by Pete Ayrton
After a while the militiaman said:
‘I would like you to live. You are a real man. But I can do nothing for you.’
‘Me sabe, me understand,’ replied the Caid, again pressing gently the hand of the militiaman. Each knew without words the sympathy that existed between them, that mutual recognition which comes unknown and unwanted but cannot be ignored.
‘Moor sabe that you be friend and no want to kill Moor, but must. Moor has to kill also. They be things of war ... and things of men, inshallah! Allah alone is great. May his name be praised for ever.’
They were placed, unresisting, in a row against a wall and mown down like blades of grass at the time of harvest.
Manuel Chaves Nogales was born in Seville in 1897. He was an excellent journalist who, when the war broke out, stayed in Madrid editing the Republican newspaper Ahora. Of his time as editor during the war, Chaves writes:
I then placed my services at the disposal of the workers just as I had in the case of my Capitalist Boss, that is to say, on a basis of loyalty towards them as towards myself. I made it quite clear that I lacked the revolutionary spirit and I protested against all kinds of Dictatorships, including the Proletariat Dictatorship, and I undertook only to defend the cause of the people against Fascism and Military Rebels.
(Preface to And in the Distance Light... ?, page 4)
His stories are among the great war stories of the 20th century. Chaves wrote about the atrocities and acts of generosity committed by both sides. What triumphs in his stories is the unexpected, the ability of individuals to empathize with the enemy, the infinite shadings of black and white. When the Republican government moved to Valencia in November 1937, Chaves Nogales went into exile in Paris. Because of his many articles denouncing the advance of German fascism, he was on the Gestapo list when the German army approached the French capital and he had to flee to the UK. He lived in London during the war writing for the Evening Standard, the BBC and his own company, the Atlantic Pacific Press Agency. He died there in 1944. His stories, first published in Chile in 1937, are now being rediscovered and celebrated in Spain.
* ‘Paisa’ is the word that a Moor gives to anyone who is fighting other than a Moor and ‘hebreo’ to any non-combatant.
LAURIE LEE
TO ALBACETE AND THE
CLEARING HOUSE
from A Moment of War
TEN DAYS AFTER MY ARRIVAL at Figueras Castle enough volunteers had gathered to make up a convoy. By that time we were sleeping all over the place – in tents in the courtyard, under the mess-hall tables, or the lucky ones in the straw-filled dungeons. Day after day, more groups of newcomers appeared – ill-clad, crop-haired and sunken-cheeked, they were (as I was) part of the skimmed-milk of the middle-Thirties. You could pick out the British by their nervous jerking heads, native air of suspicion, and constant stream of self-effacing jokes. These, again, could be divided up into the ex-convicts, the alcoholics, the wizened miners, dockers, noisy politicos and dreamy undergraduates busy scribbling manifestos and notes to their boyfriends.
We were collected now to be taken to where the war was, or, at least, another step nearer. But what had brought us here, anyway? My reasons seemed simple enough, in spite of certain confusions. But so then were those of most of the others – failure, poverty, debt, the law, betrayal by wives or lovers – most of the usual things that sent one to foreign wars. But in our case, I believe, we shared something else, unique to us at that time – the chance to make one grand, uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith which might never occur again. Certainly, it was the last time this century that a generation had such an opportunity before the fog of nationalism and mass-slaughter closed in.
Few of us yet knew that we had come to a war of antique muskets and jamming machine-guns, to be led by brave but bewildered amateurs. But for the moment there were no half-truths or hesitations, we had found a new freedom, almost a new morality, and discovered a new Satan – Fascism.
Not that much of this was openly discussed among us, in spite of our long hours of idle chatter. Apart from the occasional pronunciamentos of the middle-Europeans, and the undergraduates’ stumbling dialectics, I remember only one outright declaration of direct concern – scribbled in charcoal on a latrine wall:
The Fashish Bastids murdered my buddy at Huesca.
Don’t worry, pal. I’ve come to get them.
(Signed) HARRY.
