Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (55 page)

After that the gigantic parade in Barcelona should have been an anticlimax: but it wasn’t. “La Despedida,” the farewell, took place on the twenty-eighth, and until twenty minutes before it began there was no official announcement for fear the Nationalists would bomb the parade route. Incredibly, three hundred thousand people turned out on short notice, lining the broad Avenida Diagonal in the crisp autumn sunlight, waving from office windows and balconies, pelting the parading soldiers with flowers or scraps of paper covered with scribbled notes of thanks, and darting from the barricades to embrace them as they marched past. Capa, who had dressed carefully in a suit and tie in honor of the occasion, scrambled along beside the procession, sometimes shinnying up lampposts to get a better shot; across the avenue, the Spanish photographer Augustí Centelles was doing the same thing, and the two photographers played a little game, trying to catch each other in the backgrounds of their pictures. On either side of the Diagonal, at each intersection, were plaques bearing the names of the Brigades—Abraham Lincoln, Louise Michel, Hans Beimler—or of notable Brigade heroes; billboards were emblazoned with the names of the battles they had fought in: Las Rozas, Madrid, Teruel, Guadalajara, Belchite, Brunete.

On a dais, Negrín—looking formal today in topcoat and homburg—Luís Companys, General Rojo, and former president Azaña saluted the Brigades; behind them stood Constancia de la Mora, tears filling her eyes; in the bright blue sky her husband’s air force fighters darted to and fro to ward off any Nationalist bombers.

At the parade’s end, Republican troops, the only ones to carry arms, presented them under a giant portrait of Stalin and there were more speeches: Negrín, misty-eyed, promising Spanish citizenship to any of the men who returned to Spain after the war, and Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, in a flowered scarf and a torrent of rhetoric. “You are history!” she cried. “You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you, and when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory—come back!” Capa’s camera whirred, capturing the flurry of applauding hands, the storm of confetti. Everyone sang the “Hymn of Riego,” and then, leaving behind 9,934 dead and 7,686 missing, most of whom were already dead or soon would be, the seven thousand remaining men of the International Brigades shipped out to miserable, lice-ridden, unheated barracks in Catalan villages, where they would wait—some for months—for authentication and exit permits from the League of Nations commissioners sent to examine them before they were allowed to go home.

October 1938: Paris

Martha Gellhorn wasn’t in Barcelona for “La Despedida,” although in the story she wrote for
Collier’s
about that autumn in Spain she described the parade, with its marchers looking “very dirty and weary and young,” in such a way that it sounded as if she had been there. In fact, she and Hemingway were ensconced in Paris, where he’d just finished his two Madrid stories for
Esquire
, one an account of filming the failed offensive in the Casa de Campo, the other a version of the anecdote he’d put into
The Fifth Column
about the
miliciano
who’d been beaten and then shot to death in Chicote’s, back in the spring of 1937, for spraying patrons with a Flit gun full of lavender water. Except in his story he said it was eau de cologne, and the
miliciano
a civilian, and he made the whole thing a kind of parable of what happens to gaiety in the exigencies of war.

Hemingway was in a sour mood.
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories
had been published on October 14, and the reception for the collection he’d thought was “unbeatable” had been disappointing, with the stories coming in for praise while most critics had disparaged the play as melodrama or agitprop. Although seeing his collected short fiction gathered together between two covers had made him feel “I was alright as a sort of lasting business if I kicked off tomorrow,” the fact that “those guys” had just ganged up on him again took away all his pleasure in his achievement. It didn’t help that the book had sold 6,000 copies in two weeks; it would have sold
more
, he grumbled to Maxwell Perkins, if Scribner’s had taken out bigger ads, or given the book more space in its Fifth Avenue bookshop window.

He was, therefore, already seething with resentment when he and Martha read the news accounts, or saw the newsreels, about the disbanding of the International Brigades. To Hemingway, in this frame of mind, Negrín might as well have called off the war: he felt personally betrayed. And then he and Martha, entering their hotel lobby one evening, came face to face with Randalfo Pacciardi, the former commander of the Garibaldi Battalion, whom neither had seen since their first spring in Madrid. Pacciardi had left his command, and Spain, in August 1937, unhappy at the consolidation of his battalion into a Communist-controlled brigade, and furious at the government’s use of his troops in their campaign against the anarchists; since then he’d been living in penurious exile in Paris, where he’d founded an antifascist magazine,
La Giovine Italia
. Though he was dressed in civilian clothes instead of his khakis and jaunty cap, he was as charismatic a figure as ever; his abandonment of his command now seemed almost prescient, and his refusal to blame anyone for his predicament heroic. And Hemingway began to wonder if the war had not devolved into what he called “a carnival of treachery and rotten-ness” on both sides.

