers, and, if they had C.N.T.
membership cards in their pockets, tore them up and stamped on them. This led to
scuffles with armed Anarchists, and one or two people were killed. Very soon,
however, the Assault Guards dropped their conquering air and relations became
more friendly. It was noticeable that most of them had picked up a girl after a
day or two.
The Barcelona fighting had given the Valencia Government the long--wanted
excuse to assume fuller control of Catalonia. The workers' militias were to be
broken' up and redistributed among the Popular Army. The Spanish Republican flag
was flying all over Barcelona--the first time I had seen it, I think, except
over a Fascist trench. In the working-class quarters the barricades were being
pulled down, rather fragmentarily, for it is a lot easier to build a barricade
than to put the stones back. Outside the P.S.U.C. buildings the barricades were
allowed to remain standing, and indeed many were standing as late as June. The
Civil Guards were still occupying strategic points. Huge seizures of arms were
being made from C.N.T. strongholds, though I have no doubt a good many escaped
seizure. La Batalla was still appearing, but it was censored until the front
page was almost completely blank. The P.S.U.C. papers were un-censored and were
publishing inflammatory articles demanding the suppression of the P.O.U.M. The
P.O.U.M. was declared to be a disguised Fascist organization, and a cartoon
representing the P.O.U.M. as a figure slipping off a mask marked with the
hammer and sickle and revealing a hideous, maniacal face marked with the
swastika, was being circulated all over the town by P.S.U.C. agents. Evidently
the official version of the Barcelona fighting was already fixed upon: it was to
be represented as a 'fifth column' Fascist rising engineered solely by the
P.O.U.M.
In the hotel the horrible atmosphere of suspicion and hostility had grown
worse now that the fighting was over. In the face of the accusations that were
being flung about it was impossible to remain neutral. The posts were working
again, the foreign Communist papers were beginning to arrive, and their accounts
of the fighting were not only violently partisan but, of course, wildly
inaccurate as to facts. I think some of the Communists on the spot, who had seen
what was actually happening, were dismayed by the interpretation that was being
put upon events, but naturally they had to stick to their own side. Our
Communist friend approached me once again and asked me whether I would not
transfer into the International Column.
I was rather surprised. 'Your papers are saying I'm a Fascist,' I said.
'Surely I should be politically suspect, coming from the P.O.U.M.'
'Oh, that doesn't matter. After all, you were only acting under orders.'
I had to tell him that after this affair I could not join any
Communist-controlled unit. Sooner or later it might mean being used against the
Spanish working class. One could not tell when this kind of thing would break
out again, and if I had to use my rifle at all in such an affair I would use it
on the side of the working class and not against them. He was very decent about
it. But from now on the whole atmosphere was changed. You could not, as before,
'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political
opponent. There were some ugly wrangles in the hotel lounge. Meanwhile the jails
were already full and overflowing. After the fighting was over the Anarchists
had, of course, released their prisoners, but the Civil Guards had not released
theirs, and most of them were thrown into prison and kept there without trial,
in many cases for months on end. As usual, completely innocent people were being
arrested owing to police bungling. I mentioned earlier that Douglas Thompson was
wounded about the beginning of April. Afterwards we had lost touch with him, as
usually happened when a man was wounded, for wounded men were frequently moved
from one hospital to another. Actually he was at Tarragona hospital and was sent
back to Barcelona about the time when the fighting started. On the Tuesday
morning I met him in the street, considerably bewildered by the firing that was
going on all round. He asked the question everyone was asking:
'What the devil is this all about?'
I explained as well as I could. Thompson said promptly:
'I'm going to keep out of this. My arm's still bad. I shall go back to my
hotel and stay there.'
He went back to his hotel, but unfortunately (how important it is in
street-fighting to understand the local geography!) it was a hotel in a part of
the town controlled by the Civil Guards. The place was raided and Thompson was
arrested, flung into jail, and kept for eight days in a cell so full of people
that nobody had room to lie down. There were many similar cases. Numerous
foreigners with doubtful political records were on the run, with the police on
their track and in constant fear of denunciation. It was worst for the Italians
and Germans, who had no passports and were generally wanted by the secret police
in their own countries. If they were arrested they were liable to be deported to
France, which might mean being sent back to Italy or Germany, where God knew
what horrors were awaiting them. One or two foreign women hurriedly regularized
their position by 'marrying' Spaniards. A German girl who had no papers at all
dodged the police by posing for several days as a man's mistress. I remember the
look of shame and misery on the poor girl's face when I accidentally bumped into
her coming out of the man's bedroom. Of course she was not his mistress, but no
doubt she thought I thought she was. You had all the while a hateful feeling
that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police.
