Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  Koltsov, his teeth as bad as ever and his humor as dark, was cynical about his standing with the general secretary. Stalin had by now arrested, tried, and executed all the members of Lenin’s original Politburo, and the man who had helped him to do this, the “poison dwarf” Nikolai Yezhov, seemed himself on the verge of being ousted (or worse) by his own lieutenant, Lavrenti Beria. Koltsov made jokes even about this. Everyone gets his turn—why not me? Over lunch with Cockburn, Koltsov acted out the scene of his own imagined trial: the implacable prosecutor hammering away at him, his fatally clownish responses, the inevitable verdict. Guilty of telling bad jokes in the people’s tribunal! And laughed, as he had when showing Hemingway and Martha his hidden supply of cyanide. Then, serious, he told Cockburn that Russian planes were already at the airfield outside Prague; if Benes wanted them, if he would fight, they were his. Of course, this would mean that the Red Army, or at least the Soviet air force, would have to occupy Czechoslovakia in order to defend it, a situation not without a certain dark humor of its own. Benes would have to decide whether to embrace it.

  Which was why, shortly after his lunch with Cockburn, Koltsov was sitting on a wooden bench in a dimly lit hallway at Hradçany Castle waiting to talk to the Czech president. Suddenly he heard the tapping of high heels and looked up to find Martha Gellhorn, her blond bob bright, clutching her silver fox fur around her against the autumnal chill.

  She, too, wanted to talk to Benes, it seemed, and like Koltsov she also had an offer for him—to use Collier’s as a platform from which to “win the public opinion of America”; but despite lobbying the president’s secretary and his chief of protocol, she was getting nowhere with her requests. Sitting down on the bench beside Koltsov, she chattered away in French—their only common language—telling him of what she’d been doing in Spain, how pitiful the refugees were, particularly the children, how bad the bombing was. Koltsov seemed not to be attending. After a while he stood up. He’d been waiting to talk to Benes for four days, he said; but it didn’t seem worthwhile to wait any longer. He took Martha to dinner in a workingman’s restaurant in the old quarter, not the sort of place he would have frequented in Madrid; they spoke, each despairingly, of the situation in Europe, and afterward, on a street corner, they shook hands goodbye.

  On September 29, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier flew to Munich to meet with Hitler; twenty-four hours later, a protocol giving Hitler what he wanted in Czechoslovakia had been signed, and Chamberlain had a goodwill memorandum from the Reichschancellor that would, he told his fellow Britons, ensure “peace with honor.” Martha, after making several more vain attempts to contact Benes, returned to Paris; and Koltsov—his mission unaccomplished—went back to an uncertain future in Moscow. Before he left, he saw Cockburn one last time. They both had to know what was going to happen now, and it was worse than a victory for Hitler in Central Europe. Stalin had finally lost patience—faith was not a word you would apply to him—with the democracies; to protect himself, and Russia, he would act on the threat hinted at by Foreign Minister Litvinov almost a year ago. He would begin taking his chess pieces off the board and make common cause with his former enemy, Germany.

  The most obvious victim of this decision was Czechoslovakia; almost unnoticed, in the din that had been emanating from Munich and Prague, was Spain. For at the height of the Czech crisis Stalin had agreed that Prime Minister Negrín, in a bid for the sympathies of Britain, France, the United States, and other governments nominally opposed to “foreign intervention” in Spain, could announce the unconditional withdrawal of the International Brigades. This the Spanish premier did in a speech to the League of Nations on September 21, the day that the terms of the Sudeten handover were also made public. In practical terms the gesture meant little—there were only about seven thousand brigadistas still in Spain—but it was invested with a wealth of symbolism.

  None of which was lost on Koltsov. “The only thing to say,” he told Cockburn, “is that in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne.”

  September 1938: Paris

  On the day the Munich pact was signed, Barea and Ilsa moved out of the Hotel Delambre. When the mobilization posters went up all over Paris the manager of the hotel had demanded they pay their back rent immediately: he and his wife wanted to close the hotel and go to the country to escape the war they were sure was coming, he said, and in any case they didn’t want foreigners—the words sales metèques, “dirty wogs,” weren’t used but implied—sponging on them anymore. “I’ve spoken about you to the police anyhow,” the manager growled.