Leaving Pacciardi, he and Martha had started to climb the stairs to their room when Hemingway suddenly faltered and leaned against the wall, weeping. “They can’t do it,” he cried. “They can’t treat a brave man that way!” And Martha, seeing his tears for Pacciardi, and for the loss of what he had fought for in Spain, felt her heart melt at his “generosity & compassion.”

“I really did love E. then,” she wrote later.

November 1938: Barcelona

Two days after Barcelona bade goodbye to the remnants of the International Brigades, Nationalist troops began a fierce counteroffensive along the Ebro, bombing Republican positions in the Sierra de Caballos east of Gandesa, then advancing to take possession of the only high point left in government hands, at Pandols. The Ebro Valley now lay open to Nationalist attack; but although it was clear that there was no way the war would now end well for the Republic, no one—not the journalists, or the photographers, or the soldiers, or the members of the government, least of all Prime Minister Negrín—would acknowledge the fact. “In a war,” Hemingway would write later, speaking of this time, “you can never admit, even to yourself, that it is lost. Because when you will admit it is lost you will be beaten.”

Hemingway arrived in Barcelona for what he knew was the last time on November 4. At the Majestic, he had a reunion of sorts with Herbert Matthews, Tom Delmer, Jimmy Sheean, Hans Kahle—who as a divisional commander in the Popular Army had taken him around the battlefield at Guadalajara—and Capa. Sheean had some bad news for him: young Jim Lardner had disappeared on September 21, the day of the dissolution order, and was presumed killed, almost certainly one of the last International Brigade casualties. Did Hemingway remember then what he had said to Prudencio de Pereda at the beginning of the war?
If you didn’t get killed you would get wonderful material, and if you did get killed it would be in a good cause.

The others filled Hemingway in on the military situation: Enrique Líster, whose troops he, Matthews, and Delmer had followed in triumph into Teruel, had been holding a bridgehead on the far side of the Ebro, but the Nationalists were pressing his position and it was clear he would have to fall back. Kahle, who as an army officer had papers to get past any roadblock, was offering to accompany some of the journalists to Líster’s headquarters; so very early the next morning they set out in two cars—Kahle, Hemingway, and the
Daily Telegraph
’s Henry Buckley in one, and Matthews, Capa, and Sheean in the other. Stopping for breakfast along the way, they learned that the bridge over the Ebro at Mora, which they’d meant to use, was gone—first bombed and then swept away when the rebels reopened the Ebro floodgates upstream. It might be possible to get across by boat, though—they’d have to see when they got there.

Matthews’s car, a lumbering Belgian Minerva with a faulty clutch that had replaced the broken-down Ford he’d had at Teruel, had trouble navigating the rutted road and was soon lagging far behind Kahle’s official automobile. The fields on either side of the dirt road were empty in the November sunlight, and as they drew nearer to the front the sound of bombs and cannonades made the road seem even more exposed. When the Minerva reached Mora la Nueve, on the left bank of the river, the journalists found a deserted village filled with wrecked houses, and Kahle’s car and its occupants were nowhere to be seen. Shells were coming over the shattered streets, and a couple of sentries tried to wave the journalists away. “
Muy peligroso!
” they shouted. Matthews found a ruined stable near a crossroads and drove the car into it, figuring it was as good as anywhere else to stow it in case they
were
able to get across the river and back.

For a while the four men stood by the stable trying to see if there were any signs of Kahle, Hemingway, and Buckley; but the shells started landing closer and closer, whistling over their heads and exploding about fifty yards up the road, sending them diving for cover in the debris-filled stable yard. As they were picking themselves up from the ground, Sheean remarked to Capa that it was a bad day for photographers, but Capa shot him a withering look. “This is the only kind of day that is
any
good for photographers,” he said scornfully, picking a wisp of straw from his tweed jacket.

