by Preston Paul
In the press office, Barea was outraged by ‘reports breathing a malicious glee at the idea that Franco was, as they put it, inside the town’. He was appalled that the world was missing what he called ‘the blaze of determination and fight’ of the people of Madrid. His outrage was directed at Rubio Hidalgo: ‘I had never been as completely convinced of the need for a war censorship as when I read those petty and deeply untrue reports and realized that the damage abroad had been done. It was a defeat inflicted by the man who had deserted.’ Realizing that there had to be some censorship machinery, Barea ignored Rubio’s orders and, believing that some control over the foreign press was required as long as Madrid held out, simply kept the service going.34
On the morning of 11 November, Barea was visited by the Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Koltsov, who was initially incandescent with rage that, after the flight of Rubio Hidalgo and before Barea had managed to set up alternative arrangements, some damaging despatches had got out. Koltov’s intervention belied his status as merely the Pravda correspondent and reflected both his own energetic initiative and his semi-official position within the office of war commissars (the Comisariado General de Guerra). Once Koltsov had calmed down and heard Barea’s story, he spirited him to the Ministry of War, where he secured permission from the newly appointed Junta de Defensa for the press office to carry on in Madrid under the auspices of the General War Commissariat. Barea himself was pleased to find himself under the authority of the Comisario General de Guerra, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who in fact was already his boss in his capacity as Foreign Minister. Barea admired Álvarez del Vayo because he had been the first of the ministers to return to Madrid and get involved in the defence of the besieged city. Barea hoped vainly that, in the capital’s besieged situation, the foreign press censorship would remain free of interference from the Foreign Ministry’s bureaucracy, which remained in the Valencia rearguard. This hope was fostered by the written order that he received from the War Commissariat on 12 November:
Having regard to the transfer to Valencia of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and to the indispensable need for the Press Department of the aforesaid Ministry to continue functioning in Madrid, the General War Commissariat has decided that the aforementioned office of the Press Department shall henceforward be dependent on the General War Commissariat, and furthermore that Arturo Barea Ogazón shall be in charge of the same, with the obligation to render a daily report of its activities to the General War Commissariat.35
Barea’s optimism was short-lived. On the same evening, Rubio Hidalgo telephoned from Valencia to announce that he would return to Madrid to resolve the clash of authority. Barea informed the War Commissariat and was assured of their support. When Rubio Hidalgo arrived from Valencia, Barea received his old boss in his own office at his own desk. When he told him of the orders from the War Commissariat, Rubio went white, blinked but agreed to go to the ministry. There, he weathered the storm of ‘crude, outspoken reprimands’. He then played his cards:
he was the Press Chief of the Foreign Ministry: the War Commissariat must be opposed to any wild and disorganized action, since it recognized the authority of the Government in which the Chief of the War Commissariat was a Minister. Rubio’s legal position was unassailable. It was agreed that the Foreign Press and Censorship Office at Madrid would continue to depend on him in his capacity as Press Chief. It would be under the Madrid War Commissariat for current instructions, and through the Commissariat under the Junta de Defensa. The Foreign Ministry’s Press Department would continue to cover the expenses of the Madrid office, the censored dispatches would continue to be sent to Rubio. He was suave and conciliatory. Back at the Foreign Ministry, he discussed the details of the service with me; the general rules for the censorship continued to be the same, while military security instructions would reach me from the Madrid authorities.
