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

by Vaill, Amanda

  He was persuaded to stay, however, and the next morning the conference went on as scheduled. The proceedings had a more military tone than the session in Valencia, with a guard of honor stationed at the front of the hall, and a military band playing the “Internationale” and the jaunty Republican anthem, “The Hymn of Riego”—“Soldiers, our country calls us to fight: swear we will give her victory or death!” Unbeknownst to most of the attendees, however, a real military drama was about to take place not twenty miles away.

  For days there had been rumors of a new offensive against the Nationalist forces along the Manzanares; trucks were moving troops north and west, and men and matériel were coming in daily from the coast. But though every journalist in the Gran Via basement suspected something was up, nothing could be written about, by order of Rubio Hidalgo and Constancia de la Mora, and suddenly no passes could be issued to sensitive areas to the west of the city. Then, on the morning of July 6, in an attempt to cut off the Nationalist salient protruding into Madrid’s boundaries, government troops attacked the hamlet of Villanueva la Cañada and started moving on the nearby village of Brunete, accompanied by Loyalist bombers. The offensive met fierce resistance, however, and General Miaja gave orders to place artillery behind the infantrymen to make them go forward. That afternoon, as the congress delegates were just applauding yet another speech, three government soldiers—in an extraordinary piece of political theater—burst into the conference hall, still wearing their battle helmets. “The town of Brunete,” they announced, “is now in our power.” Then, like Roman centurions displaying an enemy’s trophies, they held aloft two captured Nationalist battle flags on the points of their bayonets, and the crowd went wild.

  To Gerda, who’d been snapping photographs in the front row, the appearance of the flags was like a signal. She had to get to the front, had to get pictures of the action while it was happening, before anyone else had them. Racing out of the auditorium with her colleague, Ce Soir’s Marc Ribécourt, and the film critic Léon Moussinac scrambling after her, she tried in vain to get passes and transportation from the censorship: but Barea and Ilsa had their orders from Valencia: absolutely no journalists at the front.

  This didn’t stop Gerda. She commandeered a car, told the chauffeur where to go, talked her way through roadblocks; she was, by now, a familiar figure to the brigadistas, who called her la pequeña rubia, the little blonde. Ribécourt and Moussinac could only follow where she led. Dodging tanks and trucks, they managed to get to Brunete itself, and Gerda, knowing it was important to document that the village had been won and she had been there to witness it, photographed three government soldiers in front of a doorway bearing an enameled plaque with the village’s name on it. Another of her photographs showed a soldier painting over Falangist graffiti, replacing the beribboned bundle of arrows that was a Nationalist symbol with the hammer and sickle and the words Viva Rusia. What a message to send the world, one year into the war!

  In the late afternoon they began to make their way back to Madrid along a road now lined with the dead and wounded. Toward sunset they came upon a column of French, Belgian, and Italian volunteers who invited them to share their rations, and—when it came time for them to drive on—serenaded them with the “Internationale.” Gerda joined in, raising her voice in song and her clenched fist to the sky, la causa’s own Marianne. Moussinac, watching, found his eyes wet with tears.

  Over the next two days—except for a junket to Guadalajara, where she photographed the culture defenders gawking at the battle site and touring ruined villages with the ever-present Hans Kahle—Gerda virtually ignored the congress. The real story, for her, was in the parched brown hills west of Madrid, where the Loyalist armies were trying to hold the ground they had gained and press forward; and to get to the front she hijacked congress cars and brought along any of her admirers who dared go with her, braving the heat and dust and danger—even briefly breaching enemy lines when one bewildered chauffeur didn’t know where he was going and drove them into Nationalist territory. Gone were the high heels and the tailored skirt she’d worn in Valencia; she was in her combat uniform of khaki overalls and alpargatas, her cameras around her neck, dust in her hair. And she came back with pictures no one else had, pictures whose dynamism—learned perhaps in her film work over the past few months—set them apart from the elegant but sometimes stagy photographs she’d made up to now. On July 8, Jay Allen, Capa’s Bilbao acquaintance who was now in Madrid, came into the basement canteen at the Gran Via and saw her sitting in the corner with Ribécourt, Georges Soria, and other French correspondents. Look, someone said with awe, that’s Gerda Taro. Allen, a renowned journalist himself, was too shy to approach her. “She had become legend to me already” is how he put it.