Just then they saw Hemingway coming up the street looking for them: He and the others had been waiting down by the river, where Kahle had found some soldiers willing to row them across in exchange for cigarettes from Hemingway’s supply. They all trooped down and climbed into the soldiers’ boat, a big flat-bottomed tub, and shoved off into the fast-flowing ocher-colored water; the opening of the floodgates had created a strong current and the oarsmen had to pull hard to keep from being swept downstream. Once on the opposite bank the journalists walked uphill from Mora de Ebro along a dusty road to Líster’s headquarters, a white farmhouse on a rise with a view of the river valley and the sierra beyond; from the wooded slopes they could hear the rattle of machine-gun fire that meant the enemy was advancing. It was hot in the sun, and the men stripped off their coats and pullovers and neckties. Líster came out of his headquarters to chat with them, and Capa photographed him and Hemingway sitting on a stone parapet on the farmhouse terrace. Líster looked tired, although he was cheerful and cordial; and Hemingway had lost the jaunty confidence he’d radiated at Teruel. Instead he seemed tentative and wary. Líster excused himself several times to take telephone calls inside the house, finally coming back to tell them they would all have to leave, and quickly, because he was giving orders for a retreat.

Walking back to Mora they passed a handful of battered tanks on the road, and the soldiers riding on them shook their fists in the air: a photo opportunity. Buckley and Matthews took out their cameras and clicked away but Capa, unimpressed, left his dangling on its strap. “This kind of thing is no good to me,” he complained. “These are not pictures of action. I can’t take good photographs unless I’m in the front lines.” When they reached the river they piled into the boat for the return crossing; but the vagaries of the current made rowing in this direction more difficult, and when they were in the middle of the river a burst of shellfire made the soldiers drop their oars and duck for cover beneath the gunwales. Suddenly the small craft started drifting dangerously downstream toward the blackened spars of the bombed-out bridge. Kahle, sure they would founder on the wreckage and have to swim for it, began pulling off his boots; Capa started shooting pictures; but Hemingway, who’d learned a thing or two about rowing guide boats up in Michigan as a boy, seized the oars and began to pull against the current as if his life depended on it. And gradually the boat’s prow turned away from the remnants of the bridge and they reached the other side safely.

The next day, November 6, Matthews drove Hemingway from Barcelona to Ripoll, near the French border, where the remnants of the Lincoln Battalion were waiting for evacuation, shivering in their filthy quarters. On a street in the village they found Alvah Bessie, hobbling along with the aid of a stick, so crippled with rheumatic pain that he’d been unable to march in the Brigades’ parade. Hemingway had first met Bessie in Madrid, at the Hotel Florida, and had last seen him in April after he and his companions had escaped from the Nationalists during the Great Retreats along the Ebro. Then Hemingway had still felt full of zeal and confidence; but the past weeks had unsettled him, and he was like a boxer who has taken a punch and doesn’t know how it happened.

“I’m glad to see you got out of this alive,” Hemingway said to Bessie.

“I am, too,” Bessie responded.

“Because,” Hemingway went on, as if Bessie had not spoken, “I always felt responsible for your being here.”

Bessie must have looked perplexed, because Hemingway continued: “You heard the speech I made at the Writers’ Congress?” Bessie nodded. “I know that speech was responsible for a lot of guys coming over,” Hemingway said, as if he had been a one-man recruiting office for the International Brigades. Bessie just stared at him.

*   *   *

On the night of November 6, “Bola” Boleslavskaya, Mikhail Koltsov’s old
Pravda
colleague, had a party in her rooms at the Majestic to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution and the relief of Madrid by the International Brigades in 1936. It was a fête like the ones they’d all had in Madrid in what seemed increasingly like the good old days: the Sheeans were there, and Matthews, and Capa, and Hemingway, and André Malraux, and Georges Soria, and Dinah Sheean’s brother, Arthur Forbes, a right-wing
Daily Express
correspondent, and many others besides. Capa organized provisions, sending people to get ham, beans,
bacalao
, and wine, and dragooning Forbes into lugging all the foodstuffs back to the Majestic under a bright full moon. “It’s a bomber’s moon,” Capa helpfully told him—and indeed there were air raids early in the evening, which they all watched from the hotel roof: bombs and antiaircraft fire thundering in the distance, red tracer bullets streaking across the sky, and searchlights illuminating the silver bodies of the Italian Savoias as they flew overhead.