The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  He did so, placing his wallet and papers on the greasy tablecloth. She took his militia card and discharge papers, which had ‘POUM’ stamped prominently on them, along with a photograph taken at the front with a POUM flag visible in the background, and tore them into tiny pieces. ‘These are the things they’ll shoot you for. Now, I’ve arranged for John McNair and Stafford Cottman to meet us at the British consulate tomorrow at ten; they’re to leave with us. The whole British contingent has orders to disperse immediately. I’ll see you there.’

  His notebooks! He had gone to Spain to write, and to leave without his notebooks was unthinkable. ‘I need my papers.’

  ‘Seized from my hotel room.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the early hours of this morning – they came in and arrested Kopp.’

  ‘Kopp!’ he exclaimed, loudly enough that anyone snooping on them could hear. His militia commander. A momentary disbelief drove all discretion out of him. He regained control. ‘I thought he was in Valencia?’

  ‘He came back.’

  ‘You and he … While I was …’

  She started to cry. ‘Are you angry with me?’

  Strangely, he found he was not. He had told her once, before they were married, that he believed marriage should involve freedom as well as love. Matrimony must never be a prison. He leaned over the table, took her face in his hands and kissed her hard on the lips. ‘What matters is that when it counts, we stay loyal to each other and the things we believe in. We must never betray each other. That is all that counts.’

  ‘Yes, darling.’ She was crying, but for a different reason now. ‘If they take me at the hotel, you must get out of Spain.’

  ‘The hotel! You mustn’t go back. You know more about the entire British detachment than anyone. You’ll be more valuable to them than me.’

  ‘It’s you they’re after,’ she said. ‘If I disappear now, it will look too suspicious. They’ll leave me alone as long as they think you haven’t yet returned from the front. By the time they realise, we’ll be long gone, hopefully. Don’t come for me.’

  ‘If I’m not at the consulate tomorrow, get yourself across the border on the first train.’

  ‘No, it’s neither or both.’ She stood and left.

  He made an instinctive attempt to follow her, to keep her within sight for possibly the last time, but became tangled in a knot of people and gave up.

  6

  He wandered alone through the streets, looking for somewhere to sleep. Barcelona felt eerily dissimilar. The streets seemed duller, less cheery, as if he had just disembarked from a tropical ocean journey into a city in the grip of winter. At first he couldn’t quite figure out what it was that was different. Then he noticed. The loudspeakers had changed their tone. The uplifting revolutionary tunes had been replaced by more martial sounds, and even though he couldn’t make out all they were saying, the voices of the speakers seemed somehow shriller and more threatening. The colourful posters and banners of the revolutionary parties were also gone. Here and there, blowing down the Ramblas, he could see a shred of brightly coloured paper or fabric flapping from a wall or lying in a gutter, blocking the drain. Given the sheer volume of propaganda the left-wing parties had pasted over the city in the previous year, removing the posters must have been a prodigious task.

  When he had arrived in Spain, he had assumed naively that the POUM and the anarchists had been the natural allies of the communists and the socialists; now it was obvious they were deadly enemies, and that all traces of their former alliance were being systematically eliminated. New posters had appeared. He stopped at a particularly ugly one that seemed to be on every wall thereabouts, and scanned it closely. It was a hideous image that struck him immediately as a threat to his own life. The picture showed a powerful-looking man carrying a large, knotted club, stamping his boot down violently on a group of POUM and anarchist members caught helplessly at his feet, like animals in a net. DESCUBRID Y APLASTAD SIN PIEDAD A LA 5a COLUMNA, it read. Uncover and crush the Fifth Column without mercy. Without mercy. In the corner of the poster was the hammer and sickle of the Spanish Communist Party. So this is what the Bolshevik revolution had come to: a boot stamping on all who resist, forever.

