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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Often cited as the best war reporter of the twentieth century, Martha Gellhorn began her career during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and was still reporting well into her 80s. This collection, selected by the author, plunges us back to Madrid in 1937, China in 1941, Europe during the Second World War, Vietnam and the United States' dirty little wars in Central America. Immediate and surprising, it's a seat-of-your-pants experience just to read them, and brilliantly shows the real cost of war wherever it occurs. 'Memory and imagination, not nuclear weapons, are the first deterrent,' she writes. The Face of War gives us the chance to remember and imagine and to share her firsthand experience of the folly of mankind at war.
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MARTHA GELLHORN
The Face of War
Writings from the Frontline, 1937–85
TO MY SON SANDY
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Since its first publication in 1959, this book has grown by accretion: more wars. To keep it within reasonable size, I cut out reports from earlier wars to make room for later reports in 1967 and 1986, while in 1988 I added a lost article on Vietnam. The reports are dated by their time of publication. I never altered my introductory comments on the wars. For example: the comments on the wars in Spain, Finland, China and World War Two were written in 1959 and so on, for following wars; none changed. I could not have re-written them if I had wanted to because I was closer then in memory and feeling to the wars.
THE WAR IN SPAIN
The War in Spain
In the summer of 1936, I was checking background material for a novel, in the Weltkriegsbibliothek of Stuttgart. The Nazi newspapers began to speak of fighting in Spain. They did not talk of war; the impression I got was of a bloodthirsty rabble, attacking the forces of decency and order. This Spanish rabble, which was the duly elected Republic of Spain, was always referred to as ‘Red Swine-dogs’. The Nazi papers had one solid value: Whatever they were against, you could be for.
Shortly after I was twenty-one I had gone to France to work and there became one of a group of young French pacifists. We had in common our poverty and our passion. Our aim in life was to kick out the evil old, who were clearly leading us into another war. We believed that there could be no peace in Europe without Franco–German rapprochement. We had the right idea, but the Nazis arrived.
In 1934 we met the young Nazis in Berlin. At the frontier, German police had come through the train, paused in our third-class carriage, and confiscated our newspapers. Although we represented no one except ourselves, we read and disagreed on all opinions, ranging from Monarchist to Socialist to Liberal–reformer (me). We united, for once, in thinking this newspaper seizure an outrage. When we got off the train, in our usual shabby argumentative huddle, we were greeted by the young Nazis in clean blond khaki-clad formation. They proved to have one parrot brain among the lot and we did not care for them. We tried very hard to excuse them; we tried to agree that they were Socialists, as they kept assuring us, not National Socialists. Being sorry for the defeated Germans was a condition of mind of many people, after both world wars; I had it then. Also, I was a pacifist and it interfered with my principles to use my eyes. By 1936, no amount of clinging to principles helped me; I saw what these bullying Nazi louts were like and were up to.
But there I was, working with miserable determination on a novel about young pacifists in France. I stayed some months in Germany discussing, with anyone who still dared to discuss, the freedom of the mind, the rights of the individual, and the Red Swine-dogs of Spain. Then I went back to America, finished my novel, shoved it forever into a desk drawer, and started to get myself to Spain. I had stopped being a pacifist and become an anti-Fascist.
By the winter of 1937, the Western democracies had proclaimed the doctrine of non-intervention, which meant simply that neither people nor supplies could pass freely to the Republican territory of Spain. I went to the French authorities in Paris to get whatever stamps or papers were required to leave the country. The French fonctionnaire, as all know who have dealt with him, is a certified brute. He sits, unlistening, behind a grille, scratching away with a sharp governmental pen and pallid ink. I cannot have come out well with this type, as I only remember studying a map, taking a train, getting off at a station nearest to the Andorran–Spanish border, walking a short distance from one country to another, and taking a second train—ancient cold little carriages, full of the soldiers of the Spanish Republic who were returning to Barcelona on leave.
They hardly looked like soldiers, being dressed however they were able, and obviously this was an army in which you fed yourself, since the government could not attend to that. I was in a wooden carriage with six boys who were eating garlic sausage and bread made of powdered stone. They offered me their food, they laughed, they sang. Whenever the train stopped, another young man, perhaps their officer, stuck his head in the carriage and exhorted them. I gathered that he was exhorting them to behave beautifully. They did behave beautifully, but I do not know what they said, as I spoke no Spanish.
Barcelona was bright with sun and gay with red banners, and the taxi driver refused money; apparently everything was free. Apparently everyone was everyone else’s brother too. Since few people have lived in such an atmosphere, even for a minute, I can report that it is the loveliest atmosphere going. I was handed around like a package, with jollity and kindness; I rode on trucks and in jammed cars. And finally, by way of Valencia, we came at night to Madrid, which was cold, enormous and pitch-black, and the streets were silent and perilous with shell holes. That was on March 27, 1937, a date I have found somewhere in notes. I had not felt as if I were at a war until now, but now I knew I was. It was a feeling I cannot describe; a whole city was a battlefield, waiting in the dark. There was certainly fear in that feeling, and courage. It made you walk carefully and listen hard and it lifted the heart.
