But even if we hid Don Carlos successfully, and we had worked out a plan with his family and with the servants of what we were all to do; particularly how the men who came for him were to be delayed while he got to his hiding place, which was the most difficult and uncertain part to manage – would not they take his young sons instead, even though they had Chilean papers? If they started to take his children we knew that Don Carlos, who was as brave as a lion anyway, would rush out and either get himself killed in a struggle or be taken off to Malaga, with the boys as well probably. Then, I must say that Gerald was something of a worry, too, to Enrique and me. He announced his intention of speaking to the men from the balcony if they came for Don Carlos, on the innocence of their proposed victim, and how ill such behaviour as theirs accorded with the pure Anarchist doctrine of the goodness of man, which needs no control.
Gerald is one of those people who, like the boy in the fairytale, have never learned to shiver and shake. It was a useful ignorance, I suppose, on the Western Front. But I must say that it has often been a highly agitating one to anyone who was fond of him. And there have been many occasions when I have wished that someone would bring the icy bucket full of fishes, and teach him to shiver and shake once and for all. I could not help admitting that his plan was worth trying; but I also could not help thinking that his frankness and fearlessness would make him say something tactless, and the end of it all would be a bullet through the head for him and the big door broken in and Don Carlos taken away.
There was an occasion on which Gerald tried to put his theory of reasoning with murderers into practice, not on behalf of Don Carlos, but of another friend of ours, Juan, the village baker. Juan was a charming man, honest, and a kind neighbour, and he was very popular in the village. But he was ‘wanted’ by the gangs in Malaga, because he was a devout Catholic and to the Right politically (though a sincere believer in some sort of social reform) and, most fatal of all, had acted as election agent for Gil Robles’ Accion Catolica party in the elections some years before. Our village had nothing against him, he was known for his honesty and his kindness to his neighbours, particularly to the very poor. The Governor of Malaga gave him a safe conduct, all the political committees gave him safe conducts – and all of them were worthless, if one small band of murderous men chose to come for him.
Well, one day we heard that they had come. I was upstairs and heard a disturbance down the street, and went out on the balcony. The only thing I could see was Gerald striding rapidly down the street with his peculiar light springy walk. He was too far away to call, so I rushed downstairs and found Enrique very disturbed.
‘Where has Don Geraldo gone?’ I demanded.
‘Gone to get himself killed by the Anarchists!’ answered Enrique bitterly.
‘But what is happening?’
‘They’ve come for Juan.’ I still remember only too clearly what I felt when Enrique said: They’ve come for Juan. The shock and horror of it, the pain I felt for Juan; and oddly enough the resignation and quietness of mind I felt about Gerald. I felt that he was doing what the circumstance and his nature demanded of him. He was obliged to try to save Juan from being murdered. If he were killed: still he had been right to attempt it. Fortunately as I reached that point in my thoughts and started down the street to find out what was happening, I saw him in the distance returning.
The gang had not come for Juan after all; but for a retired Civil Guard, who was said to have been unusually brutal and oppressive when he was in the force. And they were not going to murder him themselves, but take him into the prison in Malaga, and had now promised that he would be taken safely as far as the prison and delivered over to the proper authorities and they were allowing his wife and old mother to go with him as far as the prison door.
The village had violently opposed the demand for him. They said, as they always did in such cases, that Malaga had no right to take him, he was an hijo del pueblo, a son of the village – only the village knew his deeds and had the right to judge him. But the villagers had only a few old rifles, and the gang on the lorry were not only bristling with rifles and revolvers, but had a machine-gun which they trained on the villagers. Then unfortunately all the village Committee happened to be away so that there was no one in authority to oppose them. And in the end with menaces and threats of what the Terrorists would do to the village they got their way and carried him off. They were not one of the murder gangs who went about by night murdering people in the villages, where the country people would not do their duty as they said; but members of one of the ‘Youth’ organisations, and according to Gerald were a crew of hard-faced youths and girls. It was certainly a discouraging example of the activities of ‘Youth’ organisations, but one which was common I am told all over Spain on both sides and one which I should think would be observed anywhere where you had organisations of young irresponsible people and encouraged them to act for themselves against supposed enemies of the ‘People’ or the ‘State’ or whatever the popular watchword happened to be.
Gerald had given up his idea of addressing the gang when he saw how things were going; but he was so affected by what he had seen that he could not help making a speech about it to a large group of village men who had gathered around our door talking to Enrique. He told them how horrible it all was, how unworthy of human beings of any political persuasion. Finally he stopped and went in. Enrique followed us into the house and took me aside. ‘For God’s sake, stop Don Geraldo!’ he said. ‘He is going to get us all shot!’ It seemed to me rather probable at the moment, for I could see that the villagers did not like his speech at all, and took it as a reflection on them and their ideas. And it was not a time to have differences with your neighbours. The villagers, it was true, killed no one themselves; but as someone put it to me, they sometimes ‘threw the first stone’. For the people were beginning to change, as people do in wars. The change was largely due of course to the bombing, but also to the tales of executions and murders which refugees from the very beginning brought from the other side.