  There were no POUM safe houses that he knew of; even the party’s headquarters at the Hotel Falcon had been turned into a prison. Walking for hours, he ended up nosing around the city’s outskirts, noticing new graffiti on the walls: Gobierno Negrín: ¿dónde está Nin? – Government of Negrín: where is Nin? He found out later that on that very night, Nin was liquidated although the communists were claiming he had made his way to Berlin, where he was working for his old paymaster, Hitler. Even in death, Nin had to be kept alive as a threat.

  He first tried an empty air-raid shelter, but it had been newly dug and was dripping with damp. He then came across an abandoned church, gutted and burnt during the anti-clerical frenzy at the start of the revolution. In the dim light of the Barcelona blackout, he could just make out four walls and the remains of the belfry, and wondered to what century it belonged; probably the Middle Ages. The air inside was hot and stagnant and smelled overpoweringly of pigeon dung, but it was dry and unlikely to attract the prying eyes of the patrols. He rooted around in the rubble and found a hollow that provided a hard bed of broken masonry.

  The next morning the streets thronged with the patrols: Civil Guards, Assault Guards, Carabineros and ordinary police, as well as who knew how many plainclothes spies. He wandered about, going from café to café, killing time. At one point he passed the Hotel Falcon and the POUM comité general, noticing that the semi-circular windows just above the front doors had been smashed and the revolutionary slogans on its walls imperfectly painted over.

  Scattered about the city he saw groups of men he recognised as old comrades, some just back from the front. They winked to him as he passed, too afraid to talk. Midway down the Ramblas he spotted the two ILP comrades – McNair and Cottman – whom Eileen had arranged for him to meet, and by means of signals and whispers arranged to talk to them. They chose a market in a small plaça in the labyrinthine back streets of the medieval working-class district, where it seemed possible to talk in the middle of a thronging crowd without being detected, as long as you kept moving from stall to stall, like tourists out shopping. Along the way the pair gathered another fugitive, a 24-year-old German who went by the pseudonym Willy Brandt; Orwell knew him as the POUM’s liaison man with the German Socialist Worker’s Party, the SAP. They greeted each other warmly, lifted by the fact of being able to share their deadly predicament.

  As they moved along, Cottman, who was a short man, reached up and touched Orwell on the shoulder. ‘Comrade, the news is the worst. Bob Smillie is dead.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘The communists are saying he got ill in prison – appendicitis – but it’s rumoured they beat him to death.’

  Young Bob, beaten to death? He felt an inward shudder, as if his body was anticipating the pain of his own beatings. Up to then, being gaoled by Spaniards had seemed a sort of chaotic administrative formality, where they first wasted your time in some disordered holding pen, then checked your papers and eventually pushed you back over the border to get you out of the way. Of all the people for so-called fellow socialists to kill – a Smillie, the son of trade union royalty.

  ‘What are we doing?’ said Brandt, ashen-faced. ‘Workers killing workers? It was bad enough having to kill fascist workers, but socialist ones? What has gone wrong?’ In a moment of despair he cupped his face in his hands. ‘What have we done?’

  A moment later Brandt gathered himself. ‘Comrades,’ he began more firmly – and, as in Wigan, the word seemed natural, emotionally powerful. ‘Our cause is the right one, but the military struggle has soured it. We should never have put winning the war before securing the revolution. Can’t you see? War degrades all of us. Without the revolution, what’s all this fighting about but killing? Who will fight for that?’ One by one, he looked each
of them in the eyes, holding their stares until by some exchange of mental energy each responded with a nod. ‘This war is lost, but there are other battles to come; we know that. And we have to win them. Stay true. Are you prepared to fight and die for the eventual victory against the fascists and the communists?’

  This Brandt, he saw, had the capacity, common to natural leaders, of being able to cut through the side issues and state what was truly important. The communists posed the same threat to freedom as the fascists. Even though Brandt was the youngest of them, there was a moral force about the man: a sort of crystal spirit that nothing, not even the most powerful of bombs, could shatter. It was infinitely admirable. How strange, it struck him, the quick affection, bordering on love, you can feel for someone you hardly know.