In New York a friendly and spirited man, then an editor of Collier’s, had given me a letter. The letter said, to whom it might concern, that the bearer, Martha Gellhorn, was a special correspondent for Collier’s in Spain. This letter was intended to help me with any authorities who wondered what I was doing in Spain, or why I was trying to get there; otherwise it meant nothing. I had no connection with a newspaper or magazine, and I believed that all one did about a war was go to it, as a gesture of solidarity, and get killed, or survive if lucky until the war was over. That was what happened in the trenches of France, as I had read; everyone was dead or wounded badly enough to be sent away. I had no idea you could be what I became, an unscathed tourist of wars. A knapsack and approximately fifty dollars were my equipment for Spain; anything more seemed unnecessary.
I tagged along behind the war correspondents, experienced men who had serious work to do. Since the authorities gave them transport and military passes (transport was far harder to come by than permission to see everything; it was an open, intimate war) I went with them to the fronts in and around Madrid. Still I did nothing except learn a little Spanish and a little about war, and visit the wounded, trying to amuse or distract them. It was a poor effort and one day, weeks after I had come to Madrid, a journalist friend observed that I ought to write; it was the only way I could serve the Causa, as the Spaniards solemnly and we lovingly called the war in the Spanish Republic. After all, I was a writer, was I not? But how could I write about war, what did I know, and for whom would I write? What made a story, to begin with? Didn’t something gigantic and conclusive have to happen before one could write an article? My journalist friend suggested that I write about Madrid. Why would that interest anyone, I asked. It was daily life. He pointed out that it was not everybody’s daily life.
I mailed my first Madrid article to Collier’s, not expecting them to publish it; but I did have that letter, so I knew Collier’s address. Collier’s accepted the piece and after my next article put my name on the masthead. I learned this by accident. Once on the masthead, I was evidently a war correspondent. It began like that.
This is the place to express my gratitude to a vanished magazine and to Charles Colebaugh, the editor who then ran it. Thanks to Collier’s, I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war. They never cut or altered anything I wrote. They did, however, invent their own titles for most of my articles. I did not like their titles and am not using them here, but they were a trifling price to pay for the freedom Collier’s gave me; for eight years, I could go where I wanted, when I wanted, and write what I saw.
What was new and prophetic about the war in Spain was the life of the civilians, who stayed at home and had war brought to them. I have selected three reports on this twentieth-century war in the city. The people of the Republic of Spain were the first to suffer the relentless totality of modern war.
I have praised the Causa of the Republic of Spain on the slightest provocation for twenty years, and I am tired of explaining that the Spanish Republic was neither a collection of blood-slathering Reds nor a cat’s-paw of Russia. Long ago I also gave up repeating that the men who fought and those who died for the Republic, whatever their nationality and whether they were Communists, anarchists, Socialists, poets, plumbers, middle-class professional men, or the one Abyssinian prince, were brave and disinterested, as there were no rewards in Spain. They were fighting for us all, against the combined force of European Fascism. They deserved our thanks and our respect and got neither.
I felt then (and still do) that the Western democracies had two commanding obligations: they must save their honor by assisting a young, attacked fellow democracy, and they must save their skin, by fighting Hitler and Mussolini, at once, in Spain, instead of waiting until later, when the cost in human suffering would be unimaginably greater. Arguments were useless during the Spanish War and ever after; the carefully fostered prejudice against the Republic of Spain remains impervious to time and facts.
All of us who believed in the Causa of the Republic will mourn the Republic’s defeat and the death of its defenders, forever, and will continue to love the land of Spain and the beautiful people, who are among the noblest and unluckiest on earth.
London, 1959
HighExplosiveforEveryone
July1937
At first the shells went over: you could hear the thud as they left the Fascists’ guns, a sort of groaning cough; then you heard them fluttering toward you. As they came closer the sound went faster and straighter and sharper and then, very fast, you heard the great booming noise when they hit.
But now, for I don’t know how long—because time didn’t mean much—they had been hitting on the street in front of the hotel, and on the corner, and to the left in the side street. When the shells hit that close, it was a different sound. The shells whistled toward you—it was as if they whirled at you—faster than you could imagine speed, and, spinning that way, they whined: the whine rose higher and quicker and was a close scream—and then they hit and it was like granite thunder. There wasn’t anything to do, or anywhere to go: you could only wait. But waiting alone in a room that got dustier and dustier as the powdered cobblestones of the street floated into it was pretty bad.
I went downstairs into the lobby, practicing on the way how to breathe. You couldn’t help breathing strangely, just taking the air into your throat and not being able to inhale it.
It seemed a little crazy to be living in a hotel, like a hotel in Des Moines or New Orleans, with a lobby and wicker chairs in the lounge, and signs on the door of your room telling you that they would press your clothes immediately and that meals served privately cost ten per cent more, and meantime it was like a trench when they lay down an artillery barrage. The whole place trembled to the explosion of the shells.
The concierge was in the lobby and he said, apologetically, ‘I regret this, Mademoiselle. It is not pleasant. I can guarantee you that the bombing in November was worse. However, it is regrettable.’
I said yes, indeed, it was not very nice, was it? He said that perhaps I had better take a room in the back of the house, which might be safer. On the other hand, the rooms were not so agreeable; there was less air. I said of course there wouldn’t be so much air. Then we stood in the lobby and listened.
