The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  The letter was obviously sincere. It was written, Mrs. Strindberg pointed out, without her husband's knowledge, with the intent of clearing him from the charge of denunciation. The suggestion that Herr Strindberg was instrumental in helping me to get to Gibraltar was probably due to a confusion in her memory ten years after the event. The letter also mentioned that during the last years of the Nazi regime Mr. and Mrs. Strindberg did at various times hide Jews in their flat from the Gestapo, at considerable risk to themselves.)

  I felt now reasonably certain that I had gained a few hours before the truth was sorted out. I drove straight to Queipo's headquarters, where I said that I had been urgently recalled by my paper, and obtained without difficulty my exit permit, still on the Franco-signed Safe Conduct. Then I drove back to my hotel to collect my passport and arrange for a car to Gibraltar, which was the quickest way out. While waiting for it, a French colleague came to my room, told me that news of my row with the Nazi pilots had already got round, and advised me to beat it as quickly as I could. I thanked him earnestly, and let myself be persuaded that everything was not as it should be in Franco's Spain.

  I crossed the frontier to Gibraltar one hour before the warrant for my arrest was issued in Seville, as I learnt later on from colleagues. They also told me that Captain Bolin had been black with rage, and had sworn `to shoot K. like a mad dog if he ever got hold of him.'

  It was Captain Bolin who arrested me five months later, when the Insurgents took Malaga.'

  XXXI. In Dubious Battle

  0N my way back from Gibraltar, I stopped for a day in London and visited, for the first time, the News Chronicle building in Bouverie Street. My Seville adventures had made front-page news, and Norman Cliff, the foreign editor, gave me a friendly welcome. On my return to Paris, I went straight to the Muenzenberg office on the Boulevard Montparnasse.

  Walking up the familiar steps, I had a warm feeling of safety and home­coming. Hans, Jupp, and the rest of the gang greeted me as if I were Ulysses returning from the island of the Cyclop, then ushered me into the presence of the chief. Willy was in conference with Otto, who was sitting on the other side of the desk, head cocked on one side.

  `Nice little trip,' said Willy, grinning.

  `He looks rested and sunburnt,' said Otto thoughtfully.

  `Now we have gossiped enough,' said Willy. `You are going back to London to put steam behind that new Committee. The English comrades suffer from sleeping sickness.'

  The new committee was the `Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain', which I have already mentioned. It was an offshoot of the Spanish Relief Committee, and was preparing to hold a public show trial, following the example set by the Reichstag Counter-Trial. The Committee was composed, as usual, of a panel of distinguished and unsuspecting personalities--Philip Noel-Baker, Lord Faringdon, Eleanor Rathbone, Professor Trent, and others; but its two secretaries--Geoffrey Bing and John Langdon-Davies--were at the time both members of the C.P., and the active force behind it was a Communist caucus. This consisted of Ivor Montagu, Isabel Brown, Dorothy Woodtnan, Bing, Langdon-Davies, and Otto Katz--the latter representing Willy, that is, the West Bureau of the Comintern. Just before my return to Paris, the House Office had put Otto on their black list, and he was either refused a visa to England or turned back at Dover by the immigration officer--I don't remember which. The Committee, deprived of Otto's periodic visits, felt cut off from the Paris centre; it now became my task to act as liaison, and also to testify about my trip to Franco at the Committee's public hearings.

  My next few months were divided between Paris, London and Spain. I now belonged to Willy's `inner circle'; Otto was no longer jealous of me, realising that I had no political ambitions, and that I willingly accepted his guidance.

  Since I had left INFA, I had taken no part in any political activity. Only now, being once more brought closer to events, did I realise how profoundly the People's Front strategy had changed the atmosphere and outlook in the Party. Russia's entry into the League of Nations, and her efforts to conclude a military alliance with France and Czechoslovakia, demanded that Communists in the West should present a New Look of utter respectability. They had to defend `bourgeois democracy', and support national unity against the common enemy; all revolutionary slogans and references to the class­struggle were relegated to the lumber-room. Even the word `Communist' was, as far as possible, avoided by Communists, who instead referred to themselves as anti-Fascists and defenders of peace. The Communist Parties in the West acquired a new facade with geranium-boxes in the windows, and a gate wide open to all men of goodwill. On the Committee for Spanish Relief, for instance, the Conservative Duchess of Atholl, the Liberal Sir Walter Layton, and the Communist J. B. S. Haldane, sat side by side. In Paris, the apotheosis was reached in a scene on Bastille Day 1935 in the Salle Bullier where, acclaimed by a delirious crowd of many thousands, the veteran Communist leader, Marcel Cachin, embraced the Social-Fascist reptile Leon Blum, and kissed him on both cheeks, while half of the audience wept and the other half sang first the Marseillaise, then the Internationale.

  The background of these developments is illustrated by an anecdote which the French Socialist Deputy, Grumbach, told some years later at a party. Grumbach had accompanied Laval on his visit to Moscow after the signing of the Franco-Soviet pact in May 1935. The communique issued at the end of the visit said, inter alia, that `M. Stalin understands and fully approves the policy of national defence followed by France, in order to maintain her armed forces at the level required by her security'. This signified that the French C.P. would now have to stop voting against military credits, and drop its campaign against the proposed extension of the period of military service--which, of course, the French C.P. promptly did. But Laval could not foresee this complete reversal of the French C.P.'s line, and during one of their conversations, he asked Stalin what the latter advised him to do if the Communists continued to make trouble regarding national defence. Stalin looked at Laval with a smile of jovial irony, took a puff at his pipe, and said: `Hang them.' Laval did not believe his ears, so Stalin, with a broader smile, repeated his words, drawing a finger across his throat to avoid any possible misunderstanding.