Despite this apparent agreement, Rubio Hidalgo would never forgive Barea’s initiative, perceiving that his readiness to carry on under fire implied that he, like others who had gone to Valencia, was a deserter. As Barea put it: ‘I knew that he hated me far more deeply than I hated him.’36
When Barea took over the censorship in a beleaguered Madrid, activities were briefly transferred to the historic ministry building in the Plaza de Santa Cruz near the Plaza Mayor. This meant that the correspondents had to make a hazardous journey through blacked-out streets from the Gran Vía where they lived or had their offices to the ministry for their copy to be censored and then back to the Telefónica building to telephone it out. The operation was transferred back to the Telefónica. Each night the censors, the telephonists and the journalists worked in appalling conditions, in candle-light, waiting for the whine of artillery shells or the drone of Franco’s German and Italian bombers, until finally the shelling obliged a definitive move back to the ministry.37
Arturo Barea’s deep commitment to the Republican cause would eventually see his health undermined by overwork, worry and the precariousness of his position with regard to Rubio Hidalgo. He had to juggle the competing instructions of the War Commissariat in Madrid and Rubio Hidalgo in Valencia. Catching a few hours of sleep on a camp bed in his office, Barea kept himself going on coffee, brandy and cigarettes. The toll that the work took on him can be discerned in the description left by Delmer of Barea as ‘a cadaverous Spaniard with deep furrows of bitterness around his mouth, dug deeper by the shadows from his candle. He looked the very embodiment of Spanishness, tense and suspicious, clenched ready to take national umbrage.’ Barea’s job became easier only when he was joined, on a volunteer basis, by Ilsa Kulcsar, a thirty-four-year-old Austrian Socialist. She was short, plump and altogether unprepossessing: ‘a round face with big eyes, blunt nose, wide forehead, a mass of dark hair that looked almost black, too-broad shoulders encased in a green or gray coat, or it may have been some other colour which the purple light made indefinite and ugly. She was over thirty and no beauty.’38 Despite this unpromising start, as they talked night after night, he would soon fall in love with her. Theirs was to be one of several, and indeed one of the most enduring, love affairs that flowered in the midst of the war.
Born in Vienna in 1902, on the same day as, but five years after, Arturo Barea, Ilsa Kulcsar had studied economics and sociology. She joined the Communist Party before passing over to the Austrian Socialist Party in the mid-1920s. She had been involved in the Austrian resistance after the failed Vienna uprising of February 1934 and subsequently had fled with her husband to Czechoslovakia. She had come to Spain with credentials from some Czech and Norwegian left-wing papers, without a salary. Rubio Hidalgo, who appreciated her linguistic skills, had decreed that the press office would pay her services and she threw herself into its work with considerable enthusiasm. She not only helped out with her command of French, German, Magyar, English and other languages, but also persuaded Barea that the censorship should be more flexible. Her argument was that the conventional triumphalism imposed by the military mentality made the Republic’s defeats and economic hardship inexplicable and its victories trivial. She easily convinced him that the truth about the government’s difficulties could produce reporting that would eventually be to the benefit of the Republican cause.39
On their own initiative, Arturo and Ilsa relaxed the censorship and thereby established good relations with the correspondents. They helped them to get hotel rooms and petrol vouchers and often asked for their help in return. Risking the wrath of both Koltsov and Rubio Hidalgo, they allowed the correspondents to report the police raid on the abandoned German Embassy, which produced evidence of German collusion with the Francoist fifth column. They arranged interviews with members of the International Brigades, out of which came articles published by Louis Delaprée of Paris-Soir, Barbro Alving (Bang) of the Dagens Nyheter of Stockholm, Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Louis Fischer for The Nation. All four wrote excellent and enthusiastic articles, but perhaps the most substantial was that by Louis Fischer. Having briefly served as quarterm
aster at International Brigade headquarters in Albacete, Fischer was a particularly privileged observer.40
Unfortunately for Delaprée, his newspaper increasingly considered his enthusiastic articles to be too pro-Republican, indeed ‘communist’, although he personally was not a Communist and was actually a lukewarm Catholic. Indeed, having been sent to Spain to cover the rebel zone, he had arrived in Burgos in the same aircraft as Sefton Delmer and Hubert Knickerbocker but had shortly after been expelled for visiting the front without an escort. Ironically, almost everyone that Delaprée met in Madrid considered that his newspaper was pro-fascist. Certainly as Paris-Soir showed ever more hunger for news about Edward VIII and the abdication crisis in England, his articles about Spain were rejected. Consequently, Delaprée decided to leave Spain. Geoffrey Cox described him, on the evening of 7 December 1936 in the Miami bar in Madrid, in a raincoat, red scarf and grey felt hat patiently explaining to a suspicious Madrileño that he was not a fascist and that he had actually been expelled from Burgos by the Francoists. Later that same night, Delaprée had sat on Arturo Barea’s camp bed and told him that, when he got to Paris, he planned to protest about the pro-Franco activities of the French consulate. Unfortunately, on 8 December, the Air France plane on which he was flying to Toulouse was attacked by unknown aircraft near Guadalajara. Delaprée was hit in the hip and the back when the aircraft was machine-gunned from below. Delmer later claimed that Delaprée told him on his deathbed that the plane had been mistakenly fired on by Republican fighters. Although Delaprée was perplexed by this, Delmer was convinced that the attack had been ordered by the security services to prevent a pro-Franco diplomat taking a report on atrocities to Geneva, but he seems to have been alone in this view.
