Guerra

by Jason Webster

  The Spanish Earth showed bucolic scenes of Spanish country folk living a romantic if hard-working life, scratching a living off the land and now fighting to keep what little they had from the hands of the military rebels. Women wearing black were pictured walking through the dusty streets of whitewashed villages, while little boys rode on donkeys through the fields in quasi-biblical images that evoked the Holy Land and the time of Christ. Shattering this idyll, though, was the war, and the sight of artillery and explosions as the peasants defended their land broke rudely into this Arcadian world.

  These were the doors of houses that are empty now, Hemingway solemnly intoned over scenes of doors piled in the streets. Those that survived the bombardment bring them to reinforce the new trenches.

  From the countryside the story moved to Madrid, showing dramatic, if staged, pictures of the front line during the Nationalist assault on the city, with lingering shots of the devastation caused by the fighting: homes broken in pieces; dead bodies lying unattended on the floor. Then, returning to the countryside, the film focused on what was perhaps the greatest fear of the time: aerial bombardment and its possible use in future wars. The wreckage of a German Junkers shot down by a Republican fighter is shown in a field – this at a time when the Germans and the international community at large denied there were any foreign troops in Spain. I can’t read German either, Hemingway intoned ironically as the camera focused on Gothic-script writing on the fuselage of the downed plane.

  After more battle scenes, the film returned to images of peasants tilling and irrigating their land, making the dry soil fertile once more, while a Republican soldier fired his rifle in defence of his people.

  The men who never fought before, who were not trained in arms, who only wanted work, and food, fight on.

  The sparse, emotive commentary combined with strong images of the war was a powerful tool, but while supporters of the Republicans were moved by it, giving large sums to private charities working on the Republican side, government policies remained unchanged, and in this the propaganda failed.

  Hemingway, however, stayed on in Spain. An active backer of the government, he was sometimes to be seen teaching young fighters how to fire a rifle on the front lines, if staying out of the fray himself. His presence was generally welcomed: on one occasion when Hemingway paid a visit to the XII International Brigade, the general in command invited all the girls from a local village to a celebratory banquet. Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, while staying at the Florida Hotel in Madrid, which was hit thirty times by Nationalist bombardment while he was there. He was also one of the last people to cross back over the River Ebro after the heavy Republican defeat there in November 1938.

  Hemingway’s experiences in Spain made a lasting impression on him, and his thoughts on the conflict were distilled in his bestselling work For Whom the Bell Tolls, written after the eventual defeat of the side he had done so much to assist. A new, much greater war was on the horizon, one which Hemingway, like so many others, could clearly see.

  ‘They wrote in the old days it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,’ he wrote in his Notes for the Next War. ‘But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.’

  9

  Castuera

  There was little to show now where the concentration camp at Castuera once stood. I walked out of town along a little dust track past the cemetery, past farmhouses guarded by large fierce dogs that ran and barked overzealously in the oppressive heat, until I reached an empty field gently rising in the foothills of a long, wave-like mountain. There, at the side of the road, sat the ruins of an old lead mine, now used as a dump by the towns-people. Stretching out to the horizon, the desolate landscape of Extremadura baked under the sun. Everything in sight was either a dull yellowy grey, from the acre upon acre of dry grass, or black, where the barren soil had eroded to expose the rock that lay underneath. The place felt empty, meaningless, lacking even the austere beauty of a desert or the promise and fear of an empty ocean.

  The area had been held by the Republicans for much of the war. The town became flooded with refugees fleeing the nearby front line at the start of the conflict. The house of a local wealthy family had been turned into a hospital, while the church became a car mechanic’s workshop. As time passed and the war dragged on, though, the town slowly emptied: there were barely enough supplies to keep alive the soldiers from the 37th Division stationed there, or the whores ‘bearing their butter-white breasts’ on the streets.12 When the Francoists finally took control in the summer of 1938, they killed 183 Republican defenders and took one thousand prisoners. And to house them they built the concentration camp, just as they were doing at various points across the country.

  It was difficult to find remains of Spanish concentration camps now. Franco had forbidden any photos of them to be taken, and all the camps were destroyed when they were abandoned. Very few Spaniards, let alone foreigners, were aware that concentration camps once existed in Spain. Yet at Castuera there had once stood one of the most barbaric camps – over seventy wooden huts housing one hundred inmates each. During the day the prisoners were taken up into the hills to find wood to build more huts to house more men: by the time the camp was dismantled, over twelve thousand Republicans had been brought here. Many of them never left.

  Hot angry air blew over the plain as I stumbled through the dust and rocks looking for signs of the camp. Sloping away up the Castuera y Benquerencia hills, the field where the huts once stood was featureless, barely a ripple on its surface. Yet the small mine building which had stood on its edge, and where it was said the worst atrocities had taken place, was still standing, if half falling down.

