by Les Weil
`Why don't you make instead a trip for the Pester Lloyd to Franco's headquarters?' he suggested. `Hungary is a semi-Fascist country. Franco will welcome you with open arms.'
I have already described Willy's habit of suddenly flashing his eyes at the person to whom he was talking, and then to efface the startling effect with a reassuring smile, as if he had just said `Boo!' to a child. Nevertheless, these flashes left a lasting memory on visitors. This time Willy produced the optical `blitz' when he started to speak, but he brought out the suggestion itself in a casual manner, watching my reactions.
I agreed at once, somewhat to his surprise. Then we began to discuss technical problems. After a few minutes, Willy called in Otto Katz and informed him of the idea. Otto closed one eye and cocked his head to the other side, as was his habit when thinking. Once or twice he looked' at me with an expression which I could not make out at the time. Later I understood that it was meant to convey a private warning to me to back out of the project while there was still time.
The purpose of my visit to enemy headquarters was to collect evidence proving German and Italian intervention on Franco's side. How this was to be done, was not discussed. Willy merely said, with his broad smile, that it would be fine if I could get there and `have a good look around'. The rest of the discussion was concerned with technicalities. The insurgents refused to allow correspondents of Left-wing newspapers into the territory held by them. The Pester Lloyd would be a good cover, but there were several snags. The Pester Lloyd would, of course, never agree to sending me to Spain, and if Franco's intelligence department were to check on my credentials, the game would be up. But we agreed that in the confusion of a civil war it was unlikely that anybody would bother to inquire in Budapest whether the Pester Lloyd correspondent was genuine or not. Secondly, other foreign correspondents might find it strange that a small Hungarian paper was sending a special war correspondent to Spain instead of relying, as usual, on agency reports. It was therefore necessary to get an additional assignment from some other newspaper which would make the journey more plausible. This was less easy than it sounds, for a Left-wing paper would not serve the purpose, and if I were to approach a conservative French newspaper with the suggestion that they should send me to Franco's headquarters, I would immediately arouse suspicion. In the end, Otto suggested, faute de mieux, the London News Chronicle. The Chronicle was Liberal and anti-Franco, but Otto had friends on the paper's staff who would get me an accreditation without difficulty and delay. We then worked out a cover story on the following lines. I would travel as a correspondent of the Pester Lloyd, and would only mention the News Chronicle if this became unavoidable--that is to say, if a colleague or press official should show signs of suspicion. In this case, I would confidentially admit that, though my sympathies were the same as the god-fearing Pester Lloyd's, I had been forced for financial reasons to accept a second assignment from a London newspaper whose editors were unfortunatcly prejudiced against General Franco; but they had given me a free hand to report the facts objectively, and thus a chance to influence British Liberal opinion in favour of Franco. It sounds complicated, but it worked.
Finally, there was a danger that one of the German war correspondents in Spain would recognise me as a former Ullstein man and a Red. Against that there was no protection; I just had to trust my star and take the risk. It was, in retrospect, a foolish risk to take, for I was actually recognised the day after my arrival at Franco's headquarters in Seville.
When all was settled, Otto went out of the room and rang up London. To whom he talked I did not ask and do not know. Less than an hour later London rang back to say that everything was fixed up, and that my letter of accreditation as the News Chronicle's special correspondent with General Franco's forces in Spain was ready for me at the paper's Paris office. All I had to do was to call there and pick it up. I asked Otto whether the Chronicle was willing to pay my travelling expenses. Otto said I need not bother about that; the 'Committee' would pay for the journey. We rejoined Willy, who had left us a while ago, in his office. `All fixed?' he said, and then, turning to Otto: `How much do you think he will need for the trip?'
`Lots,' said Otto. `To start with, if Arturo is going to be a Fascist, he needs a decent suit.'
'Ganz recht,' said Willy. `Do you think you can manage on two hundred pounds? I was overwhelmed by the sound of such an astronomical sum, and started to protest. Willy was bored. `Never mind,' he said, `you can refund what's left over when you come back. Good luck and keep your eyes open.'
