by Pete Ayrton
There were bombing-planes over us and shrapnel bursting behind – but all those were only incidents. At six o’clock the retreat stopped – Walter and Babs and the big fat English doctor, whom we had seen at Majadahonda, and who appeared without his coat, his arm grazed and bleeding, with a revolver in his hand, got most of the credit. The frantic rush from ridge to ridge, the frantic wild firing into the air, the frantic rush to go faster than those tanks was ended. Companies and groups and nationalities were all mixed up, but order ensued at last. I had a group of five Spaniards to command and place in positions on an advanced ridge, part of forty men whom Babs was given to cover the retreat of the main body while they re-organized and dug new trenches. There were incidents then – the sixty seconds when we saw a valley track filled with columns of men with brown skins and red caps, swinging along easily, carelessly, and we saw those ranks crumple up and scatter to the sides under our fire.
The battle went on three days. The enemy retreated finally till they occupied only our own original positions. The woods and slopes were covered with bodies and rifles and ammunition pouches. There were night patrols to recover rifles and ammunition and the bodies of our dead. None of the English could be found. But none of those last five days before we were relieved have much to do with this story.
The last chapter of our story was written on the day that Joe was killed. It was written when a dispirited little band gathered together that night – Babs and Aussie and I dug ourselves only a shallow protection – we had not much interest in parapets and firing positions. There was a thin, greasy soup and tepid cocoa. Walter took the roll-call of the 1st Company, Thaelmann Battalion, just before the midnight guard.
He called out each name and paused, till the suspense was unbearable. Oswald and his patrol of fifteen men were every one of them missing – and we thought of the rifles pointed downwards in that trench and the bayonet slashes in the bodies of the men they brought back. The commander crossed their names all with the same word:
‘Gefallen.’
From the 1st and 2nd Zugs, fifteen men called out the answer,‘Hier!’ Forty-three did not answer.
‘Third Zug.’ Three Germans answered ‘Hier’ before he came to the English Group.
Addley – no answer, no information, ‘gefallen’.
Avener – killed, ‘gefallen’.
Birch – no answer, believed killed, ‘gefallen’.
Cox – killed, ‘gefallen’.
The suspense was still there; we knew they were killed, but yet we did not believe it. It was as if this was their last chance to plead before the final death sentence of the word written against their names.
Gillan – wounded.
Gough – killed, ‘gefallen’.
Jeans – killed, ‘gefallen’.
Messer – no answer, missing, ‘gefallen’.
There had been nothing to break the chain of those answers – we were all at the end of the alphabet.
Those last five days at the front were not so bad. We had enough to think about in the cold, miserable damp and in the fighting that went on. It was the relief, the return to the castle of El Pardo that was bad.* They talked about the action, about what ought to have been done, about the men who had been killed.
There were speeches when we said good-bye to return to Albacete, Valencia, Barcelona and England. Commander Richard said: ‘In the battles of the future, if we know that there are Englishmen on our left flank, or Englishmen on our right, then we shall know that we need give no thought nor worry to those positions.’†
We returned to England on January 3. Albacete was just the same, except that it was muddier and dirtier – and the troops now slept on the stone floors without mattresses. Here the first British battalion was being trained. It was part of the section of a thousand Englishmen who, in February, were to hold the most vital positions near the Valencia road under twelve days of the biggest artillery bombardment of the war, then counter-attack and make Madrid’s road safe for months – perhaps for good. I might have gone back and joined those men, who are the real heroes of the Spanish struggle. But I did not go. I got married and lived happily instead.
Yet more and more I see that those three months were not just an adventure, an interlude. The mark which they left is something that does not diminish but grows with time. When we were all together at the castle of El Pardo there was a kind of faith which made us feel that we could not ever be destroyed. But seven of those men – including Joe – were killed at Boadilla. They were killed, and forgotten, because they were only important for a day. Then there were other fighters, other martyrs, other sympathies.
There is something frightening, something shocking about the way the world does not stop because those men are dead. Over all this war there is that feeling. It is not something which is specifically due to the fact that one is seeing the struggle of a race of people one loves, that one’s friends are fighting, or have died – it is a feeling of the vastness of the thing which has caught up so many separate entities and individualities.
I am not a pacifist, though I wish it were possible to lead one’s life without the intrusion of this ugly monster of force and killing – war – and its preparation. And it is not with the happiness of the convinced communist, but reluctantly that I realize that there will never be peace or any of the things I like and want, until that mixture of profit-seeking, self-interest, cheap emotion and organized brutality which is called fascism has been fought and destroyed for ever.
