The Great Depression (58 page)

Liversedge’s group arrived at the Pennsylvania Station the following morning and booked into the nearby YMCA. Liversedge took his little flag and met his contact, who sent him to an address in the warehouse district. Here a second contact man told him the group would be sailing aboard the SS
President Roosevelt
in five days. He gave Liversedge the steamboat tickets and, on the day before the sailing, a sum of money to be divided temporarily among the men when the ship docked at Le Havre – in case the French officials demanded proof that the new arrivals were solvent.

All the elaborate attempts at secrecy fooled nobody on the various vessels that took the volunteers across the Atlantic. Ships’ crews, passengers, customs agents in France – all knew exactly what was going on. Eighty or ninety young men of limited means, all dressed in hand-me-down clothing and carrying battered suitcases, obviously weren’t headed for the Paris Exposition. On the
Roosevelt
, Liversedge’s group encountered a similar party of Italian Americans intent on joining the Garibaldi Battalion in Spain, where they would presumably be fighting their former compatriots on the Franco side.

On the night before the
Roosevelt
docked, the ship held the usual gala dinner with paper hats, extra beer, and plenty of singing and shouting. Liversedge remarked to one of the stewards that it had been a real bang-up affair. “Hell,” came the reply, “the bunch on the last trip going to Spain nearly tore the dining saloon apart.” Only then did Liversedge realize that everybody on board had known their destination.

Lionel Edwards, travelling earlier on the same ship, learned to his astonishment that an elderly Irish couple returning to their native land had kept to their cabin, “terribly frightened because they had been told that on the ship there were ninety-three raving Bolsheviks.” It was some days before they ventured out, but in the end they agreed to have their picture taken with the Canadians.

By the time Bill Beeching’s group arrived at Le Havre on the SS
Alona
, everybody knew who the Canadians were and most crowded around to wish them good luck. Big Orton Wade gave
each man thirty dollars to show the officials that they were solvent, then stood behind the barrier, in full view, as they handed it back. When Wade opened his own suitcase for inspection it was found to contain a bottle of gin, a pair of socks, and little else. In Beeching’s description, the customs inspector’s eyes “opened very big and he looked at him and he looked at Wade and he looked back at that and then he closed it and marked it with a piece of chalk.”

Both the British and the American governments tried, through members of their embassies, to persuade the volunteers to go back home. Lionel Edwards and his group were met at Le Havre by two officials, one of whom said, “Gentlemen, we are authorized by our respective governments to fully pay for your return fare to your country and town or village. No questions asked and no prosecution. And further, the border to Spain is closed.” There were no takers.

The Communists provided the train fare to Paris. On the train, a member of the French
sûreté
pleaded with one group not to waste their lives going to Spain. They would, he said, be fighting for a lost cause. The volunteers, in a spirited discussion, told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.

In Paris, the newcomers were sent to the headquarters of the International Committee for Volunteers, a three-storey building half a block long in the Rue Mathurin Moreau. There they were assigned hotel rooms, given money for meals, provided with new cover stories, and told to get rid of their identifying suitcases and all surplus clothing. That went to a special depot where it was sold for the cause or dispensed to wounded volunteers returning from Spain.

The following day the Canadians were taken to a big room where an instructor drilled each group thoroughly on the routes they were to take and the contacts they were to meet at each stage of their journey. Some of these instructions might have come from one of the E. Phillips Oppenheim spy novels popular at that time. Liversedge overheard one instructor outlining the course to be followed by a group of American volunteers: “When you reach Orleans, you will leave the train. On the platform will be a girl sitting on a bench close to the news-stand. She will be dressed in a black skirt, a red leather short jacket, a red beret, and she will have a poodle dog on a leash, and will be reading a
magazine … and you will follow her at a distance, but always keeping her in sight.…”

Liversedge’s group, which was taking a different route, received simpler instructions. A stranger was brought in and the Canadians were told to examine him closely from all sides and memorize his features so that they could pick him out in a crowd. He would be their contact when they reached Marseille.

