The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  More hand-made signs everywhere: WILL THERE REALLY BE AN ELECTION IN 1972? FUCK THE MOON, FIX THE EARTH ASIANS AGAINST VIETNAM WAR LOSE BODIES TO SAVE FACE? and on and on. Everyone doing his thing, spontaneously. Meanwhile the heat grew murderous; Washington is like the Sahara; there was one small, park-type drinking fountain at the far end of that huge field. From the speakers’ stage came announcements about salt tablets, heat stroke, please people sit down, if anyone faints near you, stand up so the medics can see, make room for the medics. I was watching a bearded young man folding a paper hat from a news sheet called The Student Mobilizer. He felt me staring, and looked up. “I wanted to see how to do it.” “Be my guest” he said, and gave me the hat. A few yards farther along, a blonde long-haired bare-legged girl said, “Excuse me, can you show me how to make a paper hat?” Thirst was really painful; heads bare to that sun bad enough.

  Behind us three young men were standing. “Anybody hungry?” They had sandwiches; they threw them out to people who answered yes. Later it was the same with water; the same everywhere.

  Is this the place for a declaration of love, a declaration of faith? Having been long away, I had never seen these young, nor ever imagined such a multitude of them, nor expected them to be as they are, and a revelation. Consider that there were at least one hundred thousand of them, and no discord, not even the sort of small snarling that any crowd might work up when literally fainting from heat. Their quiet, their politeness, their generosity were unlike anything I have ever witnessed in America. There was also a strong sense of their seriousness, and their intelligence. Their appearance offends millions of their countrymen, as well it might, for their appearance is a statement that they choose freedom, they are not going to be bothered with the advertising, buying-selling lunacy that keeps America so frantically busy. Perhaps this generation has even settled the ancient battle of the sexes for they seem perfectly natural together, these young, as partners. They are surely rebels and rebels with a complex of causes, but they are not violent by choice, by nature, by principle. Their basic demand is simple: stop killing anybody anywhere. No wonder they don't get on with the government.

  From noon until after three o'clock, speaker after speaker made the point that this mass rally was a beginning: spread the student strike until the whole country is striking against this hated war, go home and work out from the campuses, involve everyone, talk to everyone, work, work, work. Sentences like these brought applause: “It isn't their system, it's ours, and we're going to take it back.” “We salute a million Vietnamese who died patriotically to defend their country against a foreign invasion.” ‘The President knows what we're saying. We're saying: Stop the War, Stop Repression, Stop War Research on our Campuses.” ‘The people should run the country. Let Congress stay here and do its job.” “Spend money on life.” “The only way to bring peace is to bring the GI's home now.” “Nixon is a liar, always has been and always will be a liar.” In between the speeches, they clapped in time, shouted “Peace Now,” welcomed Dr. Spock by standing with the raised strike fist; loudly applauded the arrival of the Federal Employees Against the War, who bore three black-robed death's-heads, marked Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. “Right on,” they shouted in agreement. “Free Bobby Seale,” they chanted intermittently. From the speakers’ stand, repeatedly, came a voice saying, “Lost people meet at the glass information booth to the right of this stand.” One young man, having finished his speech, said in a tone of pure exasperation, “Oh fuck Nixon!” This was greeted by joyful laughter, cheers, applause and presently, happily, all together with large smiles, the crowd was chanting “Fuck Nixon,” until someone had the splendid idea of starting “Fuck you Agnew,” which charmed everybody since it also rhymed so nicely.

  Now it was over. Symbolic coffins, hastily improvised, black cloth over wood frames, appeared, to be borne by the crowd, urged not to push or hurry, to the White House. The coffins represented the dead GI's, the dead Vietnamese and Laotians and Cambodians and the Panthers, and the Kent students.

  Finally, over the loudspeaker, “People, please pick up your litter. Do your kitchen yoga.” No trash baskets, no water: Washington is an incredible place. But the young had found large paper cartons and deposited them around the field, and suddenly the mess of papers near me had vanished, as if by magic; and indeed they were picking up litter, for these are the same young who came out less than a month ago on Earth Day to arouse their elders to the doom of the American environment.

