No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  The tourists, frightened and inconvenienced, murmur, make a kind of flutter and try to plan.

  Who is on this train? Conspicuously, Catalan families on their way from town to town or back to Barcelona, and the two teams, the Hungarian water-polo team from Paris and the Swiss team. The Catalans leave the train, almost without exception, and find quarters in the town.

  There is a German who has come to run in the Games, on his own, from France where he has been working as a cabinetmaker. Bavarian, with a broad strong face like a man in a Brueghel picture – or a Käthe Kollwitz – his cheekbones stand out. He smiles, a very dark brown flashing. He had been a Rotfrontkämpfer who left Germany soon after Hitler came to power.

  In first class, there are Italian businessmen, and a German family with two children who are hitting each other; a very beautiful woman from South America; the French deputy, M. de Paiche, who has come officially to the Games, and his male secretary; two rather attractive English couples on their way to Mallorca on holiday, from a bank and from The New Statesman, and others in the two cars who are not at once identifiable. In the one Pullman, there are Hollywood people, a director and two cameramen.

  A Spanish doctor emerges from the Pullman and tells us about the Hollywood men; he has offered to hire a car, and to go with them to the city. But they do not want that. They want to go back to the frontier.

  The mayor of the town appears on the platform; very grave, wearing in his lapel a black ribbon of mourning. There have been deaths of men from this town today.

  A tall man, distinguished face, thin, with fine movements, climbs down the steps of the train. We see him speaking for a while to the mayor, as the long evening closes down. The birds begin; the boys whistle from the trees. Word comes back: the tall man is a professor of philosophy from the University of Madrid. He will act as go-between for the train.

  First of all, household arrangements. The two English couples bring basins of water and the little cakes of soap they carry with them, for the use of the train.

  ‘But we can wash on the train!’ says the lady from Peapack. She has five white rawhide valises, I admired them in the compartment, one is a hatbox.

  No, we can’t wash on the train; that water was used up hours ago.

  We sleep on the train. As we choose places – we have all moved to first class – the two teams are playing soccer outside. There is a rattle of guns from the olive grove on the hill. A dark figure moves to the steps where the professor of philosophy has stood. After about an hour, he comes out again; his face cannot be seen, but his shoulders are in grief.

  The station is dark, except for three or four lights and the slight movement of mimosa flowers, shadow and yellow in a slight breeze coming down cool from the Pyrenees.

  Night. Two families, the father wounded, walk in from Barcelona with news of a tremendous battle. The radio goes on at half-hour intervals: Beethoven’s Fifth, government bulletins, tangos, You’re Driving Me Crazy, sardanas, Catalan songs. As long as the radio goes, the government is in control. And now, over that booming, scratching sound, a tired voice. The general who had tried to take Catalonia. There are four of them: Goded, Mola, Sanjurjo, Franco. Sanjurjo has been killed; this is Goded. He sounds to me like the businessmen during the Crash, an endless tiredness in his defeated voice. He is telling his followers to lay down their arms. There has been enough bloodshed, he says.

  We write a letter on the train – to the town – and take up a collection for the wounded. We each give a little, the athletes do, too. No, not the German family, not the Italian businessmen, not the Cockney shoe salesman; not the six platinum blondes, the Rodney Hudson Young Ladies, who were supposed to open tonight in Barcelona. The passenger whose help counts most turns out to be a League of Nations observer from Switzerland. He revises our letter to the town, putting it in perfectly acceptable diplomatic language.

  We take it into Moncada, to the next street over from the station, past the finer houses belonging to people who live in the capital and come there for weekends sometimes. In the next street, the Committee is in session at the mayor’s office. The mayor accepts the money with a speech of thanks, and turns the letter over to the Committee – formed of members of the two unions, and the Anarchists. Catalonia is Anarchist country, the first I have ever seen. They say there has been fighting for a hundred years, but never like this.

