Reassurance as to MacDonald’s likely wellbeing was contained in an open letter to the Scottish press from David Murray, who suggested that communications from her had been obstructed by the sluggish nature of Spain’s wartime infrastructure:
The friends and parents of Miss MacDonald may reasonably be anxious about her continued non-appearance. They should realise, however, that slow travelling and faulty postal, telegraphic and telephonic communication are normal in Spain.
Further welcome words came from Robert Martin of Stevenston in Ayrshire. Though he had originally travelled to Spain as a potential volunteer with the International Brigades, in Barcelona he had been jailed for being a ‘fascist’ (after surviving the sinking of SS Ciudad de Barcelona, Martin had deserted from the Brigade HQ at Albacete and hidden with POUM comrades in Catalonia). In prison, Martin had formed a lasting friendship with MacDonald, and was able to report, back in Scotland after his escape, of her continued health and freedom ‘to walk about the streets as I have here’.
To the relief of MacDonald’s friends and relatives, in early August Aldred received a letter from Spain carrying news of her location. After her release on 8 July, she had been re-arrested and imprisoned for a further 12 days. The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel admitted she was now living an undercover, destitute life, sleeping rough and trying to avoid detection and further imprisonment:
You will have been expecting to hear from me sooner. Due to the usual, or unusual, unforeseen accidents, that was impossible. Most of the people I knew here left for their respective countries, and sometimes it is pretty lonely. My financial situation is bad. From the clothes aspect, if I am not home soon, it will be too cold to come home at all. I am a terrible sight. All my documents and clothes have gone beyond recall. I have lost everything.
In a further letter to Aldred that week, MacDonald announced that she was now unable to leave Spain lawfully:
I am still here [in Barcelona] and unable to leave the country legally. I am ‘in hiding’ or living ‘illegally’. I cannot get a visa. If I apply I shall be arrested. If I do not apply I shall be arrested. You must help. I would be foolish if I did not know the danger I am now in.
This was not, of course, in accordance with Martin’s statement that MacDonald had autonomy over her movements, but, putting that disparity aside, her parents at least had the satisfaction of knowing their daughter was alive. Notwithstanding, these inconsistencies did result in scepticism over MacDonald’s plight from other quarters. David Murray wrote a letter informing Guy Aldred that MacDonald could quite easily obtain a police exit visa if she had the motivation to do so, as he had recently fulfilled this task when in Barcelona. Murray had received information that, contrary to scare stories spread by Aldred, MacDonald had remained in Barcelona as ‘she likes Spain and I think is in love with a fellow there’. It was Murray’s feeling that Aldred had allowed himself to be exploited by the press into validating anti-republican stories surrounding MacDonald that suited their own agenda. Aldred reacted furiously to Murray’s accusation that MacDonald ‘evidently wants to stay in Spain’, and reiterated that he was working hard to secure her passage home. It was his belief that she had been commuted to Valencia and was in grave danger:
I am able to say that Ethel MacDonald left Barcelona mysteriously, and not of her own accord. Valencia is not the way to freedom, but to execution. Her situation is serious, most grave.
MacDonald was to spend a further fortnight in a republican prison in Valencia for her anarchist associations, until finally Aldred was able to ascertain from the British Consulate in that city that she would be released in September before being transported to Nimes, in France, for urgent medical treatment. Never afraid of letting facts get in the way of a good story, the Daily Express ran a piece under the erroneous headline ‘Scots girl freed by Franco’ on 25 September. MacDonald was finally on her way back to Scotland. Not as gravely ill as Aldred had appeared to believe, she gave speeches in Paris and Amsterdam in aid of the ‘Committee for the Aid and Succour of the Victims of the Counter-revolutionary Communist Party Persecution in Spain’. Then on 7 November 1937, the Scots Scarlet Pimpernel was welcomed home to Glasgow by a crowd of 300 people at Central Station. But when MacDonald stepped up to the podium and revealed her disappointment at the capitulation of the Spanish left and its revolution, their ebullience ebbed away:
I went to Spain full of hopes and dreams. It promised to be utopia realised. I return full of sadness, dulled by the tragedy I have seen. I have lived through scenes and events that belong to the French revolution.
