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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Hemingway arrived in Barcelona for what he knew was the last time on November 4. At the Majestic, he had a reunion of sorts with Herbert Matthews, Tom Delmer, Jimmy Sheean, Hans Kahle—who as a divisional commander in the Popular Army had taken him around the battlefield at Guadalajara—and Capa. Sheean had some bad news for him: young Jim Lardner had disappeared on September 21, the day of the dissolution order, and was presumed killed, almost certainly one of the last International Brigade casualties. Did Hemingway remember then what he had said to Prudencio de Pereda at the beginning of the war? If you didn’t get killed you would get wonderful material, and if you did get killed it would be in a good cause.

  The others filled Hemingway in on the military situation: Enrique Líster, whose troops he, Matthews, and Delmer had followed in triumph into Teruel, had been holding a bridgehead on the far side of the Ebro, but the Nationalists were pressing his position and it was clear he would have to fall back. Kahle, who as an army officer had papers to get past any roadblock, was offering to accompany some of the journalists to Líster’s headquarters; so very early the next morning they set out in two cars—Kahle, Hemingway, and the Daily Telegraph’s Henry Buckley in one, and Matthews, Capa, and Sheean in the other. Stopping for breakfast along the way, they learned that the bridge over the Ebro at Mora, which they’d meant to use, was gone—first bombed and then swept away when the rebels reopened the Ebro floodgates upstream. It might be possible to get across by boat, though—they’d have to see when they got there.

  Matthews’s car, a lumbering Belgian Minerva with a faulty clutch that had replaced the broken-down Ford he’d had at Teruel, had trouble navigating the rutted road and was soon lagging far behind Kahle’s official automobile. The fields on either side of the dirt road were empty in the November sunlight, and as they drew nearer to the front the sound of bombs and cannonades made the road seem even more exposed. When the Minerva reached Mora la Nueve, on the left bank of the river, the journalists found a deserted village filled with wrecked houses, and Kahle’s car and its occupants were nowhere to be seen. Shells were coming over the shattered streets, and a couple of sentries tried to wave the journalists away. “Muy peligroso!” they shouted. Matthews found a ruined stable near a crossroads and drove the car into it, figuring it was as good as anywhere else to stow it in case they were able to get across the river and back.

  For a while the four men stood by the stable trying to see if there were any signs of Kahle, Hemingway, and Buckley; but the shells started landing closer and closer, whistling over their heads and exploding about fifty yards up the road, sending them diving for cover in the debris-filled stable yard. As they were picking themselves up from the ground, Sheean remarked to Capa that it was a bad day for photographers, but Capa shot him a withering look. “This is the only kind of day that is any good for photographers,” he said scornfully, picking a wisp of straw from his tweed jacket.

  Just then they saw Hemingway coming up the street looking for them: He and the others had been waiting down by the river, where Kahle had found some soldiers willing to row them across in exchange for cigarettes from Hemingway’s supply. They all trooped down and climbed into the soldiers’ boat, a big flat-bottomed tub, and shoved off into the fast-flowing ocher-colored water; the opening of the floodgates had created a strong current and the oarsmen had to pull hard to keep from being swept downstream. Once on the opposite bank the journalists walked uphill from Mora de Ebro along a dusty road to Líster’s headquarters, a white farmhouse on a rise with a view of the river valley and the sierra beyond; from the wooded slopes they could hear the rattle of machine-gun fire that meant the enemy was advancing. It was hot in the sun, and the men stripped off their coats and pullovers and neckties. Líster came out of his headquarters to chat with them, and Capa photographed him and Hemingway sitting on a stone parapet on the farmhouse terrace. Líster looked tired, although he was cheerful and cordial; and Hemingway had lost the jaunty confidence he’d radiated at Teruel. Instead he seemed tentative and wary. Líster excused himself several times to take telephone calls inside the house, finally coming back to tell them they would all have to leave, and quickly, because he was giving orders for a retreat.