  He glanced at his companions. ‘We’ve learnt our lesson,’ he said, backing up Brandt. ‘Never trust the communists.’

  They couldn’t linger; the patrols, though sparser in the working-class quarter, were still a menace. Before departing, he turned to Brandt. ‘Come with us to France. We can try to smuggle you into England.’

  But Brandt just clenched his fist low by his side, in a clandestine version of the Republican salute, and disappeared into the crowd.

  *

  It was incredibly stupid, like taking a step into their own graves. He and Eileen should have been on the last train, but they had decided to visit Kopp in gaol. He couldn’t let his old commander be murdered without at least some show of solidarity, even if all he could do was take him food and cigarettes. On the face of it the idea seemed insane, but they had heard the prison was a shambles.

  On entering the gaol, which was really just two rooms of a shuttered shop, he saw two POUM militiamen he knew from the front, including the American who had been with him when he was shot and had carried him down the line on a stretcher. They exchanged winks.

  Kopp’s huge bulk ploughed its way through the crowd – there were at least a hundred inmates in the two spaces, each about twenty feet by twenty feet of fetid gloom – and he greeted them both with hugs. ‘Well, I suppose we shall all be shot,’ he said cheerfully.

  When arrested, Kopp told them, he had been carrying in his briefcase letters of recommendation from General Pozas, who was known to be on good terms with the communists; the letters, which stated that Kopp was needed for urgent matters at the front, were now somewhere in the office of the chief of police.

  A crazy resolve possessed Orwell: he would find the officer to whom the letters were addressed and ask him to retrieve them from the police. It might get Kopp released. He left Eileen and Kopp talking, and minutes later was walking around the labyrinth of corridors of the war office, where the man to whom Kopp’s letters of recommendation were addressed supposedly worked. So complex and rambling were the ministry’s endless network of corridors that he almost gave up, but eventually found the right office.

  Ushered in, he explained why he was there.

  ‘This Major Kopp, what force was he in?’

  ‘The 29th battalion.’

  ‘The POUM!’ The shock and alarm in his voice was unsettling. ‘And he was your commander?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which means that you too were serving in the POUM?’

  He swallowed hard. Lying wouldn’t help him now. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  The man left the room, and he could hear an animated discussion ensue outside. He was about to be arrested. His entrails turned to ice and his legs began to shake uncontrollably. He could feel it already, the truncheons, the fists, the humiliating grovelling on the floor, crying out for mercy … The man returned, put on his cap and asked Orwell to follow him to police headquarters. Momentarily he thought of running, but when they arrived the man entered the police chief’s office and began a loud argument, emerging some minutes later with the envelopes containing Kopp’s letters.

  He thanked him, and, as they parted, the man awkwardly shook his hand. It seemed a small thing, but happening right there, in front of the police headquarters and all it signified, and within sight of posters screaming that he was a Fifth Column traitor who had to be exterminated, it was an affirmation of something much more significant. He struggled to define it; in the end he could only conclude that, somehow, amid all this, the spirit of man still existed.

  *

  He, McNair and Cottman spent three evenings sleeping rough, first in a forgotten cemetery and then in the long grass at the end of a derelict building lot. By means of a morning visit to the public baths, a shoeshine (the anti-fascist salutes were long gone) and a shave, they managed to look quite normal, although they heard the patrols were onto this ruse and had taken to raiding the public baths at random. They spent their days playing the role of well-heeled English tourists, seeing the sights and eating in the more expensive restaurants, where the waiters had taken once again to wearing their boiled shirts and behaving in the most obsequious manner.

  Before leaving one fashionable restaurant, he went to the bathroom. With the door locked, it was one of the few places in the whole city where he could feel free from prying eyes and flapping ears. So this was what the revolution had come to.