MacDonald subsequently toured Scotland giving indicatively entitled lectures such as ‘Spain – a Lost Horizon’. She was a scathing and impassioned opponent of the Communist Party and its role in Spain. As so often, in Scotland she found herself arguing against the majority position, but this only served to embolden her. Her tendency to be something of a loose cannon robbed her of potential political allies such as David Murray, who aired his exasperation with her in a letter to Fenner Brockway written shortly after her final release from prison:
She may have had disagreeable experiences but was never in any danger of being ‘bumped off’. She also had ample opportunity to leave Spain, where she was performing no useful work for anybody. She entirely neglected to learn Spanish to any degree. Every little bleating message which came from Spain about her was given full publicity in the Glasgow Evening Times. She claimed to have special knowledge about Bob Smillie and continued to spread the story that he was done to death.
Certainly, MacDonald’s year in Spain had been a controversial and eventful one. As with the case of Bob Smillie, a Scottish story had reflected in microcosm the wider destructive battles raging within the republican left. The legend of the Scots Scarlet Pimpernel represented an intriguing and telling subplot in Scotland’s relationship with the Spanish Civil War.
CHAPTER 14
Last Heroic Acts:
Aragon and the Ebro
I simply cannot describe in words how keen I feel about my participation in the war, actually in the Battalion with which I will soon be in the front line. This is no mere propaganda splash, I never felt just quite so enthusiastic about anything as I am about this great struggle. We are going to win – yes we are and that without undue delay.
Tom Murray
AWAY FROM THE politicking surrounding Bob Smillie and Ethel MacDonald, in the summer of 1937 hundreds of Scots remained in Spain, their version of the country far removed from tit-for-tat newspaper allegations and rumours of wrongdoing. Despite their demoralising defeat at Brunete, the British Battalion vowed to regroup and fight on. Their resolve to continue amounted to a clarion call: the Battalion was in Spain to fight until it was told it no longer could.
In August, the Battalion moved into the Aragon region of northeast Spain ahead of a planned republican assault on the nationalist-held town of Quinto. Morale had begun to rise again, and the Battalion leaders felt their men were now equipped to launch an attack. Machine-gun company commander Robert Walker, son of the great Hearts player Bobby, reassured Peter Kerrigan:
You don’t need to worry about the Brigade now. It’s improved beyond recognition and the Brigade leadership characterises our Battalion as the best in the Brigade. The spirit is grand and this is reflected in the efficiency of the military work.
Walker was proved right when the Battalion helped rout the nationalists in Quinto. The town was captured within two days of the launch of their offensive. Heartened by this success, the republicans moved on to Fuentes de Ebro, a town beside the strategically vital River Ebro, with the aim of seizing it and moving into the surrounding valley ahead of an advance on Zaragoza. It was an objective they fell catastrophically short of completing, their heavy and unsophisticated reliance on tank attacks reaping very little reward. Runner Hugh Sloan, a Fife miner, labelled the advance a ‘ridiculous charge like that of the Light Brigade – a gallant effort but a stupid effort.’26
Regardless of their calamito
us experience at Fuentes de Ebro, the British contingent of the republican army pressed on to Belchite, emerging victorious from a traumatic rash of hand-to-hand combat with the nationalists. Hugh Sloan recalled the unique nature of combat at Belchite:
Belchite was a particular kind of battle at close quarters. You were seeing the person you were killing. That’s a different thing from killing people at a distance. In that respect it was a very bitter battle.
With this intense fighting came scenes as horrific as any in this most bloody of wars, as Sloan continued:
Members of the Anti-tank Battery pause for a photograph in the searing Aragon sun in August 1937. Scots Bill Cranston, Hugh Sloan and Chris Smith (bottom row, left) sit together, with Arthur Nicoll perched just behind them.