The need for secrecy en route to the border towns was carefully stressed, but on the train south, Bill Beeching was amused to realize that every man was easily identifiable by the brown-paper parcel, tied with string, he carried in lieu of the discarded suitcase. In some French towns the citizens rushed out and greeted them with the upraised fist of the Popular Front. So much for secrecy.

Nonetheless, the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere intensified as they neared the border. Beeching’s party, staying at a hotel in a town in the south of France, was told to use only yellow taxis – the driver would know where to go. On a certain day his party was to stand on a certain corner until a mysterious bus arrived. They were to climb aboard and, no matter what anybody said, maintain that they were tourists.

The bus took them to Perpignan at the foot of the Pyrenees. From this point they faced a dangerous and gruelling journey on foot over the mountains to Figueras in Spain. They were taken to an assembly point where they met their guides – veteran smugglers – stocky, sturdy men who wore berets and carried a stick and a blanket.

“This part is dangerous,” Beeching’s group was told. “There are border patrols, they have dogs, they have rifles and you are totally unarmed.… You will not smoke unless I tell you to smoke because smoke lays in the air. You’d better be careful and do what I tell you to do because you can be killed with a fall.” Then their guide passed out pairs of rope-soled shoes, laced at the ankles, for the climb.

Ross Russell, the Woolworth’s employee from Montreal, was held with a dozen others in a store in Perpignan for twenty-four hours, forbidden to go outside in daylight. At last they were herded out into the dark to find a long line of buses drawn up to take them to the assembly point. In spite of the supposed clandestine
nature of their journey, the whole town, which had a communist mayor, turned out to see them off.

There seemed to be hundreds of volunteers at the assembly point, meeting their guides and talking in a dozen languages. They set off in single file, following the goat trail through the foothills, one guide leading, one in the middle, a third bringing up the rear. They walked for three hours at a fast pace without a break, for they had to be across the border before dawn. When the man ahead of Russell, a big blond French Basque, could no longer stand the pace, his smaller brother helped to drag him along.

This was the most arduous part of the journey. Jules Paivio crossed the mountains in a blizzard with some thirty others. In the high altitude, one obese volunteer found he couldn’t breathe. Six of his friends tied themselves together and literally dragged him across. Milton Cohen, a young pharmacy graduate from the University of Montreal who crossed the Pyrenees in June, saw the man ahead of him collapse. A guide picked him up and carried him over his shoulder to the border. Not everyone made it: some men stumbled off the trails and fell into the ice-cold streams; others who sprained their ankles had to be hidden and left behind to be picked up on the guides’ return journey.

Murray Saunders, a Canadian from Alberta, crossed the mountains with a single companion and no guide. The pair had somehow been missed when the various parties were taken from the barn in which they had been hiding. “Well,” said Saunders, “we came here to go to Spain.… That’s Spain in that direction and tonight we leave this barn and over we go.” Off they went, blindly. After several hours they met a shepherd who pointed the way to Spain. Later, another shepherd appeared and led them on.

Saunders realized he was in Spain when he saw bullet scars on some of the buildings. Here the pair ran into a convoy of trucks. “Can you drive?” somebody asked him. Saunders replied that he’d been a chauffeur in Canada. “Well, get in and drive to Albacete,” he was told, and that was how he rejoined his comrades.

For Bill Beeching the long mountain trek was an adventure: “You taxed your physical strength and your determination.” For others it was an ordeal; the realization that the border had been
crossed came as a blessed relief. When Tommy Bailey, who was raised in the Palliser Triangle, reached the little shed where the Spanish border patrol was stationed, he looked down the slopes toward the green forests and meadows of ancient Ara and cried out, as only a boy from the dust bowl of Saskatchewan could. “Why,” he said, remembering the sullen desert of dust and thistle that he had left behind, “why, it’s like being in Heaven!”