  Walking back to Mora they passed a handful of battered tanks on the road, and the soldiers riding on them shook their fists in the air: a photo opportunity. Buckley and Matthews took out their cameras and clicked away but Capa, unimpressed, left his dangling on its strap. “This kind of thing is no good to me,” he complained. “These are not pictures of action. I can’t take good photographs unless I’m in the front lines.” When they reached the river they piled into the boat for the return crossing; but the vagaries of the current made rowing in this direction more difficult, and when they were in the middle of the river a burst of shellfire made the soldiers drop their oars and duck for cover beneath the gunwales. Suddenly the small craft started drifting dangerously downstream toward the blackened spars of the bombed-out bridge. Kahle, sure they would founder on the wreckage and have to swim for it, began pulling off his boots; Capa started shooting pictures; but Hemingway, who’d learned a thing or two about rowing guide boats up in Michigan as a boy, seized the oars and began to pull against the current as if his life depended on it. And gradually the boat’s prow turned away from the remnants of the bridge and they reached the other side safely.

  The next day, November 6, Matthews drove Hemingway from Barcelona to Ripoll, near the French border, where the remnants of the Lincoln Battalion were waiting for evacuation, shivering in their filthy quarters. On a street in the village they found Alvah Bessie, hobbling along with the aid of a stick, so crippled with rheumatic pain that he’d been unable to march in the Brigades’ parade. Hemingway had first met Bessie in Madrid, at the Hotel Florida, and had last seen him in April after he and his companions had escaped from the Nationalists during the Great Retreats along the Ebro. Then Hemingway had still felt full of zeal and confidence; but the past weeks had unsettled him, and he was like a boxer who has taken a punch and doesn’t know how it happened.

  “I’m glad to see you got out of this alive,” Hemingway said to Bessie.

  “I am, too,” Bessie responded.

  “Because,” Hemingway went on, as if Bessie had not spoken, “I always felt responsible for your being here.”

  Bessie must have looked perplexed, because Hemingway continued: “You heard the speech I made at the Writers’ Congress?” Bessie nodded. “I know that speech was responsible for a lot of guys coming over,” Hemingway said, as if he had been a one-man recruiting office for the International Brigades. Bessie just stared at him.

  * * *

  On the night of November 6, “Bola” Boleslavskaya, Mikhail Koltsov’s old Pravda colleague, had a party in her rooms at the Majestic to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution and the relief of Madrid by the International Brigades in 1936. It was a fête like the ones they’d all had in Madrid in what seemed increasingly like the good old days: the Sheeans were there, and Matthews, and Capa, and Hemingway, and André Malraux, and Georges Soria, and Dinah Sheean’s brother, Arthur Forbes, a right-wing Daily Express correspondent, and many others besides. Capa organized provisions, sending people to get ham, beans, bacalao, and wine, and dragooning Forbes into lugging all the foodstuffs back to the Majestic under a bright full moon. “It’s a bomber’s moon,” Capa helpfully told him—and indeed there were air raids early in the evening, which they all watched from the hotel roof: bombs and antiaircraft fire thundering in the distance, red tracer bullets streaking across the sky, and searchlights illuminating the silver bodies of the Italian Savoias as they flew overhead.

  When the raids stopped, everyone came back to Bola’s rooms and they put Strauss waltzes on the Victrola, and Capa and Georges Soria pinned flowers in their hair and danced to “Rustle of Spring,” Capa tossing flowers to all the girls. Then Agrippina, the Asturian singer famous for her appearances on the front lines, led them in “Viva la Quince Brigada”; and at
midnight somebody suggested they should make speeches to mark the occasion. But Bola’s chauffeur, a tall, taciturn Madrileño, raised his hand to shush them. Instead, he said, they should all stand and observe a moment of silence for those who had died in defense of Madrid.

  Those who weren’t already standing struggled to their feet. The names of the dead—from Madrid, from Brunete, from Aragon and the Sierra and the Ebro—were too numerous to utter aloud. But they all bowed their heads for a moment and remembered.

  The next morning, eager to rejoin Martha in Paris, Hemingway got Matthews to drive him to Perpignan. For him the war was over.