  July 9 was the last day of the Madrid portion of the congress, and the delegates were moving on to Barcelona; but Gerda didn’t want to go with them. A year ago she might have been inspired by the speeches and by scenes like the presentation of the captured battle flags, but she’d gone beyond such pageantry now. She had seen too much death and destruction, felt too personally the stakes Spain was fighting for. She wired her editors at Ce Soir and asked to be taken off the conference coverage and assigned to Brunete instead. She was a war correspondent, and she needed to cover the battle—not (as Stephen Spender had described it) “a circus of intellectuals.”

  But the offensive stalled; the Loyalists needed to regroup, bring up supplies and reinforcements; and Gerda seized the opportunity to make a flying visit to Paris and celebrate July 14, Bastille Day, with Capa.

  * * *

  Barea and Ilsa weren’t sorry to see the congress delegates go; a lot of posturing intellectuals, using Madrid as a backdrop for arguments about the politics of André Gide, Barea grumbled. They had enough to do dealing with the correspondents who wanted to send out real news, not just official bulletins about the fighting at Brunete, and were resorting to oddly worded “personal” telegrams about sick aunts and travel plans that were obviously coded reports of what they’d been able to find out. It was like the bad old days of November: Why couldn’t the press cover the truth? Finally, Barea went directly to the war secretary, Indalecio Prieto, who had come to Madrid to be close to operations, and begged him to lift the prohibitions on journalists’ copy. Grudgingly, Prieto agreed. But by then the Nationalists had brought up reinforcements and were fighting fiercely back, and caught in the middle of the field of fire, Brunete—where Barea had spent his childhood summers in his aunt and uncle’s big whitewashed house—was being pounded to ruins.

  Every day the Messerschmitts and Chatos flew over Madrid on their way to drop bombs on the battlefield; the smoke and the dust clouds from the fighting could be seen in the city, and in his bunker in the Palacio de Santa Cruz, where the Foreign Ministry was, Barea could hear the din of battle, like summer thunder. Finally he could hold off no longer, and climbed the stairway to the westernmost of the Palacio’s towers. In the distance, over the dun-colored meseta, hovered a dark, almost biblical cloud from which a column of smoke rose into the hot bright sky. In the magic lantern of his memory flashed images of Brunete, its pond and its dry plowed fields, and of himself as a boy, walking between his uncles down the hard, dusty street. His stomach turned and he tasted bile at the back of his throat. Brunete’s unforgiving soil was where his roots were—“the roots of my blood and my rebellion,” he would say—and the war was turning it into a wasteland.

  That night, when the car had taken him to the broadcasting station on the Calle de Alcalá, he sat before the microphone to read what he had written about Brunete, and he wept.

  July 1937: Paris

  Coming out of the Gare d’Austerlitz into the cool gray evening drizzle, Gerda found that the copies of Ce Soir in the news kiosks around the Place Valhubert were full of her pictures of Brunete. Ce Soir had been featuring her all week, in fact: her very first Brunete photos on the eighth, as well as images from the Writers’ Congress on the ninth and the eleventh. At the
studio on the rue Froidevaux there was more good news: Capa’s photograph of the falling militiaman had been reprinted as the sole accompaniment to an editorial in Life magazine marking the first anniversary of Franco’s uprising: “DEATH IN SPAIN: THE CIVIL WAR HAS TAKEN 500,000 LIVES IN ONE YEAR”; her stills of the Granjuela reenactment would be in Ce Soir (presented as a real-life attack on an unnamed village), and Regards—which had already given her photos of the Valencia bombing victims a prominent spread—would be including her photos and Capa’s in its own anniversary issue, due to appear on Bastille Day. What a contrast to their situation a year ago! Then they had been poor and unknown, refugees ekeing out an existence on the margins; now they had become the person they had invented, the famous international photographer—no, two famous international photographers, each with a name to conjure with. Even Gerda’s anxieties about her family appeared on their way to a solution: they had applied for clearance to emigrate from Yugoslavia, where they were living with her mother’s parents, to Palestine.