Ron Liversedge’s party did not reach Spain by way of the Pyrenees, and some of it, tragically, did not reach it at all. He and his fourteen men were dispatched by train to Marseille to board a ship for Barcelona. They travelled in three groups of five. At Marseille, Liversedge’s group, following orders, left the station by the main entrance, ignored the line of taxis on the street, turned sharp left, and walked a block to a short street behind the station. There they spotted three cabs and, again following instructions, took the first one to No. 1 Thournabeau Street. They left the taxi and walked down the street to the Hotel Camard where, after a whispered password to the proprietor, they registered. The other two groups of five, having memorized their contact man’s face in Paris, spotted him in the crowd and followed him at a short distance. When he entered a café, one group followed, ordered coffee, and waited to be collected. The contact left the café and led the other group to a second café, where, they, too, were collected.

Meanwhile, Liversedge and his party found the Hotel Camard crowded with volunteers from all over the world. There, another contact man gave each of them five francs, and they spent the next three days strolling about the city. Then still another contact arrived to lead them to their ship, the
Ciudad de Barcelona
, a Spanish coastal freighter that was to be their home for the next four days.

The ship was jammed with men, some of whom had already been on board for forty-eight hours. Liversedge and his group were led down a long, narrow passage, stuffy and smelling of bilge. When the police searched the ship, as they did periodically,
everybody was forced to crowd into a tiny space behind a bulkhead door until they left. The men were fed two meals daily of bread, fish, and wine, but they could not wash, shave, or go up onto the deck until the vessel sailed.

By embarkation day, May 28, two hundred and forty volunteers were crammed onto the ship, including ten other Canadians who had come down from Paris with Liversedge. At last, with darkness falling and the ship steaming out of port, they were allowed on deck. Liversedge now shared a first-class cabin with another Canadian, George Sarvas, and was able for the first time to wash. In the dining room, the volunteers were served octopus stew, a strange dish that Liversedge didn’t care for. The day would come, however, when his thoughts would turn back longingly to that banquet.

He found it eerie to move around the crowded deck in the pitch dark, listening to a dozen languages. By that time he had located all fifteen of the original draft and found there were other Canadians on board. In the lounge that night, the volunteers staged an impromptu concert with songs in various tongues. The following morning they entered Spanish waters and Liversedge could see the coast three or four miles away. Above them an airplane dipped and circled. They shook their fists at the man in the cockpit: a Franco supporter? Barcelona was forty miles away; they were due to land about five that afternoon.

Liversedge went down below for a nap but had barely settled on his bunk when a tremendous explosion shook the ship. It seemed almost to leap out of the ocean before settling back with a shudder. The engines ceased to hum. The
Ciudad de Barcelona
was dead in the water.

He sprang from his bed, thinking a naval shell had landed on deck. In fact, the ship had been torpedoed by an Italian submarine. Sensing there was no time to lose, Liversedge didn’t bother to dress. He stuffed a rubber tobacco pouch into his shirt behind his life jacket and bolted for the door in his underwear. Through a porthole on the stairway he could see the shoreline, a long way off and apparently tilted.

When he reached the deck, he saw that the ship’s stern was already under water and she was listing to port, surrounded by a mass of floating wreckage – barrels, crates, cases, planking, canvas,
even wooden bunks. He could see, bobbing in the midst of this flotsam, the heads of men who had been flung overboard and also floating bodies, surrounded by a widening stain of crimson.

A lifeboat hung over the ship’s starboard side, its ropes tangled in the davits. Fifty men crowded into the boat while one hacked away at the lines with an axe, but it was so overloaded that when the lines snapped, it plunged into the ocean and went straight to the bottom.

Liversedge found that he could now step directly from the deck into the water. He started to swim away from the foundering freighter but could not help looking back, fascinated by the spectacle of the ship’s last moments. There on the deck was a man he knew, Karl Francis, trying to pull himself over the ship’s rail. Men struggling in the sea were yelling at him to drop, but Francis was frozen with shock; when the ship went down, he went down with it. No more than five minutes had elapsed since the torpedo struck.

A seaplane appeared, seeking the submarine, and dropped depth charges, which burst under water. The force of these explosions was such that, for a moment, Liversedge thought his legs were coming off. The plane landed and took as many survivors aboard as it could accommodate, then flew off, never to return.