What had happened, we kept on asking, and got various confused accounts. There had been a fight between some soldiers who tried to seize the Government buildings and the Guardias de Asalto and the soldiers had deserted their officers. Then in the early dawn the poor quarters rose and burnt a lot of houses, two hundred houses, four hundred houses. We ate our cazuela for supper and went to bed, but we could not sleep much. Lorries dashed by, lights glared in the windows, cries, shouts, grinding of brakes. Salud! – Salud! – the Revolution.
‘Salud!’, roaring engines, grinding brakes, a distant rifle shot. Daylight again. Has anyone slept? The same lorries are dashing by. Grimy but happy, the young men wave their pistols and throw up their clenched fists in a gesture of triumph. Malaga is in the hands of the workers. And the pale smoke still hangs like a pall and drifts far out to sea.
As we were eating breakfast a patrol arrived searching for arms. But they knew us and refused to search our house. The English, they said, were the friends of Spain. So we all had some aguardiente and they left. Salud! Salud! Later when Gerald had gone out to visit a friend, a second patrol arrived. They were strangers from Malaga and hammered on the big front door. I went down to receive them with the servants behind me and they came in with their guns held forward as if boarding a pirate. The young leader to my intense delight was armed with a child’s toy gilt sword. I looked behind me, the servants to my surprise and displeasure had disappeared completely; so I showed the little band upstairs myself. They went into my bedroom, and the young leader opened a bureau drawer: it was unfortunately filled with my silk underclothes. Overcome with modesty he hurried from the scene of embarrassment leaving all the other drawers and chests unopened.
We went downstairs again and into the dining-room where the young leader with evident apprehension opened the drawer of an old table. It was full of headless dolls, the property of Pilar’s little daughter. The young leader felt that Fate was mocking him, and his companions certainly were. The servants had reappeared, and ushered the patrol out, all but the leader on a broad grin. Salud! Salud!
‘Where were you?’ I asked the servants.
‘Oh, we were just hiding the silver and your jewellery,’ they said. The distrust of Spaniards for other Spaniards is bottomless and blinds them often to reality. I could see at a glance that the young leader with his toy sword was a fanatic of the purest water. The Koh-i-noor would not have tempted him while he was doing his duty. He might have killed me in the pursuit of Anarchy, but he would never have stolen from me. But I did not argue the point uselessly with the servants. All strange Spaniards from other towns were probably robbers to them. The innocent stupid English, they think, do not understand these things; and so are always robbed and cheated.
All that morning the lorries roared and thundered and hailed Saluds with undiminished zeal. In the afternoon our village friends, the carpenters and masons and gardeners began to visit us. There was a rumour, they came to warn us of it, that house burning was going to spread, a band of extremists from the city were said to be coming to burn down some local houses.
‘They wouldn’t burn ours?’ we asked with some doubt.
‘Claro que no!’ they said surprised. The idea of anyone however fanatical burning the houses of the innocent and slightly ridiculous English had never entered their heads.
‘But they’ll burn your neighbour’s house, old Don Cristober’s. He is a Fascist. And with this wind it might catch your roof; but we’ll stay and help. We’d better borrow buckets and have some brooms and some buckets of sand ready.’ We were to be calmly prepared for what seemed to us all a natural catastrophe.
Gerald mourned a little. ‘It’s such a beautiful old house,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is a pity,’ said Juan the carpenter with resignation. ‘I do all their work and the wood is very good. It is a pity.’ But cyclones and civil wars are all felt as ‘acts of God’, or acts of the devil – there is no use protesting against anything that happens in them.
Crowds of people were gathering in the street. Don Cristober’s old gardener and his witchlike wife came to us to ask us if we could not do something to help them. Gerald told them when the house-burning party came they had better suggest their burning the furniture (which was awful anyway) and leaving the house, which might be used for a school or hospital. ‘Then at least you’ll save the house and also keep a roof over your own heads,’ he said. Time passed and nothing happened, so we went up on the roof to look at Malaga – the smoke still streamed out from the town like a long woeful banner trailing out on the air to tell of disaster.