  One of us begins to speak in sympathy for the town, but the mayor puts his hand up, stopping him flat. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No foreign nationals can intrude in revolutionary situations.’

  The passengers’ committee and the Committee shake hands, and we go back to the train.

  The roosters crowed all night, after the radio shut down. At four-forty-five the train shook, and the branches of the trees. A spire of black smoke could be seen off to the side; the church had been bombed.

  Now we begin to hear the story. The dark figure who had come to the train last night had been the priest, come to ask the professor to hide him. For an hour, the professor had considered, and had finally given his answer: this was an international place, the church had been storing ammunition for the officers’ revolt, and he could not. Years later, in America, I heard Spaniards debating this incident. The professor had become an ambassador by then; but this incident had become one of the most well-known and a node of argument of the war, with the death of Lorca. The train had become famous for the story of the priest and the professor of philosophy.

  Five officers had been shot that morning in Moncada, we heard, and before their deaths, one had said, ‘Do what you want with me. I’ve killed two or three hundred of your men already.’

  Gun cars begin to appear, with U.G.T. and C.N.T. painted on their sides – the initials of the united trade-union groups. The guns bristle, pointing at us as we walk in the town. The Committee has suspended the strike for an hour, to allow buying of food. Ernie and Rose, the American couple, face guns. He is a labor lawyer from New York, and he is comforting her. She is terrified of the guns this morning. I see her again at four in the afternoon, as the gun cars come through again. She is standing with her back to them, eating chocolate. The fear is absorbed very quickly.

  The teams are doing exercises on the station platform. A member of the Committee comes to ask us not to come out of the train anymore. I am in third class when the word of the change of control in Moncada comes through. A Catalan woman has made a fire here, and is cooking soup. The Member of the Committee will speak for the town from now on, and Otto, the German, is speaking for the train.

  The town has given the engineer permission to drive the train a hundred feet down the track, toward Barcelona. Damn fool passengers have been using the toilets; they must stop, and something must be done. The English couples have done all they can to get people to use the lavatories in the station but some few people are not listening, and PASSENGERS WILL PLEASE REFRAIN is not widely known. The town has two wells, and is giving us one of them. It also is giving us the use of the schoolhouse, the most modern building in Moncada. We can sleep on the tables. The two teams move to the schoolhouse at once; they have a playing field, too, even though they are warned not to go out for more than two hours, now. Officers and rebel men are escaping northward from Barcelona, and running battles are expected.

  There is a sound of cannon from Barcelona.

  One of the Englishmen comes back as the stores close, with a supply of gunnysacks to sleep on. ‘So cheap – really such a bargain,’ he commends them to us. ‘They’re really clean.’

  The people on the train are becoming very jumpy. Now we all go to the schoolhouse, for trucks have been promised to take the two teams into Barcelona; but they do not come.

  Otto and I begin to talk in the late afternoon, in a complex immediate closeness. He does not speak English, and my freshman German is very bad, clumsy, full of mistakes. I have never wanted language so much. We try, and laugh, and hand the orange and black book back and forth. We try the pale yellow section, English, Spanish, Fren
ch, the Romance tongues; we can both speak French of a sort. Then the pale blue: German, Dutch, the Scandinavians, and English. Then the buff: Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, always English. And the green, that the Hungarians have been using (but Ernie speaks Hungarian, with the languages that most of us speak), with Finnish, Estonian, that group. And the orange, Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, Esperanto. English always. Never Catalan.

  With our language of many colors, we make a beginning.

  The French newspapers lie on the floor of the train aisle. A tiny paragraph can be read if you pick up the paper. It says that shooting broke out yesterday in Spanish Morocco. But you don’t have to pick the paper up to see the big picture of the feature story. It is Nijinsky in his Swiss sanatorium, against the background of black cloth unrolled in the shape of a cross, dancing his black dance of the world.

  Rattle of machine guns, in the town, all night.

