We Saw Spain Die (12 page)

Newspapermen would often try to cheat the censorship in both zones, although the consequences were infinitely more severe in the rebel zone for those caught doing so. The most frequently used trick, as noted by Edward Knoblaugh and Virginia Cowles, was the use of incomprehensible slang. A different ruse was attempted by Frederick Voigt, the Berlin correspondent of the Manchester
Guardian.
He had arrived for a flying visit in Madrid at the end of April 1937 preceded by the apocryphal accolade that the Gestapo had put a price on his head. Because he was also regarded as a confidant of the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, Gustav Regler was deputed to give him an exhaustive tour of the trenches outside Madrid. Jotting down her impressions of the trip, Josephine Herbst found him to be unprepossessing: ‘peculiar Voigt with his hair unwinding around pinkish skull, small childish features but firm large chin and too heavy top of head grey wisps too long uncovering attempted covered baldness’. Voigt revealed his prejudices when he expressed his astonishment that the Republican Army was organized at all.
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His anti-Republican views came out more explicitly in a conversation with Hemingway. On the morning after Voigt’s arrival at the Hotel Florida, Hemingway asked him of his first impressions. No doubt influenced by what he read in Nazi Germany, Voigt replied: ‘There is a terror here. There is evidence of it wherever you go. Thousands of bodies are being found.’ When Hemingway asked where he had seen the bodies, Voigt replied that, although he had not actually been out yet, they were everywhere.

Already unimpressed by a man who tried to cover his baldness by carefully weaving long wisps of blond hair back and forth across his pate, Hemingway laboriously explained how the Republic had made
huge efforts to impose order and that, apart from those executed for espionage, ‘for months Madrid had been as safe and well policed from any terror as any capital in Europe’. This was something of an exaggeration but it was certainly true that massive strides had been made and that the streets were not littered with bodies as Voigt suggested. Not wanting to substantiate Voigt’s obsession with terror, and because they were in Martha Gellhorn’s room, Hemingway controlled his impulse to hit him. However, later on the same day, knowing that Ernest and Martha were about to return to the United States, Voigt gave her a sealed envelope and asked her to post it in France. He claimed that it contained a carbon copy of an already censored dispatch from the Teruel front which he wanted to make sure reached the
Guardian.
When Martha told Ernest, he insisted on taking it to Arturo Barea at the censorship office where the contents turned out to be an article denouncing the ‘fact’ that the bodies of thousands of the victims of the terror were lying around. Hemingway commented:

It made liars out of every honest correspondent in Madrid. And this guy had written it without stirring from his hotel the first day he arrived. The only ugly thing was that the girl to whom he had entrusted it could, under the rules of war, have been shot as a spy if it had been found among her papers when she was leaving the country.
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Whatever ‘the rules of war’, there were very few cases of hostile journalists being imprisoned, let alone shot, by the Republic.

Although the Republican government had to exercise some control over dispatches sent to foreign newspapers, correspondents in the loyalist zone seemed to move around relatively unhindered. The Australian Noel Monks, a pious teetotal Catholic, was initially sympathetic to Franco but was deeply shocked by what he saw at Guernica, the dead, the dying and the refugees. He wrote later:

