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

by Vaill, Amanda

  * * *

  Valencia was in full battle dress. Although the streets were still thronged with people and the grocers’ shops overflowed with produce, everywhere gigantic posters proclaimed the Valencianos’ fighting spirit. On the wall of one building was an enormous map of Spain—with a big dot for Valencia and an arrow pointing to the Nationalists’ positions at Teruel, in the Aragonese mountains—under the legend, “VALENCIANOS! The front lines are 150 kilometers from Valencia! Don’t forget!” You could try to forget by ducking into a movie theater—Give Me Your Heart, a Warner Brothers weeper starring Kay Francis and George Brent was playing in one—but when you came out what met your eyes was the stern, uncompromising hulk of the “Tribuna de Propaganda,” a massive ziggurat painted with patriotic slogans, adorned with a sculpted fist clutching a rifle, and crowned with the word “VENCEREMOS,” which dominated the center of the Plaza de Emilio Castelar.

  Not that Gerda was spending much time at the movies. Instead she was photographing the unveiling of a unit of the new Popular Army, the Ejercito Popular, a centralized, top-down, made-for-efficiency fighting machine modeled on the Red Army that was being phased in at the urging of the government’s Russian allies and its Communist members. After the disaster at Málaga the process was being accelerated, apparently to Prime Minster Largo Caballero’s chagrin—“he fears the exceptional influence that the Party has in a significant part of the army and strives to limit this,” is how the Soviet advisor General Jan Berzin (code name “DONIZETTI”) reported things to Moscow. Caballero was increasingly on the defensive, and he and his foreign minister, Álvarez del Vayo, who had begun siding with the PCE (Partido Comunista de España—the Moscow-oriented Communists) on most issues, were barely speaking. In the PCE’s congress in Valencia early in the month, the party’s secretary general, José Diaz, had pushed strongly for the unified army; and his associates were privately saying Caballero was a handicap to victory. “To win the war”—the French Communist André Marty, supreme commander of the International Brigades, told his Comintern associates—“the [popular] front demands radical rapid changes,” such as a government “without Caballero … And on this issue the public opinion of the front is being prepared.”

  The publication of photo essays like Gerda’s on the Popular Army might have seemed like a subtle part of this preparation. But although Gerda had moved closer to Communist orthodoxy since her SAP days in Germany—it would have been hard not to, working for Ce Soir and staying with Alberti and Maria Teresa Léon at the Casa de Alianza, where Mikhail Koltsov was a frequent visitor—if she’d come to share the PCE’s belief in regimentation, it was more an emotional reaction to the devastation of war than a political one. She wasn’t an ideologue. She did, however, recognize a potent visual symbol when she saw one. The new armed force marching in lockstep, standing in unwavering lines, its soldiers forming human chains as each grasped the shoulders of the man in front of him (and with women now excluded from the military they were all men)—these images had the heroic, and monolithic, grandeur of a Soviet poster. And Gerda celebrated them as she’d once celebrated the anarchic spirit in Barcelona at the beginning of the war. Gerda evolved, is how Koltsov described it: When she came here she was a child-woman playing at war; she became an antifascist warrior. And the warrior in her seemed to have decided that this was what it would take to win the fight with fascism. If that meant abandoning the social revolution—well, so be it.

  * * *

  Hemingway arrived in Madrid on the evening of the day Gerda Taro left it.

  When he and Joris Ivens had reached Valencia on March 16, he’d sent NANA a dispatch, full of the sort of scene-setting local color he could do in his sleep, describing their journey and his impressions of the conditions in Spain. And the New York office had fired back, in terse cablese: “WE UNWANT DAILY RUNNING NARRATIVE [YOUR] EXPERIENCES.” What they did want, the cable continued, was “CONSIDERED APPRAISAL SITUATION.” In other words, get to where the fighting is and report on it—that’s why we’re paying you the big bucks.

