by Mathew Carr
EPILOGUE
Of all the seasons, Lawton liked autumn best. Even in London he liked the cooler days, the long sunsets, the changing colors on the leaves in the streets and parks. The autumn of 1909 was unlike any he had ever known. It was not just the Indian summer that stretched into late September, bathing the city in a warm golden light even as the first leaves began to turn, or the pleasure that he took from his own survival. It was not even the pleasant days he spent with Lotte Friedman, which felt almost like a courtship.
At the beginning of the month he had his first seizure since returning from Barcelona, while eating supper in Lotte’s kitchen. One minute he was looking at the newspaper report describing how Francesc Ferrer had been arrested in a cave after more than a month in hiding, and then he saw himself walking once again beneath the burning sky of Barcelona and he felt the ground moving beneath his feet.
He came to himself to find Lotte Friedman wiping blood from his mouth, while her children peered from the doorway with expressions of fear and wonder. In that moment he could not stand to live like this any longer. The following day he went to see Dr. Morris and told him that he was ready to pay for surgery at Dr. Horsley’s clinic. Within a week Morris had managed to secure him an appointment at the National Hospital in Queen Square for an initial examination.
For a few days Lawton felt a surge of relief and hope that his torment might end, and then he saw himself transformed into a slack-jawed half-wit, a useless mouth, with Lotte or some nurse spoon-feeding him as he eked out his vacant days in his apartment or an asylum. As the golden autumn continued to unfold, these dire possibilities filled him with a determination to make the most of the time he had left, and to leave Lotte and her children with some pleasant memories of the man he had been. He bought two new gramophone records: Caruso singing Aida and Eddie Morton’s “Somebody Lied.” He treated Lotte Friedman to a silver bracelet and a new hat. He took her and the children to the circus and the park, and bought them ice cream, toffee apples, and cotton candy.
In the last week of September he took Lotte to the cinema for the first time in her life, to see a science fiction film called The Airship Destroyer at the Cinematograph Theatre. The film told the story of an attack on England by a German airship fleet. Even without sound, the audience gasped as the bombs fell on English towns and country roads, and everyone clapped when the handsome hero finally shot them down with his homemade missile and ended the film with his beloved swooning in his arms. Lotte came out of the theater looking anxious and said she was worried about what would happen to her children if there was a war.
Lawton replied that it was just a story, but he knew that she was not the only one who was anxious. The newspapers were filled with rumors of war and invasion, of German spies filtering into the country in their thousands, of simmering crises in the Balkans, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire that could blow up at any moment. He sensed that the world was being pulled toward some vague catastrophe, and the knowledge only reinforced his determination to make the most of the time remaining to him. On the day before his appointment at the London hospital, he and Lotte went to see The Arcadians at the Shaftesbury Theatre.
Afterward they walked along the river toward Embankment Station. Lotte was wearing her new hat and bracelet, and she looked younger and prettier than he had ever seen her as they walked arm in arm through the drifting leaves. Ahead of him Lawton could see the Whitehall buildings where he had only recently been questioned, and as he looked at the barges moving slowly back and forth and the streaks of gold reflected in the dark turbid waters, he had the disconcerting sensation that he was seeing everything around him for the last time. He heard Big Ben strike five and he imagined each solemn toll reverberating through all the corners of the Empire as the refrain from the Chorus of Fear passed through his mind: “To ev’ry race/In ev’ry clime/I set the pace, and call the time/From Camberwell to Candahar/But I quite forgot Arcadia!”
They had nearly reached Embankment when he heard a voice yelling, “Read it here! Ferrer executed! Read it here!” Lotte looked at him in surprise as he pulled away from her arm and quickened his pace to the station, where he fumbled for change and bought the Standard with the headline FERRER EXECUTED written in large black letters. He stood holding up the newspaper, oblivious to everything else around him, and read that the anarchist teacher Francesc Ferrer I Guardia had been shot by firing squad the previous day at the Montjuïc fortress in Barcelona for his part in the July riots. Ferrer had been convicted by a military court of helping to organize the rebellion, and despite protests and pleas for amnesty across Europe, the Spanish government had remained firm.
According to the paper, Ferrer had refused a priest and the blindfold, and told the firing squad: “Aim well, my friends, you are not responsible. I am innocent: long live the Modern School!” Lawton stared at the owl-like face, and remembered the man he had last seen sitting in a deckchair outside his home. The execution followed the assassination of Lieutenant Jorge Ugarte, the paper said, an officer from the Spanish political police, who had been shot dead outside his home by an unnamed female assassin. Lawton thought of Esperanza Claramunt and Rosa Tosets, as Lotte Friedman came up to him and looked at him with concern.
Lawton stared past her, past the pedestrians walking back and forth, beyond the boats moving along the river and the drifting clouds and he saw Barcelona once again. He saw the cavalry moving down the Ramblas. He saw Ferrer sitting in his deck chair and he wondered whether he had been looking over the sea when the bullets struck him. Lawton remembered the scripture that Ferrer had quoted to him: watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour. Ferrer had not known his hour, and nor did he. He could not know what would happen when Horsley operated on him. He did not know whether Horsley would cut out the bad part of his brain or leave him a vegetable.
