We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  One important legacy of Kitty’s time in Spain was her friendship with Kate Mangan. It had survived their disagreement over the hospital ship, not least because of all the help that she and Tom had given Kate in her efforts to get treatment for the wounded Jan Kurzke. Kitty had persuaded Norman Bethune to see Jan Kurzke, and was constantly visiting him in hospital, while Tom had sent him food and cigarettes and later helped in arranging for the brigade authorities to permit his return to England.60 As result of the friendship between the two women, it is possible to reconstruct much of what happened in the Valencia press and propaganda office.

  When Kate Mangan came to write her memoirs after the Spanish war, she portrayed Kitty Bowler as a typical New Yorker, endlessly and tryingly energetic, confident and intrusive, yet also thoughtful and willingly helpful. Eventually, she would come to find Kitty irritating. It was thanks to Kitty that Kate ended up in the press office and thus able to provide her unique insight into the people working there. Kitty had hoped vainly to get a job as a writer in the Valencia press office. The problem was largely that she was too occupied looking after Tom, although the suspicions still hanging over her may well have played their part. The job went to the much more experienced American journalist, Milly Bennett. Despite her own lack of success, Kitty suggested to Kate that she might be able to get a lesser position as a secretary and translator if she spoke to ‘her friend’ Liston Oak, who had been put in charge of the English-language press bulletin produced by the Valencia press office. A minor celebrity of the American left, Oak was a somewhat grey and depressive individual. In fact, according to Kate, ‘Liston Oak, like most of the people Louise [Kitty] introduced me to, was not really a friend of hers’.61 They may not have been friends – Oak seemed to have made few in Spain and was far too introspective to appeal to the ebullient Kitty – but she certainly knew Oak. In a letter in early November 1936, Tom had written to her: ‘Would you please tell Oak I wanted to see him when he returns but that I couldn’t, as you know.’ Then, on 27 January 1937, Kitty wrote to Tom about the arrival at the Hotel Inglés in Valencia of ‘a mob of new people all girating about Liston. A strange transplantation of English and American intellectual left, conversation, conversation, which seems so strangely out of place in this life.’ It was not clear whether this latter comment was a reference to Liston Oak or to the mob of newcomers.62 Prodded along by Kitty, and armed with an introduction from Hugh Slater, in late December 1936, Kate went to see, and was hired by, Liston Oak.

  When she finally got to meet him in his gloomy hotel room, Kate found the ‘rather pompous and habitually melancholy’ Liston Oak to be decidedly unimpressive. She encountered ‘a tall, distinguished-looking, middle-aged American with glasses and curling grey hair which he wore rather long at the back. He generally wore a large-size floppy beret.’ Something about the spindly and hypochondriac Oak provoked Kate’s suspicions: ‘Liston was a chameleon kind of character. I always felt he was unreal and a faker though I did not know until afterwards what he was up to.’ His politics tended to the libertarian. He expressed interest both in the FAI and the POUM, and held heated conversations with the Austrian sociologist Franz Borkenau, who was passing through Valencia while doing research for his book The Spanish Cockpit. Nevertheless, Kate felt that ‘even Liston’s Trotskyism was unconvincing’.63 By April of 1937, she would have some reason to alter that view: ‘He was that most dangerous type of all – an ex-Communist. I do not know whether he had been expelled or had left the party. Apparently his old associates did not know, for he had come to Spain armed with what were, for a Leftist, unimpeachable letters of credit.’64 According to the American writer Stephen Koch, Liston Oak was a Stalinist who, before coming to Spain, had been in Moscow, where he had been offered a job on an English-language newspaper for foreign visitors, the Moscow Daily News. However, before he took up the post, the Spanish Civil War had broken out and he got Louis Fischer to intercede on his behalf to get a job in Republican Spain. Despite his inability to speak Spanish, the ‘unimpeachable letters of credit’, recommendations from the American Communist Party and from Fischer, ensured that he was taken on. Kate’s explanation of Oak’s reason for being in Spain was rather less sinister: ‘When I discovered that his second wife had left him I assumed that he had come to Spain to forget about it.’ Nevertheless, Kate also commented on the fact that Oak carried a letter of introduction to someone referred to in her manuscript as ‘Kellt, the former head of the foreign department’. It is difficult to identify ‘Kellt’. Since Kellt did not speak English, Otto Katz, who did, may be eliminated as a candidate.65