You could only wait. All over Madrid, for fifteen days now, people had been waiting. You waited for the shelling to start, and for it to end, and for it to start again. It came from three directions, at any time, without warning and without purpose. Looking out the door, I saw people standing in doorways all around the square, just standing there patiently, and then suddenly a shell landed, and there was a fountain of granite cobblestones flying up into the air, and the silver lyddite smoke floated off softly.
A little Spaniard with a lavender shirt, a ready-made bow tie and bright brown eyes was standing in the door watching this with interest. There was also no reason for the shells to stay out of the hotel. They could land inside that door as well as anywhere else. Another shell hit, halfway across the street, and a window broke gently and airily, making a lovely tinkling musical sound.
I was watching the people in the other doorways, as best I could, watching those immensely quiet, stretched faces. You had a feeling you had been waiting here forever, and yesterday you felt the same way. The little Spaniard said to me, ‘You don’t like it?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It is nothing. It will pass. In any case, you can only die once.’
‘Yes,’ I said, but without enthusiasm.
We stood there a moment, and there was silence. Before this the shells had been falling one a minute.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think that is all. I have work to do. I am a serious man. I cannot spend my time waiting for shells. Salud,’ he said, and walked out calmly into the street, and calmly crossed it.
Seeing him, some other men decided the shelling was finished too, and presently people were crossing that square, which now was pock-marked with great round holes, and littered with broken cobblestones and glass. An old woman with a market basket on her arm hurried down a side street. And two boys came around the corner, arm in arm, singing.
I went back to my room, and again suddenly there came that whistle-whine-scream-roar and the noise was in your throat and you couldn’t feel or hear or think and the building shook and seemed to settle. Outside in the hall, the maids were calling to one another, like birds, in high excited voices. The concierge ran upstairs looking concerned and shaking his head. On the floor above, we went into a room in which the lyddite smoke still hung mistily. There was nothing left in that room, the furniture was kindling wood, the walls were stripped and in places torn open, a great hole led into the next room and the bed was twisted iron and stood upright and silly against the wall.
‘Oh, my,’ the concierge said miserably.
‘Look, Conchita,’ one of the maids said to the other; ‘look at the hole there is in 219 too.’
‘Oh,’ one of the youngest maids said, ‘imagine, it has also spoiled the bathroom in 218.’
The journalist who lived in that room had left for London the day before.
‘Well,’ the concierge said, ‘there is nothing to do. It is very regrettable.’
The maids went back to work. An aviator came down from the fifth floor. He said it was disgusting; he had two days’ leave and this sort of thing went on. Moreover, he said, a shell fragment had hit his room and broken all his toilet articles. It was inconsiderate; it wasn’t right. He would now go out and have a beer. He waited at the door for a shell to land, and ran across the square, reaching the café across the street just before the next shell. You couldn’t wait forever; you couldn’t be careful all day.
Later, you could see people around Madrid examining the new shell holes with curiosity and wonder. Otherwise they went on with the routine of their lives, as if they had been interrupted by a heavy rainstorm but nothing more. In a café which was hit in the morning, where three men were killed sitting at a table reading their morning papers and drinking coffee, the clients came back in the afternoon. You went to Chicote’s bar at the end of the day, walking up the street which was No Man’s Land, where you could hear the shells whistling even when there was silence, and the bar was crowded as always. On the way you had passed a dead horse and a very dead mule, chopped with shell fragments, and you had passed criss-crossing trails of human blood on the pavement.
You would be walking down a street, hearing only the city noises of streetcars and automobiles and people calling to one another, and suddenly, crushing it all out, would be the huge stony deep booming of a falling shell, at the corner. There was no place to run, because how did you know that the next shell would not be behind you, or ahead, or to the left or right? And going indoors was fairly silly too, considering what shells can do to a house.
So perhaps you went into a store because that was what you had intended doing before all this started. Inside a shoe shop, five women are trying on shoes. Two girls are buying summery sandals, sitting by the front window of the shop. After the third explosion, the salesman says politely: ‘I think we had better move farther back into the shop. The window might break and cut you.’
Women are standing in line, as they do all over Madrid, quiet women, dressed usually in black, with market baskets on their arms, waiting to buy food. A shell falls across the square. They turn their heads to look, and move a little closer to the house, but no one leaves her place in line.
After all, they have been waiting there for three hours and the children expect food at home.
In the Plaza Major, the shoeblacks stand around the edges of the square, with their little boxes of creams and brushes, and passers-by stop and have their shoes polished as they read a paper or gossip together. When the shells fall too heavily, the shoeblacks pick up their boxes and retreat a little way into a side street.
So now the square is empty, though people are leaning close against the houses around it, and the shells are falling so fast that there is almost no time between them to hear them coming, only the steady roaring as they land on the granite cobblestones.
Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.
A small piece of twisted steel, hot and very sharp, sprays off from the shell; it takes the little boy in the throat. The old woman stands there, holding the hand of the dead child, looking at him stupidly, not saying anything, and men run out toward her to carry the child. At their left, on the side of the square, is a huge brilliant sign which says: GET OUT OF MADRID.
No one lived here anymore because there was nothing left to live in, and besides, the trenches were only two blocks away, and there was another front, in the Casa de Campo, down to the left. Stray bullets droned over the streets, and a stray is just as dangerous as any other kind of bullet if it hits you. You walked past the street barricades, past the ruined houses and the only sound you heard was a machine gun hammering in University City, and a bird.