Although the pilot managed to crash-land in a remote field, it was three hours before help arrived. The nearest hospital lacked the equipment to deal with his wounds and it took another day before an ambulance from Madrid could get him to a better-equipped hospital. He died two days later after receiving the last sacraments and extreme unction. Paris-Soir reported his death with large headlines and numerous moving tributes. The French Government awarded him a posthumous Légion d’Honneur. He was buried in Paris with great ceremony. However, some days later the French Communist daily, L’Humanité, published the last message from Delaprée to his paper, which he had sent the day before he left Madrid. Because a carbon copy had remained in Barea’s office in Madrid, it was possible for its contents to be made public. The duplicate, complete with the stamp of the Republican censorship, read:
You have not published half my articles. That is your right. But I would have thought your friendship would have spared me useless work. For three weeks I have been getting up at 5 a.m. in order to give you the news for your first editions. You have made me work for the wastepaper basket. Thanks. I am taking a plane on Sunday unless I meet the fate of Guy de Traversay [a reporter for L’Intransigeant, a rival of Paris-Soir, who was killed by the rebels in Mallorca], which would be a good thing, wouldn’t it, for thus you should have your martyr also. In the meantime, I am sending nothing more. It is not worth the trouble. The massacre of a hundred Spanish children is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson.
Geoffrey Cox wrote of Delaprée:
It is easy to write good things of the dead, but Delaprée was a man of whom one would have written them willingly when he was alive. Without any exaggeration, he was one of the finest people I have met – intelligent, human, cheerful, courageous, good-looking. He was that rare type who is liked by both men and women. He was a journalist of the first rank, writing beautiful French prose. His descriptions of the air raids on Madrid might serve as classics of their type. Many fine men have gone to their deaths in the Spanish war. It is not the least of the tragedies of this struggle that Louis Delaprée should have been amongst them.41
Cox was right. Louis Delaprée’s descriptions of the bombing of the capital count among the most moving writing produced during the war. Moreover, what he saw led him, like so many other correspondents, to a deep indignation with the blindness of the policy-makers of the democracies:
I am only an accountant of the horror, a passive witness. However, let me make a comment, the strongest feeling that I have experienced today is not fear, or anger or even pity: IT IS SHAME. I feel ashamed of being a man when mankind shows itself capable of such massacres of the innocent. Oh old Europe, always busy with your petty games and great intrigues. God grant that all this blood should not choke you.42
The efforts of Arturo and Ilsa were a great success but did nothing to diminish the hostility of Rubio Hidalgo, who made sporadic efforts to remove them. First, Barea was summoned to Valencia in December 1936, where he realized how much resentment there was among those who had left the capital for those who had stayed. He learned that Rubio Hidalgo had expressed a desire to exile Barea to rot in the postal censorship in Valencia because he could not forgive his usurpation of his desk at the ministry. Ilsa also came to Valencia, where she was briefly arrested because her friendship with the Austrian Socialist leader Otto Bauer had led to her being denounced as a Trotskyist. When she was released, they finally admitted that their future lay together. Moreover, after an interview with Julio Álvarez del Vayo himself, Ilsa secured a reprieve for both of them. Rubio agreed to send them back to Madrid, with Arturo as head of the Foreign Press Censorship and Ilsa as his deputy.43
Barea’s work in the censorship brought him into frequent contact with General Vladimir Gorev, the senior figure in Madrid of Russian military intelligence. As both military attaché and thus the principal Russian adviser to General José Miaja, the head of the Junta de Madrid, Gorev took a burning interest in the articles of the foreign correspondents. Every morning he would pore over the previous night’s censored dispatches, sometimes disagreeing with Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar, sometimes explaining why certain military issues required censorship. He was fascinated by the way in which many correspondents had evolved from open animosity to the Republic to more objective reporting. He was inclined to attribute this to the greater freedom given to reporters by Arturo and Ilsa. His favourite articles were those by Herbert Matthews and Sefton Delmer. Ilsa believed that his liberal attitude may well have caused him problems with others in the Soviet delegation.44
Despite good relations both with Gorev and the majority of the foreign correspondents, the tensions between Valencia and Madrid continued. Finally, the combination of divorcing his wife in order to be with Ilsa and the strain of his work and the running struggle with Rubio took their toll. Barea was going through some kind of nervous breakdown and Ilsa was still dogged by accusations that she was a Trotskyist.