Esmond Romilly was born in Herefordshire in 1918. He became a rebel at his public school, Wellington College, from which he ran away to work in a communist bookshop in London. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Romilly cycled to Marseille and, from there, went by boat to Valencia to join up with the International Brigades. After minimal training in Albacete, Romilly was sent to the front at Boadilla to fight Franco’s troops attempting to take Madrid. Boadilla is the account of this fighting which ended in the decimation of his unit, the Thaelmann Battalion. It is a moving book that brilliantly captures the chaos of battle. Suffering from dysentery, Romilly returned to England, where he married Jessica Mitford, like him a class traitor. Boadilla was written in 1937 when the couple were on honeymoon in Bayonne after having been expelled from Bilbao, where Romilly had been sent to cover the Civil War for the News Chronicle. They returned to England and became active in the fight against Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. In 1939, Romilly and Mitford went to the United States to seek their fortune. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Romilly went to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was killed in November 1941 in a bombing raid over Germany. He was twenty-three.
* After 1939 the Madrid residence of General Franco.
† Colonel ‘Richard’ was a German communist named Staimer. He survived both the Civil War and the world war to become police chief in East Germany.
DULCE CHACÓN
THE MISSING TOE
from The Sleeping Voice
translated by Nick Caistor
AS USUAL, ACTIVITY in number two block began early. The prisoners were roused at seven in the morning. This was Christmas Day, visiting day. They were all forced to hear mass, as on every holy day, but only a handful of the women took communion. All the others stayed standing throughout the ceremony in protest. They held their heads high as the priest cursed them in his sermon:
‘You are dross, and that is why you are here. And if you don’t know that word, I’ll tell you what dross means. Shit, that’s what it means.’
Furious, Tomasa called a meeting straight after mass. She proposed they all go on hunger strike until the priest apologised for his insult.
‘More hunger?’
It was Reme who spoke. She looked desperately over at Hortensia, as though asking her for help, asking for bread.
‘Not more hunger, for the love of God.’
A few of the women supported the idea of the strike, but Hortensia interrupted them:
‘We have to
survive, comrades. That’s our only obligation, to survive.’
‘Survive, survive, what’s so important about that?’
‘So we can tell the story, Tomasa.’
‘What about our dignity? Is someone going to tell the story of how we lost our dignity?’
‘We haven’t lost it.’
‘No, we’ve only lost the war, haven’t we? That’s what you all think, isn’t it? That we’ve lost the war.’
‘We’ll only have lost it when we die, but we’re not going to give them that satisfaction. No more craziness. If we resist, we win.’
Further voices joined in, some in favour, others against the possibility of a hunger strike; and the word dignity drowned out that of ‘craziness’. Then Elvira came running into the shower room:
‘Watch out, Little Miss Poison’s coming!’
The women who had towels wrapped them round their hair or slung them over their shoulders. Those with no towels pretended they were drying their hands on their skirts. The meeting was over. Little Miss Poison appeared at the door, with Mercedes by her side. She was carrying a Baby Jesus. Mercedes turned the key and pushed the door open, let her superior enter and followed her in. She locked the door behind them, hung the key from her belt, and pushed in a hairpin that was sticking up out of her chignon.
‘Line up!’
It was not time for their roll-call. But none of the prisoners asked why they were being made to get into line. Mercedes clapped her hands three times and they obeyed.
Sister María de los Serafines lifted up the Baby Jesus crowned with a gilt crown, put one hand under his plump crossed legs, and offered the statue’s foot to the first prisoner:
‘Religious devotion is part of your re-education. You refused to take communion, although this is Christ’s birthday. You will all kiss his foot. All those who do not do so will have their visits cancelled this afternoon.’
One by one, the prisoners bent and kissed the proffered foot of the Christ-child. Little Miss Poison deliberately held it level with her stomach so they would have to bow their heads. After each kiss, Mercedes dried the cardboard foot with a piece of starched linen.
‘Now you, Tomasa.’
As the nun came close, Tomasa stared straight at her, her mouth twisted in fury. After a few seconds, Little Miss Poison grabbed her head and pushed it down towards the statue. Tomasa yielded, brought her mouth close to the tiny foot, and then, instead of kissing it, opened her mouth wide.
A crack resounded through the silence of the block.
A crack.
And then a smiling mouth, gripping a toe between its teeth.
A shout:
‘Communist swine!’
The shout came from Sister María de los Serafines.
Mercedes rushed to cover the amputated toe with her starched cloth, as if trying to staunch the flow of blood. The nun shouted again:
‘Communist swine!’
And punched Tomasa in the mouth with her clenched fist.
The white flurry of her habit’s wide sleeves as she assaults a face which has not lost its smile.
The punch was so hard the sacrilegious prisoner spat out the toe, and Baby Jesus’ extremity flew through the air.
The foot-kissing session is over. Sister María de los Serafines orders them to find the missing toe. The prisoners break ranks, trying hard not to laugh. Elvira can feel two tears rolling down her cheeks, and Hortensia raises her hands to her belly and exclaims:
‘Oh dear mother of mine, dear heart!’
In order not to laugh, the prisoners search for the toe without looking at each other. They cannot look at Tomasa.
‘Here it is!’
