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Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

Page 6

by Gavan Tredoux


  Both of the Haldanes were drawn deeply into the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, in which the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was prominent. Charlotte and JBS had visited Spain in the early 1930s and, as early as February 1935, JBS had spoken on behalf of the Spanish Aid Committee in Worcester.33 This was during the several years of political turmoil that preceded the war and came to a head only in February 1936, when the narrow election victory of a coalition of socialists, anarchists, and communists, intent on radical reforms, plunged Spain into chaos. The coalition (“Republicans”) had not won the majority of the popular vote but managed to gain a majority of seats. Civil war between the Republicans and Nationalists followed when the military revolted. Haldane immediately sided with the Republicans, and raged in public against the non-intervention policy pursued by Britain and France, who were afraid that the war would escalate internationally. The war caused a bitter argument and break between JBS and his mother, Kathleen, which was never fully repaired.34

  Charlotte later remembered that JBS had offered to openly join the Communist Party around this time, but that Harry Pollitt advised him to keep his affiliation unofficial, since he would be more useful if he was known publically as only a sympathizer.35 Her son, Ronnie Burghes, then only seventeen, joined the Communist Youth League and volunteered to fight in the British Battalion of the International Brigade, which was raised to aid the Republicans. Charlotte soon met with Harry Pollitt to give her permission for her underage son to fight, and to try to ensure that her son would have a gas mask. She recommended JBS to Pollitt as an expert on gas warfare. JBS could certainly call on his previous experience of gas warfare and countermeasures in the First World War, and in 1925 had even published a heterodox book on the subject, which he cryptically called Callinicus after the seventh-century Syrian from Heliopolis who invented a forerunner of napalm called “Greek fire” (hardly gas warfare). JBS assured his readers that the humanity of gas warfare was highly underrated compared to the alternatives.

  It seems likely that Haldane took Pollitt’s advice and was a secret member of the party by 1936 at the latest, since he was in Spain by December 1936, as an adviser to the Republicans on gas counter-measures. That month, an article by Charlotte for the Daily Worker, the organ of the CPGB, declared that “my two men are in Spain” and that “The Brigade is the greatest romance of modern politics.”36 She was all in, though she implies that she only joined the Party secretly in 1937. In January 1937, an intercepted letter to Clemens Palme Dutt again suggested JBS as an editorial board member of a new Marxist journal, this time The Modern Quarterly, which he would be associated with through the early 1950s.37 And then JBS publically declared himself a Marxist in 1937, publishing “A Dialectical Account of Evolution” in Science and Society—at the ripe age of forty-four, going on forty-five.

  JBS never played an important role in the Spanish conflict. Gas was a difficult weapon to deploy effectively and was not used by either side. But the war put him in touch with some enigmatic characters who would reappear in London after it was over, and it colored his ideology. On his first trip, from mid-December 1936 to mid-January 1937, he could do little more than observe air raids and their effects in Madrid, offer opinions on the construction of bomb shelters, tour the trenches, lecture about gas warfare, help out at the blood transfusion clinic of the communist Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, where he stayed for two weeks, and sample the modest biological research still being pursued in Republican Spain.

  International Brigade members were struck, as was his wife, Charlotte, by the ill-fitting black leather outfit that Haldane roamed around in, augmented by a tin hat with a broken strap that he had kept from his days twenty years previously in the Black Watch. “As it was the only tin hat in the whole of Republican Spain, it attracted a good deal of attention from passers-by, and twice sentries saluted us respectfully, obviously impressed,” according to a foreign correspondent he befriended, Virginia Cowles. Haldane seemed like an eccentric to Cowles, and not completely serious when he told people that he was “Just a spectator from England. Enjoyed the last war so much I thought I’d come to Spain for a holiday.” She tells how Haldane led her on a madcap tour of the frontline trenches of Madrid, only to abandon her in order to clamber out over a hill in open view—she was horrified—to get to a spot with a better prospect. She only caught up with him later, after being led to safety by a Spanish soldier.38