The morning came for us to leave. But it wouldn’t be by camiones after all. The snow was too heavy. We would go by train. After a brief, ragged parade, and when we had formed into lines of three, the Commandant suddenly appeared with my baggage. ‘It’s all there,’ he said, strapping it on to my shoulders, ‘all except the camera, that is.’ He gave me a sour, tired look. ‘We don’t expect much from you, comrade. But don’t ever forget – we’ll be keeping our eye on you.’
The Castle gates were thrown open, sagging loose on their hinges, and in two broken columns we shuffled down to the station. A keen, gritty snow blew over the town, through the streets, and into our faces. We passed Josepe’s whose windows were now boarded up and outside which an armed militiaman huddled. On the station platform a group of old women, young girls, and a few small boys had gathered to see us off. A sombre, Doré-like scene with which I was to become familiar – the old women in black, watching with watery eyes, speechless, like guardians of the dead; the girls holding out small shrunken oranges as their most precious offerings; the boys stiff and serious, with their clenched fists raised. The station was a heavy monochrome of black clothes and old iron, lightened here and there by clouds of wintry steam. An early Victorian train stood waiting, each carriage about the size of a stage-coach, with tiny windows and wooden seats. Every man had a hunk of grey bread and a screwed-paper of olives, and with these rations we scrambled aboard.
As we readied to leave, with clanking of buffers and couplings, and sudden jerks backward and forward, the girls ran up and handed us their little oranges, with large lustrous looks in their eyes. The small boys formed a line, shouting, ‘Salud, companeros!’ The old women waved and wept.
I shared a compartment with a half-dozen muffled-up soldiers who had only arrived the day before, including an ill-favoured young Catalan whose pox-pitted cheeks sprouted stubble like a grave in May. Garrulous – as we all were – he declared himself to be an anarchist, but one with a pivotal sense of nationalism, which made him boast, quite properly, that having been born in Barcelona, he was no more Spanish than the rest of us.
For this reason he’d joined the Brigade. He kept slapping his chest. ‘Pau Guasch,’ he said. ‘International Catalan, me! International damn Chinese-Russian-Catalan-Polish. No damn father, damn mother, damn God.’ He’d helped burn down three churches in Gerona, he said. He’d scattered petrol, thrown a match, and said, ‘Woosh!’
In the end we told him to shut up, his spluttering English was too much for us. He seemed in no way put down. He took a potato from his pocket, crossed himself before eating it, and muttered, ‘Damn Trotsky, King of the Jews.’
The train jerked and clattered at an unsteady eight miles an hour, often stopping, like a tired animal, for gasping periods of rest. We moved through a grey and desolate country crossed by deserted roads and scattered with empty villages that seemed to have had their eyes put out.
It was then that I began to sense for the first time something of the gaseous squalor of a country at war, an infection so deep it seemed to rot the earth, drain it of colour, life and sound. This was not the battlefield; but acts of war had been committed here, little murders, small excesses of vengeance. The landscape was plagued, stained and mottled, and all humanity seemed to have been banished from it. The normal drive of life had come to a halt, nobody stirred, even the trees looked blighted; one saw no dogs or children, horses or girls, no smoking fires or washing on lines, no one talking in doorways or walking by the river, leaning out of windows or watching the train go by – only a lifeless smear over roof and
field, like something cancelled or in a coma; and here and there, at the windswept crossroads, a few soldiers huddled in dripping capes. Worse than a country at war, this one was at war with itself – an ultimate, more permanent wastage.
Night came, and darkness, outside and inside the train. Only the winter stars moved. We were still smoking the last of our Gauloises Bleues, stripping them down and re-rolling them into finer and even finer spills. Our faces, lit by the dim glow of our fags, hung like hazy rose masks in the shadows. Then one by one, heads nodded, fags dropped from sagging mouths, and faces faded from sight.
It was a long broken night, the windows tight shut, our bodies drawing warmth from each other. But there were too many of us packed into this tiny old carriage, and those who chose to lie on the floor soon regretted it. Long murmuring confidences, snores, sudden whimpers of nightmare, a girl’s name muttered again and again, Pau Guasch howling blasphemies when a boot trod on his face, oaths in three languages when someone opened a window.
