Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  The likeliest refuges would have appeared to be France or Britain; and indeed, some withdrawals from the reserves had been sent to France around the time of the insurrection in July. But both of these countries, for different reasons, seemed to have turned their backs on the Republic in the name of nonintervention. What if they decided that letting the Spanish government draw on its own gold reserves was as much off-limits as selling it arms? Meanwhile, as every day brought another insurgent victory, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were sending money, men, and matériel to the Nationalists—motivated not just by ideological kinship, but by Hitler’s belief that a Spanish war distracted the world’s attention from his own rearmament and gave him a laboratory to test its products, and by Mussolini’s desire for a stage on which he might be seen as an important actor.

  As disturbing as this state of affairs was to President Azaña, Prime Minister Largo Caballero, and Spain’s finance minister, Juan Negrín, it was equally unsettling to Stalin, for it threatened the balance of power on his own geopolitical chessboard. On the one hand, a Nationalist victory in Spain, which would surround France with three potentially hostile countries and free Hitler to attack Russia, had to be avoided at all costs. But on the other hand, an outright triumph for the Republicans would allow Germany to redirect its aggression eastward, and would also alarm the right in Britain and France. A continuation of the conflict, however, would deflect attention from Stalin’s own ongoing purge of old Bolsheviks; and it might even make possible a world war that would consume Germany, Italy, France, and Britain, leaving Russia unscathed and dominant.

  So: help must be forthcoming for the Spanish Republic—food, tanks, planes, guns, cars and trucks, as well as field officers, pilots, technicians, and political advisors. But how would this aid be compensated, Stalin wondered. Fortunately, Prime Minister Largo Caballero and Finance Minister Negrín had a suggestion: For helping the Republic, for being the only government to stand beside it in its hour of greatest need, Russia could become the guardian of Spain’s gold reserves. They would be shipped to safety in Moscow, where they could form the basis of a drawing account from which the Soviet Union could deduct for the Republic’s purchases of Russian arms, oil, and foodstuffs. And if, or when, the government defeated the rebels, Spain’s good friend would of course return its treasure intact.

  The cable to Orlov was Stalin’s answer; and within days of receiving it Orlov met with Negrín, to hammer out the details of the transfer. The crates of gold and silver would have to be loaded onto Soviet ships at Cartagena for transport through the Mediterranean to the Bosporus and thence to the Black Sea and the Russian port of Odessa—a journey fraught with danger. German and Italian warships patrolled the Mediterranean and could seize the precious cargo if they knew anything about it; and there might be an outraged reaction among the non-Communist majority of the left at the removal of their country’s reserves to Communist Russia. So Orlov and Negrín cooked up a cover story in which Orlov was given false credentials as the representative of the Bank of America in order to claim, if the need arose, that the gold was going to the United States and not the Soviet Union. And the arrangements for the transfer were kept secret from anyone without a specific need to know about it—which included, to his later fury, the president of the Republic, Manuel Azaña.

  On October 22, the first crates containing the reserves, which weighed 145 pounds apiece, were loaded onto trucks holding 100 boxes each and driven from the caves to the docks at Cartagena under cover of darkness; after two nights more the trucks made their final trip, and a flotilla of Soviet steamers sailed off with more than $500 million in gold—worth more than 8.5 billion in today’s dollars—in its holds. At the same time Spain took delivery of approximately one hundred T-26 Russian tanks and the same number of aircraft, including I-15 and I-16 fighters—“Chatos” (snubnoses) and “Moscas” (flies)—which were the fastest in Europe. And Azaña and Largo Caballero endorsed a proposal by the Comintern—the Moscow-directed organization devoted to advancing the cause of communism internationally—to form a volunteer force made up of foreign antifascists to aid in the defense of the Republic, “the common cause of progressive humanity,” as Stalin put it in an open letter to Mundo Obrero, Madrid’s Communist newspaper.