  Hoping a glass of wine would help him figure out what to do, Barea had gone to the Dôme; and there, by some miracle, he encountered a prosperous Cuban he and Ilsa had befriended in Madrid and hadn’t seen since. Horrified to hear of the fix Barea and Ilsa were in, he insisted on lending them the money they owed their landlord; and a Norwegian journalist, one of Ilsa’s contacts from the old days, said he could rent them a room in his airy, modern flat. They could hardly believe their good fortune.

  Soon after they moved in, Barea received a parcel of books from Barcelona: the first copies of Valor y miedo, the book of stories he’d written before leaving Spain. Paging through them, Barea allowed himself a little flicker of pride that he’d been able to make something simple out of something so tumultuous: Maybe a little lightweight, he thought, but not so bad.

  It was the only good news from Spain. After some initial success the Ebro campaign had turned sour, with the Nationalist armies pushing the government’s forces back again toward the Ebro and the Rio Segre. Then Negrín had announced the dissolution of the Brigades, and Britain and France had made a deal with Hitler for the corpse of Czechoslovakia. This is the end of Spain’s last, best hope, Barea told himself. Now Russia would withdraw her aid to Spain. Even worse, people like himself and Ilsa would be considered troublemakers, Reds who wanted to drag all of Europe into their conflict.

  But as the trees turned bronze and yellow along the boulevards and the banks of the Seine, and peace—however spurious—seemed to have been at least temporarily bought, he and Ilsa allowed themselves a tiny sigh of relief. They had a comfortable place to stay; they were working. Perhaps it was foolish to always imagine the worst that could happen, instead of the best. Strolling one late golden afternoon along the gravel paths in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Hemingway had liked to walk when he was young and unknown in Paris in the twenties, they saw an old couple, he bearded and erect, carrying a silver-handled cane, she petite, lively, elegantly dressed in black. “When we’re as old as they, we might be rather like them,” Ilsa murmured. “We’ll take walks, and tell each other about old times, and smile at the dreadful things that happened to us when we were younger.” They were just enjoying the idea—themselves, old, at peace, together—when the old gentleman bowed, kissed the lady’s hand, and strode away, leaving her alone; and Ilsa’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  October 1938: Barcelona

  Early in the second week of October Robert Capa returned to Spain. He’d done all he could in China, including shooting a Bosch-like series of color photographs for Life—the first he’d ever taken, and the first color prints Life had ever published—of the aftermath of a bombing raid on Hankow; but, as he’d written in his English-language practice sentences, he missed his Europe grievously. It was time to come back.

  Walking into the Majestic bar, he was greeted with a chorus of welcome from all the journalists: Jesus, it was about time. Where the hell had he been? He dumped his camera bag on the floor and sat down and almost immediately had a circle around him: Matthews, and Georges Soria from L’Humanité, and André Malraux, who was in Barcelona trying to shoot a movie of his Spanish war novel, L’Espoir, and Sheean, and Sheean’s English wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson (whom everybody called Dinah). The couple had recently come in from Prague, where Sheean had been covering the Munich crisis; and Dinah was feeling very m
uch like the new girl in school who doesn’t know anyone. Telling stories and joking in French and his newly acquired English, Capa soon made her feel as much a part of the group as the old hands were. And the next day, when he discovered her sitting forlornly in the lobby because no one had arranged transport or passes for her, he grabbed her arm. “I take you,” he announced; and dragged her along to Constancia de la Mora’s office. “Connie,” he called out to the propaganda chief, “Diana would like to do something about Spain. Speak or write or whatever you want. Find something.” And he left.

  On the sixteenth he went to Falset, a hamlet ninety miles south and west of Barcelona, where the International Brigades were to have a final muster. He’d been with these soldiers—and some who had not made it this far—in Aragon, in the Guadarrama, in Madrid, at Peñarroya; shared meals and cigarettes and jokes with them; come under fire with them. And he wanted to be with them today.