  The area around the dirty red-brick building was littered with broken bottles and smashed toilets, heavy white porcelain scattered over the scrubby little weeds that seemed to be the only thing that could grow here. From the graffiti I got the impression kids from the town used the place for drinking parties, spraying the wall in moments of drunkenness. But when I looked more closely I realized that whoever came here knew exactly what kind of a place it was.

  ¿Qué es la guerra? ¡Los de aquí dentro lo saben! Muertes olvidadas.

  What is war? Those lying in here know. The forgotten dead.

  At that moment the wind changed direction and for a second I caught the unmistakable sweet sickly smell of rotting flesh. No one knew how many had been killed there. Dozens, perhaps hundreds. But that had all been seventy years ago. Surely there couldn’t still be decomposing remains of the men who had died here? For a second, with the heat, the smell and the hollow silence, broken only by the buzzing of flies desperately trying to catch drops of sweat on my forehead and arms in the seconds before they evaporated away, I began to wonder. There was nothing to hold on to in a place like this. No terms of reference. The triggers that usually surround us, reassuring us constantly that the world functions as we know it to, and will continue to do so, were all removed. You could think anything here.

  I skirted around the back of the ruined mine, looking for a way in. It was a small rectangular building with high windowless walls, open to the elements save for part of a roof covering a taller, tower-like section at one end. I tripped up a small grey slope over more broken porcelain. There was no door, but I found the origin of the stench: a dead sheep, its carcass melting into the ground, crushed more by the heat of the sun than by the flies and worms of ordinary decomposition. Survival even for them out here would be hard, you felt. Circling back round to the dirt track at the front of the mine building, it was clear I would have to scale the wall if I wanted to get inside, as there didn’t appear to be any entrance. And it was the inside that I wanted to see.

  For the months that the Castuera concentration camp was in existence, members of the local Falange party had come up from the village at night to murder the inmates. Many of the victims were political activists from among the Republican ranks. In public, F
ranco used to declare that Republicans with no blood on their hands would be spared. In secret, at Castuera many were murdered simply for having been on the other side. Grouping the prisoners into batches of ten, the Falangists would tie them together around the waist and then drag them to the mine just outside the camp. There they would line them up at the top of the shaft and push them over the edge. Some fell directly to their deaths, others smashed their limbs at the bottom but remained alive. The Falangists finished them off with grenades.

  Although some historians referred to Castuera as Franco’s death camp, there was still a veil of silence draped over what precisely had taken place here. Few of the people involved who were still alive were prepared to talk about their experiences, while Pablo Ortiz, a school teacher from the nearby town of Zafra who had recently published an article on the history of the camp, had received anonymous threats over the phone. In Castuera, most were still determined to forget, and to keep the truth buried along with the unclaimed dead.

  I found footholds in the wall and began to climb. The wall was only eight feet high, and within a couple of steps I was peering over the edge at a kind of shallow pit. The stench of death, once again, was overpowering, and as I looked down I could make out more dead sheep – at least half a dozen of them. Puzzled, I wondered how they had got in there – the only way in was over the wall. Would a farmer have thrown them in like this to rot? They lay on their sides, white bones pushing through what was left of their wool, mouths stretched into permanent grins where their faces had all but gone. Some of them looked to have been quite young.

  Even stranger, lying next to an assortment of plastic bags and other rubbish were three or four prosthetic limbs. Legs, for the most part, full-sized and designed to go right up to the hip, complete with socks and boots covering the foot. Although clearly made of plastic, at first sight they seemed real. Even when, after the initial shock, I’d worked out what they were, it was hard not to think of them as actually human, with their carefully moulded knee caps and calf muscles. Was this some kind of statement, symbolizing the horror of what had happened here during the war? Lambs to the slaughter, abandoned fake body parts, all shrouded in the smell of decay. But maybe it was just a tip, a place to discard what you wanted to forget.

  Looking further into the mine building, I realized the shaft where the prisoners had been murdered was on the other side of the pit. There was no way through, as the ground was a sea of dead sheep and plastic legs, so I gingerly crept over the outer wall and skirted around the inside of it, gripping on to any gaps in the brickwork. The drop was no more than a few feet, but it was the thought of what I might land in that gave me pause.

  On cue, the ledge I had committed all my weight on to gave way and I fell down the edge of the wall, landing with a crack in the middle of the pit. I looked down and saw my foot placed in the middle of a sheep’s abdomen, the dry bones snapping under my weight. The smell of putrefaction hit me as flies rose up into my face. Looking down at my foot as I lifted it out of the animal’s corpse, I expected it to be covered in what remained of the sheep’s innards, but it was just dusty, and thankfully there were no scratches on my leg. I didn’t want to think about what kind of diseases the thing might be carrying. The sheep seemed fairly dry. In these conditions you got the sense that once an animal died its body liquids would evaporate within a few hours.