It may have been twenty hours later – waking and sleeping, arguing, telling stories, nibbling bread and olives, or just sitting in silence and gazing dully at each other – that the train slowed down to less than a walking pace and finally halted in a gasp of exhausted steam under the cheese-green lights ofValencia station.
We were to change trains here, and were promised hot food. The time was about midnight, and the great city around us showed no light as though trying to deny its existence, its miles of dark buildings giving off an air of prostration, pressed tight to the ground like turtles.
We had pulled up in a siding. A late moon was rising. Some women arrived with buckets of stew. They moved in a quick, jerky silence, not even talking to each other, ladling out the thin broth in little frightened jabs. Suddenly one of them stopped, lifted her head, gave a panicky yelp like a puppy, dropped her food bucket and scampered away. She had heard something we had not, her ears better tuned already to the signals of what was to come.
Following her cry and departure, the others fled too. Then the station lights were switched off. An inert kind of stillness smothered the city, a stretched and expectant waiting. Then from the blank eastern sky, far out over the sea, came a fine point of sound, growing to a deep throbbing roar, advancing steadily overhead towards us. Such a sound that the women on the platform had learned to beware of, but which to us was only an aircraft at night. And which, as we listened, changed from the familiar, casual passage of peace to one of malignant purpose. The fatal sound which Spain was the first country in Europe to know, but with which most of the world would soon be visited.
Franco’s airfields in Majorca, armed by Italian and German warplanes, were only a few minutes’ flight from the mainland. Barcelona and Valencia lay as open cities, their defences but a few noisy and ineffectual guns.
As the bombers closed in, spreading their steady roar above us, I felt a quick surge of unnatural excitement. I left the train, and the roofed platform, and wandered off alone to the marshalling yards some distance away. This was my first air-raid, and I wanted to meet it by myself, to taste the full brunt of it without fuss or panic. We’d already seen posters and photographs of what bombs could do to a city, slicing down through apartment blocks, leaving all their intimacies exposed – the wedding portrait on the wall, the cheap little crucifix, the broken bed hanging bare to the street – the feeling of whole families huddled together in their private caves being suddenly blasted to death in one breath. New images of outrage which Spain was the first to show us, and which in some idiot way I was impatient to share.
The bombers seemed now overhead, moving slowly, heavily, ploughing deep furrows of sound. A single searchlight switched on, then off again quickly, as though trying to cancel itself out. Then the whole silent city woke to an almost hysterical clamour, guns crackling and chattering in all directions, while long arcs of tracer-bullets looped across the sky in a brilliant skein of stars. This frantic outburst of fire lasted only a minute or two, then petered out, its panic exhausted.
The airplanes swung casually over the city, left now to their own intentions. Just a couple of dozen young men, in their rocking dim-lit cabins, and the million below them waiting their chance in the dark. A plane accelerated and went into a dive, followed by the others in a roaring procession. They swooped low and fast, guided perhaps by the late moon on the water, on the rooftops and railway tracks. Then the bombs were released – not from any great height, for the tearing shriek of their fall was short. There followed a series of thumping explosions and blasts of light as parcels of flame straddled the edge of the station. I felt the ground jump at my feet and smelt the reek of burnt dust. A bomb hit the track near the loading sheds, and two trucks sailed sideways against a halo of fire, while torn lines circled around them like ribbons. Further off an old house lit from inside like a turnip lamp, then crumpled and disappeared. A warehouse slowly expanded in the gory bloom of a direct hit, and several other fires were rooted in the distance. But it was over quickly – a little more of the city destroyed, more people burnt or buried, then the bombers turned back out to sea.
I found I’d stood out in the open and watched this air-raid on Valencia with curiosity but otherwise no emotion. I was surprised at my detachment and lack of fear. I may even have felt some queer satisfaction. It was something I learned about myself that night which I have never quite understood.