  At the press office, Kate also met Coco Robles, the sixteen-year-old son of John Dos Passos’ friend, José Robles Pazos(see previous chapter). Having been educated in Baltimore, where his father was a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Coco spoke perfect American English as well as French, Spanish and some Russian. Kate remembered him as ‘a lanky boy of sixteen with a dark skin, big white teeth and clear grey eyes with long lashes’. Constancia de la Mora regarded him as ‘one of the most intelligent, able, and sweet-tempered boys I have known’.66 Kate, Coco and Milly Bennett would scour the press and Republican news agency reports for stories that could be translated and issued to foreign journalists. They also translated speeches by Republican politicians such as Dolores Ibárruri and government ministers.67 One of the things that struck Kate most forcibly was the extent to which the Republican authorities made every effort to facilitate the visits of foreign journalists, writers and politicians: ‘the Spanish government is commendably and equally polite to all, real and fake, and we have all kinds from the film star Errol Flynn, who came here for publicity and staged a fake narrow escape for himself in Madrid, to the Dean of Canterbury, who had a real narrow escape in Durango’.68

  One of the most colourful and fascinating characters to be employed by the Republican press office to help visiting writers and journalists was the striking Swedish redhead Kajsa Hellin Rothman. According to Virginia Cowles, for whom she acted as interpreter, Kajsa ‘had held jobs all over Europe ranging from governess to tourist guide and had finally ended up in Barcelona as a marathon dancer. On the twelfth day of the dance, war broke out and she went to the front as a nurse.’ Born in Karlstad in 1903, she went to live in Paris when she was twenty and then worked as a nanny and a journalist. In 1925, she joined a dance troupe and toured all over Europe. In 1931, she gave it up after her manager absconded with her prize money leaving her high and dry in Cairo. She stayed in Romania for two years as a nanny before moving to Spain in 1934 where she helped set up a travel agency. During that time, she developed a passionate love of the country. Accordingly, on hearing of the military coup in July 1936, she became the first Swedish citizen to volunteer for the Republic, joining the Red Cross, as a nurse and being assigned to an anarchist militia unit, the Columna de Hierro.69

  The war brought out in her a political commitment that soon became the driving force of her life. Believing that she could be more use in the besieged capital, she joined the Scottish Ambulance Unit that had arrived in Madrid in late September. The Unit was run by the puritanical and conservative Fernanda Jacobsen, who diverted food donated by Scottish workers for needy nursing mothers of the Spanish Republic, to right-wingers who had taken refuge in the British Embassy. Miss Jacobsen also permitted the Scottish Ambulance Unit to be used to smuggle rebel supporters out of Spain. In mid-December 1936, when the Unit returned to the UK on Christmas leave, by then much-depleted and with serious doubts as to its future, Kajsa left to seek other work. It was later alleged in a security report that she had actually been expelled for immorality. However, it seems more likely that she had protested about the use of the Unit to help Fifth Columnists and that Miss Jacobsen’s accusations of ‘loose morals’ were a device to discredit Kajsa.70

  By the end of December 1936, Kajsa had found work as secretary to the Canadian surgeon Dr Norman Bethune at the Hispano-Canadian Blood Transfusion Institute which he had established in Madr
id. She made a great impact both in helping to improve the unit’s organisational efficiency and in successfully publicising appeals for blood donors. She courageously delivered blood to the front during the battle of Jarama. T.C. Worsley, who drove Bethune’s ambulance for a time, portrayed Kajsa in his memoir of that time as ‘Gretchen’: ‘She was a big blonde Swede, more typically Aryan than any Nazi idealization. Where she had come from no one knew, but she could speak most languages, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, English.’ He commented on her ‘striking figure and warm nature’ and her amazing range of contacts in Madrid.