  The soldiers reappeared, as loyal troops. Civil Guard, for the government, patrolling the train, their yellow straps shining dark in the light from the platform.

  In the morning a car came – not for the Hollywood men, who are shouting by now, but for the little Spanish doctor, who is needed in Barcelona. It goes off in that direction, the purple-faced director staring.

  Now a curious panic begins on the train. Rumor has followed rumor, and now we hear that the looting has begun. ‘Rape,’ says one of the Rodney Hudson blondes, and the shoe salesman comforts her.

  Down the street of houses belonging to absentee landlords, and facing the train, a methodical process, perfectly visible to the passengers. A group of young men – rather like the young men who went off in an open truck the first night to fight in Barcelona, no two firearms alike – go from door to door. Systematically, one opens the big heavy door with its black knocker in the shape of an iron hand dropped to sound on the door. If his key does not work, he forces the lock. Two young men go in, and after a moment, they can be seen with two or three religious prints and a hunting rifle and a pistol, perhaps. This goes on; the scene repeats. Suddenly, a boy of five or so ducks under the arm of the leader and disappears for a minute. Still running, he comes out with a heap of towels and cuts down the street. We all watch. ‘Spanish looting,’ says Ernie.

  Halfway down the block, his mother catches him, walks in the sight of all to the young leader, returns the towels and makes her short speech.

  Far off, among the olive trees on the hill, a man can be seen. He is running too. Shouts hurrah on the slopes. A plane flies far to one side, but one pulls one’s head in. Everything is visible to the naked eyes, one feels.

  At this moment the trucks arrive. There are two of them, open, with railings and stakes. They are for the teams and for anyone else who wants to try the ride. A car precedes them, a Communist Party car. The Americans wonder about being saved by the Communist Party, each with his own feelings before that prospect. Two American school teachers, who have been reading pamphlets on The Problems of the Spanish Revolution. The two teams; Otto and I; Ernie and Rose; some of the others in the second truck. There is actually a united front now in Catalonia, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists, all backing the government.

  The valises are set up around the sides of the truck for fortification. The Swiss team amazes the town with a burst of yodeling, part of our thanks. A machine-gun truck goes down the road; we are to follow in two minutes.

  Sudden spasm of nerves and laughing. Ernie, in the voice of Groucho Marx – ‘Of course they know this means war!’A tiny boy in his shirt, holding his penis. Ernie – ‘Vive le sport!’And the truck starts off to Barcelona.

  The road has fortifications, thrown-up bales of hay, later there are barricades of paving stones flying the red flag for unity. There are machine-gun nests, dead horses, dead mules, terrible spots that I cannot identify at several crossroads. A Ford sign on the way into the city.

  As we reach Barcelona, the white flags are at all windows – towels, sheets, tablecloths hung over the windowsills for peace. Shooting is heard again and again – not cannons or machine guns (except once), but guns. My teeth feel the shots, and everything else, too; a nerve in my leg jumps. Ahead of us, a man falls, and our truck swerves and turns, taking a detour as some street-corner battle opens.

  We are taking another road to the Hotel Olympic – immense building requisitioned for the athletes.

  In the streets, there are no cars that are not armed and painted with initials or titles. VISCA (that’s Viva) CATALUNYA.

  Overturned cars, dead animals, coils and spires of smoke rising from burning churches. The coils of color climbing the architectural heart of the city, Gaudí’s marvelous church, untouched by harm. The Chinese Quarter, money-set.

  From the roof of the hotel, the city is laid out before you, the wide avenues to the port, the Rambla, and there Columbus on a gilded ball and the water beyond. The heights over the city, Tibidabo, are very beautiful, the squares are illuminated, and the bullring, Monumental y Arena across the way, still a perfect place for snipers.

  Look down, you can see the teams arriving still. Cars are overturned, here in the Plaza España, one of the two centers of the fighting. Guards stream into the building, and girls with rifles take their places in the cars.