  Wide and slow as a river, we flowed away from the Ellipse and up the long street in the direction of the White House, which no one could reach. The cops stood two feet apart, stiff-faced. Authority made a small cheap gesture; obvious plainclothes cops trying to look like demonstrators and taking pictures madly. Who cared?

  Behind me a cop said to a girl, “Thank you for that smile, that was very pleasant.”

  We stared at each other, laughing, and the girl said, “Wasn't that surprising? What got into him?”

  The boy with her said, “If we're going to be hit by the cops, let's get him.”

  Farther along, leaning out of high windows in the Washington Hotel, two children were shouting their heads off, a boy of perhaps fourteen clearly heard because this great crowd was so quiet. “Peace Now,” the child shouted, “Free Bobby Seale! Right on!” Everyone laughed and gave the child strike salutes. A large bearded student observed, mildly, “In a minute his mamma's going to catch him and spank him.” And so the makeshift coffins were borne on and the crowd began breaking up. When last seen, again like migrating birds, a mass of the people had drifted over the bridge to Arlington National Cemetery, to leave the coffins among the dead, killed in the wars, near a President who might have understood these young and valued them.

  When Franco Died

  NEW YORK MAGAZINE, February 1976

  THE OBSERVER, March 1976

  On the day Franco died, I returned to Madrid, the city I lived in and loved during the Spanish Civil War, and stayed at the Place Hotel for memory's sake. The Palace looks and feels like all old grand European hotels; marble and gilt and plush and expensive quiet. The clientele was always the same seen in such places—a timeless lot, lacquered ladies, well-dressed, well-fed elderly gents. When last I visited the Palace it smelled of ether and cabbage and there was often blood on the marble steps. The Palace had been the largest military hospital in Madrid.

  The clientele was very young then, though pain ages the face, and wore shabby pajamas, scraps of uniform. In the corridors, now deeply carpeted and discreetly lit, piles of used bandages collected on the bare floors. Sleazy cotton blackout curtains hung at the windows and there was no furniture except iron cots. Food was scarce, and medicines, especially morphine. I don't remember sheets and pillowcases, only gray army blankets.

  Recognizing nothing, I nerved myself to ask an old concierge whether it was true that the Palace had been a military hospital in the Civil War. Sí, señora, all of it; but he didn't offer more information and I didn't dare to go on questioning. I wandered around the pompous rotunda where ladies sustained themselves on morning coffee and pastries; I was trying to find the operating room.

  The surgeons used to work by the light of two cut-glass chandeliers. Fancy Edwardian show cabinets, for displaying jewelry and crocodile handbags, held their tools. The room seemed to have vanished. Then, while watching Franco's funeral in the walnut-paneled TV room, I stretched back to rest from that curious TV spectacular, and saw above me the chandeliers and the stained glass skylight and knew this was it. In this room, filled with Franco's devoted followers—old men wiping their eyes at the sight of the coffin, ladies sniffling into delicate handkerchiefs—soldiers of the Spanish Republic had pieces of steel cut from their bodies, had their legs and arms amputated.

  By the first winter of the war, in 1937, Madrid was half destroyed, open to ranging artillery fire day and night. A sample score: “275 shells today, 32 killed, over 200 gravely wounded. What we thought the safe pavement of the Gran
Via full of new shell holes.” The city was encircled on three sides; you could walk to the trenches, or watch an attack in the Casa de Campo from the upper story of a gutted house. People scrounged wood from the smashed abandoned buildings or burned their furniture to keep off the cold. Despite the danger in the streets, women queued everywhere, following a stray pushcart of oranges, waiting for rations of chick peas and milk.

  It was always a poor man's war in the Republic, desperately poor. Though he had the valuable allies, Germany and Italy, to provide all he needed, Franco took nearly three years to starve out the Republic and he hated the conquered and called them all, with hatred, los Rojos—the Reds. Spain is a young country now, 70% of its population born since the Civil War. But Franco never let the newcomers forget that old war; in every speech he reminded them that he had defeated los Rojos.