  It was hazy, but the autumn sun was still warm on the terraced hills. Near the village of Falset a makeshift reviewing stand had been set up by the side of the dusty road; flags were clustered around it, including the flag of the Spanish Republic, the hammer and sickle, and a mordantly funny hand-lettered banner with the words “J’Aime Berlin”—Chamberlain—drawn under a swastika with an interdict symbol. A meager band struck up, just a couple of slide trombones, trumpets, some clarinets, and a tuba, and the Brigade columns, including a detachment of cavalry, began to march past the reviewing stand: the men of the Lincoln Battalion (now formally the Lincoln-Washington Battalion), 300 out of the 4,000 who had originally sailed to Spain, with their lanky twenty-three-year-old newly created major, Milton Wolff, striding along at their head; Canadian Mac-Paps (the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion); Polish Dombrowskis; Yugoslavs, Britons, Czechs, Austrians—and the 150 survivors of the Thaelmann Column, the heroes of Madrid, all of them refugees from Germany who were now without a homeland, marching to their anthem, “Freiheit.” The men had already given up their weapons, so their arms swung loosely by their sides until it came time for them to throw the clenched-fist salute; their numbers appeared pitifully small, and as they stood at ease listening to the speeches of their commanders, they were dwarfed by the hills of the foreign country they had come to defend.

  Eight days later came the official dissolution of the Brigades, at a mill at Montblanch that had been converted into a hospital for the wounded. Capa got there early, while soldiers were still sweeping the courtyard with leafy branches (even brooms were hard to find in wartime) and flags and garlands were being hung on the balcony where the dignitaries would stand. The Brigaders trickled in, some still in their tattered uniforms but most in mufti, since all government-issued equipment and clothing had to be left behind; as the ceremony began they formed themselves into columns, filling the courtyard, and Capa clambered up onto the balcony to shoot the crowd: a sea of upturned faces, some lined and coarse with stubble, others youthful, under berets or caps or visored officers’ hats. Some of the soldiers had their dogs with them, curled at their feet or cradled in their arms. The band played, the speeches began: Colonel Modesto, dark and romantic-looking in his uniform, his voice breaking as he spoke of their “shared experiences” and “common suffering”; then Prime Minister Negrín, in riding breeches and puttees, offering “profound and eternal gratitude” for their help. “¡Salud, hermanos!” he cried, raising his fist to the side of his head; with tears streaming down their faces, they saluted him back—and the commissar for the Army of the Ebro read them, for the last time, the order to dismiss.

  After that the gigantic parade in Barcelona should have been an anticlimax: but it wasn’t. “La Despedida,” the farewell, took place on the twenty-eighth, and until twenty minutes before it began there was no official announcement for fear the Nationalists would bomb the parade route. Incredibly, three hundred thousand people turned out on short notice, lining the broad Avenida Diagonal in the crisp autumn sunlight, waving from office windows and balconies, pelting the parading soldiers with flowers or scraps of paper covered with scribbled notes of thanks, and darting from the barricades to embrace them as they marched past. Capa, who had dressed carefully in a suit and tie in honor of the occasion, scrambled along beside the procession, sometimes shinnying up lampposts to get a better shot; across the avenue, the Spanish photographer Augustí Centelles was doing the same thing, and the two photographers played a little game, trying to catch each other in the backgrounds of their pictures. On either side of the Diagonal, at each intersection, were plaques bearing the names of the Brigades—Abraham Lincoln, Louise Michel, Hans Beimler—or of notable Brigade heroes; billboards were emblazoned with the names of the battles they had fought in: Las Rozas, Madrid, Teruel, Guadalajara, Belchite, Brunete.

  On a dais, Negrín—looking formal today in topcoat and homburg—Luís Companys, General Rojo, and former president Azaña saluted the Brigades; behind them stood Constancia de la Mora, tears filling her eyes; in the bright blue sky her husband’s air force fighters darted to and fro to ward off any Nationalist bombers.