  He combed his hair and, looking into the mirror, noticed how he had changed since he had arrived in Barcelona seven months ago. There was the scar in his neck, of course, and a few more grey hairs. He was only thirty-four, but he now knew something he hadn’t known back then. It wasn’t the conclusion others had reached: that all revolutions were a fraud and politics should be shunned. It was that people like him were on the way out. He was already a relic – not because of any physical decline, but because there was no longer any place in the world for those like him, pathetic romantics who believed in the truth and that men should be free to think as they chose. The future, he now understood, belonged to a new generation: to streamlined men with streamlined minds packed with lies, hate and power-worship – the sort of men who had rounded up Nin and Kopp and killed Bob Smillie and were now hunting him and Eileen.

  He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out his pen, unscrewed the cap and wrote on the wall in as large a script as he could: Visca POUM! – Long live the POUM! It was reckless, but he didn’t care. The communists, he concluded, would shoot him anyway if he was caught, no matter what he did; even if he had committed no actual crime, the case against him would be faked. In truth, no real laws existed anymore, the only crime being to oppose those in power.

  Just as he was about to leave there was a knock on the door. Already! They must have been followed; or perhaps the proprietor was an informer who had lured them into a trap, maybe with some sort of two-way mirror in the bathroom. The folly; the sheer, suicidal folly! He froze. The knock was repeated. He realised the worst thing would be to delay – which would be taken as a sure sign that he was hiding from someone. Carefully, he opened the door to find that it was only Cottman, who, like him, had drunk a lot of wine and needed to use the urinal.

  The next morning he, Eileen, McNair and Cottman boarded the train for France. Upon crossing the border, they purchased a French newspaper which carried a report on its front page saying that Cottman had been arrested as a Trotskyist spy. What to do but laugh?

  7

  The Stores, Wallington, March 1938. He ignored the approaching storm. In Wallington, ignoring the present came naturally. It was this quality – the feeling that this was somewhere they had forgotten to modernise, a vision of nostalgia turned into reality – that had attracted him to the tiny, two-street village in the first place. That wasn’t the sort of thing you admitted freely, of course. Nostalgia, they would say, stupid and useless nostalgia; only a fool would waste his time with it; all that really mattered was the future. But he never saw it that way. The moment he entered the village one half of him was back in another time. It was hard to say exactly what set him off: the familiar smells of chaff and sainfoin, the sweet mustiness of the ancient church, the sight of the burly farmhands drinking thick, dark
ale outside The Plough, the shady pond with its lurking dace, or maybe just the warm sunshine; in the past, of course, it is always summer. All he knew was that once his mind was back there, before August 1914, it seemed a good time to have been alive. Far better than now. The problem of the present, he reckoned, was that people couldn’t remember just how good the past had been.

  Wallington seemed just the place for them after Spain. The fleets of bombing planes, which he knew were on their way, likely wouldn’t waste their loads on so small a dot on the map. He and Eileen took up the lease of the village store, bought a bacon slicer and placed large bottles of boiled sweets behind the counter to sell to the local children. They spent their time writing and managing the shop, and their evenings in front of the fireplace reading and talking. On weekends they entertained friends up from London, she sitting on his lap, telling them of his many failures in animal husbandry. But no matter how much he and Eileen tried to run from it, the Spanish business wouldn’t let them go. They had escaped, but Kopp was still in prison and the bodies of his POUM comrades lay decomposing in front of Huesca. And of course he had his Spanish book to finish. He returned to it, thumping away at the keys.

  When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this – and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and physical suffering – the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

  He had begun by placing great hopes on the book – it was the wake-up call the left needed – but already he was assailed by doubts. From the notices in the Times and the political newspapers, he guessed the market for books on Spain was already glutted, and it occurred to him that it was only intellectuals who bought books of this kind. He couldn’t imagine his northern miners reading and discussing it at the pub, or even knowing of its existence, even though they, not the intellectuals, were the ones who could stop the nightmares being repeated here. If only they could be made conscious – but of course the moment they became conscious, they would cease to be themselves, and would instead surrender themselves to ‘objective political realities’. His mind was full of such paradoxes. Revolutions, he now realised, were all about paradoxes.