  As if all this good fortune weren’t enough, Capa had had another of his ideas, this time about something even more ambitious than their original expedition to Spain. On July 7, just days ago, the Empire of Japan—an ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, hungry for territory and historically opposed to Russia—had declared war on China; this war was going to be a big story, he knew it, and no European or American journalists were on the spot yet. He’d had gone to see Richard de Rochemont of Life and had asked him to send the two of them to cover it. De Rochemont had promised him an answer soon. It would mean a long sea voyage to a place unlike any they’d ever been to; it would be just the two of them, far from home; but they would be working together, on Life’s masthead alongside Alfred Eisenstadt and Margaret Bourke-White; Life paid well, and their photographs would be seen by millions of readers. Would Gerda do it?

  If Capa had worried about Gerda’s diffidence, her self-protectiveness, her need to put personal and professional distance between them, he need not have. She couldn’t wait to go. She just had to return to Spain to see the Loyalists win at Brunete and get those pictures; but she’d only stay ten days. Then she’d come straight back to Paris; by then Capa should have good news from Life and they’d start packing for China. She didn’t promise more than that; and perhaps he was wise enough not to ask.

  On July 14, Bastille Day, a crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands marched through the streets of Paris, which were hung with tricolors and red bunting. Everywhere there were banners calling for aid to the Spanish republic, or dissolution of the fascist leagues; everybody sang the “Marseillaise” and the “Internationale.” In the morning the gray skies had seemed to promise rain, but by evening the clouds were blowing away, and Capa and Gerda went dancing up in Montmartre, on the Place du Tertre, just beneath the white domes of Sacre-Coeur, with an acquaintance from Spain, a young American wire-service correspondent who had quit to join the International Brigades, and his Viennese girlfriend.

  The four young people were gay: it had been an exhilarating afternoon, and Capa and Gerda, at least, had much to celebrate. They had money in their pockets, their work was everywhere, and they were on the brink of a great adventure on the other side of the world. At the back of all their minds was the possibility that there was danger ahead for each of them; but tonight there was music—“Parlez-moi d’amour” was big that year—and their bodies moving together as they danced, and the smell of the soft breeze, and the sky over Sacre-Coeur, pierced by a thousand stars.

  July 1937: Valencia/Madrid

  Constancia de la Mora was at the end of her rope: with the fighting at Brunete every correspondent in Spain wanted to get to Madrid, and she just didn’t have enough cars and drivers and fuel to go around. So when Gerda Taro showed up, fresh from her holiday in Paris, and asked for transport to the combat zone, she couldn’t help her. Maybe she snapped at the girl just a little—it was hot and the phone kept ringing and she was tired; but Gerda didn’t pout, or leave the Propaganda Ministry in a huff. Instead she went out and bought Connie de la Mora a bunch of flowers, and left them on her desk with a polite little note, apologizing for giving her trouble when she was so busy. And she hitched a ride in another correspondent’s car.

  When she got to the Alianza in Madrid she learned that things weren’t going well at Brunete. Stretched to their utmost in the attempt to advance against the Nationalists in the blistering July weather, the Republican forces were short of food, water, ammunition, bandages, stretcher bearers, ambulances, everything. The government’s Chatos and Moscas had been outnumbered and outgunned by the Condor Legion’s new Messerschmitt bombers, and the bare baked earth of the Castilian plain offered the Loyalist forces no cover. Losses were mounting: 3,000 men had fallen between the tenth and the sixteenth, among them the hugely popular George Nathan, operations chief of the British and American Fifteenth Brigade. On the eighteenth, the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Nationalists launched a counteroffensive whose casualties included Virginia Woolf’s nephew, the ambulance driver Julian Bell. Both sides seemed locked in a grim dance of death. At dinner with Claud Cockburn, who’d moved into the Alianza to be closer to her, Gerda remarked, “When you think of all the fine people we both know who have been killed even in this one offensive, you get an absurd feeling that somehow it’s unfair still to be alive.”