Poor Gerald, with his strong feelings of humanity and his tremendous energy, which made him feel that something should, and consequently must be done – and by him if there was no one else to do it, really suffered from the sensation of being powerless to help the people around him who were enduring so much from violence of all sorts, from the cruel night murders by the gangs of Terrorists and the terrifying bombing from the air.
He once proposed to beard the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ who, like the similarly named committee during the French Revolution, were supposed to decide who should be executed. (I do not think they did execute many people, the murders were the work of uncontrollable elements among the various parties or of mobs maddened by air raids.) ‘But if I tell them what a dreadful impression these murders are creating abroad, surely they will try to stop them!’ he said. Don Carlos was completely cynical as to the possibility of influencing such brutes as he said they must be. Doña Maria Louisa and I felt sure that whatever they were it would do no good, and that the attempt would be dangerous; the last thing we wanted was to attract attention to our household.
But Gerald did make one appeal of this sort one day when I was with him. We went to the office of the little Malaga newspaper, the only one that was still appearing, since the other presses had been burned in the fire. Before the rising it had been a moderately Left Wing little paper, but was now simply the voice of the times (it was in fact written in the usual war style familiar to most of us) – full of imaginary victories, talk about our heroic defenders who are conquering everywhere, and about the ‘cowardly Fascistas’, who are unfortunately holding out to the death in a lot of places. This odd form of cowardice never seemed to strike them as peculiar, and the enemy were always automatically spoken of as ‘cowardly Fascistas’ even when they were described as holding some post until their last man had been killed.
We went to the office to make some enquiries: the editor excused himself, but sent out a youn
g assistant. We asked the young man if something could not be done by appeals to the public in the press to stop the murders. He rather tried to make light of it all, admitting that there were a few unfortunately unavoidable incidents; but ‘You mustn’t dwell on the disagreeable side of Revolutions,’ which angered us very much. But he had in spite of his words a troubled look, and I think did both fear and hate what was going on, though he probably naturally resented having suggestions made to him by two unknown foreigners.
I must say our conduct did remind me a little of George Fox, when as an obscure and proscribed Quaker he describes himself as telling everyone their duty, ‘Just then I felt moved to write to the King to reprove his conduct towards the dissenters.’
Both then and later every organisation, Anarchist, Communist, Socialist and Republican alike, condemned and deplored the killings. I remember seeing Malaga plastered with posters by the Anarchists calling on the wilder elements among them to cease their brutalities which were disgracing the whole organisation and shaming them in the eyes of the world. But I do not believe that there was even one murder the fewer for all their fervent words. And this nightly murdering went on getting worse and worse until for a week or so there was a veritable reign of terror. People were even dragged out of hotels in the centre of Malaga. There was no protection for them. It was appalling.
Then suddenly one day when we went in to Malaga we found nearly all the red flags gone. Republican flags and streamers had taken their place. Everyone seemed more cheerful, and we wondered what could have happened. The story which we heard from various quarters was that the Militia and the Assault Guards (a body formed by the Republic and generally loyal to it) had declared that they would cease fighting and lay down their arms unless the murdering ceased. They said that they would not fight to defend a community of assassins. As together they were practically the entire fighting force their defection would have been fatal, so that their declaration had a great effect, especially as it coincided with strong representations from Madrid on the harm their violence was doing the Government cause both at home and abroad. For some time the murders almost ceased and they were never resumed in the same way. The centre of Malaga became fairly safe for the suspected and ‘wanted’ even at night. Guards were stationed at the doors of the hotels, and all doors were ordered shut and locked at night, and only to be opened to Militia who showed a proper authority from the Governor.
The murders never became so bad again, as I have said, but they continued slowly getting worse as the effect of the various declarations wore off. It would surely have been possible to stop them if there had been a comparatively small body of energetic and determined men of forceful character who were bent upon doing so.* But with great natural energy the Spanish often combine a strange apathy, an inability to act at some crucial moment. It has often betrayed them in their wars.
It must have been examples of this apathy, this strange, sometimes fatal, inertia, as well as his observation of their wonderful stoicism and heroic patience (how often shown in these days!) which made General Napier in his History of the Peninsular War pronounce his odd judgement upon the Spanish – which, while I feel it to be a libel upon one of the noblest races, always amuses me in spite of myself by its oddity and by some essential truth of caricature in it.
‘The Spaniards,’ he said, ‘are a race of many virtues, but unfortunately their virtues are passive and their faults are active.’
* An acute and disinterested observer, a well-known journalist, who visited Malaga not long before it was taken, tells me that it was then perfectly orderly. The people were sunk in a sort of stoical misery due to the incessant and horrible bombing and shelling from the sea, and hunger and fear of the Nationalists at their gates. (He says he hardly saw a smile.) But the murder gangs had been put down and the prisoners were safe. It is what I would expect of the Spanish people that under any conditions, however horrible, their natural humanity would assert itself.