  I scrambled back up the wall, trying not to retch, and deliberately avoiding the ledge that I’d just fallen from. Shuffling along sideways, I eventually got to the edge of the mine shaft and looked down. It was dark and dank, a featureless grimy cavern not quite as deep as I had expected: perhaps a hundred feet. I assumed it had been partially filled in. Perhaps earth had been poured into it at some point to cover the bodies that lay at the bottom.

  I stayed there for a few moments, the sun beating down on the back of my head as I peered into this hole in the ground, sensing the animal fear and helplessness of falling into its depths. The moment of panic, the fear, the rush. Then the crash, pain, and explosions as the grenades fell from above. I pictured the men who had done this enjoying themselves as they disposed of another dozen or so Reds, slapping one another on the back and lighting cigarettes as they walked away, satisfied with their night’s work.

  Clambering out and away from the blackness, past the sheep and limbs and over the wall again, I took another look at the crumbling old building, trying to absorb and understand what had taken place there. On the outside of the wall the Conscience of Castuera had scrawled more graffiti.

  Puta hipocresía. Estamos vendidos.

  Fucking hypocrisy. We’ve been sold down the river.

  A sheep’s skull was nestling among some rags and the remains of a rusting washing machine by the side of the road. It had been blanched by the summer light, back teeth half formed as they pushed down through the bone of the upper jaw.

  What was it about this country, I wondered, that places like this could just be abandoned, as though the events that took place here might evaporate simply by forgetting they had ever happened? Standing there, the bleakness seeping into me, I remembered how Miguel had told me of the horrors that had been committed in this impoverished part of the country. I felt buried by the weight of all the anger and violence that had been a part of this landscape. Why had I come? I had wanted to explore the Civil War, but right then I just wanted to get out as fast as I could.

  As I was turning to walk back into the town, I caught sight of something moving over the dry dead plains in the distance. A white figure was bobbing up and down in a crease in the hillside, its form half obscured by the colourless weeds and dry grass. I stood still in the burning air to make out what it was. Nothing out there felt familiar – it seemed more like the landscape of a choking dream than any real countryside I had ever known. As I flicked away in vain at the flies, I suddenly realized: this was one of the hottest and most barren places on earth, yet at that very moment I was being approached by a jogger.

  Caught in a trance-like state induced by the eerie surroundings, I watched in amazement as the man paced across the fields, following a path which stretched the length of the foothills, eventually passing in front of me. His face was red and swollen with exertion, and a pink baseball cap covered his head, patchy dark stains growing around the sides where it had absorbed the sweat. His white T-shirt clung to his skin, flecked with spots of grime where the dust had been kicked up from his running shoes. I simply stared at him as he came closer, wondering how and why he should be carrying out such an exhausting activity in this heat.

  Despite the bovine expression on my face, he stopped as he ran up to the old mine building and greeted me. Two lunatics in the middle of the Extremaduran desert, each wondering what the other was doing there.

  ‘Are you from the town?’ I asked after we had introduced ourselves. His face spoke of nothing but pain. I half wondered if he was going to drop dead on the spot from heart failure.

  His wife was from Castuera, he said, but he was originally from Cáceres. I remarked how amazing it was seeing someone jogging at that time of the day.

  ‘I only come out here in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘Don’t like to come any other time.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be cooler in the evenings?’ I asked. ‘Or early in the morning?’

  His head turned to the side and he gave me a furtive look, hands on his hips as his lungs heaved up and down, catching his breath.

  ‘It’s good for running round here,’ he said with a nervous laugh. ‘But it’s a bit … You know what happened here, right?’

  He mentioned the concentration camp, and the killings that had taken place there. I told him I’d just climbed in to take a look.

  ‘You think it’s a bit creepy,’ I said.

  His eyes became intense and shiny, black with fear.

  ‘I don’t know whether to believe these things,’ he laughed again, ‘but they say there are ghosts here – men who were killed in the war.’ He looked down and swallowed, lifting the
baseball cap off his head and wiping his brow with his arm. Grey hairs were beginning to sprout around his ears. I guessed him to be in his forties.

  ‘Have you seen them?’

  ‘No. People in the village … I don’t know. I just don’t want to take any chances. So I reckon it’s safer only coming here during the daytime.’

  ‘What have they seen?’ I asked. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Just comments. You know. One of the old men in the village said he was walking his dog out here one night a few years back and he saw this blue-purple shadow – a young man dressed as a soldier. The dog went mad and he had to put it down.’

  ‘The dog saw the ghost too?’

  ‘It was never quite right, that dog. Vicious. But after that day it just went out of control. They had to shoot it, see. Might have attacked a child or something.’ The man’s eyes moved from side to side in a flickering motion, never looking me in the face.

  ‘And where was the ghost? Where did this man see it?’ I felt a sudden fascination with the story, a feverish desire to find out everything I could. The place felt like a reflection of the Underworld. Perhaps the only beings that could survive out here were phantoms and shades. The skin on the back of my neck began to sting with the heat of the sun. I had been outside unprotected for too long and needed water and to cool down. Dizziness was creeping up my spine.