In April 1937, Arturo and Ilsa were visited in Madrid by the great American novelist, John Dos Passos, who helped them with their work one evening and later remembered ‘a cadaverous Spaniard and a plump little pleasant-voiced Austrian woman’. Barea liked Dos Passos for the gentle and affectionate way he spoke about the plight of Spanish peasants. Dos Passos wrote sympathetically of the two censors:
Only yesterday the Austrian woman came back to find that a shell fragment had set her room on fire and burned up all her shoes, and the censor had seen a woman made mincemeat of beside him when he stepped out to get a bite of lunch. It’s not surprising that the censor is a nervous man; he looks underslept and underfed.45
Eventually, Barea was advised by Rubio’s increasingly important assistant, and eventual successor, Constancia de la Mora, to take a holiday. He realized that part of the problem was that: ‘she must have found it irksome that we in Madrid invariably acted as if we were independent of their – of her – authority. Tall, buxom, with full, dark eyes, the imperious bearing of a matriarch, a schoolgirl’s simplicity of thought and the self-confidence of a grand-daughter of Antonio Maura, she grated on me, as I must have grated on her.’ It was clear that he and Ilsa would not be permitted to return to their jobs in Madrid. Indeed, Constancia de la Mora had already selected Arturo’s successor.
He was replaced as Head of the Foreign Press and Censorship Department by Rosario del Olmo. Jay Allen remembered her as ‘a darling, dedicated girl’. Described by Barea as a ‘pale, inhibited girl’, she had been secretary to the League of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and had been recommended by María Teresa de León, the wife of Rafael Alberti and a friend of Constancia. In fact, Rosario would be a worthy successor to Barea, working in Madrid with bravery and dedication until the very last days of the siege in 1939. Barea himself was shunted into radio censorship and occasional broadcasting until eventually, his health broken, he and Ilsa would leave for England in 1938.46
In the meanwhile, the efficacy of the efforts of Arturo and Ilsa to facilitate the work of newspapermen was illustrated by the envious remarks of Sir Percival Phillips, Daily Telegraph correspondent in the Nationalist zone. Irked by the aggressive rigidities of the Francoist censorship, Phillips reported what he had been told by colleagues who had experienced the Republican operation, where the press officer was usually a journalist himself and happy to welcome colleagues from London or New York: ‘No need to wait three hours for an audience and then be told that you must come again tomorrow: you just blow in through the open door of the office, and help yourself to a drink or a cigar if the censor is busy. Sometimes he even asks you to lend him a hand or to give him some advice.’ Phillips believed ‘the humility and the camaraderie of those Red censors is so flattering and so touching that some Englishmen have actually dropped well-paid newspaper work in order to help them out’.47 It is certainly the case that many journalists were moved by the camaraderie of the besieged population to work in favour of the Loyalist cause. Some reflected their sympathies in their writings, others by going back to lobby for the Republican cause in their own countries, and a small number of men by abandoning journalistic work altogether to join the International Brigades and take part in the fighting.