Airplanes, bombs, bullets, fire. Within twenty-four hours Franco was going to brand these shocked homeless people as liars before the whole world. So-called British experts were going to come to
Guernica months afterwards, when the smell of burnt human flesh had been replaced by petrol dumped here and there among the ruins, and deliver pompous judgements: ‘Guernica was set on fire by the Reds.’ My answer to them is unprintable. No government official had accompanied me to Guernica. I wandered among the ruins and survivors at will. I drove back to Bilbao and had to wake up the operator – it was two in the morning – to send my message. Censorship had been lifted. The man who sent my urgent dispatch couldn’t read English. If the ‘Reds’ had destroyed Guernica, I for one could have blown the whole story for all they knew. And how I would have blown it had it been true!
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Guernica was the subject of one of the most important articles produced during the Spanish Civil War. It was the work of George Lowther Steer, the special envoy of
The Times
with the Republican forces in Bilbao during the spring of 1937. He had been with Noel Monks in Bilbao on the night of 26 April when the news arrived that Guernica had been bombed. Together they drove to the burning town and spoke at length to the survivors. Steer’s despatch, which appeared on 28 April in
The Times
and the
New York Times,
was factual and eschewed sensationalism. Without it, and those of Noel Monks, Christopher Holme of Reuters and Mathieu Corman of the Parisian
Ce Soir,
the truth might have been buried under the massive blanket of disinformation woven by the rebel press chief, Luis Bolín, and maintained by the Franco regime for a further thirty-five years.
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Despite all the efforts of Arturo Barea, Ilsa Kulcsar and later Constancia de la Mora and Rosario del Olmo to facilitate news-gathering within the Republican zone, the life of the correspondents was hard and often dangerous. In the last week of May 1938, dragging a suitcase containing tins of sardines, tuna, ham and butter, Vincent Sheean of the
New York Herald Tribune
came from Valencia to a now desperately hungry Madrid. In the Hotel Victoria in the Plaza del Ángel near the Puerta del Sol, he found that the standard fare was aged dried cod
(bacalao)
and lentils. The hotel was regularly shelled and fellow guests, such as Willy Forrest, urged him to take no notice of the machine-gun
fire that could be heard from his room. It was just about tolerable for those, like Sheean, who were passing through as visiting firemen. Yet, Arturo Barea’s successor as chief of the press office in Madrid, Rosario del Olmo, despite having been offered by Constancia de la Mora a job in the Barcelona bureau, had refused to leave the capital because it was her home. Sheean remembered Rosario as ‘unobtrusive, severe and rectilinear as a schoolteacher with a crowd of refractory children, but possessed of such fixity of purpose that no difficulties could affect her inner sureness’. He heard later that she had fainted several times from under-nourishment. Geoffrey Brereton, who wrote for the
New Statesman and Nation,
paid tribute to the efforts of Rosario to ensure that journalists were fed, even if only on horsemeat, at the Hotel Victoria.
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For those like Rosario del Olmo who stayed and went through the long siege of Madrid, the psychological effects were long-lasting. Barea’s health never recovered and Lester Ziffren later recounted a common experience. According to Jay Allen, a close friend, after Webb Miller saw the carnage left after the massacre perpetrated when the rebels entered Toledo, he left Spain ‘with a walking nervous break-down’.
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Ziffren wrote:

During the war I had become accustomed to lack of food, the daily bombing and shelling, the absence of heating, the lack of hot water. The body adjusted itself to the increasingly bad conditions. But after I arrived in France a severe physical reaction set in. I saw persons living calmly, eating tranquilly and as much as they desired, free from the fear of bombs and bullets. When persons questioned me about Spain, I felt miserable and mournful. I began to suffer from nightmares. My dreams were of horrors. I used to wake several times a night in a cold sweat. If I could sleep four hours I was fortunate. For such are the aftereffects of living through a veritable hell in a city which had survived days and nights such as no city in history has endured.
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Probably the last correspondent to leave Madrid was O’Dowd Gallagher of the
Daily Express.
Unshaven and scruffy, he was a hard-drinking
half-Irish, half-South African, who had proved that a total disregard for personal appearance was no impediment to attracting streams of women. In this regard, Randolph Churchill once complained to Geoffrey Cox, ‘Why should a grubby chap like that, without a bean, be able to get any woman he wants and I who have everything can’t get a single one?’
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It was freezing in Madrid; Gallagher and the remaining handful of correspondents huddled in their overcoats living on a diet of watery lentil or chickpea ‘soup’. They lived the bewildering days following the anti-Negrín coup carried out on 4 March 1939 by Colonel Segismundo Casado in the naïve hope of a negotiated peace with Franco. The Casado action tapped into deep seams of war-weariness. Gallagher was aware that hunger and demoralization were rife in the central zone, where ‘ordinary people had been worn down out by two and a half years of living below the bread line’. Nevertheless, he lived through the hair-raising experience of the fighting between Casado’s men and the Communists. The President of the Madrid Defence Junta, the jovial General José Miaja, aligned himself with Casado. Gallagher enjoyed a glass of sherry with Miaja two days before the Francoists entered Madrid. He had stayed on in Madrid assuming that he would be writing about the last-ditch defence of the capital. In the event, he would write about the jubilant scenes of the city’s right-wingers as the fifth column came out into the streets. On the morning that they arrived, he was awakened by the chants of ‘¡Franco! ¡Franco!’ from the street below the apartment where he was staying. After rapidly pulling his clothes on, he set off through the crowds to the censor’s office. It was nearly deserted. There was only one censor left, a woman, perhaps Rosario herself, who passed his first bulletins. By midday, she too had fled and he stamped his story with her official rubber stamps and faked her signature.
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As Republican refugees streamed out of the capital towards the Mediterranean coast, he sent out a story about the scenes of jubilation beginning with the words ‘Madrid, after a two and a half years’ siege, surrendered today and tonight is completely under General Franco’s control’.
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Shortly afterwards, he was caught by Nationalist press officers, who told him that he was lucky not to be shot and expelled him from Spain.
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It was a sad anti-climax to the collective efforts of the foreign journalists who had shared the vicissitudes of the besieged city.

