Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (56 page)

When the raids stopped, everyone came back to Bola’s rooms and they put Strauss waltzes on the Victrola, and Capa and Georges Soria pinned flowers in their hair and danced to “Rustle of Spring,” Capa tossing flowers to all the girls. Then Agrippina, the Asturian singer famous for her appearances on the front lines, led them in “Viva la Quince Brigada”; and at midnight somebody suggested they should make speeches to mark the occasion. But Bola’s chauffeur, a tall, taciturn Madrileño, raised his hand to shush them. Instead, he said, they should all stand and observe a moment of silence for those who had died in defense of Madrid.

Those who weren’t already standing struggled to their feet. The names of the dead—from Madrid, from Brunete, from Aragon and the Sierra and the Ebro—were too numerous to utter aloud. But they all bowed their heads for a moment and remembered.

The next morning, eager to rejoin Martha in Paris, Hemingway got Matthews to drive him to Perpignan. For him the war was over.

*   *   *

While the Italians were bombing Barcelona and Bola’s guests were singing and dancing at the Majestic, Loyalist troops were splashing across a tributary of the Ebro, the Segre, near the town of Fraga, forty miles west of Barcelona. Spreading themselves out along a six-mile stretch of riverbank, they prepared to launch an attack on the highlands to the west that would—it was hoped—distract the Nationalists from their drive on the Ebro at Mora. The attack was meant to be a secret, so there was no preliminary artillery barrage or bombing of enemy positions; but somehow the news leaked out in Barcelona, and as Capa was leaving Bola’s party he heard about it. Within hours he was at the front.

When he arrived, pontoon bridges had just been built to bring in supplies to the attackers and carry out the wounded, and there were already stretchers lined up along the bank. Next to one of them a soldier draped in a blanket against the morning chill was bent over, painstakingly writing down the muttered words of his comrade on the stretcher; from the man’s glazed expression and the bloody bandage wrapped around his head Capa guessed they would be the last he spoke.

Among the troops mustered on the riverbank was a company of marineros, seafarers from Asturias, whom Capa had encountered at Teruel. He attached himself to their unit and when they moved out he went with them, huffing up the slope from the river, through the olive orchards and scrub to the rocky hills above. The company commander, a former lawyer in incongruous horn-rimmed glasses, hunkered down with his officers and a map under an overhanging ledge, getting his final orders over a hastily strung field telephone; and the political commissar spoke to the men, telling them where they were going and how much was at stake. Then, after daubing mud all over their helmets for camouflage, they all picked up their weapons and blanket rolls—some of them strapping grenades to their chests—and headed for the hilltop.

It wasn’t long before the incoming fire started: first rifles and machine guns, then artillery shells. Capa kept moving forward, using his camera like a weapon. He didn’t stop to think. A man in front of him was running uphill with a cigarette in his mouth when he was hit and doubled over, the cigarette still clenched in his teeth. Another was shot in the leg: one of his comrades picked him up, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him toward the stretcher bearers who’d been following the assault. All around men were stumbling forward and firing and ducking for cover; the air was hazy with explosives and alive with bullets. At the top of the first hill a small roofless farmhouse looked like it might provide shelter, and Capa started toward it behind a handful of soldiers; just then a shell landed squarely on it, a cloud of dust and smoke filling Capa’s viewfinder. When the smoke cleared, the house and the soldiers hiding in it were gone.

The fighting went on all day. Eventually Capa’s company managed to secure a small hamlet on one of the windswept hills, where they paused to regroup and gather their wounded for evacuation, and Capa made his way back to Barcelona. In his camera were pictures that were nothing like what he had taken when he first came to Spain; they weren’t even like what he had
thought
he would take back then. Blurry, chaotic, choppily framed, immediate, and terrifying—these were pictures of what war really was like. And when he sent them on to Paris, they created a sensation.
Life
gave them two pages,
Regards
five pages and the back cover,
Match
seven pages; and the British magazine
Picture Post
ran them in an eleven-page spread prefaced by a huge portrait of Capa over the caption: “The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa.”

The Segre offensive, however, was a failure. The Nationalists rallied, and pushed the Republicans back again across both the Segre and the Ebro. On November 15, leaving between ten and fifteen thousand dead and an enormous amount of precious war matériel behind, the remnants of the government’s army crossed the iron bridge over the Ebro at Flix and blew it up behind them.