  At the parade’s end, Republican troops, the only ones to carry arms, presented them under a giant portrait of Stalin and there were more speeches: Negrín, misty-eyed, promising Spanish citizenship to any of the men who returned to Spain after the war, and Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, in a flowered scarf and a torrent of rhetoric. “You are history!” she cried. “You are legend. You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you, and when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory—come back!” Capa’s camera whirred, capturing the flurry of applauding hands, the storm of confetti. Everyone sang the “Hymn of Riego,” and then, leaving behind 9,934 dead and 7,686 missing, most of whom were already dead or soon would be, the seven thousand remaining men of the International Brigades shipped out to miserable, lice-ridden, unheated barracks in Catalan villages, where they would wait—some for months—for authentication and exit permits from the League of Nations commissioners sent to examine them before they were allowed to go home.

  October 1938: Paris

  Martha Gellhorn wasn’t in Barcelona for “La Despedida,” although in the story she wrote for Collier’s about that autumn in Spain she described the parade, with its marchers looking “very dirty and weary and young,” in such a way that it sounded as if she had been there. In fact, she and Hemingway were ensconced in Paris, where he’d just finished his two Madrid stories for Esquire, one an account of filming the failed offensive in the Casa de Campo, the other a version of the anecdote he’d put into The Fifth Column about the miliciano who’d been beaten and then shot to death in Chicote’s, back in the spring of 1937, for spraying patrons with a Flit gun full of lavender water. Except in his story he said it was eau de cologne, and the miliciano a civilian, and he made the whole thing a kind of parable of what happens to gaiety in the exigencies of war.

  Hemingway was in a sour mood. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories had been published on October 14, and the reception for the collection he’d thought was “unbeatable” had been disappointing, with the stories coming in for praise while most critics had disparaged the play as melodrama or agitprop. Although seeing his collected short fiction gathered together between two covers had made him feel “I was alright as a sort of lasting business if I kicked off tomorrow,” the fact that “those guys” had just ganged up on him again took away all his pleasure in his achievement. It didn’t help that the book had sold 6,000 copies in two weeks; it would have sold more, he grumbled to Maxwell Perkins, if Scribner’s had taken out bigger ads, or given the book more space in its Fifth Avenue bookshop window.

  He was, therefore, already seething with resentment when he and Martha read the news accounts, or saw the newsreels, about the disbanding of the International Brigades. To Hemingway, in this frame of mind, Negrín might as well have called off the war: he felt personally betrayed. And then he and Martha,
entering their hotel lobby one evening, came face to face with Randalfo Pacciardi, the former commander of the Garibaldi Battalion, whom neither had seen since their first spring in Madrid. Pacciardi had left his command, and Spain, in August 1937, unhappy at the consolidation of his battalion into a Communist-controlled brigade, and furious at the government’s use of his troops in their campaign against the anarchists; since then he’d been living in penurious exile in Paris, where he’d founded an antifascist magazine, La Giovine Italia. Though he was dressed in civilian clothes instead of his khakis and jaunty cap, he was as charismatic a figure as ever; his abandonment of his command now seemed almost prescient, and his refusal to blame anyone for his predicament heroic. And Hemingway began to wonder if the war had not devolved into what he called “a carnival of treachery and rotten-ness” on both sides.

  Leaving Pacciardi, he and Martha had started to climb the stairs to their room when Hemingway suddenly faltered and leaned against the wall, weeping. “They can’t do it,” he cried. “They can’t treat a brave man that way!” And Martha, seeing his tears for Pacciardi, and for the loss of what he had fought for in Spain, felt her heart melt at his “generosity & compassion.”

  “I really did love E. then,” she wrote later.

  November 1938: Barcelona

  Two days after Barcelona bade goodbye to the remnants of the International Brigades, Nationalist troops began a fierce counteroffensive along the Ebro, bombing Republican positions in the Sierra de Caballos east of Gandesa, then advancing to take possession of the only high point left in government hands, at Pandols. The Ebro Valley now lay open to Nationalist attack; but although it was clear that there was no way the war would now end well for the Republic, no one—not the journalists, or the photographers, or the soldiers, or the members of the government, least of all Prime Minister Negrín—would acknowledge the fact. “In a war,” Hemingway would write later, speaking of this time, “you can never admit, even to yourself, that it is lost. Because when you will admit it is lost you will be beaten.”