  Kajsa had also become Bethune’s lover and the jealousy aroused in a crucial member of his staff, Henning Sorenson, provoked a damaging conflict. The American sailor-turned journalist, Greg Moller, correspondent for the Copenhagen magazine Politiken, who knew both Bethune and Kajsa, wrote that her ‘loveliness almost broke up the Canadian Blood Transfusion outfit’. Sorensen was the unit’s liaison officer with the Spanish medical authorities and able to cause serious problems for Bethune. The situation was unsustainable. The Spanish doctors resented her steadfast defence of Bethune during his long fund-raising absences. Moreover, the confident manner of this tall redhead, exaggerated by her adoption of male attire, ‘militia trousers and Sam Browne’, made them rather uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Worsley recalled her as ‘a person of great generosity, generous with her time, her help and her cheerfulness, quite unafraid and yet entirely unselfcon-scious in her whole attitude to the war. She never generalized about it, contenting herself with concentrating on the immediate problems whatever they might be.’

  By the time that the Canadian blood transfusion team was absorbed into the Spanish medical services, on 2 March 1937, Kajsa had already left to join the Republican press office. She seems to have decided that it would be better for the unit and for Bethune if she broke with him and moved on. Despite this, she was inadvertently and peripherally involved in Bethune being forced out of Spain. His opposition to the absorption of his unit had already led to clashes with others in the unit and with the Republican authorities. At the beginning of April 1937, the anonymous report emanating from the Spanish security services absurdly accused Bethune of being a thief. It also insinuated, as a lever against him, that Kajsa might be a spy. Moreover, badly affected by the loss of Kajsa, he had begun to drink heavily and, on 5 April 1937, was persuaded to leave Spain.71

  Kajsa herself remained deeply committed to the cause and made Swedish-language broadcasts for the Republican radio and also wrote articles for her home-town newspaper, the Karlstad-tidningen. That, plus her unique range of languages, made her an ideal recruit for the press office. Kate Mangan wrote of Kajsa:

  She was a handsome giantess with red-gold flowing hair. She was also correspondent for a Swedish paper and typing in Swedish involved putting in a lot of accents by hand. She had worked previously with Dr Bethune and had started in the war wearing trousers and riding a motor-bike. With us, she wore flowing, Isidora Duncan garments. She was said to have worked for a travel agency before the war. She used to bawl into the telephone: ‘Aquí, Kajsa, sabes, la sueca, alta, rubia!’

  In the spring and summer of 1937, she worked in and around Madrid as guide and interpreter for Herbert Matthews, Philip Jordan, Willie Forrest, Josephine Herbst, and Virginia Cowles. At that time, as Virginia Cowles recalled, and as can be seen from the photograph with Hemingway and Liston Oak, when she was working on the Madrid front, she ‘dressed in men’s clothes and wore her hair in a Greta Garbo bob’.72 According to Moller, Kajsa provided information which permitted him to expose in the Scandinavian press the extensive fifth-column organization run out of the Norwegian Legation by its German charge d'affaires, Felix Schlayer. This led to Schlayer’s removal by the Norwegian government. In the autumn of 1937, Kajsa was recruited by the Svenska Spanienhjälpen (Swedish Relief for Spain) and worked tirelessly with refugee children. She opened an orphanage, to raise money for which she toured Sweden in 1938 and spoke to large audiences. She also wrote the text for a book of the children’s drawings of the war (Barnen ritar om kriget). When the Republic was finally defeated, she fled to France with the rest of the press office where she helped organize the exodus to Mexico where she herself lived and worked as a tour guide until her death in 1969.73

  An even more crucial member of the staff of the press office was the thirty-seven-year-old Californian ‘Milly Bennett’ (Mildred Jacqueline Bremler), ‘Poppy’ in Kate Mangan’s memoirs. Like Kajsa, she greatly facilitated the work of the correspondents. Although, unlike her Swedish colleague, she was far from being a striking beauty, she had a thirst for life that ensured a steady supply of lovers. According to Kate, she was

  exceedingly popular with men and never without a romance of her own – probably because she was warm-hearted, such a genuine good sort, and also very amusing company. She was a first-rate newspaperwoman and quite well known as such and if it had not been for her Left sympathies, though she belonged to no political party, she would have been earning very good money. She had done so in the past. Only her left views and her love affairs, which made her rather a rolling stone, stood in her way. She had been everywhere, Honolulu, Shanghai and Moscow and never lacked a job as she was very competent.