It was a little like walking in the country, over gutted country roads, and the street barricades made it all seem very strange, and the houses were like scenery in a war movie; it seemed impossible that houses could really be like that.
We were going to visit a janitor who lived in this section; he and his family. They were the only people here, except the soldiers who guarded the barricades. His name was Pedro.
Pedro lived in a fine apartment house; he had been the janitor and caretaker for eight years. In November a bomb fell on the roof; Pedro and his family had been in their tiny basement apartment when the bomb hit, and they were all safe. They saw no reason to move. They were used to living there, and in time of war a basement is more desirable than in time of peace.
They showed us their building with pride. We went into a marble hall, past an elevator, through a mahogany front door, and were in a room that was all dust and broken plaster. Looking up, for eight stories, you could see the insides of all the apartments in that building. The bomb had fallen squarely, and now only the outside walls remained. There was a very fine bathroom on the seventh floor, and the tub was hanging into space by its pipes. A cabinet with china in it stood on the fourth floor, and all the china was in neat unbroken piles. The concierge’s two little daughters played in this destruction as children play in an empty lot, or in caves they have found beside a river.
We sat in their underground apartment, with the lights burning, and talked. They said yes, of course, it was difficult to get food, but then it was difficult for everyone and they had never really been hungry. Yes, the bombing had been very bad, but they had just waited in the basement and finally it had stopped. The only trouble, they said, was that the children couldn’t go to school because the school had been bombed, and it was impossible to let the children go all the way across Madrid to another school, because bullets whined up past the street barricades at the end of their block and they couldn’t risk having the children hurt.
Juanita remarked that she didn’t like school anyhow very much, she wanted to be an artist and it was better to sit at home and paint. She had been copying a picture—with crayons on wrapping paper—of a very elegant Spanish gentleman whose portrait hung on the wall of a ruined first-floor apartment in their building.
Mrs Pedro said it was wonderful now, women could have careers in Spain, did I know about that? That was since the Republic. ‘We are very in favor of the Republic,’ she said. ‘I think Maria may be able to get training as a doctor. Isn’t it fine? Can women be doctors in North America?’
I always got a shock from the Palace Hotel, because it had a concierge’s desk and a sign saying ‘Coiffeur on the First Floor,’ and another sign saying how beautiful Majorca was and they had a hotel to recommend there. The Palace Hotel had its old furniture, but it smelled of ether and was crowded with bandaged men. It is the first military hospital of Madrid now. I went around to the operating room, which used to be the reading room.
There were bloody stretchers piled in the hall, but it was quiet this afternoon. The Empire bookcases, where they used to keep dull reading for the hotel guests, were now used for bandages and hypodermic needles and surgical instruments, and there were brilliant lights in the cut-glass chandeliers to make operating easier. The nurse on duty told me about the men on the sixth floor and I went up to see them.
The room was full of sun. There were four men. One of them was sitting with his leg up on a chair; it was in plaster. He had on a red blouse and was sitting in profile. Beside him, a man with a beret was working quietly, drawing his portrait in pastels. The two other men were in bed. One of them I tried not to look at. The other one was quiet and pale and looked tired. Once or twice he smiled, but did not speak. He had a bad chest wound.
The man in the red blouse was a Hungarian; his knee had been smashed by a piece of shell. He was handsome and very polite and refused politely to talk about his wound because it was of no importance. He was alive, he was very lucky, the doctors were fine and his knee would probably get well. At any rate, he would be able to limp. He wanted to talk about his friend who was making his portrait. ‘Jaime,’ he said, ‘is a fine artist. Look how well he works. He always wanted to be an artist but he never had so much time before.’
Jaime smiled and went on; he was working very close to the paper, stopping now and again and peering at the man in the red blouse. His eyes looked a little strange, filmed over and dim. I said it was a fine portrait, a great likeness, and he thanked me. A little later someone called him and he left and then the man in the red blouse said, ‘He was wounded in the head; he covers it with the beret. His eyes are not very good; they are very bad, really. He does not see much. We ask him to paint pictures of us to keep him busy and make him think he still sees well. Jaime never complains about it.’
I said, softly, ‘What happened to that boy over there?’
‘He’s an aviator.’
He was blond and young, with a round face. There was nothing left except the eyes. He had been shot down in his plane and burned, but he had been wearing goggles and that saved his sight. His face and hands were a hard brown thick scab, and his hands were enormous; there were no lips, only the scab. The worst was that his pain was so great he couldn’t sleep.
Then a soldier I knew, a Pole, came in, and said, ‘Listen, Dominic in room 507 has some mimosa. A whole big branch of it. Do you want to come up and see it? He says it grows all around where he lives in Marseille. I never saw any flowers like that before.’
Every once in a while the actors would stop talking and wait; shells were exploding down the street in the Plaza Major and to the right of the Gran Via and when they hit too close you couldn’t hear the lines of the play, so they waited. It was a benefit performance on Sunday morning; it was to make money for the hospitals.
An amateur had written the play and amateurs directed, costumed and acted it; it couldn’t have been more amateur. The audience was delighted; it was a dramatic play, all about the moral and psychological crisis of a young man who decided not to enter the priesthood. The audience thought it was terribly funny and laughed with great good will at the emotional places.