Chapter 10
THERE IS A VERY CURIOUS and uncomfortable feeling about living among uncontrolled human beings. I used to feel it particularly sometimes when we were coming back on the train from Malaga. I felt that it was like being surrounded by a herd of buffaloes or a pack of wild dogs, or I suppose like living among savages on some remote island. The crowds were good humoured and friendly: it seemed as if there were nothing to be afraid of. But you were dependent on their changing humour: if it grew dangerous, there was no power to control them – and I am not a pure Anarchist to believe in man’s perfect natural goodness. Not that I thought the Spanish people naturally bad, but like all crowds capricious and easily swayed.
I was not exactly afraid myself to be among them; I never believed that English people were in danger in ‘Red Spain’ in spite of some of the consuls. But I was afraid simply of what might happen around me, of being involved as a witness in some movement of mob violence. But the crowds on trains and buses were actually as good humoured and good mannered as ever. Once I did see two old men taken off the train. They were priests who had tried to get away to Malaga dressed in ordinary clothes, but had been recognised and given away by some one on the train. When it stopped at the next station some members of the local committee were waiting, and the two poor old men were taken off, but without any manifestation of anything except curiosity, everyone craning out of windows to see what was happening. The priests were politely helped into a waiting car, and taken off to the prison in Malaga for ‘safe keeping’. Unfortunately it was not a very safe prison to be in. People were taken out and shot after every bad air raid. It was the same on both sides judging by accounts given us later by Italian journalists who had been in Nationalist Spain. Their accounts of what happened there were almost indistinguishable from accounts of what happened in Malaga.
Hate rises very high during air raids, especially raids at night. These droning aeroplanes like searching bees seem seeking out everyone’s hiding place. Peasants cannot feel (could any of us?) that the bomb which killed little three year old Mariquilla and mangled little José fell on those two children by pure chance and was really meant to destroy an ammunition dump. They think, and rightly, that when you drop bombs from a great height, almost at random from thousands of feet up, you are to blame when they fall on women, children, old people, the wounded, the sick. The aviator above seeking for a place to sow destruction seems like a peering devil. The bomb falls, kills its innocent victims: the angry people must be paid blood for blood. The quarter rises and goes off to the prison, and there is another murder of forty or fifty or a hundred poor people, most of them as innocent as the slaughtered children. And I believe that far from being peculiar to Spain, the same thing will happen wherever you have air raids and there are any prisoners of war or other helpless unfortunates the mob can revenge itself upon.
I did have a rather horrid experience one day on the road to Malaga, but not in a train or bus. We had particularly wanted to go in early one morning, but found when we got down to the square that the ancient bus had broken down completely; so we started walking along the road hoping that some lorry would come along and offer us a lift, but nothing did come, and we finally reached the main road to Algeçiras. As we were already extremely hot and tired and Malaga still many miles away, we stopped in the shade of a eucalyptus tree where a countryman and his wife were standing, and opened the usual conversation with them. They said that probably the Torremolinos bus would come if we waited long enough. They had apparently been waiting for hours, but they had the usual patience of the Spanish poor and we had not. However it was so hot that we waited with them and presently an empty lorry came along and offered us a lift.
Gerald and the countryman got in behind and the woman and I, as señoras, were invited to get up in front. I sat next to the driver, and was much annoyed because he began to press against me and stroke my leg. I have often been pressed and stroked in crowded buses and trains by strangers in Spain; and, sitting down alone for a minute to wait for someone in Malaga ca
fés have become the centre of a sort of Mad Hatter’s tea-party of men who sit down at my table and silently stare with fixed and glassy eyes, like Mock Turtles. (I should explain that this is peculiar to the south of Spain where respectable women do not go to cafés alone.)
But the villagers and workmen had never behaved like that (perhaps only because the English seem such a different race that they appear no more desirable than zebras or hornbuck); and I was particularly annoyed by the lorry driver’s approaches because they were so openly made in the presence of another respectable woman, and also for the perhaps rather odd reason that I felt that he was behaving badly in time of revolution. I felt that all restraint being removed, he should have restrained himself.
But his attention was suddenly called away from me and he began to grin with simple pleasure and cry ‘Look! Look!’ pointing to the side of the road and almost stopping the lorry in his eagerness to see something better.
I looked and saw the body of a dead man lying beside the road. It was the body of a large old man dressed in trousers and a white shirt, and it lay on its back with one hand thrown over the head and the other still clasping the torn stomach. The face was glazed with blood and the shirt was almost crimson with it. The thing that was lying there seemed too large and stiff ever to have been a man. It looked like a large dirty doll someone had thrown away. I only saw the body for a minute, but in that minute I had a very intense and curious impression – I not only knew that what I saw was not alive, I knew that it never had been alive. That thing I saw lying beside the road was a castaway mechanical doll, a broken automaton, nothing more. It never had been anything more.
Death's Other Kingdom Page 8
