Death's Other Kingdom

by Woolsey, Gamel; Jacobs, Michael;

Our lunch was sad, for it was in many ways a leave-taking, a leave-taking of Spain as it had been and would be no more. Before we had finished our coffee there was a knock at the door. The buses had come to pick up the refugees and their luggage, so we hurried off again to the pension. The two ancient buses which had come were already so full that it was almost impossible to cram more people inside; but they were got in somehow by the good-natured workmen’s committee, and with two fine-looking carabineros in charge they rumbled off almost too suddenly for leave-takings. Goodbye! Goodbye! Salud! Salud! They were gone, and we were left standing in the street with a few other die-hards who also would not desert their homes or businesses. There were also a few poor Germans and refugees of other nationalities who could not leave because they had no passports and nowhere to go. The departure of the English in many cases was taking away their only means of livelihood. How were they to live now, poor Ishmaels of our days!

  We said Goodbye and Good Luck to the other stayers, and started down the street to the sea to bathe. As we passed all the villagers greeted us with friendly smiles, they were so pleased at our staying. They had felt the English going off as they did very much. There were the English, members of a stronger nation and they had to be taken off in destroyers – Vaya! – as if they were not perfectly safe where they were! Finding that some of the English had not gone and evidently felt safe among Spaniards comforted their injured pride, and also reassured them for themselves, making them feel that the situation really couldn’t be so bad after all if we stayed on of our own free will. So that we received almost a minor ovation as we went down the crowded street, everyone smiling at us and old women coming out to pat us on the arm and say ‘These ones aren’t leaving, they aren’t afraid to stay with us.’ We smiled back at them feeling a profound attraction towards them, towards the Spanish people – not the Left nor the Right, but the people of Spain.

  The bathing that afternoon was perfect, infinitely cool and refreshing. We swam about in the lovely salt green waves for a long time. Afterwards drying our feet and putting on our gritty cotton sandals we sat looking out to sea. A little squatty Spanish cruiser was going off towards the south somewhere on her occasions. The smoke from the city still drifted far out to sea. For some reason there was no one about except a few children further along the beach, there was not even a fishing boat to be seen along the shore.

  We got up to go home at last. There was no one left, we rather sadly realised, to offer us tea or cocktails as we climbed back up the long white street. As we stood looking after the little destroyer steaming heavily away under the smoky sky, there was certainly rather a feeling of being marooned in the air.

  Chapter 7

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS showed a great improvement in the situation; train and bus services were resumed everywhere, and in Malaga the shops were opened and the streets began to look more normal though there was still a notable absence of women in them and also of well-dressed men. The necktie, symbol for some reason of bourgeois degeneracy – had completely disappeared, on Spanish necks at any rate, though some among the foreigners continued to wear them and to dress as usual. It was pleasant to meet, among the blue overalls and collarless shirts which became the fashion, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell in the smartest of summer suits and the brightest of buttonholes. And I remember thinking that the American Consul, a large figure in starched and glittering white, was enough to discourage any revolution. Mr Clissold, the British Vice-Consul, was another who dressed exactly as usual. He was an admirable man for a difficult situation, and all the English in Malaga as well as many others had reason to be extremely grateful to him.

  For a time we went into Malaga almost every day hoping to pick up some scraps of news, but we never got very much. British destroyers and gunboats came and went from Gibraltar continually (the Foreign Office had been rather previous in warning us that that first destroyer was probably our last chance of leaving, for there was an opportunity of going every few days, either on an English gunboat or destroyer, or from time to time on an American destroyer, or a French or German boat of some sort). They took our letters for us, as of course there was no ordinary post out, and occasionally brought us a letter or two, but most of ours seemed to get lost on the way. Some arrived rather ironically, one came from a friend in Germany I had not heard from for years, another from a missionary acquaintance who kindly sent us some lime seeds from Portuguese East Africa, later on another strayed in from Bali marked ‘via Siberia’. Why these exotic communications arrived safely when our plain English post did not I have never been able to imagine. We did both send and receive cables.

  It was pleasant meeting the young sailors from the destroyers and gunboats (it always is pleasant meeting sailors), but they never seemed to know even as much as we did about the situation in Spain. The thing they did know more about was atrocities, and they often left us gasping at the stories they told us they had heard in Gibraltar. The best (on the authority of a high official in Gibraltar) was that naked nuns were being crushed by steamrollers in the streets of Malaga. This Marx Brothers–Heath Robinson atrocity still makes me laugh when I think of it, it was such a completely inane invention.

  Some German writers have recently most disinterestedly praised the British propaganda during the last War, the stories of handless babies, crucified Canadians, corpse factories, and all the rest of the manufactured evidence with which we fed the avid public. They point out that it was highly successful in rousing public feeling, and is an excellent example for them to imitate in the next war. That the feelings which it aroused were feelings more suited to maniacs or the lowest type of savages than to civilised human beings is a point which, I am afraid, neither they nor we will consider if there is another occasion when the usefulness of arousing the basest of human passions arises. But it is really hardly necessary to have a special office and pay experts to invent your atrocities. In time of war people are so changed and their uglier instincts are so actively at work that unpaid amateurs will do it for you.