The hero came out, after the curtain rang down, and said he was sorry he’d forgotten his lines that way but he hadn’t had time to memorize them. He’d been in the trenches near Garabitas until just a few hours ago (everyone knew an attack had been going on there for two days), and so he couldn’t memorize things.
The audience applauded and shouted that it was quite all right; they didn’t care anyhow. Then he said he had written a poem up there in the trenches and he would like to recite it. He did. It rolled and tossed and was full of enormous big words and remarkable rhymes and his gestures were excellent and when he was through the audience cheered him and he looked very happy. He was a nice boy, if not a brilliant poet, and they knew he had been in a bad piece of trench, and they liked plays and theaters, even bad plays and even theaters just down the street from where the shells were landing.
Every night, lying in bed, you can hear the machine guns in University City, just ten blocks away. Every once in a while you can hear the dull, heavy explosion of a trench mortar. When the shells wake you, you think first that it is thunder. If they are not too close, you do not really wake.
You know that in November there were black Junker planes flying over and dropping bombs, that all winter long there was no fuel and the days were cold and the nights were colder, you know that food is scarce, and that all these people have sons and husbands and sweethearts at the front somewhere. And now they are living in a city where you take your chances and hope your chances are good. You have seen no panic, no hysteria, you have heard no hate talk. You know they have the kind of faith which makes courage and a fine future. You have no right to be disturbed. There are no lights anywhere and the city itself is quiet. The sensible thing is to go back to sleep.
TheBesiegedCity
November1937
At the end of the day the wind swooped down from the mountains into Madrid and blew the broken glass from the windows of the shelled houses. It rained steadily and the streets were mustard-colored with mud. It rained and people talked about the coming offensive, wondering when, when … Someone said he knew that food and munitions were being moved; someone else said that Campesino’s outfit was in the south or in the north; villages (forty of them, in this direction, in that direction) had been evacuated; the transport unit was ready to go; have you heard? All front passes have been recalled, leaves are cancelled. Who told you, does he know? What, what did you say? So it went, and then the rain would start again. And everyone waited. Waiting is a big part of war and it is hard to do.
Finally it was someone’s birthday, or a national holiday (and still cold and nothing happening, only the rain and the rumors), so we decided to have a party. There were two of us who lived in this hotel in Madrid and the third was a visiting friend, an American soldier from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. A machine-gun bullet had smashed his hip and he had come to the city on his first leave from the brigade hospital. We took the entire hoard of cans from the bottom bureau drawer—canned soup, canned sardines, canned spinach, canned corned beef and two bottles of new red wine—and planned to eat ourselves warm and talk about something else, not the offensive. We would talk about movie stars and pretty places we had seen and have a proper party. It went perfectly until the coffee (one teaspoonful in a cup of hot water and stir). Then the first shell plunged into the building next door, brought down a shower of glass on the inner courtyard and rattled the typewriter on the table.
The boy with the splintered hip moved his heavy plaster-encased leg and said, ‘Anybody seen my crutches?’ He found his crutches and shifted to the place between the windows, and we opened the windows so that we could hear better and so that they wouldn’t break, turned off the lights and waited.
We knew this well: the whirling scream of the shells as they came, the huge round roar as they hit, guessing where they went, where they came from, timing them with a stop watch, counting, betting on the size of the shells. The boy was sad. He was used to war at the front where you could do something about it, not to this helpless war in the city; but he would never go to any front again, as his leg would always be too short, and you can’t be an infantryman with a cane. There was smoke in the room and the hotel had been hit several times, so we took our wine glasses next door, on the agreeable and traditional theory that if a shell came in the front room it would not bother to come as far as the back room, passing through the bathroom on its way.
We counted six hundred shells and got tired of it, and an hour later it was all over. We said to one another, ‘Well, that was a nice little shelling.’ Then we said, ‘Maybe that means the offensive will start.’ On the strength of this, we ate up the last bar of chocolate and called it a night.
The next day it rained again, and Madrid picked itself up as it had done before. Streetcars clanked slowly through the streets, collecting the fallen bricks, the broken glass, the odd bits of wood and furniture. People stopped on their way to work, looking at the new shell holes. The front of the hotel gaped a little more. The elevator man, who worked in bronze for his pleasure, hunted for unexploded shells in the rooms, to make lamps from them. His friend, the night concierge, painted warlike scenes on parchment for the lamp shades, and they were both busy all the time. The maid said, ‘Come and see the room you used to have,’ and we went merrily in to where nothing remained except the dressing table, with the mirror uncracked, and I found the nosecap of the shell in the broken wood of the bureau. On the fourth floor, lying against the staircase railing, was a long heavy shell that had not exploded. It had only ripped out half a wall and chopped up the furniture of room 409, pulled down the door, and come to rest there in the hall, where everyone admired it because it had a new shape. Some friends telephoned and remarked, ‘Ah, so you aren’t dead.’ It was just like before. Like the last time and time before and all the other times. Everybody wondered why the Fascists shelled last night and not some other night; does it mean anything? What do you think?