On August 22, I embarked at Southampton in the S.S. Ahnanzora, bound for Lisbon. Franco had not yet conquered the Basque coast, his temporary capital was still Seville, and the only access to insurgent territory was through Portugal. When we arrived in Lisbon, the passport control officer discovered that though my Portuguese visa was in order, the validity of my passport had expired during the journey. In the excitement of my Hurried departure, I had forgotten about the expiry date. This gross negligence was to turn unexpectedly to my advantage. After some argument, the Portuguese police agreed to let me land on condition that I went at once to the Hungarian Consul at Lisbon and had my passport renewed. This was very annoying, for I was anxious to avoid calling the Hungarian authorities' attention to me. The Consul, however, turned out to be a most charming person. He was merely an Honorary Consul and not even a Hungarian, but a huge, jovial Danish export trader. He received me with great friendliness because, as he explained, the only Hungarians he had so far seen had been stranded sailors, and vagabonds in trouble with the police. He extended my passport for a year with a brand-new looking rubber stamp; and when I asked him how I should set about getting an entry permit into Insurgent Spain, he told me to join him after dinner at the Casino in Estoril, where he would arrange everything. He also advised me to move into the Hotel Aviz which served as headquarters for General Franco's emissaries in Portugal. The Consul then presented me to his equally charming wife, who was a member of the Portuguese aristocracy, staunchly Fascist in sentiment, and on intimate terms with the whole Franco bunch in Lisbon.
The same night at the Casino, I was introduced by the Consul and his wife to several members of that illustrious crowd. Everybody seemed to be a marquis or a duke, and I felt very grateful to Otto for my presentable new suit. They all had wonderfully melodious names in copperplate writing on their visiting cards, and I felt so thrilled buying drinks out of Comintern funds for the Marques de Quintanar and the Marques de la Vega de Anzo, that I momentarily forgot all my worries. Later in the evening, a subscription list for General Franco's hospitals was discreetly handed around, and I made a contribution out of the same funds.
It was a strange evening. The drinks, the glamorous atmosphere of the Casino, and the feeling of two hundred pounds of traveller-cheques in my pocket after all these years of poverty, had rather turned my head. I found that all these Fascists were friendly and charming people, and thus quite genuinely forgot that I was playing a confidence trick on them. I found myself suddenly back again in the atmosphere and mood of my preCommunist, foreign correspondent days. My reports on the Graf Zeppelin's Polar expedition had actually been serialised in the Spanish Press, and some of my new acquaintances vaguely remembered them, or at least pretended to do so; I thus became a potentially valuable asset to Franco's propaganda department. Somebody drank a toast to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, and I reciprocated by drinking the health of General Franco. My honest Danish friend, the Consul, beamed with pleasure.
The next day, at the Hotel Aviz, the fraternisation continued, and I was introduced to the two heads of the Franco conspiracy in Lisbon: the Catholic leader, Gil Robles, and a gentleman who called himself Fernandez d'Avila, and was in fact Nicholas Franco, the General's brother. On the same evening, thirty-six hours after my arrival in Lisbon, I left for Insurgent territory, carrying on me two priceless documents: a Safe-Conduct, describing me as a reliable friend of the National Revolution, signed by Nicholas Franco; and a personal let
ter of recommendation, from Gil Robles to the Commander of the Garrison of Seville, General Queipo de Llano.
XXX. The Return of Ahor
THE train to the small Spanish frontier town of Ayamonte--at that time the only route open to rebel territory--leaves from the southern bank of the Tagus estuary, which is reached from Lisbon by boat. The boat started late at night; most of the passengers on board were bound for Rebel Spain, and not in a talkative mood.
There were only thirty or forty of us--mostly, I supposed, volunteers for the Rebel Army, armament dealers, and perhaps some German and Italian officers in mufti. I sat huddled on the deck, watching the lights of Lisbon fade over the dark water, and with it the euphoria of the last twenty-four hours. It was replaced by a growing feeling of anxiety which was partly due to a justified apprehension of what lay ahead, but partly quite irrational; and which gradually became so intense that I caught myself shivering in the warm, scented night. It was accompanied by an oppressive feeling of guilt, due to my perfidious betrayal of the friendly Consul's trust--though of course it had been done in the interest of the Cause. Mixed into this was the fear that he would find out about me, and would warn the Spaniards. Maybe he had found out already, and I was running into a trap. Could they shoot me in that case? Legally not; in a civil war, perhaps. This led up to the puzzling question whether I was a spy or not. I was certainly a paid agent, travelling under false pretences; on the other hand, I was not working for any military organisation, merely for a propaganda department--though it was the Comintern's.
