However, the situation was getting so desperate that Don Carlos decided to try it and the very next morning when an American destroyer happened to be leaving. Then an anxious discussion began as to the safest way of getting to Malaga. And we all decided in the end that it would be best to go quite openly on the eight o’clock morning train, as that only stopped once at one little country station, whereas the cars and buses could be stopped anywhere along the road. The boys would have to go to their house to get a few clothes and get on the train at the little station which fortunately happened to be near it.
Maria Louisa and I afterwards confessed to each other that we did not sleep at all that last night: we were both so afraid that something would happen at the last minute. But the night was tranquil and the next morning we did exactly what we had planned. We all walked quite openly to the station saying good morning cheerfully to the people we passed as if we were going on a shopping expedition. I must say it was rather an alarming walk, and some of the people looked at Don Carlos very oddly; but nothing happened and we got on the train, and were profoundly relieved when it started, and went rattling along until it came to the next little station. What would happen there? I could not help remembering that it was there that they had taken off the two poor old priests to take them to prison. And would the boys be there? Yes, with a long breath of relief we saw them getting on, and felt the train starting. There was an even more anxious moment when we got to Malaga – would we be stopped at the barriers? But we showed our tickets and walked quietly through, then, as quickly as we could go without attracting attention, we carried Don Carlos off to the English Club, while Maria Louisa and the children went to her mother’s house to say goodbye. We found that the destroyer did not leave until early in the afternoon, and we rashly took Don Carlos to the hotel where his sister and a nephew were staying and left him there for a little while to say goodbye. This we afterwards realised had been a perfectly mad thing to do, for we were told later that some of the Terrorists began to look for him in Malaga almost as soon as he left our house – word had somehow got to them. And that morning after we had gone three heavily armed strangers appeared at the door, and asked Maria if Don Carlos C— were there. Maria with her usual presence of mind and I daresay with a very severe manner which carried conviction said: ‘You are too late. He has already left the country on his way to the Argentine.’ I think this decided statement of Maria’s with her stern manner, very effective in a country with a good many remnants of a matriarchal system like Andalucia, may well have saved Don Carlos’s life. For they probably did not look for him in Malaga with the same conviction and perseverance they would otherwise have done. And the very boldness of his going to see his sister may well have turned out a wise move, for they would hardly have expected him to go there of all places.
Anyway all went well, and we were all sitting safely in the American Consulate long before the time for the destroyer to leave. Gerald had rushed out on some last minute task and I was holding the various papers of the family when the American Consul came up and looked at them.
‘That Chilean paper is no good at all,’ he said discouragingly. ‘You’ll never get them away with that,’ he added, not realising that Don Carlos knew a certain amount of English. Don Carlos and I interchanged looks, glad that Maria Louisa and the children could not understand what he was saying.
Just then Gerald returned and we set off to the docks which were not far away. There we waited in a long shed in the really terrific afternoon heat, while the officials worked their way slowly through the long lines of refugees, Cubans and South Americans of all sorts, with a few Spaniards and one or two North Americans. The Chilean vice-consul, an intelligent and energetic young man who had been a great help to us all along had appeared, to be there in case anything went wrong. One of his most valuable qualities was that he had greater powers of conversation even than the Spaniards – and these powers were still to prove useful to us. For when Don Carlos’s turn came, the officials refused to accept the paper of the Argentine Consulate, and said Don Carlos could not leave the country. Maria Louisa and I were in despair, and I suppose Don Carlos was too, though he did not show it. Gerald, however, was undaunted, he asked the Consul to hold the boat a little if necessary; and he and the Chilean vice-consul sprang into a taxi and rushed off to the Governor’s office and the various committees again.
Gerald said afterwards that it was really the Vice-Consul who managed it. Not only did he have greater conversational powers than any Spaniard, he had twice the staying power, and all the energy of new continents. He talked them to a standstill, and if ever he flagged for a moment Gerald himself took up the strain. However it was done, just as Maria Louisa and I were really beginning to despair, the two appeared in triumph with the confirmatory document they wanted. This the embarkation authorities most unwillingly recognised, and we went as quickly as possible to the waiting ship’s launch. As soon as we had hurriedly embraced and said goodbye, they stepped into the boat, and at a word from the Consul to the officer in charge, it pushed off from the shore, handled by some immaculate but extraordinarily rough-and-ready looking American sailors.
We stood waving on the dock. The long struggle was over: they were saved.
And the time has almost come for me to say goodbye too; though we did not leave for some time after the C—s went. Our position was never very pleasant again. Some people did not ‘look at us very well’ as the Spaniards put it. We were perfectly safe I think in spite of having saved a Fascista, but there was a certain amount of suspicion of us. People watched us doubtfully. They were not so sure of the innocence and simplicity of the English as they had been.