  In the dark, we set out for dinner at the stadium, with M. de Paiche (whose stomach has been badly upset by the diet of beans and soda) and his secretary. The windshield of the car we drive in is spangled by bullets, and there is blood on the cushion behind me. I sit upright; but the car goes up a winding road, and I can’t help learning back.

  Two thousand foreigners, thrown on the city as civil war began, are to be lodged and fed here.

  The stadium is filled with athletes and stranded nationals. We eat beans; they are delicious. News goes around. We meet the English team, and at last the American team. Block parties have been held for months, and tryouts at Randall’s Island – and here they are: Dr. Smith and George Gordon Battle in charge, and Al Chakin, boxing and wrestling; Irving Jenkins, boxing; Frank Payton, Eddie Kraus, Dorothy Tucker, Harry Engle, Myron Dickes, all track; Bernie Danchik, gymnast; Julian Raul, cycling; Charles Burley, William Chamberlain and Frank Adams Hanson.

  In the meetings that night, the decisions are made to leave – the French, whose M. de Paiche says, ‘We have much to learn from Spain’ – and many others, to take the burden of thousands (some say twenty thousand) of foreigners off the government at this crucial and bloody moment. The French leave the next day on the Chellé and Djeube; we all see them off, waving from the dock. Even the gypsies, in red and pink, salute with clenched fists up. At the last moment, as on the deck the arms all rise together, the ship we watch appears to lift up on the sea.

  The American and British athletes decide to stay, and ask us to come with them, to clear the Olympic building of as many people as possibly can go. The British are wonderful, brave, droll – they are feeling particularly humiliated, for they have had to lie down on the tennis courts while they were shot at – lie down on the courts! We go with them into the narrow streets, with barricades thrown breast high, paving torn up, the crowds in lyric late nighttime Catalan – to the Hotel Madrid in the Calle de Boqueria. Here, on the street, in the hotel and the two restaurants, the Condal and our own, we have the next days. We send our cables; the Telefónica, run by American business, is proud of a continued service.

  At the American consulate, Drew Franklin tells us that Companys has asked him to supervise our leaving. There is no safe conduct, the consul tells us, don’t try to go to the border by car. An art professor and a correspondent are there; the men should leave off their jackets, the women should not wear jewelry – ‘They will think you are proletarians.’ The hysterical reports have begun to register. Our three Hollywood men have reached the frontier, and have told reporters that they saw wild scenes of looting from the train, that they suffered deprivations and saw horrors.

  Some of the athletes are talking of joining the fighting forces, which n
ow include many members of the Assault Troops in their blue uniforms, the Civil Guard, and men and women who a week ago had been civilians.

  We walk, going back always to the Madrid, talking with Otto, with the English athletes, smoking Bisontes (the Spanish relative of Camels) and drinking wine. There was a moment outside a house in Moncada, when they taught me the double-spouted drinking; I learned laughing how to bite off the free-pouring drink. My practice drink was water, not wine, and they were shooting at the house – real practice conditions. We went in the house, and I learned. Now we drank from glasses, and from the pouring too; we came to our decisions in these days. It cleared and deepened between us; it was certain for Otto. He had found his chance to fight fascism, and a profound quiet, amounting to joy, was there; it was the German chance, in or out of Germany.

  We talked with the athletes about what might happen. It was a matter of doing what we did entire, with our whole selves committed. What about King Edward, said the English. There was a rumor that something was happening so that his life was at last coherent, politically and erotically; it had something to do with the American woman, Mrs. Simpson, but there was a lot more besides.

  Who would help the government and the people of Spain against the generals and the officers, the Fascist revolt backed by Germany and Iatly? The checks and guns had been found in the Fascist strongholds. News of all this was published in the papers, which were coming out whole after the first days in which front-page stories were torn out, and sometimes hardly anything but the lists of the dead and wounded appeared. The death of the dancer La Argentina, whom I had loved to watch, was noted in a tiny paragraph.