But the crux of the matter was that, whether or not I was a spy, I certainly felt like one. When young von E., in the distant Berlin days, had threatened to shoot himself, he must have felt the same way; but this time it would be less easy to explain matters away harmlessly. It was now nearly five years since I had joined the Party--five years lived in a twilight-world of ambiguity and deception. Franco's Foreign Legionaries and Moors were even worse than Hitler's Brownshirts, and the mass-shootings in the bullring of Badajoz surpassed in horror any crime the Nazis had committed up to that date. Why then did I feel so guilty for taking in that guileless, jovial Dane? And having accepted the risks from the beginning, why did I feel this subterranean anxiety that was so much more harrowing than real fear?
'Ahor'--the anxiety-neurosis which had plagued my childhood--burst into full dark bloom again during that crossing of the Tagus. There had been occasional slight relapses during the last years--the night before crossing the Caucasus, for instance; but this was the real thing, the terror of the child locked up in a dark cellar.
Before we got into the train at Barreiro, I bought two litres of red wine and, with it, Dutch courage. It helped on this and on many future occasions; for during the next four stormy years, until my escape to England in November 1940, I lived in a chronic anxiety-neurosis in the clinical meaning of the term. Acute attacks, mostly not motivated by any external threat, would alternate with periods of relative quiet. But even during the latter periods I was dimly aware of a kind of floating haze of anxiety-cum-guilt, like morning mist hovering over a lake.
Anxiety, as distinct from realistic fear, is an irrational and capricious scourge; it did not prevent me from behaving quite rationally in a crisis. This is less paradoxical than it sounds, for anxiety is not caused by any known danger; it is the fear of the unknown, and is ultimately rooted in an unsolved inner conflict. It is the rumbling echo of a subterranean war, the dread of punishment for an unknown crime, a sensing of danger that emanates from the inner world.
The only anxiety-free periods were, again paradoxically, those spent in prison--perhaps because here guilt was being atoned for, and the expectation of punishment fulfilled.
The adventures of the months that followed should be understood against this mental background--which must remain a background, as it would be tedious and repetitive to go on harping on it.
The trip to Rebel Headquarters, though cut short in a drastic fashion, was on the whole a successful one. In Lisbon, I had already found ample proof of the Portuguese authorities' connivance with the insurgents. In Seville, evidence of Nazi intervention on Franco's side could literally be had in the streets, in the shape of German airmen, walking about in the white overalls of the Spanish Air Force, but with a small swastika between two wings embroidered on their blouses. I was able to ascertain the names of several German pilots and (through a young Englishman who had volunteered for Franco's air force and then got fed up with it) the types, markings and approximate numbers of German aircraft delivered to Franco. Finally, thanks to Gil Robles' letter, I obtained an exclusive interview with General Queipo de Llano--the most popular, owing to his radio-speeches, of Franco's Generals--who, believing that I was in sympathy with his side, made some highly indiscreet statements referring to foreign aid. The Civil War had only just entered its second month, and non-intervention was still a carefully maintained fiction; Hitler kept denying that he was sending help to Franco, and Franco denied receiving it. Against this background, the material that I brought back was worth the trouble.
My sojourn in Rebel territory was brought to a sudden end on my second day in Seville. I have to describe the incident that ended it in some detail, as it is necessary for the understanding of some later chapters.
I had found out from the porter in my hotel that all German officers were billeted at the Hotel Christina. He had warned me against setting foot in the Christina for, he said smilingly, all strangers entering that hotel were liable to be taken for spies. The porter also told me that a French journalist had been arrested at three o'clock that morning in our own hotel. The next day a newsreel man of Pathe Gazette was arrested, and subsequently held for three months on the suspicion of having filmed the massacre of Badajoz. The remaining French journalists were, during my stay, under a kind of house arrest. The atmosphere in Seville was not exactly favourable to newsmen--not even genuine ones.
I decided nevertheless to go to the Hotel Christina, and to have a closer look at the Nazi pilots. With Nicholas Franco's Safe-Conduct in my pocket, the worst that could happen was, I thought, that they would politely turn me out.
As I was entering the lounge of the Christina, which was nearly empty, I saw four uniformed German air force officers sitting at a table in the company of a fifth person in civilian clothes. I sat down a few tables further on, and ordered a sherry. After a while, the man in civilian clothes walked past my table. We recognised each other instantly. He was Herr Strindberg, a former colleague of mine from Ullstein's in Berlin, and, incidentally, the son of the great August Strindberg. The only explanation for his presence was that he acted as a war correspondent for the Ullsteins, who were now a Nazi trust. Strindberg knew of course that I was a Communist.