  The fighting was over at Guadalajara, but maybe he could catch the tail end of things if he was lucky. Visiting the press office to discuss travel arrangements to Madrid, he met Stephen Spender, who’d just come from the beleaguered city and seemed relieved to get away. Something about the fair-haired, fair-skinned English poet seemed to rub Hemingway the wrong way: he told Spender he couldn’t wait to get to Madrid: he wanted to see if he had lost his nerve since he’d been under fire in Italy. And fortunately, Rubio Hidalgo’s new deputy, a very tall, dark, aristocratic woman named Constancia de la Mora, who was married to the Republicans’ air force chief, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, was able to help him.

  Constancia, nicknamed Connie, spoke English fluently—the result of three years in a convent school in Cambridge—and her girlhood in the drawing rooms of Madrid society had given her the sort of natural authority that gets things done. In addition, she and her husband had become members of the PCE, so Joris Ivens’s party credentials were as impressive to her as Hemingway’s literary ones. Very quickly she produced a car, ration slips for gasoline, and a driver, Tomás, a tiny man whose nearly toothless mouth made him look like one of Velázquez’s dwarves; and on the morning of March 20, Ivens and Hemingway were on their way to their destination, up through the coastal mountains and across the high plain of La Mancha. Although Valencia was warm and springlike, here it was bitterly cold; there was no heat in the car, so Hemingway—not neglecting Tomás—passed around his silver flask, engraved “E.H. from E.H.” and full of scotch. By the time they discerned Madrid rising like a citadel on the horizon, everyone was a little the worse for drink, and Tomás was moved to whiskey-fueled tears by the sight.

  “Long live Madrid, the capital of my soul!” he cried.

  “And of my heart,” Hemingway responded—adding, as Tomás’s emotions caused them to narrowly miss colliding with an army staff car, “Just try to watch where you’re driving.”

  Soon they were pulling up in front of the Hotel Florida, where John Ferno was also staying; and the next day all three of them went to the battlefield beyond Guadalajara with Colonel Hans Kahle, a burly Prussian Communist who had commanded the first International Brigades battalion to relieve Madrid the previous November. With Tomás at the wheel, they drove out the Guadalajara road through freezing drizzle mixed with flakes of wet snow. Beyond the provincial capital, on the muddy hillsides around Brihuega and Trijueque, they saw, and filmed, the abandoned tanks and weapons, the corpses surrounded by the scattered contents of their rucksacks; and although Hemingway wasn’t the first journalist on the scene—Matthews, Sefton Delmer, Georges Soria, and others had all filed stories already—he saw details they hadn’t, or hadn’t been interested in describing: the weather, the terrain, the “waxy gray faces” of the fallen.

  Over the next few days, he accompanied the two filmmakers to various sites in the vicinity of Guadalajara. At Valdesaz, a hamlet outside Brihuega, he met the temporary commander of the Garibaldi Battalion (Pacciardi had been slightly wounded and was temporarily out of action); and later they were taken in hand by the German novelist Ludwig Renn, the Thaelmann Battalion’s commander. The tall, balding Renn looked every inch the professional soldier in his natty uniform, complete with puttees and Sam Browne belt; and as he talked about how Franco had been foiled in his quest to encircle Madrid, and how, because of its natural position, the city would now be nearly impregnable to assault, Hemingway felt the seductive pull of what he would come to call “the true gen”—the real lowdown, the inside dope. He might be a former ambulance driver, not a military man; but when he walked the battlefield talking with Renn (a fellow novelist, after all) he felt like one of the brass hats from headquarters. Back in his room at the Hotel Florida, typing the dispatches he would send to London and thence to New York, he wrote, sweepingly, that Guadalajara was “the biggest Italian defeat since Caporetto,” the retreat he had so memorably chronicled in A Farewell to Arms; more than th
at, it was “a complicatedly planned and perfectly organized military operation comparable to the finest in the Great War,” and one that “will take its place in military history with other decisive battles of the world.” If that wasn’t CONSIDERED APPRAISAL SITUATION, he didn’t know what was.