  The startling news is that there are more Reds in Spain today than there were during the Republic. I use “Red” as Franco did, meaning everyone who opposed him. New generations and categories have grown up to become Rojos, to form with workers and peasants the Opposition: priests, students, professors, lawyers, architects, journalists, movie directors, actors, bank clerks, businessmen, bankers, housewives, even Army officers. Political opinion polls are illegal in Spain but L'Express ran an opinion poll, I can't imagine how, and discovered that only 27% of Spaniards favor some kind of authoritarian government. That leaves a lot of Reds. The new varied Reds share one common aim: to live as free citizens in a democracy. Not a “cosmetic democracy,” as they say, a paint job for the EEC, The European Economic Community. They mean to end Franco's police state for good.

  There was “much tension,” as they later explained, during the three days between Franco's death and burial. People were not sleeping at home or had left town suddenly. Rumors had spread of 4,000 arrests in Madrid to follow Franco's death, rumors of police allowing the armed bully-boys who call themselves Guerillas of Christ the King to run wild. None of this happened, it is said by order of the army. But the city was leaden, silent, and the atmosphere very strange, uneasy, dark. After Franco was finally laid to rest, the air became breathable, the city started to live.

  In Madrid on the night of Franco's burial, an illegal meeting of wives of political prisoners was held in the small back room of a flat, with their children playing in the kitchen behind us. Seven women, four young, three in their late fifties, nice looking, dowdy—they could be housewives you'd see in any supermarket. “I've been married for ten years and my husband has been in prison for seven years. Our only child only knows his father in prison.” Among them, their husbands have already spent a total of 76 years in prison. None is accused of crimes of violence. Their crime is very common: illegal association, in this case being members of the Workers’ Committees, the only genuine, though forbidden, trade unions. Their present sentence is seven years, but prison has not stopped them before. They come out of jail, go on with trade union work, and are rearrested.

  The State has used all its police power against the Workers’ Committees and failed, as the present wave of strikes proves. Spain's famous prosperity made the rich richer while the poor stayed poor due to “tyrannical capitalism,” in the words of a Basque priest, “based on cheap oppressed labor.”

  Like all other wives of political prisoners, these women must support themselves and their children as best they can; life is lonely and hard. They seemed calm and undaunted, even able to laugh. They had met to discuss amnesty. Unlike pardon, amnesty declares that no crime had been committed and thus in effect abrogates Franco's vicious political laws. The wives were heartbreakingly optimistic; they expected the jails to empty in a fortnight. The opposition needed to hope for quick liberating change once the dictator was dead. They know better now.

  From that night on, amnesty has been the boiling issue. It is the key to the future. Changes in Spain will be merely “cosmetic” until there is total amnesty for all political prisoners, some 2,000 men and women, and for all political exiles and for all political offenses. I was told that 100,000 offenders, now at liberty, are waiting trial. This sounds improbable until you realize that handing out a leaflet, putting up a poster, even private talk, are crimes.

  Everywhere, slowly, people began to risk talking though no one forgot that only Franco had died: the police were still alive and well.

  A woman, a shopkeeper in a Basque village, crying her anguish and hatred: her only son, age nineteen, coming home from his graduation party, was shot dead for no reason by a Civil Guard, one of the loathed rural police. The guard remains in the village, unpunished. “Is that justice?” A rock-steady worker in Barcelona telling about his years in Mauthausen, a Nazi extermination prison, where 7,500 out of 8,500 Spanish Republicans died, but not even that has changed his will for a free Spain. A delightful Catalan scholar explaining how he was imprisoned and his career ruined for refusing to answer the Spanish police in Spanish; he is a patriot, he speaks only Catalan.

  In Catalonia and Euzqadi, the Basque country, Franco's regime is universally detested. There are no Basques or Catalans in the state police. They were self-governing regions in the Republic and are passionately determined to be so again. Barcelona felt free and gentle compared with Madrid, though that is not how the Catalans see it. They feel themselves occupied and exploited by a foreign power. In Bilbao and the Basque country, the population lives under a reign of naked terror, the city falling to pieces, the countryside filthy and polluted, the alien Spanish police trigger-happy and addicted to torture. A line in my notebook: “The police shot another boy today, eighteen years old.”