  It has constantly been suggested in the Press that the savagery with which the war in Spain has been conducted is due to the violence of the Spanish character: I do not really subscribe to that point of view. Spaniards, I would agree, are a race of stronger feelings than (for instance) the British or the North Americans. They not only hate more bitterly, they love more warmly; and that leads at times to violent outbursts of popular feeling, sometimes magnificent as in the universal resistance to Napoleon’s armies, sometimes deplorable as in the murder of hundreds of harmless French men and women at that time. And it ought always to be remembered that this has been a Civil War of the bitterest kind, with the opposing ideologies struggling, inextricably mixed together in every town and village.

  A great many people still remember England as it was in the last War (which was not a civil war and not fought on English soil). I cannot myself, for I was not only very young then but lived in the tropics where distance and security kept heads clearer, so that even at the height of the struggle the German members of the local Yacht Club still came to the clubhouse and were kindly received. I think it shows how much international relations have deteriorated of late years that this statement which would have been received as a matter of course by Wellington (read, for instance Napier’s description of Soult’s wonderful kindness to his brother, Major Napier, when he fell into his hands with a bullet through his leg, and his efforts to get him exchanged as soon as his leg was entirely healed so that his military career would not be affected!) always arouses surprise and often disapproval now.

  But even those of us who cannot remember what the country was like then have heard a great deal about it from those who can. Many people who were soldiers then have told me that they hated to come home, they were so horrified by the bloodthirsty, suspicious, crazy state their friends and neighbours were in. For the soldiers are apparently always much saner in a war than the civilians. Hundreds of unpleasant incidents of the period, attacks by mobs on poor German shopkeepe
rs, with difficulty saved by the police from their would-be murderers, the persecution of sensitive people whose crime was not to approve of war for religious or social reasons, attempts by mobs to burn houses of people with German names (who had frequently never even been in Germany), show only too clearly the state of the public mind. But all we really have to do is to look at a newspaper of the period – read now in cold blood, it is a painful spectacle.

  In view of these few facts, and a thousand others which could be brought forward about the condition of England during the last foreign war, it is horrible to contemplate what it would be like in a state of civil war. And that, after all is what we are observing in Spain – and the worst kind of civil war, with religious feeling, class feeling, political differences, sectional feeling, all engaged – any one of which in the past has proved enough to embitter whole nations.

  In many ways the conduct of the Spanish people, far from being worse than might have been expected from a population with all restraint removed (for the Civil Guards and the Guardias de Asalto were almost all sent to the front as the only trained men available) was very much better. After all, cities which have had police strikes have always had trouble of some sort, generally looting. Boston does not sound a very violent place, yet when its police struck they had to call out the Militia. And everyone remembers the alarm the General Strike occasioned in England.

  Our village, which was a large one by English standards – it contained over two thousand people – was perfectly quiet, safe, and orderly during the entire Civil War, except when invaded on several occasions by gangs from Malaga. And it must have been typical of hundreds of other villages in Spain. It was managed by a Syndicalist Committee, a committee chosen by a meeting of the entire village and serving without salary.

  In our village they were all Anarcho-Syndicalists. That is, everyone belonged to a Syndicalist trade union because everyone belonged to a Syndicalist trade union. One villager who did not was always known as ‘that Antonio of the UGT’ because he was a worker in a sugar factory and belonged to the UGT, a Socialist trade union which many of the workers in the sugar factories belonged to. It was regarded as rather marking him out, like being an ‘Elk’ in a community of ‘Buffaloes’. But that there was any ideological divergence between them I don’t think ever entered anyone’s head. In fact there really wasn’t any. Most of them weren’t politically minded at all. And those that were were all Anarchists in the simplest and vaguest meaning of that word. That is, they were federalists, and believed in as little central authority as possible (or none) and the village as the unit of political life; in the natural rights and the natural dignity of man, to be respected in the poorest and most miserable; in some sort of communal possession of the land (this is a very old idea in Spain, formerly true to some extent in fact, and often advocated in the writings of the Church Fathers up to the eighteenth century), and – most important of all – they believe that man is naturally good, but has somehow fallen from his early Eden through the corruptions of the world; but left to himself (they think) in primitive surroundings he can always create the Golden Age anew out of the natural simplicity and goodness of his own heart. This faith seems to me so touching in itself and to show so clearly the simplicity and goodness of natures that profess it that I cannot help always feeling a sort of love for the anarchists in Spain.

  But this sort of natural anarchism in Spaniards is something so truly Spanish and so common in Spain even in days before Anarchism was ever heard of and even among Spaniards who would call themselves now Conservatives or Republicans or simply non-political that there must surely be something truly indigenous to Spain about it. So that it seems to be not so much an expression of some new ideology as of the simple and noble nature of the Spanish character.

  The Anarchists are generally credited with most of the crimes committed on the Government side in Spain (or – much more horrible! – the crimes supposed to have been committed there, though in the foreign Press they are usually referred to as the ‘communists’.) That there have been terrorists among the Anarchists is perfectly true. Unfortunately there have been terrorists among most of the political parties in Spain – what they call their ‘uncontrollables’. But the Anarcho-Syndicalists as a whole while they are sometimes unable to control the excesses of the criminal elements which are apt to spring up among them in bad times (partly due to their not believing in restraining the natural impulses of man and not having any means of restraining them if they turn out to be bad after all) are, as one would expect, anti-militarists and against violence in general.