Reme has found God’s toe and hands it over to the nun.
Tomasa’s lip has started to bleed. Sister María de los Serafines pushes her towards Mercedes.
‘Get this sacrilegious creature out of my sight!’
Then she lifts the tiny toe to the tiny foot to see if she can cure the wound. Yes, she’ll be able to stick it back on. She looks at it in ecstasy. A teardrop wells up in the corner of her eye. She’ll be able to stick it back, although the join will look like a tiny scar.
The inmates of block number two will be able to laugh when they are getting ready to go out to the visiting-room. When the bustle of activity and the anticipation of seeing their families helps them forget the sad sight of Tomasa trying to keep her balance as she was pushed roughly out of the room to face her punishment. They can laugh when they forget how sorry they felt to see her walking away buttoning up Elvira’s mother’s dress. It is only as the prisoners are preparing to meet their relatives that they can laugh. And it is Reme who makes them do so. Like all the women, she is pinching her cheeks to give them a bit of colour so her face will look healthier – a little less haggard and starving – and she says:
‘Now they’ll know they are telling the truth when they say we Communists eat young babies. What a stupid cunt that woman is.’
Reme bursts out laughing. Elvira is next, as she asks Hortensia:
‘Did you see Little Miss Poison’s face?’
‘She looked incredible! I thought she was going to have a fit!’
All the built-up tension is released as the women who have got visitors are helped by those who haven’t.
‘Here, Reme, wear this red scarf, it makes your face look prettier.’
Reme uses saliva to wash her hands: the water was cut off much earlier. As she washes, she thinks of Benjamín. She shouldn’t have asked him to bring soap at his last visit. Soap is hard to find. She shouldn’t have asked him for that, and still less for the little wicker chair. Poor Benjamin, she shouldn’t have asked him for anything. He always brings her what he can. Reme smiles thinking of her grandson, whom she is going to see for the first time this afternoon. Her son’s son, born in Leon barely six months earlier.
Hortensia is more excited than usual, and can’t imagine why. She had been making two plaits, the way Felipe likes her, when a woman from Salamanca who was brought into the prison a few days earlier came up to her. All they knew about this small, energetic woman who entered number two block without a trace of fear in her eyes was that she was accused of collaborating with bandits. Some of the women thought she must be a guerrilla fighter, but in fact she was a member of the Communist Party leadership in Salamanca.
‘My name is Sole.’
After telling Hortensia her name, she explains that she is a midwife, and that her daughter has sent her a message:
‘She says I’m to stay next to you, that we’re to go out to the visiting-room together. She says it’s very important for us to stick together.’
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t say.’
And Elvira sings, more cheerful than ever, while she is tying a piece of string in her pony-tail, just how Paulino likes it. She still can’t get rid of the last of her fever, but today she’s glad of it, because that way her grandfather will see colour in her cheeks.
Elvira has no idea that in a few minutes she is going to see her brother Paulino. Paulino does not know it either.
Paulino is already on his way to Ventas prison with Felipe.
Dulce Chacón war born in Zafra in Extremadura in 1954. Her father, the mayor of Zafra, was a supporter of Franco who loved literature. After Franco’s death in 1975, the democratic government passed, as part of the Amnesty Law, the Pact of Forgetting – an attempt to forget the past and concentrate on the future. For writers like Chacón this attempt at forced collective amnesia was unacceptable. The research for The Sleeping Voice took her all over Spain to interview survivors of Franco’s rule. For her, the women she interviewed were ‘the silenced voices, the figures in shadow... who lost so much and then had no right to complain’. The Sleeping Voice is set in the Prisión de Ventas, a well-known prison during the Civil War. It is a book in which the political views of the women are paramount. Chacón wrote the book out of ‘a personal necessity dating back a long way, to dig out the history
of Spain that I hadn’t been taught: a censored and silenced history’. A moving book shot through with dark humour, The Sleeping Voice won the Spanish Book of the Year Award in 2002. Dulce Chacón died in Madrid in 2003.
VICTOR SERGE
‘SPEAK PLAINLY,
YOU KNOW ME’
from The Case of Comrade Tulayev
translated by Willard R. Trask
AT FIVE THOUSAND FEET, in a sky that was pure light, the most sundrenched catastrophe in history was no longer visible. The Civil War vanished at just the altitude at which the bomber pilots prepared to fight. The ground was like a map – so rich in colour, so full of geological, vegetable, marine, and human life that, looking at it, Kondratiev felt a sort of intoxication. When at last, flying over the forest of Lithuania, an undulating, dark mossiness which struck him as looking pre-human, he saw the Soviet countryside, so different from all others because of the uniform colouring of the vast kolkhoze fields, a definite anxiety pierced him to the marrow. He pitied the thatched roofs, humble as old women, assembled here and there in the hollows of almost black ploughlands, beside gloomy rivers. (Doubtless at bottom he pitied himself.)