  The diminutive Jewish South African photographer Vera Ines Morley Elkan encountered Haldane at a hostel in Madrid, in the unisex washroom. “He was huge beside me.” As the hostel was cold and miserable, he offered her a place with him at the marginally more comfortable apartment of a decamped nationalist lawyer. The apartment had been taken over by the Canadian Blood Transfusion Unit. She took photographs of the operations there, which included gruesome direct body-to-body transfusions without anesthetic, involving “quite a bit of screaming and quite a bit of wriggling.”39 Haldane used members of the unit to help him test gas masks, and made propaganda broadcasts at the radio station. The unit was run by Dr. Norman Bethune, who, Elkan remembered, had a large supply of Canadian whiskey on hand. Haldane helped Bethune perform some transfusions, reusing the experience for later propaganda.

  I believe that every healthy communist ought to be ready to give his blood, and not only to comrades. A pint of good red communist blood is better propaganda for the party of Marx and Lenin than a gallon of Tory beer for the National Government. For this reason, it is worth finding out to what group one belongs. . . . A Spanish comrade was brought in with his left arm shattered. He was as pale as a corpse. He could not move or speak. We looked for a vein in his arm, but his veins were empty. Bethune cut through the skin inside his right elbow, found a vein, and placed a hollow needle in it. He did not move. For some twenty minutes I held a reservoir of blood, connected to the needle by a rubber tube, at the right height to give a steady flow. As the new blood entered his vessels his colour gradually returned, and with it consciousness. When we sewed up the hole in his arm he winced. He was still too weak to speak, but as we left him he bent his right arm and gave us the Red Front salute.40

  The Red Front salute! On January 4, 1937, all of the foreigners at Bethune’s blood transfusion clinic, including Haldane and Be thune himself, were arrested by the Republican Secret Police. Most of them were released, except Bethune’s Swedish lover Kajsa Rothman, who was detained for a while longer, and one Hurturg (possibly “Harturg” or “Hartung”), an Austrian who was then shot by the Republicans.41 Curiously, Haldane referred to this incident in only an elliptical and flippant way, saying that “a number of foreigners” were “rounded up” and that “I think, one was shot.”42 Elkan must have been arrested too, but makes no mention of the incident. After a few weeks Haldane left for London. According to Elkan, “he left behind a pair of pajamas, which was a Godsend . . . they went about three times around me, but I lived in them because they were beautifully warm at night.”43

  Back in London, Haldane spoke at a series of public meetings in aid of the Republicans, which were duly monitored by MI5. Addressing a crowd of a thousand at Euston Road on February 25, he was defensive. “Haldane opened his speech by referring to the scorn with which his scientific colleagues regarded his association with a man such as Pollitt.”44

  On the basis of its non-intervention policy, the government prevented the Daily Worker correspondent “Frank Pitcairn” (Claud Cock-burn) from going to Spain to cover the war. Haldane volunteered to go in Cockburn’s place, arriving in Madrid on March 25. On this second visit, Haldane saw the hard-drinking Norman Bethune again, inspected trenches, and once more helped to broadcast propaganda on the government radio station, EAQ. The American geneticist and future Nobel laureate Hermann Joseph Muller was also at Bethune’s clinic at this time. Muller was ostensibly researching transfusion of cadaver blood, but was really ducking the storm developing in the Soviet Union, where he had worked, since 1933, with Solomon Levit, Israel Agol, and others th
at Haldane knew well.45 The Soviets had turned increasingly hostile to mainstream genetics, and Muller had volunteered to go to Spain to avoid the maw of the NKVD. On the way to Spain, Muller wrote to Julian Huxley that, judging from the “tone and content” of his letters, Haldane was “at present having his political opinions impressed upon him with a rubber stamp” and that therefore he would not disillusion him about the Soviet Union, since that might push him even further into the pro-Soviet camp.46 Muller would return after eight weeks to Moscow to pack his things quickly and leave for good. He chose this roundabout route, instead of leaving directly from Spain, to avoid casting suspicion on Vavilov, who had organized the Spanish trip to get Muller out of sight.

