Death's Other Kingdom

by Woolsey, Gamel; Jacobs, Michael;

  The Province of Malaga had practically become an independent state with almost the old limits of the Moorish Kingdom of Malaga. The little trains ran but they did not run very far, the posts arrived and went out, but they only went to a few places. Granada, Algeçiras, Cadiz, Seville had all become enemies and everyone thought in provinces – a Spanish habit at the best of times.

  ‘Granada is attacking us,’ people said. ‘Seville is attacking us.’ The capture of a town in the province of Granada was regarded as putting us one up on Granada. We had scored; and it was seriously suggested that the captured town should be incorporated in the Province of Malaga! This extreme federalism was more important to most of the country people than the class-war aspects of the struggle which some of their leaders were emphasising. They had always thought of the Granadinos as foreigners anyway, and there was nothing very surprising about their turning into active enemies.

  Some of the villagers of course were very class-war conscious, and there was one remark which was common at the time which used to annoy me more than I can say. To my irritated ears it used to seem to go on all the time like a sort of chorus, and it was always spoken with maddening self-complacency. It was: ‘You can do nothing against the will of the people!’ And I used to think that anyone silly enough to make such a remark at such a moment ought not to be allowed any exercise of the will at all. Another remark which was also common and annoyed me only slightly less, and was made with almost equal self-complacency was ‘If all the Provinces did their part as we have done it would be all over now. But now they want us to help them with their work.’ I used almost to join Maria in her snort of contempt when some villager who had taken no part in the struggle and had no intention of taking part in it unless it actually broke out in the street he lived in and forced itself in at his front door, used unctuously to produce this piece of wisdom again.

  Still I can’t help thinking that it was really to the credit of the Malagueñans that they did not on the whole show any disposition for war. They were people of peace, and wanted to take as little part in this unnecessary struggle as possible. They never made any real attempt even to defend their city, which seems curious in Spain, the country of remarkable sieges. Malaga did not seem to us even at that time likely to be the scene of a second Numantia or Saragossa; and time was to prove that we were right.

  But those appalling sieges for which Spain is famous, sieges which seemed designed to show how much human beings can force themselves to endure without even hope to aid them, have always taken place in the north of Spain. Numantia, Saragossa, Gerona, the Alcazar at Toledo and of course Madrid, in the present war, and a dozen other sieges which could be named all occurred in the north.

  I don’t mean to suggest that Andalucians can’t be extremely brave: they have proved their bravery in every war they have taken part in. But that extraordinary tenacity of whole populations, that screwing your courage to the sticking point and never wavering again, those forlorn hopes which last not for an hour, but for months of taut agonising endurance, that gaunt stoical holding-out against all rhyme and reason, that sublime, or demoniac, stubborn, desperate insanity of courage seems only to exist in northern Spain out of all the countries in the world.

  ‘The Insurgents can take Malaga any afternoon they feel like it,’ I remember Gerald saying at about that time. ‘But I don’t believe they will take it now, because from a military point of view they ought to get on with their drive north. Malaga isn’t of sufficient strategical importance for them to spare the men to take it.’ Of course we didn’t realise then how many Moors would be brought, much less that there would be foreign intervention on a great scale.

  Poor Gerald had had only too much experience of wars, for he had gone to Belgium as a boy of nineteen in the spring of 1915, and not returned to England except for short periods of leave and longer periods spent in hospitals until the summer of 1918 when he finally ceased to be passed for active service at the age of twenty-three. As one of his reasons for living in Spain (besides trying to recover his health) had been that it had been neutral in the last war, and so was not connected in his mind with a period he so much disliked remembering, it seemed curiously hard luck that we should have chosen a house on the edge of an unsuspected volcano.

  One hot day when things seemed particularly quiet we heard the really alarming news that several thousand Moors had been brought over.

  ‘I’d bring over an army in canoes!’ snorted an English naval officer we happened to meet at the club, in disgust at the inefficiency of the officerless Spanish Government Navy, which seemed usually to be tied up to the dock in Malaga at that time.

  The poor old women who hung about the kitchen were dreadfully upset at the news about the Moors, and their chorus of ‘Los Moros! Los Moros!’ murmured on all day.

  ‘Won’t England help us against the Moors?’ they used to ask pathetically. I don’t think that they ever had the least idea of who was fighting or why. They had heard of old wars against the Moors, and thought that those evil days had returned. They had in any case no conception of what the world consisted of. They lived in a medieval world – there was Spain, or rather Malaga, and there was the sea, and they had heard that there were lands beyond the sea; but what lands, or what they were like they did not know. When we told them that England was cold and wet, they replied quite simply and understandingly ‘Ah! you live in high mountains, but there is no doubt plenty of wood to burn there.’ To explain why England was really cold and wet you would have had to begin at the beginning and reform the school system of Spain sixty years ago.

  And so we could not easily explain why England would not help them now ‘against the Moors’ – we were rich, we had plenty of battleships, they had often seen vast grey boats flying the British flag coming up from the Straits – it would cost us so little – they sighed – and we sighed too over the impossibility of explaining to these poor creatures suddenly waking up in the midst of a civil war, why it was that Spaniards were killing one another.