The long nightmare of the fighting, the noise, the lack of food and sleep, the
mingled strain and boredom of sitting on the roof and wondering whether in
another minute I should be shot myself or be obliged to shoot somebody else had
put my nerves on edge. I had got to the point when every time a door banged I
grabbed for my pistol. On the Saturday morning there was an uproar of shots
outside and everyone cried out: 'It's starting again!' I ran into the street to
find that it was only some Assault Guards shooting a mad dog. No one who was in
Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere
produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails,
enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men.
I have tried to give some idea of what it felt like to be in the middle of
the Barcelona fighting; yet I do not suppose I have succeeded in conveying much
of the strangeness of that time. One of the things that stick in my mind when I
look back is the casual contacts one made at the time, the sudden glimpses of
non-combatants to whom the whole thing was simply a meaningless uproar. I
remember the fashionably-dressed woman I saw strolling down the Ramblas, with a
shopping-basket over her arm and leading a white poodle, while the rifles
cracked and roared a street or two away. It is conceivable that she was deaf.
And the man I saw rushing across the completely empty Plaza de Cataluna,
brandishing a white handkerchief in each hand. And the large party of people all
dressed in black who kept trying for about an hour to cross the Plaza de
Cataluna and always failing. Every time they emerged from the side-street at the
corner the P.S.U.C. machine-gunners in the Hotel Colon opened fire and drove
them back--I don't know why, for they were obviously unarmed. I have since
thought that they may have been a funeral party. And the little man who acted as
caretaker at the museum over the Poliorama and who seemed to regard the whole
affair as a social occasion. He was so pleased to have the English visiting him
--the English were so simpatico, he said. He hoped we would all come and see him
again when the trouble was over; as a matter of fact I did go and see him. And
the other little man, sheltering in a doorway, who jerked his head in a pleased
manner towards the hell of firing on the Plaza de Cataluna and said (as though
remarking that it was a fine morning): 'So we've got the nineteenth of July back
again!' And the people in the shoe-shop who were making my marching-boots. I
went there before the fighting, after it was over, and, for a very few minutes,
during the brief armistice on 5 May. It was an expensive shop, and the
shop-people were U.G.T. and may have been P.S.U.C. members--at any rate they
were politically on the other side and they knew that I was serving with the
P.O.U.M. Yet their attitude was completely indifferent. 'Such a pity, this kind
of thing, isn't it? And so bad for business. What a pity it doesn't stop! As
though there wasn't enough of that kind of thing at the front!' etc., etc. There
must have been quantities of people, perhaps a majority of the inhabitants of
Barcelona, who regarded the whole affair without a nicker of interest, or with
no more interest than they would have felt in an air-raid.
In this chapter I have described only my personal experiences. In the next
chapter I must discuss as best I can the larger issues--what actually happened
and with what results, what were the rights and wrongs of the affair, and who if
anyone was responsible. So much political capital has been made out of the
Barcelona fighting that it is important to try and get a balanced view of it. An
immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the
subject, and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of
it is untruthful. Nearly all the newspaper accounts published at the time were
manufactured by journalists at a distance, and were not only inaccurate in their
facts but intentionally misleading. As usual, only one side of the question has
been allowed to get to the wider public. Like everyone who was in Barcelona at
the time. I saw only what was happening in my immediate neighbourhood, but I saw
and heard quite enough to be able to contradict many of the lies that have been
circulated. As before, if you are not interested in political controversy and
the mob of parties and sub-parties with their confusing names (rather like the
names of the generals in a Chinese war), please skip. It is a horrible thing to
have to enter into the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a
cesspool. But it is necessary to try and establish the truth, so far as it is
possible. This squalid brawl in a distant city is more important than might
appear at first sight.
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