  In his blacked-out room at the Telefónica, Arturo Barea knew that that cause was also desperate. General Mola had four columns of soldiers massed on the outskirts of Madrid and was claiming to reporters on the Nationalist side that the city would soon fall to his fifth column, “men now in hiding who will rise and support us.” The bombing grew more intense every night: Barea’s sister’s house in the western suburbs had been reduced to rubble and she and her children were now staying with his brother in Lavapiés. Others weren’t so lucky. On October 30, in an attack on the neighborhood around the airport at Getafe, just outside the city, fifty children were killed: Barea saw the photographs taken in the morgue afterward, the children lying in neat rows, their eyes closed and their lips parted as if in sleep, numbers on their chests for identification. They might have been his, or his brother’s or his sister’s. He couldn’t get them out of his mind.

  Meanwhile, far away in Odessa, a gray ship with no markings, flying no flag, tied up in the harbor, and an armored train ferried its cargo to Moscow. To celebrate its safe arrival, and that of other, similar ships with similar cargo, General Secretary Stalin threw one of the loud, lavish, and vaguely threatening Kremlin dinner parties for which he was famous—the kind where even the seating has political implications. As the evening drew to a climax Stalin raised his vodka glass for a toast. The company fell silent. To the Spanish gold, their host said, which for the Spanish people would be like the ears on their heads: they would know it was there, but they would never see it again.

  November 1936: New York

  It really was a most unpleasant surprise. Just when she was about to have a little taste of celebrity as one of a starry roster of speakers—along with the poet Edgar Lee Masters, the actor Burgess Meredith, the lawyer and free-speech advocate Morris Ernst, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and playwright Margaret Ayer Barnes—at the first-ever New York Book Fair, Martha Gellhorn found herself in an embarrassing predicament. Things had started off so promisingly, too: she’d returned from Europe to a fanfare of admiring reviews for The Trouble I’ve Seen, and she’d learned that her Spectator piece about lynching, “Justice at Night,” had been reprinted by a transatlantic magazine called Living Age and in the States by Reader’s Digest, whose circulation numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It was the most natural thing in the world for her to mention this to Eleanor Roosevelt over lunch at the presidential retreat at Hyde Park on November 1; and just as natural for the First Lady, who liked the article very much, to pass it along to Walter Francis White, the director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had been trying for several years to get Congress to pass an antilynching bill. But that’s where the trouble started. White was hoping to spur congressional hearings on the bill, and now he’d written Martha a lengthy and complimentary letter asking her, since she’d been a firsthand witness to this dreadful miscarriage of justice, to testify about it before a Senate committee.

  Unfortunately, no matter how much she might have wanted to, there was no way in the world that Martha could do that. If she did, she would have to raise her slender hand and swear that the testimony she was about to give was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God—and she couldn’t. Because it wasn’t. And now, somehow, she was going to have to turn White down. Worse, she was going to have to explain to Mrs. Roosevelt, as well as to White, what had happened: that she’d written a terrifyingly plausible piece of sensational, finger-pointing journalism that just happened to be fiction.

  Trying both to brazen things out and to apologize to the woman she regarded as a “pillar” of her “cosmos,” she wrote ER a chipper little note whose tone veered back and forth between swagger and shame. She c
onfessed that the story was just that—a story: “apparently I am a very realistic writer (or liar), because everyone assumed I’d been an eye-witness to a lynching whereas I just made it up.” But, she rationalized, she really couldn’t be blamed for its publication: all those magazines had simply helped themselves to her piece—she (or her agents) had had nothing to do with placing it. (She didn’t explain how it was that she’d been paid for the piece.) Now, although she was bewildered by finding herself “on something of a spot” for her creativity, and although her first instinct had been to ask Mrs. Roosevelt to intervene with White on her behalf, she said she’d be “a big brave girl and tidy it all up myself.”