Once the planes had gone, there was little to be heard but the crackling of flames and the distant bells of a fire-engine. I was joined by two of my companions from the train, both silent, both fresh to this, as I was. A railwayman crossed the lines, grouping about, bent double. We asked him if he was all right, and he said yes, but he needed help. He shone a torch on his left hand, which was smashed and bleeding, then jerked his head in the direction of the nearby street. We ran round the edge of the burning warehouse and found two little houses, also well alight. They were small working-class shops, blazing tents of tiles and beams from beneath which came an old man’s cry.
‘My uncle,’ said the railwayman, tearing away at the smoking rubble with his one undamaged hand. ‘I told him to sleep in the cinema.’ The roofs collapsed suddenly, sending a skirt of sparks riffling across the road. The old man’s cries ceased, and we staggered back while great curling flames took over. ‘The fault is his,’ said the railwayman. ‘He would have been safe in the cine. He used to go there every afternoon.’ He stood doubled up, staring furiously at the blazing ruin, his clothes smoking, his hands hanging black and helpless.
Walking back towards the station, we stumbled over a figure on the pavement, lying powdered white, like a dying crusader. His face and body were covered in plaster dust, and he shook violently from head to toe. We rolled him on to a couple of boards and carried him to the main platform, where several other bodies were already spread out in rows. A moaning woman held a broken child in her arms; two others lay clasped together in silence, while a bearded doctor, in a dingy white coat, just wandered up and down the platform blaspheming.
It was a small, brief horror imposed on the sleeping citizens of Valencia, and one so slight and routine, compared with what was happening elsewhere in Spain, as to be scarcely worth recording. Those few minutes’ bombing I’d witnessed were simply an early essay in a new kind of warfare, soon to be known – and accepted – throughout the world.
Few acknowledged at the time that it was General Franco, the Supreme Patriot and Defender of the Christian Faith, who allowed these first trial-runs to be inflicted on the bodies of his countrymen, and who delivered up vast areas of Spain to be the living testing-grounds for Hitler’s new bomber-squadrons, culminating in the annihilation of the ancient city of Guernica.
About four in the morning, with fires still burning in the distance, we were rounded up by our ‘transport officer’, who was rather drunk and wearing a Mongolian jacket. Round his neck, somewhat oddly, he’d slung binoculars and a tape-measure, and he scurried about, shooing us back to the train, as though our
departure was part of some major logistic.
Some of the men had loud, over-excited voices, shining eyes, and brave tales of survival. Some were quiet and staring, others appeared to have slept unaware through everything.
Our new train was drawn up in another part of the station, where we found Pau Guasch carrying a basket of bread. Once crammed into our compartment he handed chunks of it round, saying we were not fit to eat such victuals. He was half-right there; the bread must have been several weeks old, and was coated with soot and plaster. He looked smug and benign as we tried to gnaw away at his bounty; in the end we swallowed it down.
The night was long and cramped as the train lumbered inland, slowly circling and climbing the escarpment of Chiclana to reach the freezing tableland of Mancha. I had known part of this plateau in the heat of high summer when it seemed to blaze and buckle like a copper sheet. Now it was as dead as the Russian steppes, an immensity of ashen snow reflecting the hard light of the winter moon. No gold path of glory, this, for youth to go to war, but a grey path of intense disquiet.
Apart from Pau Guasch, all the men in my compartment were volunteers from outside – British, Canadian, Dutch. And poor Guasch, the only true native son of the Peninsula, found himself squashed between his own natural assumption of leadership and our teasing contempt for him – the ‘foreigner’. So we used him as the butt of our mindless exhaustion, pushed him around, tripped him up, trod him under our feet, and stuffed his shirt with crumbs and crusts of bread.
Fear, exasperation and cruelty gripped us, and we continued to taunt the furious little Catalan till we tired, at last, of our mirthless game and slumped one by one to sleep. We slept stiffly, uneasily, propping each other bolt upright, or toppling sideways like bottles in a basket. We were not warriors any more, but lumps of merchandise being carried to a dumping-ground.