We were looking towards the distant sea when suddenly from a big white house not far away sprang up a thin white column of smoke – ‘oh, Lord, it’s come,’ I thought with that sickening feeling of the worst arriving. The smoke got thicker and thicker, eddying in clouds – then a red flame appeared, then a great burst of flame and smoke, the roof had fallen in. Far away to the left a second column of smoke appeared. We waited rather grimly, but no one came, nothing happened, no more fires appeared.
‘Not a good day for burning houses,’ said Gerald, making me laugh, for he sounded as if he were apologising for them. The thermometer stood at ninety-four degrees and it was breathless – ‘so hot standing round a fire. Perhaps they’ll come tonight. Fires are much finer at night anyway.’ But that evening a sinister rumour began to run about the village, so sinister that everyone forgot all about burning houses.
‘El Tercio!’ ‘El Tercio is coming!’ From the tone of the voices we heard in the street they might have been saying ‘Hell has opened!’ ‘Lucifer and his legions are upon us!’ For it was a Legion that was coming.
El Tercio (The Force) is the Foreign Legion, the only regular soldiers, except twelve thousand Moors, that Spain possessed. I do not know if they deserve the dread the people showed of them. But there were ugly tales of what they did at Oviedo. There were only six thousand of them, but they made up in courage and ferocity for their lack of numbers, and I have heard foreign soldiers say that they would take on the Prussian Guard or their own weight in wild cats.
This was the Legion worthy of Lucifer that was expected, and the expectation ran like a cold wave of horror through the countryside. No one went to bed. Everyone was abroad on the road watching the red flare of Malaga, listening if they could hear on the distant highway the tramp of the approaching enemy. And the whisper ‘El Tercio, El Tercio’ ran from mouth to mouth in a tone of blood-curdling fear that communicated itself to us in spite of ourselves, chilling our blood, echoing fearfully in our unwilling ears.
We went at last to bed hearing the splutter and misfiring of a little aeroplane droning bravely off to blow up bridges and hinder the Legion’s advance. The lorries were still rushing by – some to go towards Algeçiras carrying eager youths to defend their villages, some into the mountains to defend the passes against the ‘Fascists’, who had ceased already to be Don Fulano (Don Somebody-or-other) and his sons and nephews and cousins, and become a quite mythical figure of wickedness and horror rather like the figure of the ‘Red’ in the mind of a Daily Mail reader. Figures of fun, ‘Hodadoddys’ of the mind’s cabbage garden, figures to laugh at if they were not used to frighten all reason out of the air.
The dark night was lit by the glow from Malaga, and the ruddy dark was suddenly punctured by the white flare of headlights rushing by. As I sank into a deeper darkness of sleep – I heard a voice below whisper ‘El Tercio’ like the voice of fear itself.
Chapter 3
MORNING CAME, and nothing had happened after all. The Legion, they now said, was far away near Algeçiras. Everything was going to be all right. They would be kept there. The Moors, except the few that had crossed, would be kept in Africa. But there was a more sober look about things. There were more lorries on the road than ever, but they had a new determined air, as if they had something serious to do, somewhere important to go.
The kitchen was full of poor old countrywomen who had already begun to see Moors behind e
very bush and had come for protection and consolation. That day for the first time we flew our English flag. We had bought it at the Army and Navy Stores for just such occasions if they should eventuate. But we had not liked to put it up before because we had no Spanish flag to fly with it. But Pilar had hastily run one up out of odds and ends of old coloured dresses and we hung them both out on the balcony where they were received with enthusiasm by the passing lorries. And it was a great comfort to the servants and to all our poor neighbours, who said ‘Now the house is sacred. No one can touch it.’
‘Let’s go to Torremolinos to see Gray and find out what has happened,’ Gerald said.
Gray was an American friend, a journalist, who had taken a villa in Torremolinos, a village by the sea where there is a large English colony eked out with foreigners of other nationalities. Gray was trying to write a book on the confused subject of modern Spanish politics and so we felt that he ought to understand better than the rest of us what was really happening.
‘It’s dreadfully hot,’ I said. There were no buses running and the very thought of those long dusty miles under this burning sky made me tired and thirsty.