  Whether or not she hoped Mrs. Roosevelt would take the hint and defend her, and whether or not she felt any queasiness about being publicly caught out as what she herself would later call an “apocryphier,” Martha wasted no more time on self-recrimination. On the evening of November 17, with an unseasonably cold wind whipping the flags along Fifth Avenue, she made her way to the most recently opened of the monumental palaces of Rockefeller Center, the International Building. Passing the huge bronze statue of Atlas, effortlessly hefting his earthly burden in the building’s forecourt, she joined the thousands of people packing the streamlined escalators and pushing past glass cases full of first editions of Dickens, Joyce, and Whitman to the crowded auditorium.

  Martha had little experience of public speaking and it didn’t help that she was slated to go on near the end of the evening’s program: she was trembling like a racehorse in the starting gate by the time it was her turn, and gripped the shaky lectern for support. The subject of the evening’s program was “Listening to America,” and although her predecessors had talked about their American readers, or about the state of literature, or drama, in the United States, Martha decided to widen her focus. Writers, particularly American writers, she said, needed to develop their social consciousness. They needed to “dramatize, advertise, and sell democracy” to their readers—and if they didn’t, she warned, they risked having what was happening in Germany happen to them. Despite her initial nervousness, she appeared unfazed, at one week past her twenty-sixth birthday, to be playing Cassandra to a capacity crowd of her elders. “It seemed to make some sense to some people,” she said of her speech afterward.

  Describing the proceedings later to Mrs. Roosevelt, Martha was disdainful of her fellow speakers, who made her “mad” or “miserable” by mumbling or producing platitudes. She had particular scorn for Margaret Ayer Barnes, who had spoken of asking her husband for background about bank failures so she could describe one in her fiction. How pathetic, Martha thought, to “go feminine publicly” in this way, when writing was really “as practical as plumbing.” But Barnes was no fluttery lady writer; she was a professional who wanted to be sure of her facts—as Martha might have realized if she’d heard Barnes earlier that day, in another session, talking about the importance of checking the truth of details when writing about the past. It was much harder to do this than anyone would suppose, Barnes said; “but if the author makes such a mistake, a thousand people will detect it.”

  November 1936: Madrid

  It had turned colder in Madrid, and in the mornings when you looked out the windows of the Telefónica toward the Guadarrama the mountains were mantled with white. The soldiers, going out to the front, wore heavy scarves with their overcoats, and were glad of the extra warmth of the blanket rolls strapped over their shoulders.

  On November 6, Barea arrived at Rubio Hidalgo’s office for his usual briefing to find the place in turmoil: drawers open, papers stacked on the desk, other papers burning in the grate. Rubio told him to shut the door and sit down. With the Nationalist armies poised on the west bank of the Manzanares, it was obvious that Madrid was doomed, Rubio said; President Azaña had already fled to Barcelona, and now the rest of the government was relocating to Valencia, on the coast. The press office was going with it. Or rather, the permanent staff was going, as well as any foreign journalists whose lives would be at risk when Franco entered the city, as he would surely do either tomorrow or the next day. As for Barea: Rubio would have liked to move him to safety, too, but really there was nothing he could do about it. He was sorry.

  “I hope—the government hopes, I should say—that you will remain at your post up to the last moment,” he said. And waited for an answer. What could Barea say? Of course, sir.

  Over the distant obbligato of munitions fire from the west, Rubio told him that General José Miaja, who had been in charge of the government’s ill-fated assault on the Córdoba front, would take over political as well as military control of the capital, with instructions to negotiate a surrender with the least amount of blood spilled. He, Barea, should issue a bulletin saying that the press services were being evacuated, but that was all; then he should just close the censorship office, go home, and try to save his own neck.

  Rubio handed him a packet containing two months’ salary for himself and the wages for his orderly, Luis, and for the couriers; then he rose, came around the desk, and shook Barea’s hand solemnly. Like a funeral, thought Barea. He glanced at Rubio’s desk, saw the photographs of the murdered children of Getafe spread out on the surface. “What are you going to do with these photographs?” he asked. Burn them, of course, Rubio answered; they were obvious propaganda and anyone found with them would be shot on the spot. “Let me take them,” Barea said. He didn’t know what he was going to do with them, but he couldn’t abandon these children to die a second time. Rubio shrugged and handed over the prints and a box of negatives, and Barea put them under his arm and left.