  Haldane assured Daily Worker readers that the International Brigade soldiers were holding up. “They have suffered heavy losses and have been in the trenches for many weeks. But their spirit was wonderful.”47 But Haldane did more than passive reporting. It must have been around this time that the future Soviet Red Orchestra spy and defector Alexander Allan Foote met him. “I remember Professor JBS Haldane, when for a short period he served with the Brigade as a private soldier, standing in a trench brandishing a tiny, snub-nosed revolver and shouting defiance at the advancing Franco infantry. Luckily for science, we managed to repel the rebel attack and the Professor was spared for his further contributions to world knowledge.”48 Fred Copeman—an imposing and intelligent brawler, who had been raised in a workhouse but now commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain—was more blunt when he was interviewed forty years later:

  . . . and old Haldane was there, and more bloody nuisance than he was worth. He was a big fat fellow who wore a little leather jacket with only one button on. I don’t think he ever changed his bloody shirt in four months you know, and the button used to be on his big fat old belly, you know, and it kinda stuck out, and he had funny dirty old trousers; and yet, he was a brilliant scientist. He insisted on being in the front line, and he had a little tiny revolver, I doubt that would hit that bloody window if you tried, but he would hop up on the step holding this bloody thing, and I would go up and every time I would say ‘What bloody good do you think you are? First of all you’re taking two blokes room, two blokes can sit where your fat arse is, so get down out of it and get back to Brigade Headquarters’. I’m being told politically JBS Haldane must not get killed, he’s too valuable, keep him out the line. He was all the time in the bloody line! After about 3 months I said, I had a long talk with him, I said ‘look you’ve done enough bloody talking old fat man’, I said ‘you’ve got to go home, you’ve got to go home! They want you there, you’re important there now. You’ve been in the line, you can talk and a thousand will listen to you’. So he finally caved in and went back home.49

  The Republican Government wanted maximum value from their celebrity visitors. But Copeman’s memory was faulty: Haldane was there for less than a month on this second visit, and his final tour in December would be just as short. His own memories of this visit were rosier. “I remember one evening when the conversation in the battalion head-quarters dug-out passed from adultery to telegony. The commanding officer (a former mutineer in the navy) upheld the view that the foetal and maternal circulations anastomose in the human placenta, and a fascist attack unfortunately terminated my effort to convince him that he was wrong.”50 The former mutineer was Copeman, who had fonder memories of Haldane’s lectures to the troops, which were always popular, drawing up to a hundred men each night. “He would lecture on anything and of course the lads would always try and get him onto a lecture to do with sex, men always do, you know.” Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a favorite theme. “I got a lot out of that old boy.”51

  Haldane also met up with the physiologist Juan Negrín, minister of finance in the Republican cabinet. They may have met for the first time in 1933, at a physiological conference in Madrid, or on Haldane’s visit in December 1936. Negrín was from the Canary Islands and had established a successful university career, first as a professor of physiology and then as an administrator. The minister of finance was an extravagant gourmand and womanizer who lived large. Reports circulated that he ate out up to three times a night, a luxury enabled by bulimia. Officially Negrín was a socialist, but the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky52 stated that the Soviets viewed him as more pliable than Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, who had resisted “liquidation” of radicals and anarchists like the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). As minister of finance, Negrín enabled the secret transfer to Stalin of Spain’s treasury of gold, one of the largest in the world and worth some 500 million dollars. Stalin gratefully accepted it for “safe-keeping” and as collateral for arms shipments. The gold was never returned, and exchange rates were manipulated to grossly inflate the prices of the arms supplied, many of which, though not all, were obsolete.53 The Soviets had early on resolved to do no more than prolong the conflict as long as possible, in order to tie up any Western powers unwise enough to get involved. Making a lot of money along the way was an unanticipated bonus.

  Before Haldane left Spain, he met Martha Gellhorn, a foreign correspondent, at Bethune’s blood transfusion clinic in Morata on April 5, and presumably through her or Bethune, her lover Ernest Hemingway. On April 9, Haldane and Gellhorn watched a Nationalist assault through binoculars from a house on the edge of Casa de Campo—“like college kids on an outing,” as Gellhorn put it.54 A few days later, Hemingway, Herbert Mathews, and Virginia Cowles, who were all foreign correspondents, watched the battle from a building christened the “Old Homestead” by Hemingway. Cowles was amused.