I remember walking up what you could call the main street, and I couldn’t bear the smell of death. Some of our people were digging large holes into which all sorts of remains of living things, humans but also pigs and goats, were being thrown. We came to the square. There was a very large heap of dead human beings piled up. And in the very hot weather the smell was completely unbearable.
The Battalion’s greatest success in Aragon was to come on 8 January 1938, when they played a key part in capturing the town of Teruel. After this spirited victory, the mood among Brigaders improved greatly, and celebratory parties were held. John Ross felt that the triumphs in Aragon had bred a new-found sense of unity on the republican side, as he wrote on 30 January:
The different armies of the unions, anarchists, etc., are now united in a single People’s Army, well-trained, well-disciplined, under a capable general staff purged of the elements which were a main cause of the defeats and unwise retreats last year. The effectiveness of this new army is proved by the magnificent victory of Teruel, taken with amazingly small losses according to schedule and held ever since against the terrific counter-attacks which have lost Franco thousands of men.
Archie Dewar (back, left) poses with Glaswegian and Spanish comrades in happier times; he was to die during the retreat from Aragon.
The gains of Aragon had escalated the feeling within the Battalion that republican success was now inevitable, as Ross enthusiastically continued:
With this improved organisation in the rearguard and the whole Spanish people on our side, there is no doubt about our ultimate victory. Everybody is impatient to go to the front and the morale of the men is magnificent. Against such volunteers, fighting for convictions, side by side with Spaniards fighting for their life and liberty, the forces of Franco have no chance.
Sadly, this optimism soon ebbed away as the British Battalion were forced, from the end of January, into a series of retreats amidst a fierce nationalist onslaught. That month had begun happily for the British, with buoyancy surrounding the victory of Teruel allied to first anniversary celebrations of the Battalion’s debut at the Jarama. As Garry McCartney recalled, the birthday was marked in a very patriotic way, the men ‘stuffing away double rations of bacon and eggs with real English tea’. Yet celebration soon turned to commiseration, as Franco’s forces powered into Teruel and forced the republicans to decamp some 70 miles over the following days, brutally taking back Belchite as they did so. Brave stands were made at Caspe and Batea, as the British Battalion attempted to stunt the nationalist advance towards Spain’s east coast. However, they were eventually forced back to Calaceite, where at the end of March over 100 were ambushed and imprisoned, as documented above. The Battalion, now just 80-strong, retreated to Gandesa, before the nationalists pushed them out, and back over the River Ebro where a retreat of 125 miles finally came to a halt.
The bell tower at Belchite where Barney Shields held out, the last republican in the area.
Scottish Brigaders played a central, by parts heroic and harrowing, role in the fighting in Aragon. During the siege of Belchite, as the republicans strove to hold on to the town and arrest their retreat, Barney Shields took up position in the bell tower of a Catholic cathedral, with only his machine-gun for company. Besieged by nationalist troops, Shields’ republican commander demanded an immediate flight from the area. Shields, though, took it upon himself to remain in the bell tower picking out nationalist troops until finally, as the only republican left in the area, he was flushed out and brutally killed.
In the retreat from Belchite, Robert Walker was one of four Brigaders who unwittingly walked into the middle of a nationalist patrol. The four men were instructed at gunpoint to drop their weapons and place their hands in the air. Surprisingly, Franco’s troops concerned themselves not with carting them off as valuable prisoners, but instead looted their pockets for money and their wrists for watches. As the captors placed their guns on the floor to indulge in this bout of larceny, Walker whispered to his comrades ‘now’s our chance’ and landed an almighty blow to the face of his own personal thief. Walker’s comrades, Sam Wild and Joe Norman, quickly got in on the act, booting a further two soldiers to the floor. Meanwhile, the fourth member of the quartet, Harry Dobson, added a touch of the slapstick to proceedings, grabbing a tin of ‘bully beef’ from his bag and knocking a final man out cold. The four sprinted away into the darkness and rough terrain of the Aragon countryside, grateful for their spare portion of processed meat.