  It was raining when he came out of the Foreign Ministry, a cold, dank drizzle that went through your clothes into your bones. Making his way through the rain-slick streets, he went to Calle del Ave Maria to tell Aurelia to pack bags for herself and the children in case they, too, would have to flee; then he headed back to the Telefónica to issue Rubio’s bulletin and try to keep the reporters from writing nonsense about it. In the hours just after midnight, news came that the fascists had crossed the Manzanares and that there was fighting in the Model Prison, less than a mile away; one of the American correspondents, a big man named Louis Fischer who wrote for The Nation and had been knocking back whiskey all night while waiting for a free telephone line, wanted to send the story that the capital had fallen. When Barea refused, Fischer grabbed him by the collar and shook him, and Barea had to call guards to throw the correspondent onto one of the emergency beds, where he promptly sank into a sodden sleep.

  In the morning, although the Nationalists were still at the city’s western boundary, they had got no farther. The convoys of journalists and diplomats and government employees left, and Barea paid off the couriers and Luis, as he’d been told to do; he was about to leave the Telefónica himself and go home when one of the switch censors—who listened in to the correspondents’ calls and switched off the line if anything forbidden was mentioned—asked him who was going to take over now. No one had given orders not to let the journalists’ calls go through, the man said; but now who would censor their stories? Barea started to repeat what Rubio had told him—We’re done for, just get out while you can and leave the journalists to General Miaja—and found he couldn’t do it. He’d started working as a censor not because it was just another job, but because he wanted to make a stand against fascism, and believed that the story of the government’s fight had to be told to the world. If he walked out now, he risked allowing lies or fabrications to be published, or having the stories silenced altogether by military censors.

  Just months ago he’d been wrapped in a fog of professional ambivalence, political alienation, marital exhaustion, and sexual ennui; but today the fog had rolled away and was replaced with a strange clarity. “We can’t let things go,” Barea said to the switch censor. Rubio and the others could run, but he had work to do.

  How much work was confirmed that evening, when Henry Buckley, the slight, sandy-haired, soft-spoken correspond
ent of London’s Daily Telegraph, telephoned his editor to report that despite Franco’s attack on suburban districts across the Manzanares, Madrid itself was calm and unvanquished.

  “I say, Buckley,” the young man in London said, “do you know your copy does not tally with the other information we have? We have it quite definitely that Franco’s forces are now fighting in the center of Madrid.” Buckley, generally the politest of men, hung up on him.

  * * *

  Over the next two days, Barea stepped into the vacuum left by the departure of his chief and became a leader. He pulled the remnants of the censorship staff together and ordered them to start vetting all journalists’ reports for accuracy and confidentiality before allowing them to be transmitted; then he went to the Foreign Ministry, rounded up a few left-behind office employees to form a “Popular Front Committee,” and got an authorization from them (really just a piece of paper with an impressive-looking stamp on it) to assume the duties of head of the Press Office; finally he found someone at the newly established defense committee, the Junta de Defensa, to make the whole process official. He thought it entirely possible he’d be shot for insubordination, but he was too tired to care.

  While Barea was knocking on doors in nearly empty ministries, however, something surprising was taking place. On Saturday, the day that the government convoys had set out for Valencia, they passed the first detachments of foreign soldiers from the recently formed International Brigades that had mustered at Albacete, 140 miles southeast of Madrid; by Sunday morning, November 8, a battalion of Germans, another of French and Belgians, and still another made up of Polish miners, as well as a section of British machine-gunners and two squadrons of French cavalry, were marching down the Gran Via toward the front. And incredulous Madrileños—who believed these multinational dei ex machina had been sent by their new Soviet allies—were cheering “Viven los Rusos!” and waving their handkerchiefs from the balconies along the avenue. By that evening the international battalions had joined the civilian volunteers and Loyalist troops in the Casa de Campo; by the next day the rebels’ advance there had been halted, and suddenly it seemed as if Madrid might not fall after all.