  * * *

  While the Italians were bombing Barcelona and Bola’s guests were singing and dancing at the Majestic, Loyalist troops were splashing across a tributary of the Ebro, the Segre, near the town of Fraga, forty miles west of Barcelona. Spreading themselves out along a six-mile stretch of riverbank, they prepared to launch an attack on the highlands to the west that would—it was hoped—distract the Nationalists from their drive on the Ebro at Mora. The attack was meant to be a secret, so there was no preliminary artillery barrage or bombing of enemy positions; but somehow the news leaked out in Barcelona, and as Capa was leaving Bola’s party he heard about it. Within hours he was at the front.

  When he arrived, pontoon bridges had just been built to bring in supplies to the attackers and carry out the wounded, and there were already stretchers lined up along the bank. Next to one of them a soldier draped in a blanket against the morning chill was bent over, painstakingly writing down the muttered words of his comrade on the stretcher; from the man’s glazed expression and the bloody bandage wrapped around his head Capa guessed they would be the last he spoke.

  Among the troops mustered on the riverbank was a company of marineros, seafarers from Asturias, whom Capa had encountered at Teruel. He attached himself to their unit and when they moved out he went with them, huffing up the slope from the river, through the olive orchards and scrub to the rocky hills above. The company commander, a former lawyer in incongruous horn-rimmed glasses, hunkered down with his officers and a map under an overhanging ledge, getting his final orders over a hastily strung field telephone; and the political commissar spoke to the men, telling them where they were going and how much was at stake. Then, after daubing mud all over their helmets for camouflage, they all picked up their weapons and blanket rolls—some of them strapping grenades to their chests—and headed for the hilltop.

  It wasn’t long before the incoming fire started: first rifles and machine guns, then artillery shells. Capa kept moving forward, using his camera like a weapon. He didn’t stop to think. A man in front of him was running uphill with a cigarette in his mouth when he was hit and doubled over, the cigarette still clenched in his teeth. Another was shot in the leg: one of his comrades picked him up, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him toward the stretcher bearers who’d been following the assault. All around men were stumbling forward and firing and ducking for cover; the air was hazy with explosives and alive with bullets. At the top of the first hill a small roofless farmhouse looked like it might provide shelter, and Capa started toward it behind a handful of soldiers; just then a shell landed squarely on it, a cloud of dust and smoke filling Capa’s viewfinder. When the smoke cleared, the house and the soldiers hiding in it were gone.

  The fighting went on all day. Eventually Capa’s company managed to secure a small hamlet on one of the windswept hills, where they paused to regroup and gather their wounded for evacuation, and Capa made his way back to Barcelona. In his camera were pictures that were nothing like what he had taken when he first came to Spain; they weren’t even like what he had thought he would take back then. Blurry, chaotic, choppily framed, immediate, and terrifying—these were pictures of what war really was like. And when he sent them on to Paris, they created a sensation. Life gave them two pages, Regards five pages and the back cover, Match seven pages; and the British magazine Picture Post ran them in an eleven-page spread prefaced by a huge portrait of Capa over the caption: “The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa.”

  The Segre offensive, however, was a failure. The Nationalists rallied, and pushed the Republicans back again across both the Segre and the Ebro. On November 15, leaving between ten and fifteen thousand dead and an enormous amount of precious war matériel behind, the remnants of the government’s army crossed the iron bridge over the Ebro at Flix and blew it up behind them.

  * * *

  After seeing Hemingway off for New York on the Normandie, Martha Gellhorn arrived in Barcelona on November 21, intending to write the story about the sufferings of the civilian population that she’d tried to interest Collier’s in the previous April. Perhaps she felt that, having delivered three tough analytical reportages about Europe to her editors, they owed her this; perhaps, too, she knew this would be her last chance to write about Spain.