  He got an even stronger whiff of the true gen when Joris Ivens took him to a gathering in Mikhail Koltsov’s rooms at Gaylord’s Hotel, where most of the Russian advisors had moved when the Palace was taken over for use as a military hospital. Ivens knew how important it was to Hemingway to feel he had privileged access to the real movers and shakers in Madrid, “an edge,” as the filmmaker put it, that “other correspondents did not have.” He’d resisted Hemingway’s first entreaties to be included in the Gaylord’s set, waiting until he judged Hemingway was “ready”; so this evening had almost the feeling of a debut about it. Hemingway had brought two bottles of whiskey from his well-stocked armoire as gifts, and set them on a table next to the wine and vodka and the huge ham that were already there. The smoky rooms were full of people who made things happen: There was Gustav Regler and General Lukácz; and Alexander Orlov, who was spending most of his time in Valencia overseeing a new network of guerrilla fighters. There was Koltsov himself, whom Hemingway liked immediately for his intelligence and sardonic humor, and even his way of spitting when he talked because of his bad teeth. And there was the Izvestia correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg, who almost started a fight with Hemingway by asking him, in French, if he sent nouvelles—news—to the United States by cable. Hemingway thought he meant novelas—novels—and was so insulted that his reportage should be considered fiction that he swung at Ehrenburg with the bottle he was pouring a drink from. Fortunately, the misunderstanding was cleared up, they all had a good laugh over it, and Ehrenburg saw to it that Hemingway met someone who might give him material for a dozen nouvelles or novelas: a dark, hawk-faced man calling himself Colonel Xanthé. No one was sure of his real name—it might have been Hajji Mourat Mamsourov, or Mamsurov Haji-Umar—but what was certain was that he was a guerrilla from the Caucasus who had come to direct some of Orlov’s aktivi, sabotage groups working behind the lines in Nationalist territory. Tough, fearless, his skin tanned mahogany from exposure to sun and wind, Colonel Xanthé was the genuine article, a real freedom fighter; what a subject he would make! Unfortunately, Hemingway wasn’t able—or wasn’t encouraged—to talk to him at length just then; but, Regler promised him, that time would come.

  March 1937: Barcelona/Valencia/Madrid

  Martha Gellhorn got out of her second-class railroad compartment at the Catalan border town of Puigcerdá on the morning of March 23 and stretched her long legs. She’d sat up all night and she was stiff, and cold—for although the fruit trees were blooming on the slopes of the Pyrenees it had snowed as they climbed to Puigcerdá, and the fields were as white as the trees. Alone on the platform, she watched the train reverse and chug back into France—because French and Spanish railroad tracks have different gauges, French trains couldn’t continue across the border; then, picking up the backpack and duffel bag which were the only luggage she’d brought with her from Paris, she crossed the track to the aduana, where they stamped her passport and nonintervention papers, and waved her on to the waiting Barcelona train.

  Paris had annoyed her. The fonctionnaires she had to get papers from were bureaucratic and rude, and she was put out by having to deal with Sidney Franklin—a pet of Pauline’s, and therefore a potential enemy—over the matter of getting her baggage to Spain. In order to maintain deniability about her relationship with Hemingway she had to make the border crossing alone; she’d wanted to travel light, so she’d handed off her suitcases to Franklin in his role as Hemingway’s majordomo before getting on the train for Toulouse and the border.

  The ride to Barcelona, however, restored her sense of adventure. At one stop a group of young recruits, scarcely more than boys, got on, bound for the front; they were singing and joking like prep school boys going home for the holidays until their leader, who told Martha he was the regional Communist Party commissar, made them quiet down. The cause needed discipline, he explained to her, and the Party would provide it; those Anarchists in Barcelona, for example—they wanted too much, too soon, and they’d have to be paddled to make them behave. Certainly Barcelona, when she got there, didn’t seem very disciplined: the streets were festooned with political posters and red banners, and crowded with red-and-black Anarchist taxis whose drivers refused tips, and everywhere there was a spirit of joyous camaraderie that she later described as “the greatest atmosphere going.” A great contrast, in fact, to Valencia, to which she was transported by government car, along with three other passengers, also journalists, two days later; Valencia seemed full of profiteers living high off the hog and loving it. She was warmly received by Rubio Hidalgo, though, who welcomed her as if he’d been expecting her and had got her a room at the Victoria; and in the morning Constancia de la Mora came by to tell her the press department had made arrangements for her and Sidney Franklin, who had just arrived from Paris, to be driven to Madrid early the next day with another journalist.