In Madrid there is not only first-aid service for wounded people, but there is also a first-aid service for wounded houses. The men who manage this are architects and engineers and bricklayers and electricians, and some workers are employed only to dig bodies from the collapsed houses. This staff is always active because when they are not propping up, repairing, plugging holes and cleaning off debris, they make plans for a beautiful new city, which they will build in place of what has been destroyed, when the war is over. So that morning in the rain, I went about with them to see what had happened during the night and what could be done.
In the best residential section, at one street corner, police were telling people not to crowd and to move on. A shell had burst through the top floor of a fine new apartment house, blown the iron balcony railing on to the roof of a house across the way, and now the top floor stood without support, ready to fall into the street. Farther up, a water main had been cracked by a shell and the street was rapidly flooding. One of the architects had with him, wrapped in a newspaper, his day’s ration of bread. He was very careful all morning, climbing through ruins, jumping flooded gutters, not to drop the bread; he had to take it home—there were two small children there, and come death and destruction and anything else, the bread mattered.
We climbed to the top floor, moving gently into a room where half the floor hung in space. We shook hands with all the friends and visitors who had come to see also. Two women lived here, an old woman and her daughter. They had been in the back of the apartment when the front of it blew out. They were picking up what they could save: a cup that had no saucer left, a sofa pillow, two pictures with the glass broken. They were chatty and glad to be alive and they said everything was quite all right—look, the whole back of the apartment could still be lived in, three rooms, not as bright or as nice as the rooms that had been destroyed, but still they were not without a home. If only the front part didn’t fall into the street and hurt someone.
A mud road, behind the bull ring on the other side of Madrid, led into a square where there was a trough for the women of that place to wash clothes. There were ten little houses, huddled together, with cloth tacked over the windows and newspapers stuck in the walls to keep the wind out. Women with quiet, pale faces and quiet children stood by the trough and looked at one house, or what was left of it. The men stood a little nearer. A shell had landed directly on one flimsy shack, where five people were keeping warm, talking with one another for comfort and for gaiety, and now there was only a mound of clay and kindling wood, and they had dug out the five dead bodies as soon as it was light. The people standing there knew the dead. A woman reached down suddenly for her child and took it in her arms, and held it close to her.
Disaster had swung like a compass needle, aimlessly, all over the city. Near the station, the architect asked a concierge if everyone was all right in her house. Four shells had come that way. Yes, she said, do you want to see it? Upstairs the family, including the husband’s sister and mother, and the wife’s niece, and her baby, were standing in their living room, getting used to what had happened. The front wall was gone. The china was broken, and the chairs.
The wife said to me, ‘What a shame for the sewing machine; it will never work again.’
The husband picked a thin, dead canary off the sideboard, showed it to me sadly, shrugged and said nothing.
I asked where they would live now. (The wind coming in, looking down five flights into the street, the broken furniture and all of them crowded into one room and the kitchen. It is bad enough to be cold, never to eat enough, to wait for the sound of the shells, but at least one must have four walls, at least four solid walls, to keep the rain out.)
The woman was surprised. ‘But we will live here,’ she said. ‘Where else shall we go? This is our home, we have always lived here.’
The architect said to me, miserably, ‘No, I cannot patch up the walls; we must save the wood for essentials. The walls are not going to fall out; there is no danger from them.’
‘But the cold,’ I said.
‘Ah, the cold,’ he said. ‘What can we do?’ He said to them, Good luck, and they said to him, Thank you, we are all right, and then we walked silently down the steep, unlighted stairs.
It was night now. Streetcars, with people sticking like ivy on the steps and bumpers, burned muffled blue lights. People hurried, with their heads down against the rain, through the dark streets to their homes, where they would cook whatever they had and try to keep warm and wait for tomorrow and be surprised at nothing. A man walked along by himself, singing. Two children sat on a doorstep having a long, serious conversation. A shop window showed a bargain in silk stockings. We were tired, but there was a house near here that the architect had to see. A man brought a candle and we found our way up the stairs. It was hardly worth while going inside the apartment. There was nothing left at all, nothing to save; the walls were gored, and the ceiling and the floor. What had been a place to live was now a collection of old rags and paper, pieces of plaster and broken wood, twisted wires and slivers of glass. The man held the candle above his head so that we could see, and the shadows crawled over chaos.
An old woman had been standing by the door. She came in now. She took my arm and pulled at me to come closer to hear her. She said, very softly, as if she were telling me a secret, ‘Look at that, look at that, do you see, that is my home, that’s where I live, there, what you see there.’ She looked at me as if I should deny it, with wide, puzzled, frightened eyes. I did not know what to say. ‘I cannot understand,’ she said slowly, hoping I would understand and explain; after all I was a foreigner, I was younger than she, I had probably been to school, surely I could explain. ‘I do not understand,’ she said. ‘You see, it is my home.’
And all the time it was cold. Madrid flowed with rain, rain everywhere; oh, the cold and, oh, the wet feet, and the thick smell of wet wool overcoats. And we waited for the offensive. The rumors grew each day; they rushed and swayed over the town. People looked wise or sly or happy or worried or anything, and you wondered, What do they know about the offensive? We knew it was to be an important offensive; everyone had confidence in its success whenever it came; everyone was waiting. But there was nothing to do.