The day after the C—s got away is fixed in our memories as the day of our most startling war experience. We were sitting in the garden drinking coffee after lunch under the trees when a large silver grey aeroplane appeared overhead flying very low. We supposed that it was about to land at the airfield, and looked at it with interest as we had never seen any plane so large and modern looking from there before. Then suddenly there was a terrific explosion. A large bomb had fallen just outside our garden wall, spattering us with dirt. We rushed for the house; but there was another explosion close to us before we could reach it. We found the sala rapidly filling with our terrified neighbours who had been more suspicious than we had of the strange grey plane.
Then as we stood crowded together there was a perfect hail of bombs around us. The aviator appeared to us to be actually trying to hit the house. Explosion after explosion came on every side of us. One bomb crashed on the asphalt road in front, and the glass from the windows along the street came raining tinkling down. Two young girls had completely lost control of themselves and sobbed and shrieked in hysterics. The sound irritated and hurt me. I felt that I could either stand the repeated shocks of the bombs or the shrieks of the girls. The two together seemed unendurable. And the time seemed very long until it was all over.
Afterwards our neighbours counted the holes made by the explosions. They found that seventy bombs had fallen within two hundred yards of our house. We could not imagine why this violent attack had been made on this particular section of our poor village: all sorts of speculations were rife. But afterwards we were told that there had been an ammunition dump in the garden of a large white house near us for a short time, though the ammunition had actually all been removed before the raid. Of course the bombs used were quite small ones or the vibration caused by so many explosions in a small sector would have been serious, but even so the slight amount of damage done was remarkable. Only one bomb actually struck a house, that one fell on the roof of the school (which was empty of course) crashed through it – and did not go off. Two people were rather badly cut by flying glass and two goats and a donkey were killed. All the other bombs wasted themselves in digging holes in gardens or tearing up the streets.
Pilar, who had noticed that I seemed unusually nervous and irritated during the raid, sympathised with me over the hysterics o
f the girls. ‘I could see that those girls shrieking like that made you nervous, Señora,’ she said. It did not seem to occur to her that perhaps the bombs made me nervous too. This was flattering: but it was not true. For I did suffer from something almost like shell-shock for a time after that raid. But it was shell-shock of a curious kind; for its incidence was almost entirely confined to being in our garden. If I was out under the trees by the bed of zinnias the sight of a plane even on the distant horizon, or the sound of one, even though I knew it by its coughing to be one of the old local machines familiar to me even before the outbreak of war, would make me want to hurry into the house, and if I was alone I would yield to this urge to escape from the menace I felt in the air. Our garden which had seemed to me even during the war so safe and sheltered seemed to me after that raid a defenceless place open to attack from the Prince of the Air and all his evil Legions. I could not feel secure in it any more. In the house or the street or in Malaga I felt the same as ever, though just after that we had a number of disagreeable night raids. But in the garden I felt exposed, like a rabbit when there are hawks about. It had become the place where bombs fell suddenly out of the clear sky.
But before we left Spain we had been in so many air raids that I had come unconsciously to feel that all aeroplanes were potential murderers (a feeling with a good deal of justification) and when we first came back to England I could not really believe that the aeroplanes I saw were not coming to drop bombs. I could not help looking at them with a certain apprehension, expecting the first bomb to fall. Just as when I happened to see a burned house in England, I thought before I could stop myself, ‘Why they’ve been burning houses here, too.’
Once in our village during the worst times, an old lady died; and we all began asking each other what had happened – surely they were not killing old ladies! And when we were told that she had died a natural death in her sleep, being extremely old, we were all strangely pleased. It was as if, like some savages, we had not known that people could die natural deaths.
Our leaving Spain in the end was a kind of accident. We decided to go to Gibraltar to get some money and find out what was happening, and then to return to Spain. Again the boat which was leaving happened to be an American destroyer. As we stood on its deck it looked as glittering and new as if it were immune to all the troubles of Europe. And we felt strange and out of place on it; for we could not leave behind our troubled thoughts about Spain – though Malaga looking lovely in the distance with its great cathedral and the Moorish castle on the hill, grew small and smaller until the destroyer, gathering speed, drew rapidly out to sea and they were gone.
Epilogue
THE SCENE OF MY EPILOGUE is laid in Lisbon on the morning of a late autumn day. After we left Spain we never returned after all. We stayed in Gibraltar for a time and then our affairs called us home. We tried to forget the war, but all the while it lay heavy and sore at the bottom of our minds – and lies there still, though now we can think of other things and almost forget it.
I think that, odd though it may seem, Gibraltar seemed to me almost a more unpleasant place to be in during the Civil War than Malaga itself. I remember the paeon into which Borrow breaks forth in The Bible in Spain when he crosses the frontier from the Spanish side, and comes upon ‘noble’ English faces – ‘Protestant’ too, I suppose, as that was Borrow’s first requirement for nobility. Either I am less susceptible to nobility and Protestantism than Borrow was (which I am afraid is very likely!) or else the Rock has changed.
Before the war we used always to find it amusing with its cribbed and confined garrison life, full of the usual parties, quarrels, flirting, gossip and games. And those narrow shopping streets with their little booths whose Oriental shopkeepers lean out with dark clutching hands to draw you in and sell you papery silk kimonos embroidered with golden dragons for 7/6d. Those busy quarters with their dark foreign faces, wandering sailors of all nations and tourists straying about in the sun pricing the cheapjack wares, had a ‘Somewhere East of Suez’ effect which diverted us when we came fresh from village life in Spain.