‘Never mind, some one will give us a drink and we can have a swim in the sea.’ Maria unwillingly made us up a merienda, a picnic lunch. ‘You’d much better stay at home in your own garden, and not go on the roads and get yourselves shot by these ill-educated youths,’ she said severely, with the scorn of the true conservative Spaniard, hating all forms of novedad, distrusting all change either to left or right.
‘Vaya usted con Dios,’ she said disapprovingly as we went out of the kitchen door into the street. ‘Salud!’ yelled a passing lorry load. ‘Salud!’ we yelled back with an excitement we could not repress. ‘Con Dios,’ said Maria so disapprovingly that it amounted to a curse, but her ‘with God’ was drowned in the hail of ‘Saluds’. And she went inside and shut the door with a bang.
We set off. Heavens, how hot it was! Not a breath from the sea, as we toiled down the seemingly endless way. Presently we left the tarred high road with relief and escaped the thundering lorries. As we climbed down the narrow yellow goat tracks our feet crunched the rosemary and thyme, and the sharp bitter-sweet scent rose in the hot air.
At last we could see Torremolinos, small and white on the edge of the sea. Exhausted by the heat we sat down in the shade of an olive tree and opened our lunch. It was a true Spanish merienda, cold potato omelette, a little goat’s milk cheese, half a loaf of bread, early muscatels and a small bottle of white wine. The blue sea was as quiet as it had been three days before. An air of everlasting peace, of classical peace rising from the deep past brooded over the Mediterranean. But suddenly far off inland we heard a rattle of shots, and to the left the ominous smoke of Malaga burning was still drifting out to sea.
A little wind was springing up, a tiny but fresh levante. It blew in our faces as we continued on our way; a long hot pull through the level plain among crops of beet sugar. Two patrols stopped us, but when they realised that we were English they only saluted and laughed. ‘These aren’t Fascists,’ they said grinning.
Torremolinos at last. Longing for coffee we stopped at the first café – locked and shut. ‘All the cafés are shut,’ said an onlooker. ‘Order of the governor. No place that sells liquor is allowed to serve anyone with anything.’
Thirsty and weary, we turned down a street towards the sea and knocked at Gray’s door. Our friend, who opened it, was a big dark American, ‘Thank heavens, you’re here. Do give us a drink, the cafés are shut. And tell us what has happened.’
‘Hell’s broken loose,’ he said pulling out a bottle of white wine and some glasses from the cupboard. ‘Maria,’ he shouted to his old fat cook, ‘Café para tres.’
‘Yes, but how did it begin?’
Generals in Morocco rose first. Everywhere in Spain they’ve tried to seize the Government buildings. Failed here completely, succeeded in Seville, and God knows where else. I don’t suppose they can do much really unless they can get all the Foreign Legion and the Moors over. And I don’t see how they can because the Government has got practically all the Navy. The officers rose, but the sailors refused to obey orders. Only one merchant ship brought over a boatload of Moors and Legionaries. Then the sailors seized the boat and took her off somewhere. The sailors on the warships have seized their officers and put them in chains or thrown them overboard, anyway they are all for the Government, or so people here say.’
Old Maria came in with the coffee just then.
‘Maria, como está usted en estos tiempos malos?’
‘Malísimos están! y a estos locos que van por las calles en coches con revólveres se deben de ponerlos todos en la carcel.’ ‘And these idiots who run about in motorcars with revolvers ought all to be in prison.’ Maria was as unsympathetic as our Maria over the popular excitement.
Gray laughed, his tolerant, kindly, western laugh.
‘She is a Fascist,’ he said to Maria’s indignation.
Fascist was already bandied about as a word of violent abuse. It had become the extreme of insult, even ousting sinverguenza from its place of honour.
Maria went out muttering about the evil of these times.
‘What are Maria’s politics?’
‘Complete disapproval of anything that was not done in her time in her hometown, Cártama – complete loyalty to Cártama – mild dislike of all the rest of Spain, distrust of all “foreigners”, that is to say all Spaniards not born in Cártama.’
‘How can she bear living away from it then?’