  We heard footsteps coming up the stairs and looked around to find Professor J.B.S. Haldane. He greeted us with his usual cordiality and looked round for a place to sit. The house was gutted with pulverized furniture, old clothes and broken pictures. From the débris he dragged a dilapidated red plush chair, placed it in the middle of the room, and sat down in full view of the battlefield. He put his elbows on his knees and adjusted his field-glasses. Hemingway warned him it was dangerous to remain exposed, but Haldane waved him aside. A few minutes later Hemingway spoke again: ‘Your glasses shine in the sun; they will think we are military observers’. ‘My dear fellow, I can assure you there isn’t any danger here in the house’. Ten minutes later there was a loud whistle as a shell plunged into a flat next door. Two more screamed overhead and we all went down on the floor—all except Haldane, who scrambled down the stairs and disappeared. We were shelled for fifteen or twenty minutes, and when at last we got back to the [Hotel] Florida we found him sitting in the lobby, drinking beer. ‘Hallo,’ he called amiably, ‘let’s have a drink’. We did; and more than one.55

  Perhaps it was through Hemingway that Haldane met Hans Kahle (1899–1947), though it may have been the other way around. They established a close relationship that would stretch over the next decade. Kahle, who was born in Berlin in 1899 to Dr. Karl Kahle and Maria Caroline Duebener, was commander of the 11th International Brigade, including the “Ernst Thälmann” battalion; he usually referred to himself as “Lieutenant Colonel.”56 Tall for his day at 6 feet, ½ inch, with brown hair and brown eyes, he had served as a lieutenant in the German Army during the First World War from 1916 to 1918, but he was captured and held until 1920. After the war, he was, so it was said, “in business” in Mexico from 1921 to 1927, returning to Germany by 1927 or 1928. He was an open member of the Communist Party of Germany from then onward, and a member of the communist paramilitary group Roter Frontkämpferbund, which was led by Ernst Thälmann.57 By July 1935, he was in Moscow under the aegis of the “International Red Help” group, having traveled there via the UK. Apparently this was his second visit to the USSR. In Moscow, he edited a German newspaper, D.Z.Z. By this time he was married to Gertrude Ernestina Kahle (1913–?). MI5 believed they were married in Berlin in December 1933.58 He entered Spain in 1936 via Switzerland and France.

  In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway based the sympathetic ch
aracter Hans on Kahle.59 A photograph survives of the two from this period.60 Another International Brigade member, Gustav Regler, later claimed that Hemingway was so enamoured of Kahle during the Spanish Civil War that he proposed to write a book about him.

  He was a Communist, commanded the Eleventh Brigade, was precise in his orders, understood the unstable Spaniards, mingled the methods of Potsdam with those of Alcazar, obeyed his Party, because obedience flowed downwards to the troops, but leavened it at staff meetings and conferences with an almost French irony. He resisted onsets of melancholy with a formal bearing which dominated all staff activities and meals. He liked looting, but handed everything he found in the castles over to the legal Government, departing from this principle only with a big china vase which he took with him from one field to another in a packing-case. He wore silk shirts and during lulls in the fighting went to Madrid, where he slept in the Empire bed of a film star who had fled, swam in her pool and slowly drank her cellar dry. During critical periods he scorned all feminine consolations, but as soon as things eased up he was to be seen again at Gaylord’s or at the theatre, which was kept open despite the bombardment.61

  Kahle’s activities included working on the German Freedom radio station in Spain. MI5 were informed by multiple sources that Kahle was in the service of, and perhaps even the head of, the Soviet OGPU in Madrid at this time, and that he was responsible for numerous liquidations there; elimination of ideological enemies quickly became the major focus of Soviet involvement in Spain.62 But this information was incorrect in one important respect: the OGPU in Madrid was headed by Alexander Orlov.63 Kahle, like all International Brigade commanders, was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) man. But it is true that many members of the Brigades were tortured and executed for political reasons, and Kahle would have been involved in these “repressions.” Another International Brigade commander, André Marty, is said to have executed more than five hundred of his own men.64

 

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