  But there were terrors even greater than the Moors coming for them. One morning we were quietly sleeping under a grey sky, for it was early morning and the blackness of the night was fading, when – crash! a large bomb had fallen out of the grey air, and after it came the sharp rattle of a machine-gun. We leaped from our beds before we even realised what the dreadful noise was. The loud drone of the plane overhead warned us that there was still danger about, and we rushed out, calling the servants as we went, and met Pilar carrying the sleeping Mariquilla and hurrying down the passage towards our room crying, ‘Don Geraldo! Don Geraldo! What has happened?’ There was a second terrific crash as we met, and we hurried her downstairs where we found Maria and Enrique who had run in half-dressed from their cottage, and led them all into the big storeroom where we hung the fruit. Its thick walls and the fact that it had only one small high window and that its only door opened into a long passage made it seem the safest place anyway.

  There were two more terrific crashes, but the next sounded much further away. Maria muttered to herself, I don’t know whether prayers or curses, Pilar quietly wept, rocking the sleepy, whimpering Mariquilla in her arms, Enrique as befits a man wrapped his coat stoically about his shoulders. Another crash was obviously at a considerable distance, and Gerald and I rushed up to the balcony to see what was happening.

  A big silver-grey plane was hovering at a great height probably trying to hit the planes at the airfield. Artillery and machine-guns had begun to crash and rattle in Malaga. The louder crash of the bursting bombs came at intervals. They left tiny white puffs of smoke in the air as they fell (or were those from shells?). A fire blazed up suddenly near the sea – at the airport? But the planes had dropped all their bombs. Like silver flies they sailed away out to sea, towards Africa. Two little aeroplanes had got up from the field to pursue them, barking and coughing, obviously completely outclassed, but gamely willing to attack these deadly grey strangers. But the grey bombers out-flew them, grew tiny in
the distance and disappeared, and the little coughing planes returned. Distant as we were they looked like noisy toys as they sailed in circles and finally settled down.

  The next morning promptly at four, bombs again! as punctual and arousing as an alarm clock, and after that we were bombed almost daily for some time, generally in the early morning but sometimes later and occasionally in the afternoon; the night raids came later. After the first raid we all knew what to do, and were downstairs and gathered together in two minutes, but I refused to stay in the storeroom, it seemed to me to resemble a tomb too closely; I preferred the corner of the dining-room though it was obviously not so safe a place, as it had a large window on the patio, but I think we all had an irrational feeling that the bombs would come to the front door instead of the back. Anyway the servants either through that belief or through blind confidence in us joined us in the dining-room and left the safer despensa to the more timid of the villagers who came seeking refuge.

  For after that first air raid the lower floor of the house was always crowded with refugees. Our big house seemed so much safer to them than their own poor little cottages that all our poor neighbours rushed in with their children at the first rumour that planes were coming, or at the sound of some shots in the distance, and many of them spent almost the entire day in our garden too frightened to go home except to get a little food ready. We had one very large room opening off the patio which we gave up to them completely, and a number of them brought their bedding and slept in it after the night raids began. But as the air raids continued a great many villagers became too frightened to stay in the village during the day, and every morning there was a pathetic stream of frightened people carrying their children and driving their goats, going off to the mountains. I can still see in my mind the touching little Swiss Family Robinson groups and hear their shrill frightened chatter, as they hurried by looking up at the sky as they went fearful of seeing planes approaching.

  I found later that Pilar and I had received the same impression from the little groups going to the mountains: we wanted to go too. Not then, but if things got very much worse and if ‘the Moors were coming’. We found each other out in this, and used to enjoy planning it all. We decided that we would try to buy a donkey to carry our food and blankets, and a couple of milk goats to take with us, we would grind the maize which we had just harvested to make corn meal mush of, and buy as much flour as we could, and we would take the chickens, but would have to eat them soon as we could not feed them. The chief problem was ‘Piggy’, Enrique’s pig, who like all Spanish swine was practically a household pet – should we take him on the hoof or in the form of hams and sausages? He was still small, but could we find enough acorns to feed him during our Robinson Crusoe life among the cork oaks. I regretfully decided that Piggy probably ought to be turned into sausages.

  For I was much attracted by the vision of our expedition to the woods and the wilds accompanied by Platera, two brown nanny goats and Piggy; led by tall, fair Don Geraldo springing actively up the mountain with the goats and followed by severe black-clothed Maria acting as rearguard and turning back to lay a final curse upon the wicked city. Pilar and I could not help feeling that even after Piggy was disposed of, Maria might turn out to be an insoluble difficulty; so we rather tended to leave her out of our dream of desert island life in the sierra.

  But often later on when things began to get worse, I used to wander off in my mind to the mountains – I would be sitting by a stream under an ilex tree with Piggy eating up the acorns on the ground, and the donkey and the goats cropping the grey, sweet mountain herbs, while Don Geraldo leaped from rock to rock above us looking for dangers and Enrique gathered sticks for the little fire on which the corn meal was cooking in a black iron pot, and Pilar sang Mariquilla to sleep with a Christmas copla.