‘Well you know, she’s like the Boston Irish. She loves Cártama even more from a distance. But you’ll see that she’ll go back. She stays with me because I pay her well and she’s rather fond of me, and thinks these awful robbers of Torremolinos would fleece me if she weren’t here to protect me. Ask her about her twelve olive trees in Cártama some time. They’ve all got names and personalities. One is “the one with the broken bough”, another is “the one where they hung the fox”. I’m sure she prays for them and I expect they come when they are called.’
We all drank Maria of Cártama’s coffee. Delicious after the thirst and tiredness of that endless hot road.
‘I’m off this afternoon,’ Gray said.
‘Where to?’
‘To Morocco to see what’s happening, or to Madrid if I can get there by plane, or to Seville. There’s no use staying here. Malaga isn’t likely to be important. I want to see some of this fuss before it’s over. And you can’t send news out from here anyway. Everything’s censored.’
‘But how’ll you get away? There aren’t any trains or buses and surely you can’t pass the Rebel lines at La Linea, can you, even if you could get a car?’
‘I shan’t try. I’ve got a fishing-boat that’s promised to take me. Goes to Gibraltar smuggling every night anyway. My local friends will help me hop a lorry to Fuengirola. Then the fishing-boat and Gibraltar at dawn if we have luck.’
‘And a prison in Seville if you don’t, I suppose,’ said Gerald sardonically.
‘Or a nice roomy grave in the Mediterranean. I don’t believe the Rebels are up to catching us. But the worst of it is I’m a hell of a bad sailor. I shall be sick as a dog all night on that beastly fishy lugger. And I’ll look and smell so horrid that your conservative fellow countrymen will throw me back when they see what they’ve caught.’
‘Don’t you want to pack?’ Gerald asked.
‘Oh, I’m packed already, I wanted to go this morning but there was no way. Stay till my friends come – God knows when we’ll meet again. I shall go to America when I’ve had a look around. Spain’s going to be a hell of a place to write books in for the next year or so.’
‘I shouldn’t try, too exciting just watching it.’
Someone knocked upon the door, and two young men in blue overalls came in. And we all greeted one another Salud! Salud! Salud!
‘Hurry!’ they said. Gray seized his typewriter and suitcase. Goodbye
! Goodbye! Salud! Salud!
Maria of Cártama stood in the doorway dolefully shaking her head.
Wearily we walked home. The sun was going down, but walking was still a penance. Our Maria greeted us crossly. She was glad to see us safe home, but she felt that something ought to have happened to us. The Spanish have a proverb which she quoted to us that night. ‘The foolhardy who get themselves killed are the Devil’s martyrs.’
Chapter 4
I HAVE FORGOTTEN to mention that we were carrying a burden on our way back from Torremolinos which added to our discomfort in the dust and heat. Gray as he was leaving had urged us to take his radio so that we could get some news from outside, and we had decided to lug it with us lest it should be confiscated before we were able to come back for it. It was a horrid-looking little radio, but we were glad of its small proportions at the time as it was quite heavy enough as it was to carry for miles uphill; but later we discovered what a wretched little thing it was. Voices roared and bellowed and squeaked out of it, all languages sounded alike and all incomprehensible, every station seemed to talk at once on every wavelength, and yet it was almost impossible to find the particular station you wanted at all. When you finally got some English station, either Czechoslovakia was sending directly on top of it, or Seville or Malaga were buzzing on its wavelength to prevent you from getting any outside news. Yet, bad as it was, it became one of the greatest interests of our lives, and after six o’clock (when the electric light in the village was turned on) we were almost always to be found seated in front of its varnished face trying to get some meaning out of the chaotic sounds which strangely roared and shrieked out of it.
Radio in time of war becomes absolutely fascinating. The pronouncements, denials, alarms, rumours, propaganda, speeches of national leaders, make it enthralling to the listener who is at all emotionally involved, especially if he can follow the news in several languages. When we turned the hand on the little dial, harsh voices began to speak, excited, alarmed, denunciatory. After we had heard the news about Spain – the uncertain rumours rather – from England, France and Germany, we listened to Spain herself.
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