Perhaps the world was always like that: sleepwalking toward catastrophes that the present could not even imagine. But his generation knew what was going to happen. Everyone knew that war would break out—the war that Foulkes and Weygrand had predicted would kill millions and shatter thrones and empires, but no one knew when. And even as he stood there, on a fine autumn afternoon in the greatest city in the world, it seemed to him that he could hear the thunder of the great guns, and he saw the flaming cities with their roofless buildings and their blackened stumps of walls, and the lines of soldiers—more than the world had ever seen—marching toward the front like an endless swarm of ants.
And somewhere beyond the light puffy clouds, behind the pallid blue of that English sky, in some country he could not yet name, he saw pitiless men wearing white laboratory coats standing in a barred room in front of a black sun, while human beings just like them lay on operating tables with their mouths taped up, crying into their gags for their mothers and fathers. Could such things really happen? There was nothing to say they could not. Now a breeze rustled the pages of his newspaper, a chill Hyperborean wind blowing down from the north, whistling through cemeteries filled with white crosses, through forests stripped of trees, and battlefields piled with the bodies of young men, and he shivered and folded the newspaper.
“Are you alright, Harry?” she asked.
“I’m fine.” Lawton took Lotte Friedman’s arm and drew her closer to him, and as they walked back down into the underground, he felt grateful for the time they had had together, and for whatever time they had left.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In historical fiction, any references to real persons or events are entirely deliberate, regardless of the liberties that may be taken with them, and this novel is no exception. That said, readers not familiar with this period of Spanish history might appreciate some sketching out of the people and events referred to. The urban insurrection known as La Semana Tragica (The Tragic Week) is one of the key events in early twentieth-century Spanish history, which took place in Barcelona between July 26 and August 2, 1909. It was the culmination of a decade of intensifying political and social conflict that
followed the collapse of the Spanish empire in 1898.
According to the two-party political system established following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874, local political bosses known as caciques bought and manipulated elections locally, while the Liberal and Conservative parties effectively took turns in government according to the ritualized system known as the alternancia pactada (agreed alternation). In the aftermath of 1898 this system came under pressure from Basque and Catalan nationalists; from a militant trade union movement strongly influenced by anarchism, and increasingly confident socialist and republican parties.
This confrontation was particularly sharp in Barcelona, the largest industrial city in Spain, and a city with strong separatist and anarchist traditions. In 1901 the conservative Catalan nationalist Regionalist League triumphed in local elections and became the dominant Catalan party for the next two decades. The prospect of Catalan autonomy alarmed the Spanish army and government, and resulted in the incident that Mata refers to early on in the novel, when junior Spanish army officers ransacked the offices of the satirical Catalan magazine ¡Cu-Cut! in 1905, in response to a cartoon insulting the Spanish army.
Instead of punishing the officers, the Spanish government passed the Law of Jurisdictions, which placed a swathe of offenses in military courts. In response Catalan nationalist parties formed a new coalition, Solidaritat Catalana (Catalan Solidarity) in 1906. The rise of separatism in Catalonia coincided with a political struggle between the city’s powerful anarchist movement and the Radical Republican party.
Under the leadership of the fiery journalist Alejandro Lerroux, the Radicals gained widespread support in the city’s working class districts, particularly in the Raval and the Parallel. In the same period a city with a long history of anarchist bomb outrages experienced a dramatic increase in terrorist bombings. As the novel suggests, the perpetrators of these outrages were never clear, and the controversy was such that in 1907 the Barcelona city council contracted a retired Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Charles Arrow to form a new anti-terrorist Office of Criminal Investigation. The “twentieth century Sherlock Holmes,” as he became known in Barcelona, soon found that he was not being given the support he required, and that his presence was resented by the local police.
As the bombings continued, Arrow’s office became effectively irrelevant. In 1908 an anarchist and police informant named Joan Rull was arrested by the Spanish police and put on trial for most of the bombings of the preceding few years. Though the trial concluded that Rull and his family were planting bombs in order to justify Rull’s continued employment as a police informer, some observers—including Inspector Arrow—believed that more complex political motives were behind them.
Rull’s execution in 1908 failed to resolve these debates. His bombing campaign was something of an aberration at a time when the new anarchist coalition Solidaridad Obrera (Workers Solidarity), was rejecting bombings and assassinations in favor of an anarcho-syndicalist strategy of trade union organization and direct action, with the ultimate goal of a general strike.
In July 1909 the conservative government of Antonio Maura took the decision to call up the Catalan reservists following another military reversal in Spain’s conflict with Rif tribesmen in Morocco. The escalation of the war was greeted with widespread opposition across Spain, but the protests were particularly virulent in Barcelona. When the anarchists, the trade unions, and the socialists called for a general strike, the Radical Party was obliged to follow suit. The strike quickly degenerated into a week of chaotic and confused violence that fell somewhere between an anticlerical riot and a spontaneous revolutionary insurrection that surprised the organizers of the strike as much as anyone else.