*   *   *

After seeing Hemingway off for New York on the
Normandie
, Martha Gellhorn arrived in Barcelona on November 21, intending to write the story about the sufferings of the civilian population that she’d tried to interest
Collier’s
in the previous April. Perhaps she felt that, having delivered three tough analytical reportages about Europe to her editors, they owed her this; perhaps, too, she knew this would be her last chance to write about Spain.

She went to hospitals, reporting on the children lying in the wards, staring with huge dark eyes; to food lines, where tiny pieces of salt cod and little packets of rice or dried peas were doled out to housewives who would have to feed their families on these starvation rations; to munitions factories, where shells were made out of fabric that in peacetime would have been turned into women’s summer dresses. Sometimes she was with Herbert Matthews, who was still besotted with her—“underneath she’s a lot softer than she seems,” he wrote defensively to his wife, Nancie—sometimes with Capa, whom she had unaccountably not met in Madrid with Hemingway, and whom she took to immediately. “He was my brother, my real brother,” she would later say; and although he made her laugh (always an important touchstone for her) they also fought, loudly and passionately, about almost anything. How could she write about suffering and injustice and expect it to end? he would ask.
You are more stupid than a herd of mules.
And she would shout at him that he was a self-involved cynic.
Do you think taking pictures of wars and refugees is any way to help people?
At its best, though, her journalism was very like his: short, sharp vignettes that put you into the frame with her subjects; at its worst, when in her zeal to make a point she made up facts to go with it, it fell into traps that he had learned to avoid.

One night he held her hand during an air raid, and she teased him about the camel’s hair coat he was wearing, a coat with wide lapels and enormous mother-of-pearl buttons that he’d bought in Paris; it was vulgar, she told him, and it wasn’t right to wear it in Barcelona where everyone was freezing and starving. He didn’t care, he said. He had always wanted a coat like this, and if he had to die in an air raid, he would die wearing it. Not that he seemed afraid of dying—he was, Martha observed, “always very brave and always saying how frightened he was. He had none of Hemingway’s bravado.”

Early in December, both Martha and Capa left Barcelona for Paris. After writing up her Barcelona story for
Collier’s
Martha was going on to New York, where Hemingway was waiting for her. Although she’d confessed to Herbert Matthews that she wasn’t sure their relationship had a future, she needed to test it for herself. As for Capa, his coverage of the Segre campaign, coupled with the drawn-out farewells to the men with whom he, and Gerda, had experienced so much, had left him emotionally and physically depleted. When he got home to the rue Froidevaux he was, as he wrote to his mother, “so sick I had an absolute breakdown.”

December 1938: Moscow

Constancia de la Mora loved Moscow. She had first visited it in the autumn of 1937, when Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros had suffered a stroke and she had decided he should go to Russia to recuperate (“No other country in Europe could cure Ignacio, I knew”); and now she was back, again with Hidalgo, this time on a mission to save—not her husband, but the Spanish Republic. The army had suffered huge losses, of men but also of arms and ammunition, in the disastrous Ebro campaign, and Prime Minister Negrín had sent his air force chief and his propagandist wife to beg Stalin for more war matériel. Specifically, he wanted 250 aircraft, 250 tanks, 4,000 machine guns, 650 artillery, and other ordnance and ammunition.

General Secretary Stalin invited Hidalgo and Constancia to the Kremlin for dinner, and when the pair walked into the dining room where Stalin, Defense Minister Voroshilov, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian prime minister, were sitting, all three men rose to greet them; the expression on his wife’s face, Hidalgo would later say, was unforgettable. Despite this warm welcome, Hidalgo was apprehensive about asking for Stalin’s help; Russian advisors in Spain had complained that Prime Minister Negrín was waging “a very expensive war.”

Stalin smiled at him, that smile that could strike terror when you knew what lay behind it, and looked at Voroshilov, who smiled back.

“Your war is a very inexpensive war … Very inexpensive! So inexpensive and so important that we will continue to send you everything you need. Whatever you need!”

There was, of course, a price: an amount equivalent to $103 million. But, alas, of the enormous wealth—more than $500 million in gold and silver—that Spain had transferred to Moscow at the beginning of the war, there was less than $100,000 left. Fortunately, Stalin would allow Hidalgo to purchase the arms on credit, with only his signature as a guarantee.