  For the next few days she drove herself mercilessly, rising early and taking her cameras—her Leica and the “March of Time” Eyemo that Capa had given her—to the front. Once she had to lug the Eyemo eight miles in order to reach the sector where she thought she’d get the best footage, and she still wasn’t satisfied. “Tomorrow I’ll get up at six so I can get better shots,” she sighed. Sometimes Cockburn went with her; sometimes Ted Allan did. Allan had resumed his puppylike attendance on her, had even brought her his short stories to read; and she’d been encouraging about them: They’re good, Teddie, very good. He was, however, anxious about going with her to the front lines, although—or because—he’d promised Capa to take care of her. Maybe, he suggested, they shouldn’t go too close to the action. “How do you want me to take pictures?” she asked, laughing. “Long distance?”

  Through days of scorching heat, she photographed officers in the field and soldiers in the trenches—one of them a heartbreakingly young boy, too young to shave, in a too-large adult’s uniform; she photographed the bombers in the sky and the shattering impact of their payloads, the smoke and flying clods of dirt. “In case we do somehow get out of this,” she told Cockburn, who’d come along with her that day and was crouching beside her as she focused on the Messerschmitts above them, “we’ll have something to show the Non-Intervention Committee.” She photographed the wounded, even riding in the ambulance with them. She photographed the dead. The pictures had none of the careful structure and artful composition of her early work; they were jittery, sometimes out of focus or overexposed, but vital, immediate, even terrifying. One day she and Cockburn were visiting the British Battalion when enemy aircraft bombed the supply vehicles, and as Gerda rushed to the scene one of the trucks burst into flames. Black smoke filled her viewfinder. Soldiers ran, panic-stricken, to extinguish the fire; one of them was hit and fell to the ground. And Gerda stood in the middle of this apocalypse, clicking her shutter.

  It was odd to come back from the inferno of Brunete every evening and sit in the garden of the Alianza, where Alberti wanted to talk about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and everyone would listen to the news on the radio and then sing along with whatever popular songs were playing. Odder still to find Ted Allan waiting for her, hoping to romance her, as if this were Leipzig in 1933 and she were still the girl who just had to wiggle her little finger to have five or six guys running after her. Not that she didn’t like the attention, and even enjoy teasing him a little: stripping to her lacy underthings in front of him after her day at the front, lying down on the bed beside him, touching him lightly and suggestively, then watching him—like a fox tha
t is going to play a trick on you—to see how he reacted. But this was July 1937, and she had more important things to do than flirt with a lovesick twenty-one-year-old.

  She did, however, want his company in the field, especially if she was taking two cameras with her. On Saturday, July 24, the rebels had smashed their way back into Brunete, only to be driven out of it again by nightfall in fierce house-to-house fighting. Journalists hadn’t been permitted to go to the front to report on the battle, so it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening; but any prohibition was just one more challenge to Gerda, and on Sunday she asked Allan to come with her to the front lines. Her ten days in Madrid were up, she said, and tomorrow she was leaving to join Capa in Paris; this would be her last chance to get photos and footage of what was already the biggest and costliest engagement of the war.

  Allan met her outside the Alianza. She’d found a car, and a chauffeur who kept trying his American slang on them—“Okey-dokey,” he would say, whenever Gerda gave him directions—and they drove north along the Paseo de Recoletos to the road for El Escorial, then turned south to Brunete. The sun made the car feel like an oven; to keep their minds off the heat Gerda suggested they sing.

  When they reached the front Gerda managed to talk her way as far as General Walter’s position before they had to stop. She got out of the car, sure of her welcome from the officer who had been so taken with her just a month ago in the Sierra; but the shaven-headed Walter was the opposite of welcoming. The line ahead of them had broken, he told them, and it was no longer safe where they were. “You must go away immediately,” he said; and, turning to Allan, “Get her away from here.” Gerda protested: it was her last day, she needed the pictures. Please. Walter lost his temper. “Go immediately,” he ordered. “In five minutes there will be hell.”