  She went to hospitals, reporting on the children lying in the wards, staring with huge dark eyes; to food lines, where tiny pieces of salt cod and little packets of rice or dried peas were doled out to housewives who would have to feed their families on these starvation rations; to munitions factories, where shells were made out of fabric that in peacetime would have been turned into women’s summer dresses. Sometimes she was with Herbert Matthews, who was still besotted with her—“underneath she’s a lot softer than she seems,” he wrote defensively to his wife, Nancie—sometimes with Capa, whom she had unaccountably not met in Madrid with Hemingway, and whom she took to immediately. “He was my brother, my real brother,” she would later say; and although he made her laugh (always an important touchstone for her) they also fought, loudly and passionately, about almost anything. How could she write about suffering and injustice and expect it to end? he would ask. You are more stupid than a herd of mules. And she would shout at him that he was a self-involved cynic. Do you think taking pictures of wars and refugees is any way to help people? At its best, though, her journalism was very like his: short, sharp vignettes that put you into the frame with her subjects; at its worst, when in her zeal to make a point she made up facts to go with it, it fell into traps that he had learned to avoid.

  One night he held her hand during an air raid, and she teased him about the camel’s hair coat he was wearing, a coat with wide lapels and enormous mother-of-pearl buttons that he’d bought in Paris; it was vulgar, she told him, and it wasn’t right to wear it in Barcelona where everyone was freezing and starving. He didn’t care, he said. He had always wanted a coat like this, and if he had to die in an air raid, he would die wearing it. Not that he seemed afraid of dying—he was, Martha observed, “always very brave and always saying how frightened he was. He had none of Hemingway’s bravado.”

  Early in December, both Martha and Capa left Barcelona for Paris. After writing up her Barcelona story for Collier’s Martha was going on to New York, where Hemingway was waiting for her. Although she’d confessed to Herbert Matthews that she wasn’t sure their relationship had a future, she needed to test it for herself. As for Capa, his coverage of the Segre campaign, coupled with the drawn-out farewells to the men with whom he, and Gerda, had experienced so much, had left him emotionally and physically depleted. When he got home to the rue Froidevaux he was, as he wrote to his mother, “so sick I had an absolute breakdown.”

  December 1938: Moscow

  Constancia de la Mora loved Moscow. She had first visited it in the autumn of 1937, when Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros had suffered a stroke and she had decided he should go to Russia to recuperate (“No other country in Europe could cure Ignacio, I knew”); and now she was back, again with Hidalgo, this time on a mission to save—not her husband, but the Spanish Republic. The army had suffered huge losses, of men but also of arms and ammunition, in the disastrous Ebro campaign, and Prime Minister Negrín had sent his air force chief and his propagandist wife to beg Stalin for more war matériel. Specifically, he wanted 250 aircraft, 250 tanks, 4,000 machine guns, 650 artillery, and o
ther ordnance and ammunition.

  General Secretary Stalin invited Hidalgo and Constancia to the Kremlin for dinner, and when the pair walked into the dining room where Stalin, Defense Minister Voroshilov, and Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian prime minister, were sitting, all three men rose to greet them; the expression on his wife’s face, Hidalgo would later say, was unforgettable. Despite this warm welcome, Hidalgo was apprehensive about asking for Stalin’s help; Russian advisors in Spain had complained that Prime Minister Negrín was waging “a very expensive war.”

  Stalin smiled at him, that smile that could strike terror when you knew what lay behind it, and looked at Voroshilov, who smiled back.

  “Your war is a very inexpensive war … Very inexpensive! So inexpensive and so important that we will continue to send you everything you need. Whatever you need!”

  There was, of course, a price: an amount equivalent to $103 million. But, alas, of the enormous wealth—more than $500 million in gold and silver—that Spain had transferred to Moscow at the beginning of the war, there was less than $100,000 left. Fortunately, Stalin would allow Hidalgo to purchase the arms on credit, with only his signature as a guarantee.

  It wasn’t until, months later, some of the promised arms failed to materialize, that Constancia permitted herself the tiniest flicker of doubt. “Why didn’t Stalin send us what he promised?” she wondered to a friend, Enrique Castro Delgado, one of the founders of the Communist Fifth Regiment. “Could he have tricked us?”