It wasn’t until, months later, some of the promised arms failed to materialize, that Constancia permitted herself the tiniest flicker of doubt. “Why didn’t Stalin send us what he promised?” she wondered to a friend, Enrique Castro Delgado, one of the founders of the Communist Fifth Regiment. “Could he have tricked us?”

To which Castro confidently responded: “Stalin never tricks anyone, at least not Communists.”

*   *   *

In the year since he had been recalled from Spain, Mikhail Koltsov had publicly thrown himself into an embrace of every official position of the Communist Party in an effort to keep the noose he feared was waiting for him away from his neck. He’d even denounced Nikolai Bukharin, Ilya Ehrenburg’s friend and Stalin’s former staunch ally against Trotsky, who’d been tried for treason the previous spring; and he’d toed the Party line by insisting that Andrés Nin and the POUM had been in league with Franco. But he knew he was protesting too much. “I think I’m going out of my mind,” he told his brother, the cartoonist Boris Efimov. “Surely, as a member of the editorial board of
Pravda
, a well-known journalist, a parliamentary deputy, I should be able to explain to others the meaning of what is going on, the reason for so many denunciations and arrests. But … I know nothing, understand nothing.”

Certainly he didn’t know why he hadn’t been included in the just-concluded meetings between Stalin, Voroshilov, and Molotov and his own old friend from Spain, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, as he told Hidalgo himself when they had dinner on December 9. He wondered what fate held in store for an antifascist like himself in a Russia where communication channels were being opened to Nazi Germany. And he was worried that only the day before, Nikolai Yezhov, whom he’d regarded as a protector, had been replaced as people’s commissar and NKVD overlord by Lavrenti Beria.

On the other hand, he was riding an extraordinary crest of success and popularity: in the summer he’d been elected to the Supreme Soviet, and the serialization of his Spanish diary in
Novyi Mir
had been the talk of Moscow. Stalin himself had called him into his box at the Bolshoi to congratulate him on his achievement, and there was no talk of whether or not Koltsov might be contemplating suicide, as had been suggested in their meeting in December of ’36. In fact, the general secretary had made an extraordinary and complimentary request: he had just completed a history of the Bolshevik Party, he said, and he would be honored if Comrade Koltsov would consent to introduce it with a lecture at the Writers’ Union in December.

The date fixed for the lecture was December 12; and two days before that Koltsov was given another honor that filled his cup almost to overflowing: he was made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Late on the afternoon of the twelfth, in the spacious mansion in Bolshaya Nikitskaya that Tolstoy had used as the model for the Rostovs’ house in
War and Peace
, he presented Stalin’s party history to an enthusiastic audience of Writers Union members and their guests. At the end of the evening he went to his office at
Pravda
to take care of a few odds and ends; that’s where he was when the black van, which Muscovites called a
voronka
—a crow—pulled up at the curb and the NKVD agents came for him. At the Lubyanka, where he was tortured and interrogated over a period of fourteen months, they took his glasses away.
Without glasses everything looks black to me
, he’d said to Gustav Regler in Madrid:
If they ever shoot me I’ll have to ask them not to take my glasses off first
.

He didn’t get the chance. On February 1, 1940, after a twenty-minute trial, he was convicted of espionage and treason—just one more of the Russian advisors to Spain, among them the generals Vladimir Gorev and Emilio Kléber and Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg, who needed to be liquidated now that Stalin had changed his mind about what game he was playing.

January 1939: New York

Claiming business in New York, where he had to discuss revisions to
The Fifth Column
with its producer, the Theatre Guild, Hemingway escaped from Christmas in Key West as soon as he decently could. Or sooner—he and Pauline could not keep from quarreling. Nor could he keep rancor out of his relations with Benjamin F. Glaser, the screenwriter the Theatre Guild had hired to adapt the not-yet-ready-for-Broadway
Fifth Column
for stage production. Glaser’s contract forbade him from making any adverse criticisms of the Spanish government or the Communist Party, and required him to get the author’s approval for any changes; but even so Hemingway complained to his mother-in-law that “the Jews” had so cheapened what he’d originally written that “it should be called the 4.95 Column marked down from 5.” He insisted on writing new material himself to replace what Glaser had done, and although Glaser and the Theatre Guild accepted his revisions, Hemingway was by now so disgusted with the whole process that he was telling everyone he should have written the damned thing as a novel.