And so, to fill the days, we went visiting at the nearest fronts (ten blocks from the hotel, fifteen blocks, a good brisk walk in the rain, something to circulate your blood). There were always funny people in the trenches, new faces, always something to talk about. So we strolled to University City and Usera, to the Parque del Oeste, to those trenches that are a part of the city and that we knew so well. No matter how often you do it, it is surprising just to walk to war, easily, from your own bedroom where you have been reading a detective story or a life of Byron, or listening to the phonograph, or chatting with your friends.
It was as usual cold, and that day we walked through all the trenches in that particular park. In these trenches, in this once fine Madrid park, the mud was like chewing gum. We admired the dugouts smelling of fresh wood and of wood smoke from the little stoves, the bright blankets over the machine guns, the pictures of movie stars on the walls, the curious serenity—and, after all, there was no news in it. But on the other hand, it was different at night. Every night, clearly, you could hear from the hotel the machine guns hammering, and the echoing thud of mortars, and what was normal in the daytime became a strange business at night.
So the next evening, when the sky turned blue-purple, we presented ourselves at staff headquarters, in a bombed apartment house. It was a homelike spot: there were three women, the wives of officers, shrill as birds. A five-months-old baby slept on the plush sofa and his mother told us all about him breathlessly, with astonishment, as women will. The Major was tired but very courteous. The staff cook wandered in, laughing like Ophelia and a little mad, and asked when they wanted dinner. The soldier who would be our guide was at a dance given by another battalion. They had been making war here for over a year; it was right in the city and the dance was within ten minutes’ walk, and a man wants a change now and again. Presently he came, a boy with fantastic eyelashes and an easy laugh, and we walked a block, went down some slippery steps and were in the trenches.
The flashlight was fading, and the mud pulled at our shoes, and we had to walk bent over to avoid hitting the low beams that held up the trench, and it was very cold. In the third line we leaned against the mud walls and looked at the thin, stripped trees of what had once been a city park, and listened. We had come to hear the loud-speakers. At night, one side or the other presents the soldiers in those trenches with a program of propaganda and music. The loud-speakers were hidden near the front line, and you could hear everything, as you can hear a telephone conversation. Tonight the enemy was speaking. A careful, pompous radio voice began: ‘The chief of Spain, the only chief, is willing to give his blood for you … Franco, Franco …’
Another soldier had come up and he and our guide lighted cigarettes, and our guide, who was anxious for us to enjoy ourselves, said, ‘This talking part is very tiresome, but it won’t last long; afterward comes music.’
Suddenly, blaring across that narrow no man’s land, we heard ‘Kitten on the Keys’, played seven times too fast. ‘Ah,’ said our guide, ‘that is very pretty, that is American music.’
Then the smooth, careful voice came back: ‘Your leaders live well in the rear guard while you are given guns to go out and die.’ There was a burst of irritated machine-gun fire after his remark. ‘He is too stupid,’ the soldier guide said, with disgust. ‘Usually we do not listen to him. Why doesn’t he stop talking and play the music? The music is very nice. We all enjoy the music. It helps pass the time.’
At this point the music started: Valencia, deedle-deedle-deedle-dee … It went on for about an hour. We were moving forward with some difficulty because the flashlight had worn out, feeling our way through covered trenches with our hands out, touching both walls, bending beneath the beams of tunnels, slipping on the duckboards when there were any, or stumbling in mud. At one point a mortar exploded, flashing through the trees, and the machine guns clattered an answer. The radio voice said, ‘VivaFranco!ArribaEspaña!’; and we could hear, from up ahead in the first line, the jeers of the government troops. Then we heard the voice but not the words of a soldier who was answering that remote radio orator.
The guide explained, ‘The fight will now start. Now it is mainly a joke, but that loud-speaker used to make us angry. We have heard it so much, and we know it is so silly, and sometimes it announces a great victory right here where we have been all day and seen nothing, and we do not pay attention to it. But it is the custom to answer back.’
Very thin and high, and through the trees, we could still hear the soldier’s voice, shouting.
‘He says,’ the guide said, after listening, ‘that it is useless to talk to them in Spanish because they are all Moors over there.’
We waited but could not make out any other words. The guide went on: ‘One of our boys usually tells them they are liars and are destroying Spain, and they tell him he is a murderous Red, and later they will get angry and throw mortars at one another. Their loud-speaker is a waste of time, but the music is agreeable.’
‘You seem very much at home here,’ I said, because it suddenly struck me that we were as casual as people at an outdoor concert in any peacetime city in the summer. (The stadium in New York with all the stars, that place in a park in St Louis, with the two great trees growing from the stage, the little brass bands in the little squares in Europe. I thought, it takes something to be so calm about war.)
‘These trenches are good,’ the soldier said. ‘You can see that for yourself. And we have been here a long time.’ The machine guns down by the Puente de los Franceses echoed over the black land. ‘If necessary,’ the boy said quietly, ‘we can stay here forever.’
I asked where the government loud-speaker was. He said probably up the line somewhere, toward the Clinical Hospital; they didn’t always work at the same place at the same time.
‘You should come and hear ours some night,’ the guide said. ‘We have very pretty music, too, but only Spanish songs. You would like it.’
We were by this time in a communicating trench, on our way to the first line. A mortar shook the walls of the trench and scattered mud over us, and did not explode, to everyone’s delight. The guide said to the other soldier, ‘It is scarcely worthwhile to kill foreign journalists for a little music.’ He told us he could not take us farther and, as we could see, both the music and the speaking were finished, and now there were only mortars. We argued it, bracing ourselves against the walls of the trench, but he said, ‘No, the Major would be very angry with me and I will get in trouble.’