‘M
orning: wake early suddenly, hearing two heavy thuds, shelling beginning, followed rapidly by crashes – house falling slam heavy as wall of water, voices in hall, doors opening, rising voices, more voices as shelling keeps up.’ Josie Herbst was terrified, her hands shaking as she tried to find her clothes. She gave up, threw on a dressing gown and went out into the corridor where, in the darkness, other guests were milling. It was still dark and the revellers in the Hotel Florida had had little sleep when, at 6 a.m. on Thursday 22 April 1937, they were awakened by an artillery bombardment. Only a few hours earlier, their usual nightly carousing had been ended by a peevish complaint from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the correspondent of the Paris daily
L’Intransigeant.
According to Tom Delmer, ‘All kinds of liaisons were revealed as people poured from their bedrooms to seek shelter in the basement, among them Ernest [Hemingway] and Martha [Gellhorn].’Martha was ‘in pyjamas, uncombed, with a coat on’ and putting on a brave face. Josie saw her with Virginia Cowles ‘in semi-bravado laughter going to corner back room’.

Out from the rooms of correspondents and International Brigaders scuttled dozens of prostitutes, ‘crying in high voices like birds’ as Martha wrote in her diary. Awakened by the noise, John Dos Passos chose first to shave because ‘a man feels safe shaving, sniffing the little customary odour of the usual shaving soap’. Emerging in a tartan bathrobe, he saw men and women ‘in various stages of undress’ dragging suitcases and mattresses into back rooms. One of the waiters from the restaurant came out of room after room with his arm around ‘a different giggling or snivelling young woman. Great exhibitions of
dishevelment and lingerie.’ Rather miffed that no one noticed her, the dowdy Josie went back into her room and dressed, carefully starting with red socks. When she reappeared, Ernest Hemingway asked how she was. Finding her voice almost gone, she just said ‘fine’ in a funny voice, but thought to herself, ‘but I didn’t come here to die like a rat in a trap’. ‘Shells seem to be tearing right into the room. Front of hotel seems ripping off. Expect any moment terrible scream, falling rocks and plaster.’

Despite the mayhem, the guests put on a show of serenity as the bombardment continued. Hemingway was ‘very big and cheerful’. Dos Passos went back to bed for an hour, then appeared fully dressed, ‘very composed and at ease’; Saint-Exupéry (‘French gent emerges in blue pajamas’) stood at the top of the stairs with a basket of grapefruits, bowed to each passing female, saying
‘Voulez-vous une pamplemousse, Madame?’
Finally, a combination of Hemingway’s bullfighting valet, Sidney Franklin, Claud Cockburn and Josie Herbst managed to get coffee going. The shelling went on relentlessly, the explosions outside sounding as if they were inside the hotel, ‘actually were breaking in street outside, tearing up pavements, big 6 inch German shells’. Josie’s scribbled and disorganized diary entry recorded the correspondents’ attempts to construct some sort of normality in the midst of what seemed like their impending destruction:

Frenchman with grapefruit reassembled in suit but with more grapefruits, continually pressed upon half-awake somewhat dazed behaving well crowd. Coburn, Klein, Frenchman, Dos, I have coffee Coburn’s room, & makings 2 pieces toast made fringed brown on edges no bidders, crumbled bread on stand & coffee drunk gratefully, shelling bang bang Go to H’s room. Gals gone. Gals (professionals) swarming in halls. As shelling subsides, what looks like 60 whores emerge from one room. More coffee made in Hem’s room & then still another batch.
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