  That turned out to be Ted Allan, on whom Martha’s charms—her smile, her golden bob, her racy figure—had the effect they usually did on impressionable young (and not-so-young) men. When a big Citroën pulled up in front of the hotel, with Sid Franklin in the front seat beside the driver, Allan made sure—once all the luggage, including a couple of typewriters, was arranged inside the car and Martha’s duffel was tied to the front fender—that he sat in the back with her, the better to bring her up to date on “policy matters.” Franklin, whose brief now included acting as Martha’s chaperone, seemed none too pleased.

  It was a long, cold drive and the packed car made it hard to get comfortable; perhaps that’s why Martha ended up half in Allan’s lap, with her legs draped over the seat. He flirted with her, she flirted back, but nothing much could happen with Franklin in the front of the car, turning back every now and then to glare at Allan—mystifyingly, since Allan had no idea what the connection between this glamorous girl and the surly American matador might be. The rest of the time Martha gazed out the window at the treeless, ocher-colored hills and endless fields of La Mancha. Eventually the road became crowded with military and official traffic, and a sentry stopped the car to ask for their papers. They got out and stood in the grass by the side of the road, looking north and west to where the peaks of the Guadarrama were catching the last rays of the sun. There was a rumbling like thunder in the distance. “Guns?” asked Martha. “Yes,” said Ted Allan. The day before, Good Friday, there had been so little fighting that soldiers in the trenches near University City had left their shelter to play football in the street without attracting a single bullet from the rebels a hundred yards away; but today, apparently, firing had resumed.

  Suddenly they were in the city. At the bullring another sentry stopped them for their papers and the daily password; then they went on, through the rutted and darkened streets, past the shattered buildings and papered shop fronts that told Martha she was in a war zone, until they reached the Hotel Florida.

  Ted Allan, who had to report to duty at the transfusion unit’s headquarters, parted with Martha reluctantly, but not before saying he wanted to see her again. By now it was dinnertime, and the Florida’s soaring lobby was deserted except for the reception clerk, Don Cristóbal, who was studying his stamp collection behind the desk and barely looked up to tell the new arrivals that Señor Hemingway was not here; he had gone to eat at the Gran Via. To which Martha duly went, shadowed by Franklin; and found it full of smoke and loud laughter. Hemingway, wearing his wire-rimmed glasses, was sitting at the long table with an American airman who flew for the Republican air force under the name Hernando Diaz Evans, but whom everyone called Whitey because of his pale blond hair and eyebrows; both of them looked up when Martha came in. Hemingway’s face broke into a broad smile and he got up from the table to put his arm around her. “I knew you’d ge
t here, daughter,” he said, proud and proprietary, “because I fixed it up so you could.”

  Martha, who prized her independence and self-sufficiency, and thought she’d done a pretty good job of getting to Spain alone, looked at him incredulously. You fixed it up? She was fuming. That he’d had Sidney Franklin get her luggage to Valencia, that he might have put in a word with Álvarez del Vayo and Constancia de la Mora to provide her transport to Madrid, cut no ice with her at all.

  So it must have amused her that later that evening, as she was sitting alone in one of the two rooms Hemingway had taken at the Florida—numbers 108 and 109 at the back of the third floor—Ted Allan came looking for her, imagining he might take up where they had left off a few hours before. He had just sat down beside her on the bed when there was a brief knock, and the door opened to admit a burly dark man with wire-rimmed glasses and a mustache. It took Allan a few seconds to realize it was Ernest Hemingway.