  After marrying an American, Mike Mitchell, in 1921, she worked as a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. She divorced him in 1926 and went to cover the Chinese revolution of Chiang Kai-shek. She went to Moscow in 1931 and worked for an English-language newspaper for foreign visitors, the Moscow Daily News, as well as being a stringer for the New York Times and Time magazine. She became a good friend of the future commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades, Robert Merriman, and his wife Marion, after they met her in Moscow in early 1935. Marion recalled: ‘I could tell Milly was as “crazy” as I’d heard – an extrovert who knew no limits and whose curiosity demanded that she seek out virtually everything that came to mind.’ In Moscow, Milly was working with the American journalist, Anna Louise Strong, who was briefly co-editor of the Moscow Daily News. After a brief visit to Madrid in mid-December 1936, Milly was given a job in the foreign press service in Valencia in the first week of January 1937.74

  According to Marion Merriman: ‘Milly Bennett was a wanderer who kept moving, from continent to continent, war to war, job to job, recording it all in whatever newspaper she could find to pay her at the moment.’ Wherever she went, as Kate Mangan noted, she was extremely popular with men. Marion wrote:

  Milly was a homely woman, but she was blessed with an extraordinary figure. She didn’t dress in a particularly sexy way, preferring the business skirts and blouses of the rather scruffy newspaper business. But her shapely figure turned the head of many a man with a roving eye. She was thirty-nine but looked years younger. Her face reflected her travels, her features craggy and rough-hewn. She was regarded as ‘one of the boys’ in the newspaper office and at the café bars where the journalists, crowd that included few women, gathered.

  In 1931, she had married a Russian, Evgeni Konstantinov, but after he was arrested in 1934, she began to live with a ballet dancer. When Marion asked one of the other correspondents in Moscow the secret to Milly’s attractiveness to men, he replied: ‘“Have you ever danced with her? No, of course you haven’t”, he added with a wink that suggested that Milly’s charm lay not strictly in her ability to gather and write the news.’

  James Minifie met Milly with an anarchist group south of Madrid. He described her as ‘the homeliest woman I have ever seen; she had a muddy skin, poor teeth, unkempt black hair, and a bumpy figure’. Observing Minifie’s dismay, an anarchist militiawoman told him: ‘Don’t underestimate Milly Bennett. She may not look like much, but she has a powerful attraction for men. She has charm.’ Sefton Delmer had similar, if less affectionate memories of her. In a wildly exaggerated account, he wrote:

  She was always clowning and mugging, and making a mock of herself and being a good fellow. Which was understandable. For Milly, with
a mop of thick wiry hair, a sallow face, pebble lensed glasses perched on her thick stub of a nose, had one of those short, piano-legged, large torso bodies which are normally ignored by the courting males of our hemisphere.

  Milly was, however, no pushover: ‘She drank whiskey with the best of the correspondents, when they could get it, and vodka a good proportion of the rest of the time. Everybody liked Milly, and respected her. She was a pro.’

  On the basis of her remarks to Robert Merriman in many heated conversations there could be little doubt that Milly Bennett was not a Communist. She was highly critical of the Soviet system and totally sceptical of the official line on its inexorable progress. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she wanted to pursue a former lover, Wallace Burton, who had gone to join the International Brigades. With some difficulty, Milly managed to persuade her Russian employers to name her their correspondent in Spain. Burton was killed in action but Milly stayed on, writing occasional articles for the London Times, the Associated Press and United Press. She also worked in the press and propaganda office in Valencia, fell in love with a Swedish brigader called Hans Amlie and also helped gather material for Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.75

  Although Milly was not a Communist, she fell foul of one of the more right-wing correspondents. Kate wrote of attending an event at which the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, made a speech:

  A very tall American journalist lifted me up so that I could see over all heads. Hank, the American, was a friend of Poppy and often used to take us out for a beer or invite us to cocktails at his flat. When he left Spain he wrote a pro-Franco book in which he said Poppy was a red agent sent straight from the Comintern and we laughed a lot about it but perhaps some people believed it.