Then there was the Rock Hotel, at the other extreme in every way. In fact I used to feel on the occasions when someone invited us to it for a meal that one lunch there was almost enough to make a Communist of anyone. For some reason you felt concentrated there all the irresponsible stupidity of modern wealth. The sort of conversation you would hear from the tables around you, smug, self-complacent, secure in the power of unearned money – money which for the first time in history is not expected to carry any obligations with it, made me, for one, long for a cataclysm to shock these dulled creatures out of their stupid battening. I wished for it indeed as heartily as any of the Medieval Fathers of the Church would have done while they cursed them for their ‘usury’ and their refusal to undertake their part in the Commonwealth of God.
There were, however, guests at the Rock Hotel who were of a different sort. These were a number of Spaniards, mostly old ladies in black, who had left Spain after the Republic came in, or after the rising at Oviedo, and had been waiting in Gibraltar ever since for the revolution which was to come; and which finally more than justified their fears by coming in a more horrible, more devastating form than even these tremblers can have apprehended – though it came from a quarter they had not, I suppose, expected it from. Once the Civil War began of course, Gibraltar was absolutely crowded with refugees of every class and party, who carried on their hatreds comparatively harmlessly in neutral territory.
The Rock Hotel had always, as I say, produced a disagreeable effect, as luxury hotels are apt to do, especially when you come from a region where hunger is common. But during the Civil War Gibraltar as a whole made a most unpleasant impression. The poor refugees hated and feared, and occasionally broke out into disturbances; and their anxious, excited state made everyone feel troubled and insecure. Most of the civilians as well as the Army and Navy officers we met talked the most extraordinary nonsense about ‘Reds’ and ‘Communists’ and were bursting with incredible atrocity stories. For the real sufferings of the Spanish people of all classes they cared not a particle: it was not a subject which had the slightest interest for them. Perhaps it was natural enough: they were interested in riding and tennis, in swimming and bridge. What had the Spanish people or their sufferings to do with them?
Complete indifference we would not have minded very much, it is natural enough to be indifferent to the misfortunes of others; but what was particularly unpleasant in the attitude of the English at Gibraltar (and I might add of the Americans and most of the other foreigners one met), was that they combined this essential indifference and ignorance with the most violent prejudices and a perfect revelling in preposterous atrocity stories. They were generally not so much for the Nationalists (since they tried us extremely by depreciating the Spaniards as a race – an attitude only possible to those who have never known that extraordinary people) as against the ‘Reds’. And it would have been amusing, if it had not been so discouraging to anyone who would like to think well of the human intelligence, to listen to some stalwart Englishman or Englishwoman holding forth about the ‘Communists’ and their extraordinary atrocities, then, sometimes, to see a look of doubt and hesitation come over their faces, and the uncertain question ‘Which side are the Moors fighting on?’ A remark occasionally varied, as it was by one Army woman I happened to be talking to, by violent indictments of those criminal ‘Reds’ who had brought over the wild Moors to attack their own country! If you pointed out that as a matter of fact it was the Nationalists who had brought over the Moors, it immediately became a wise and necessary measure. For Reason and Justice if not actually killed in time of war, are at least under detentive arrest.
While atrocities supposed to have been committed by the ‘Reds’ were naturally the favourite consumption, a number supposed to have been committed by the Nationalists were told with equal enjoyment. Even the crucified baby was crucified again (this time by the Nationalists), and seen b
y an English sentry from his post on the edge of Spanish territory. One very odd atrocity story about the Nationalists was told later on by some of the Italians who had been at the taking of Malaga. They said that the wounded militia in the hospitals had been intentionally so badly treated by the surgeons who were of secret Right sympathies that many were unnecessarily dying of slight wounds and many had been deliberately crippled by bad treatment. I should find this story hard to believe about surgeons anywhere: nothing would make me believe it about Spanish surgeons. For I have seen something of the medical profession in Spain, and I believe there is no country where it contains such devoted servants of humanity.
For those who talk as if Spain were the country of illiteracy, bull fights, massacres and atrocities, have forgotten, or have never known, that Spain (as well as being a country of a glorious history, a most beautiful language and a magnificent literature) is also the country of the saints. There is surely no other country where extraordinary, single-hearted, passionate goodness has occurred so often as in Spain. How many names come to the mind – Las Casas, the Dominican spending himself ceaselessly for the Indians, San Tomás de Villanueva and his devoted work for the prisoners and captives – and how many more. And if it does not now often find its outlet in the charitable works of the Church (though you will still find it there) as it did in times past, it is diverted into various lay activities, often into the care of the poor and suffering. But indeed you may find this single-hearted passion anywhere in Spain, among the Sisters of Charity caring for the sick and poor, among the patient, starving mothers of hungry children, among the Anarchists – where you least look for it there starts the hare.
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