So we went back as we had come.
‘Well,’ the major said, ‘how did you enjoy it?’
‘Very much.’
‘How was the music?’
‘A little too fast.’
‘I have here something that will interest you,’ the Major said. He took a rocket, like a Fourth of July rocket, from the table. ‘The Fascists send these over with propaganda in them, and sometimes I write an answer and we send them back. It is quite a discussion.’
He now showed us the propaganda. ‘It is too much,’ he said. ‘It makes you laugh. They think we know nothing. Look at this.’
He thumbed through the little booklet quickly, dismissing statements he had seen before and arguments he considered either too boring or too ridiculous. One page started: ‘What are you fighting for?’ The Major smiled and said, ‘That’s something we all know.’
He then read us his reply, all very careful, all very dull. And we said, ‘That is fine.’
A lieutenant offered me some acorns and the talk turned to America. The guide said he knew a great deal about America because he had read Zane Grey and also James Oliver Curwood, although he realized that was about Canada. Aragon must be very much like Arizona, no? Yes, that’s right.
The Major said when the war was over he would like to visit America, but he was a poor man. ‘I am a worker,’ he said gently and yet proudly. ‘Would I ever have enough money to go to America?’
‘Certainly,’ we said. Well, then, how much? Ah, now, that was difficult, in the cities it was more, in the small towns less, travel by bus was not expensive.
‘Well, it’s hard to say how much it would cost, Commandante.’
‘How about two dollars? Could you do it with two dollars a day?’
‘That depends,’ I said.
‘Well, three dollars.’
‘Oh, surely with three dollars.’
They were all quiet. The Major looked at his adjutant. ‘Hombre,’ he said, ‘thirty-six pesetas a day. Something.’ And then to me, ‘Ah, well, there is much work to do here and we are all needed. But America must be so beautiful. I would like all the same to see it.’
At the end of the cold wet waiting days, Chicote’s is the place to go in search of company and conversation and more rumors about the offensive. Chicote’s used to be a bar where the elegant young men of Madrid came to drink a few cocktails before dinner. Now it is like a dugout on the Gran Via, that wide rich street where you can hear the shells, even when there is silence. Chicote’s is not in a safe locality at all, and every day it is so crowded that you remember, comfortably, the subway at five o’clock, Times Square and the Grand Central Station.
A group of us were sitting in Chicote’s wondering whether to drink the sherry, which was tasteless, or the gin, which was frankly fatal. The English girl, who looked like a small, good-humored boy, drove an ambulance for a base hospital. One of the men, a German, wrote for a Spanish newspaper and was now talking rapid French about politics. There were two American soldiers, the two wonderfully funny ones, so young, and so much braver and gayer than people usually are. The smoke from black tobacco was choking, the noise deafening; soldiers at other tables shouted their news; the indomitable girls with dyed hair and amazing high heels waved and smiled; people walked in through the sandbagged door and stared and saw no one they knew or nothing they liked and walked out again. In this crowded din, one could be entirely alone and quiet, and think one’s own thoughts about Spain and the war and the people.
How is it going to be possible ever to explain what this is really like? All you can say is, ‘This happened; that happened; he did this; she did that.’ But this does not tell how the land looks on the way to the Guadarrama, the smooth brown land, with olive trees and scrub oak growing beside the dry stream beds, and the handsome mountains curving against the sky. Nor does this tell of Sanchez and Ausino, and the others with them, those calm young men who were once photographers or doctors or bank clerks or law students, and who now shape and train their troops so that one day they can be citizens instead of soldiers. And there is not time to write of the school where the children were making little houses of clay, and dolls from cardboard, and learning to recite poetry and missed school only when the shelling was too bad. And what about all the rest, and all the others? How can I explain that you feel safe at this war, knowing that the people around you are good people?
TheThirdWinter
November1938
In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafés along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the cold afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours.
The flower stalls looked bright and pretty along the promenade. ‘The flowers are all sold, Señores. For the funerals of those who were killed in the eleven o’clock bombing, poor souls.’
It had been clear and cold all day yesterday and probably would be fair from now on. ‘What beautiful weather,’ a woman said, and she stood, holding her shawl around her, staring at the sky. ‘And the nights are as fine as the days. A catastrophe,’ she said, and walked with her husband toward a café.
It was cold but really too lovely and everyone listened for the sirens all the time, and when we saw the bombers they were like tiny silver bullets moving forever up, across the sky.
It gets dark suddenly and no street lights are allowed in Barcelona, and at night the old town is rough going. It would be a silly end, I thought, to fall into a bomb hole, like the one I saw yesterday, that opens right down to the sewers. Everything you do in war is odd, I thought; why should I be plowing around after dark, looking for a carpenter in order to call for a picture frame for a friend? I found Hernández’s house in a back street and I held my cigarette lighter above my head to see my way down the hall and up the stairs and then I was knocking on the door and old Mrs Hernández opened the door and asked me to come in, to be welcome, her house was mine.
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘As you see,’ old Hernández said, and he pushed his cap back on his forehead and smiled, ‘alive.’