Lerroux’s Radicals were instrumental in turning the antiwar protest in an anticlerical direction, which resulted in the burning of more than eighty churches and religious institutions. The uprising was put down with considerable violence by the Spanish army. Between 100–150 people were killed by the security forces, though the real figure may have been higher. Nearly two thousand people were arrested and charged with armed rebellion. Dozens were imprisoned and five individuals were tried and executed.
The most famous victim of the Tragic Week repression was the anarchist educationalist Francesc Ferrer I Guardia. Ferrer was not directly involved in the preparations for the strike, and was not in Barcelona during the Tragic Week itself, but the Spanish government and army believed him to be complicit in the attempted assassination of King Alfonso XIII in 1906, and seized the opportunity to execute him, despite widespread protests across Europe.
The Tragic Week was a catalyst in Spain’s road to civil war. That same year, the reactionary government of Antonio Maura fell from power, following criticisms of the heavy-handed repression in Catalonia, thus bringing to an end the system of “agreed alternation.” The rebellion and the repression also led to the formation of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (National Work Confederation) the following year, which rapidly became the most powerful national anarchist organization in Spain. In 1909 Inspector Arrow returned to England with his payment.
Inspector Manuel Bravo Portillo went on to become the chief of Barcelona police, and a key organizer of the pistoleros (gunmen) hired by Barcelona employers to assassinate scores of anarchists and trade unionists during World War I, before he himself was assassinated in 1919. In the aftermath of Tragic Week, Alejandro Lerroux fell from favor with the Barcelona working classes, and moved his political base to Córdoba. Under the second republic he became prime minister three times, and went into exile following the outbreak of civil war.
Lieutenant Ugarte is entirely imaginary, but the Brigada Social did exist, and was largely responsible for the “Inquisitorial” response to the Corpus Christi bombing of 1896.
* * *
As the novel suggests, the transfusion experiments carried out by Weygrand and Foulkes were indeed ahead of their time. Despite improvements in blood transfusion techniques during World War I, blood was mostly used to treat battlefield injuries through “direct” patient-to-patient transfusions for much of the war, rather than through the use of stored blood. In 1917 Captain Lawrence Bruce Robertson, a doctor with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, persuaded his British colleagues to conduct “indirect” transfusions for the first time, using the new syringe and paraffin tube methods that had been developed in American hospitals—and which Foulkes and Weygrand use in the novel.
That same year an American military doctor named Oswald Hope Robertson built the world’s first blood bank following America’s entry into the war. Robertson stored blood mixed with a citrate and dextrose solution in glass bottles in ammunition boxes packed with ice and sawdust, thereby making it possible to store blood for up to twenty-six days and move it to casualty clearing stations to be used in transfusions to patients. In 1917 the British surgeon Geoffrey Keynes, a lieutenant in the British army, designed the first portable transfusion kits, consisting of a wooden box, a storage bottle, and needles.
Between them, these three men saved thousands of lives, and laid the basis for the further development of blood transfusion and blood storage techniques on the battlefield. The experiments with blood plasma described in the novel are also anachronistic. Though Captain Gordon R. Ward of the British Royal Army Medical Corps suggested injecting patients suffering from shock with plasma during World War I, his advice was not followed.
It was not until World War II that plasma was used on a large scale by the American army on the battlefield, and also in the United Kingdom, as a result of the American “Plasma for Britain” initiative. This program was overseen by the African American scientist Charles Drew, who developed a method for “banking” dried plasma while completing his doctorate at Columbia University in the late 1930s. Following the American biochemist Edwin Cohn’s discovery of the process of blood fractionation, serum albumin—a derivative of plasma—was used by the American army during World War II for treating battlefield shock. As a resul
t of research carried out by one of Cohn’s colleagues, Dr. Carl W. Walter, plasma transfusions were carried out using plastic bags and tubing, rather than glass or rubber, and these became standard procedures during WWII and the wars that followed.
The “pre-Nazi” beliefs and characteristics of Weygrand, Foulkes, and the Explorer Club were not as unusual as they might seem. Dozens of groups proliferated in Germany and Europe in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th that combined paganism, Wotanism, Runology, occultism, German romanticism, antisemitism, racism, and a quasi-mystical fascination with mythical Aryan homelands. Perhaps the most famous exponent of these views was the Austrian writer Guido von List, who predicted that the Central Powers would win World War II and create a global Wotanist empire.
List died in 1919. Had it not been for World War I, he and the other exponents of “Ariosophy”—wisdom of the Aryans—would have mostly likely faded into complete obscurity. Instead these movements went on to influence the Nazi Party and the SS, and some of their ideological descendants are still with us even in the twenty-first century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Carr is a novelist, journalist, and lifelong Hispanophile. His non-fiction is published by The New Press: Fortress Europe; Sherman’s Ghosts; and The Savage Frontier. This is Matt’s second novel, following the critically acclaimed The Devils of Cardona, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He blogs regularly at www.infernalmachine.co.uk.
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