  Not unnaturally, the ferocity of the Spanish police to the Basque people has produced counterterror in ETA, a small, secret band of Basque Nationalists. ETA is altogether different from the IRA or the Palestinian guerrillas, terrorists who murder innocents at random. ETA executes specific police torturers and police informers. These young ETA men come from the Basque villages and the people admire and support them. Another small group of executioners, called FRAP, is not exclusively Basque; it is said to have Marxist leanings but no wide popular base. Three young men from FRAP and two from ETA were shot in Franco's final burst of death sentences in September.

  A Xeroxed, intensely illegal pamphlet gives full details of the tortures used to extract confessions from these men, which were denied in court and followed by more torture. The lack of proof and the dishonesty tolerated in the military courts are documented at length. The members of Solidaridad, an apolitical organization throughout Spain, chance at least long imprisonment to publish such pamphlets. Their aim is to spread information, through this secret Xerox machine, that the censored public press can never give. Anyone reading that pamphlet would only be surprised that there is not more counterterror, horribly justified by police terror.

  The barbarous police and the injustice and oppression of Franco's laws have also produced a whole new breed, the young civil rights lawyers, men and women. They are a glory to Spain. Their offices are jammed like doctors’ waiting rooms. They keep the true record of detentions without charge and arrests and torture during interrogations. They are faithful prison visitors, and lawyers like these stayed through their last night with the last five political prisoners Franco executed.

  An enchanting Jesuit priest received me in his cupboard-size Madrid office: baby blue wallpaper and a print of Picasso's Guernica behind his desk. He wore a leather jacket and brown polo shirt; I didn't meet any priests dressed as priests. These are a new species in Spain, an active ingredient in what the priest calls “the other Spain—a majority of the working class, the youth, the intellectuals, the professionals, the majority of the clergy and the church.” I had been sent to him by a Communist who told me he was “a fine man and a good friend.” “How can I explain that a Jesuit is good friends with Communists?” That made him laugh. “I think there are Communists and Communists, as there are Catholics and Catholics. For instance, the Portuguese church is fascist but that's no longer true here. The S
panish Communists I know are stupendous people and we want the same things: an end to this Franco regime, amnesty, human rights. Whether the Communists would be so fine if they were in power, I don't know.”

  “Do you think they ever will be?”

  “No.”

  The Spanish Communists are about ten per cent of the population, as they were long ago in the Republic. They opposed Franco for 36 years; they are stupendous people on the basis of bravery alone. In Spain, they seem to me exactly like the Russian civil-rights dissidents. One day, sitting in his freezing kitchen, I said this to a resolute little Basque, so much guts in such a small body. (The Spanish working class is still undersized, a commentary on the division of wealth and the conditions of labor.) He had come home after three years in prison a few days before; he was in his early thirties but his teeth were rotten and he was half bald; he had made too many hunger strikes in jail.

  “Yes, probably,” he said with indifference. ‘They need to have a political revolution in Russia.” Russia didn't concern him; he was a member of the Communist party of Spain.

  As I couldn't believe there were opponents of the regime on the right, I was directed to a charming upper-class executive in the world of the multinationals. (“The multinationals have no interest in liberalizing Spain.”) His office was stylish, his English faultless; in England he'd be a Tory, in America an Establishment Republican. He talked economics: how inflation and growing unemployment would affect workers’ actions; how Spain had become the ninth industrial power in the world with a per capita income of $2,200. (This looks great until you break it down: 3 percent of the population owns 30 percent of the wealth; 52 percent owns 21 percent, and they have to work like hell for it.) He said that most businessmen wanted to get into Europe, into the Common Market, but hadn't really thought about the price, such as free trade unions. He believes democracy must come to Spain; he hopes for changes within a year. Suddenly he said, “I don't know how this whole Franco thing is going to collapse, but it will.”