  But unfortunately there is nothing new and nothing peculiar to one party about terrorism in Spain (I wish there were!). The Napoleonic Wars had their own tale of cruelty and horror in those days, excesses were committed by both sides in the Carlist Wars, and in our own days we have seen this bitterest of civil wars with murders and mass executions in almost every part of Spain.

  As I say our village was controlled by the ‘Committee’, and it was very well managed, quite as well as it ever had been. In fact it justified the old Spanish saying: If you removed the central government in Spain no one would notice the difference, and also, perhaps, the Anarchists’ belief that if Central Governments were removed, in Spain, at any rate, each community would manage its own affairs happily and successfully.

  There was perfect order, and respect for private property. There were, for instance, three or four large houses in the village belonging to rich landowners who did not live there, but came occasionally for short visits. These houses, though they belonged to individuals who were popularly suspected of Fascist sympathies, stood vacant during the entire period up to the taking of Malaga, even at a time when refugees from the interior were sleeping under trees in the rain. There was a suggestion at one time that some of the poorest people might be put in them, especially when bombs began to come through the thin roofs of their huts; but it was decided by the authorities in Malaga (and the village committee conformed to their decision) that as the big houses were furnished it would not be right to occupy them – the furniture might get hurt! Houses of people who were known to have left the country, however, were looted and occupied even in our village. And of course in Malaga where there was always an acute refugee problem, houses were occupied whether furnished or unfurnished. But I was speaking of our village and other villages I knew of.

  There was something very touching in those days about the attitude of the more intelligent villagers. They were appalled by the catastrophe which had come upon them. They were not revolutionary themselves, and they felt that they had been abandoned and betrayed. And now power had been thrust into their hands, unwilling and unfit as they felt themselves to receive it. And they were pathetically anxious to learn how to use this new power as well as possible if they were called upon to do so, conscious as they were of their ignorance and lamenting their uneducated state. We had a great many friends among the masons and painters and carpenters of the village because we had had to have a good deal of obra (building and repairs) when we first moved into our house, and had been much impressed by the good work of the workmen we employed and by their good manners and frank and friendly ways, and as usually happens in Spain they had remained our friends after our need for their services was over. Some of them used to come in those days to try to learn something from us about this new problem of governing themselves. They asked us endless questions about England – was it true that even workmen sometimes owned motorcycles and that almost anyone could have a bicycle (a proud possession and an extremely rare one in our village) – did the villages govern themselves? Was it true that when men could not get work the Government helped them, and no one was actually starving? But then you are English, they would say, and know how to govern yourselves, and England is a rich country not like these ‘poor worlds of Spain’.

  I remember one day we stopped to talk to some masons who were mending a wall. ‘But, Don Geraldo, have you seen what they are doing to us’ (several pe
ople had been killed that morning in the neighbourhood by bombs) ‘and we never did anything to them!’ Later on I heard this used as an excuse for the gang murders in Malaga and the shooting of prisoners after air raids, but always half-shamefacedly – ‘They are worse, they do worse things to us –’ ‘And they are educated men,’ they would add sadly. ‘What can you expect of us, poor ignorant creatures that we are! But they had opportunities and went to schools and universities – and see how they are behaving, worse than we do!’

  Often, if we happened to go out during the evening and found the usual gathering in the kitchen, some poor visitor would say: ‘Why doesn’t England put her hand to Spain? We will never do anything for ourselves. The English are good, but we are bad, bad, somos malos, malos!’

  For the Spanish poor, at any rate, we occupy the place the Germans did for the Romans in Tacitus’s pages. Stupid and noble, calm, heavy-drinking, nature’s noblemen – we are the stick they use to beat each other with.

  ‘See the Germans how much nobler they are!’ Tacitus was always saying. ‘Honest, chaste, handsome, brave (though stupid, drunken gamblers all, I grant you!). Why aren’t you more like them, ignoble, modern Romans!’

  I daresay the Romans left behind them in Spain their old custom of telling each other how much better the blond northern races are – (only it’s a pity they are quite so stupid, they add under their breath). We had got used to feeling large and stupid and honest – the size and stupidity we always found quite easy and even the honesty was not very difficult in a country where our only business transactions were buying grapes for a penny or lettuces for a farthing, and having Maria assume the responsibility even for that.

  Chapter 8

  THE IMPROVEMENT in the state of things seemed to be continuing, and we began to hope that some arrangement would be come to between the various parties. We even hoped that perhaps the military coup had not really come off after all, and also that the Government would be able to dominate the revolutionary forces which seemed to be coming to the front. After all there had been so many military coups in Spain and so many revolutions, and so few of them had come to anything. Our village continued perfectly quiet, and in Malaga everything appeared almost normal on the surface, but we began to hear sinister rumours of continual arrests and nightly murders by gangs in the city and also in some of the villages near us.