Looting and food featured, too, in the exploits of Dundonian Brigaders Malcolm Smith, whom John Dunlop described as having ‘the strong red face of an Angus farmer’, and Micky Sullivan. The two were among those who had escaped capture at Calaceite, but soon found themselves detached from their fellow escapees and ensconced in nationalist territory. Upon hearing the whir of an approaching tank, Smith and Sullivan dived for cover, anticipating the arrival of a battalion. They were relieved to see, instead, a solitary tank, which Smith and Sullivan instinctively fired upon with their Soviet-supplied Dikterov machine-gun. The armoured vehicle burst into flames, at which point its crewmembers spilled onto the road. They were met with another burst of Smith and Sullivan’s fire, and swiftly killed. The happy result for the two Brigaders was the chance to ransack the tank for its contents, which turned out to consist of generous food supplies. The starving men gratefully enjoyed their finest meal in months while seated upon a tank marked with fascist insignia, and then found their way back into friendly territory.
With Franco’s German and Italian troops attacking incisively and brutally, such tales of glee were predictably rare during the Aragon retreat. Alec Park described the devastation left by nationalist soldiers as they passed through the region:
I was in a village where the fascist bombers a few days ago had given to the inhabitants just exactly what is meant to represent the new fascist culture which is to save the whole world from Red Ruin. The scene of destruction is indescribable but the horror of it all is written in the faces of the women.
That horror was not reserved for the natives. According to a number of Brigaders, nationalist forces employed expanding ‘dum-dum’ bullets during the retreat, a violation of the Geneva Convention. Steve Fullarton witnessed the impact of this weaponry on George Kelly of Greenock, remembering that “his forearm from the wrist to the elbow was just a gaping hole”. Similarly terrifying was the ordeal suffered by Glaswegian David Stirrat, who became separated from the rest of the British Battalion. As they withdrew across the River Ebro, he and a small band of other volunteers were left over the line. In a letter to his father written on 20 April, Stirrat gave a detailed account of their efforts to avoid detection and get back to their comrades:
Ruined houses at Belchite
I was a machine-gunner and we were the Company who bumped into the enemy tanks first. We were about a hundred yards from the first tank when it opened fire on us and we got our gun mounted and hit them back. Then the first tanks burst into flames and we kept the other back for about two hours until we found that the machine-gun company (by that time about 30 men) had been cut off from the rest. Well there was only five of us got out of that and it took me and another chap eighteen days to do it. We took to the mountain
s and followed the fascist advance from day to day. Several times we tried to get through their front line but we could never manage it. I think if it had not been for the thought of my mother I would have given up trying, because we didn’t have much chance then and the grub wasn’t too plentiful. As the days went by we got used to things a bit and began to find more food by ‘various methods’. Then about ten days later we struck the River Ebro and discovered that it was the enemy flank so we decided to have a go at swimming over.
We met an American then and tried the river two nights later but it was too strong at that point and the American drowned because he was a poor swimmer. We got back again to fascist territory and met two Germans in a house where there was plenty flour and olive oil and we ‘found’ nine rabbits so after a few days when the grub was finished we decided to have another go at the river. We tried it at a different place and swam over at night. We all got over to within a few feet of this bank and were standing in the river shaking hands when one of the Germans spoke out loud and our own guards started firing at us, chucked a hand grenade, it was like a bloomin’ fireworks night. Three of us made a dive for the bank but the other German got the wind up and buzzed off back to the other side again. They took us prisoner and when they discovered who we were they treated us well. Well I have lost everything but my mind. I think I’ve lost half of that so maybe you would send me a cheap shaving kit.
Safely returned to the republicans, though suffering terrible illness, Stirrat was able to impart his knowledge of nationalist territory to his military commanders, thus playing a fundamental part in what was to become perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the British Battalion in Spain: the crossing of the River Ebro.
Homage to Caledonia Page 18