He acted as if he had not seen me, and I acted in the same way. He rejoined the table of the Nazi airmen. For a minute or two I was too paralysed to think, and only felt that this was the point in the nightmare where I should wake up. After a while Strindberg and one of the Nazi pilots got up and began pacing up and down the lounge; another airman went to the porter's lodge and made a telephone call. By then I had sufficiently recovered to order another sherry and to decide, more by instinct than by reflection, that my only hope was to take the initiative and to act the innocent. I downed the sherry, then got up and shouted in German, as naturally as I could make it, across two empty tables:
`Hello, aren't you Strindberg?'
They both stopped dead, and Strindberg murmured in an embarrassed voice:
`Excuse me, but I am in conversation with this gentleman.'
I had by now walked up to them and, again following my instinct, which told me that if I retreated now I was lost, I asked Strindberg in a loud and arrogant voice what reason he had for not shaking hands with me. This was obviously the course which a really innocent person would take; moreover, by now I felt genuinely angry. At that point, the German pilot at Herr Strindberg's side stepped in. With a stiff little bow, he introduced lumself-`von Ber
nhardt'--and demanded to see my papers. I grew even angrier and asked on what authority he was acting; von Bernhardt said that as an officer of the Spanish Army, he had the right to ask any suspicious character to identify himself. Considering that he spoke in German and wore a swastika on his blouse, it was a sweet statement. I protested indignantly against the word `suspicious', disclosed my status as a war correspondent of the London News Chronicle, accredited with Captain Bolin, head of the Press Department, found the whole incident unerhort, and asked to be put into communication with Bolin, to lodge a complaint.
I had mentioned the News Chronicle and not the Pester Lloyd, for. I felt that an English newspaper, even a Left-wing one, would impress them more with the implied threat of diplomatic complications. This was indeed the case. We went on arguing, but von Bernhardt's voice sounded a shade more doubtful, particularly as I insisted that we jointly telephone Captain Bolin. I had told Captain Bolin my Pester Lloyd-News Chronicle double-decker story, so he was bound to bear me out on the telephone--and that, I hoped, would enable me to get out of the Christina. I gave no thought to what would happen afterwards--only to getting out of the hotel. I have often noticed that in moments of emergency reasoned planning is automatically replaced by this type of step-by-step thinking.
At that moment, Captain Bolin entered the hotel like a dens ex machina. He was a tall, weak-faced, tough-acting officer of Scandinavian descent, who had already become famous for his rudeness to the foreign press. It was Boin who had ordered the arrest of the French newsmen, and had threatened one of them with a revolver held under his nose. But Bolin had also seen my papers from Gil Robles and Nicholas Franco, and had personally arranged my interview with Queipo de Llano; so he was certainly not preparcd to believe that I was a spy. My interest was, of course, to confuse the issue and prevent a reasoned argument by making a scene; so I rushed up to Bolin and launched into an agitated complaint againt the indignities that I had suffered, demanding that Strindberg and von Bernhardt should apologise on the spot. Bolin was at first bewildered, then furious, declared that he refused to have anything to do with the whole silly business, that there was a war on, and that he didn't give a damn whether two damned journalists shook hands or not. His rudeness was my salvation. He told us all to go to hell, and ended the scene by turning on his heel. I walked out of the hotel in a huff, prevented by nobody. I have so often walked off in a huff after a quarrel that it looked quite convincing. ('The story of my meeting with Herr Strindbcrg in Seville was first published in Spanish Testament in 1938, and contained some unfriendly comments on his person. I have not seen him again. Ten years later, however, in July 1948, I received a letter from Mrs. Strindberg (whom I have never met) in which she gave a different interpretation of the facts. According to her letter, Strindberg himself, though a Nazi correspondent, had fallen under suspicion because a few days earlier, on his way to Spain, he had been seen in conversation with a British correspondent in Gibraltar. `On his arrival in Seville,' the letter continued, 'he was arrested and threatened with summary execution as a spy. At his urgent request, however, a cable was sent to Berlin to confirm his credentials. . . . In this critical moment you entered on the scene--another representative of an English paper, and a Communist to boot! The result was that in the confusion of the moment, he simply disowned you.... This disowning of you at the moment of your meeting was the only error he committed towards you. He had nothing to do with your arrest and--this you certainly didn't know--it was through his help or intermediary that you reached Gibraltar!'