  ‘The Virgin hung her washing

  On the rosemary to dry,

  All the birds were singing

  And the river running by.’

  Or I would imagine that we were just setting out, going further and further away from towns and men, weary and hungry, but climbing higher and higher into the clear, free, mountain air.

  Air raids soon became almost a part of normal life. It is strange how quickly you become accustomed to them; and in a curious way when there was no air raid as sometimes happened I missed it. I was keyed up to expect it, and if it did not come I felt a sort of flatness. But our raids were not really bad ones, the bombs were usually small and we always felt that unless there was a direct hit on the house just above us, or unless we were hurt by flying splinters or glass we were fairly safe indoors; and Gerald and I were fortunate in both being of rather philosophic temperament and inclined to feel the bombs probably were not going to hit us and if they were we could not help it – and of course Gerald had had so many worse times in the last war already.

  When huge modern bombs are being used I know from experience in Malaga when they were trying to wreck the port with them, it is impossible to be philosophic. The noise and shock are appalling and the feeling that there is no defence anywhere, that whole houses will fall upon you, is horrible.

  What I really minded most about the air raids in our village was the terror of the villagers. Our servants were very stoical, but some of the women lost all control of themselves and sobbed and screamed hysterically, while the poor children, terrified by the behaviour of their parents as much as by the unknown horror of the sky, shrieked and sobbed convulsively. Something I felt then (and am ashamed to have felt) was a physical repugnance towards these poor frightened creatures, towards their lack of control which is always an ugly thing to see and to the sharp fetid smell which fear produces. I felt all the time that my sensations were meanly fastidious just when I should have felt the strongest solidarity with my fellow men. But I could not help that instinctive distaste and withdrawal into myself when outwardly I was being kindest and most reassuring. But there were times when the pain of these others melted the thin icicle in my heart (we need no Snow Queen, any of us, to put one there).

  One day one of the village women was caught out of the village by an air raid while she was taking some food to her husband at the airfield. Her fear for herself alone in the fields with huge planes hovering overhead scattering death must have been very great, it must have seemed like a horrible nightmare to her, but her fear for her children was much greater, and she did not try to take cover, but ran all the way home to them. They had already come in to us and were crying ‘Oh! Mother! Mother!’ sure that she had been killed by the first explosions. When she rushed in, not having found them at home and desperate with anxiety and saw them sitting with me, she tried to take a few steps further to reach them and fell in a fit at my feet. As I knelt on the floor beside her while she foamed at the mouth and jerked and twisted in convulsions I felt not the slightest trace of repulsion. She was among the poorest of the women: she was dirty, emaciated, ugly, unkempt, ill-smelling – everything that man’s inhumanity daily makes of man, except unloving or unloved. But as I sat there holding the poor creature in my arms as she gradually grew quieter and the fearful upturned eyes closed in unconsciousness, while her daughter sat beside me embracing her mother and sometimes kissing my helping hands, my mind held no tinge or taint of distaste, I felt nothing but love – for them and for the millions like them, the poor, the suffering, the burden bearers of this world.

  One morning not long after the raids began we were waked as usual by the crash of a bomb: it was just beginning to be light. The bombs seemed fairly distant, so we went up on the balcony to see what was happening. The planes were dropping incendiary bombs, trying to hit the petrol tanks and the standing planes at the airfield: they caught the dry grass where they fell and blazed with much white smoke. Presently black smoke poured up from the airfield, probably one of the standing planes had been hit. Gerald brought out his field-glasses.

  ‘I hope Don Carlos is all right,’ he said, and then a moment later ‘My God! They’ve hit his house!’ D
on Carlos was a poor but aristocratic Spanish friend who lived on some land he farmed near the sea, which actually adjoined the airfield. Now his house was hidden by clouds of white smoke.

  ‘Oh! the children!’ I said. I imagined them burnt by the bombs, trapped in their rooms.

  ‘We’d better go at once,’ Gerald said. I seized a basket and put in bandages, iodine, and a bottle of brandy and Enrique said that he would come with us as we might need him, and we set off.

  I have to confess (and I am again ashamed to confess it) that I enjoyed that walk. There was just enough feeling of danger in the air to give me a feeling of heightened life, of using some faculty that generally sleeps. Dawn was coming over the sea and we were walking towards the growing light. And we walked rapidly, seeming almost to fly as one sometimes walks in dreams.

  A patrol hailed us and we stopped to explain where we were going.

  ‘Two boys were killed at the San Fernando farm,’ they told us. ‘A bomb fell right on them as they were standing in the patio drinking some milk the farmer’s wife had given them, the bomb fell and – nada –’ They made a gesture of dispersal – nothing. They just happened to be there. It was chance – and what of those six on whom the Tower of Siloam fell – my mind asked retreating from the thought of those too near, too recently shattered, bodies. Well it will be our mala sombra, our ill-shade, if one of these bombs catches us and poor Enrique while we are rushing away across these early morning fields. And yet I could not repress that lift of excitement, of happiness, as if quicker, more ardent life were running through my veins, or as if I had been drinking some wine not meant for me but for creatures of more fiery birth.