  Thus, in retrospect, the memories of those days are tainted with the knowledge of the cynical insincerity behind the facade. But while it lasted, the People's Front had a strong emotional appeal, and the fervent mystique of a genuine mass movement.

  The same ambiguity applies to memories of the Spanish War. Today we know the aftermath: Russia's refusal to grant asylum to the survivors of the International Brigades, and the liquidation of every Russian and Spaniard who took a leading part in the civil war and knew too much of what had happened behind the scenes. We know how Russia prolonged the agony of Spain by sending just enough supplies to keep the war going until agreement with Nazi Germany was in sight; we know how she used Spain as a convenient killers' lane to get rid of Anarchists, Trotskyists, and other political undesirables. When the war started, the Communists were an insignificant little party, with less than two hundred members in the whole of Catalonia; yet, as the war progressed, they succeeded in gradually transforming the country, through blackmail, intrigue and terror, into an obedient satellite of the Kremlin.

  All this we know today, but did not know then. We now know that our truth was a half-truth, our fight a battle in the mist, and that those who suffered and died in it were pawns in a complicated game between the two totalitarian pretenders for world domination. But when the International Brigades saved Madrid on November 8, 1936, we all felt that they would go down in history as the defenders of Thermopylae did; and when the first Russian fighters appeared in the skies of battered Madrid, all of us who had lived through the agony of the defenceless town felt that they we were the saviours of civilisation.

  For Madrid (how remote this sounds today!) was the first European capital subjected to aerial bombardment on a large scale. During the four weeks from October 2
4 to November 20, about a thousand people were killed, three thousand injured, and one third of the city was laid in ruins. The impact of that experience lay not so much in its physical horror though air bombardment without aerial defences is horrible enough--but iu the realisation that it marked the beginning of a new and problematical epoch in history, when the age-old distinction between soldiers and civilians would be abolished, and death would strike indiscriminately from the sky--an age of total war and total fear. Typical of this apocalyptic premonition, shared by all who had lived through those days, is the following outburst at the end of the chapter describing the bombardment of Madrid in Spanish Testament:

  An air-raid, while it lasts, is not a political event in the mind of the person experiencing it, but a natural catastrophe like an earthquake or the eruption of a volcano. On August 16, General Franco declared that he would never bombard the capital of his country, and on August 28th, he began to bombard it. He is a liar. He has turned his compatriots into cattle for the slaughter. This is not apolitical act, it is a challenge to civilisation.

  Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his nerves, his heart, his stomach--and then pretends to be objective, is a liar. If those who have at their command printing machines and printer's ink for the expression of their opinions, remain neutral and objective in the face of such bestiality, then Europe is lost, and it is time for Western civilisation to say good night.

  Compared to Germany, Spain was a small and peripheral country, and yet Franco unleashed a wave of more passionate indignation throughout the world than Hitler during the initial stages of his regime. The Nazis' acts of terror were at least hidden behind the walls of prisons and concentration camps. But the massacre of Badajoz, the bombardment of Madrid, the dead children of Getafe, the razing of Guernica, were public events to which the public reacted with a spontaneous convulsion of horror. There were other elements in the Spanish War which touched directly the collective archetypes of European memory: once more the Moors were let loose behind the Pyrenees--but this time as defenders of the Church. The shadows of the Middle Ages seemed to have come alive, the gargoyles were spouting blood, Goya's Disasters were made to look like topical records; once more a mercenary horde, the Foreign Legionaries of the Tercio, killed, raped and plundered in the name of a Holy Crusade, while the air smelt of incense and burning flesh.

  Spain caused the last twitch of Europe's dying conscience.

  The international propaganda campaign through which that conscience expressed itself was a mixture of passion and farce.

  On the one hand, Spain became the rendezvous of the international Leftist bohemia. Bloomsbury and Greenwich Village went on a revolutionary junket; poets, novelists, journalists and art students flocked across the Pyrenees to attend writers' congresses, to bolster morale on the front by reading their works from mobile loudspeaker-vans to the militiamen, to accept highly-paid, though short-lived, jobs in one of the numerous radio and propaganda departments, and `to be useful', as the phrase went, on all kinds of secret, undefinable errands. Stephen Spender has described, with disarming self-irony, how he and a friend were sent by the British Communist Party on a wild-goose chase after the crew of a Russian ship which the Italians had sunk in the Mediterranean. The search took the young poet to Marseilles, Barcelona, Alicante, Gibraltar, Tangiers and Oran; and was terminated by an inquiry at the Italian consulate, which promptly disclosed the interned crew's whereabouts--'an obvious step,' Spender ruefully remarks, `which could easily have been taken without our leaving London.' Thus a good historical time was being had by all.

  There were other grotesque episodes. A famous lady of London's smart set of the 'twenties, who in the 'thirties had taken up the liberation of all coloured peoples, was arrested as a spy in her Madrid hotel room because she was found there in the company of an African native, an anti-Fascist comrade whom the police mistook for one of Franco's Moors. Otto Katz, who had now adopted the alias `Andre Simon', was conducting British Parlamentary delegations through a Potemkinized Spain, explaining to them that the burnt-down churches of Catalonia had been destroyed by air bombardments, which had never taken place. Louis Aragon threatened to resign from the War because another writer, Gustave Regler, was appointed to drive the culture-dispensing loud-speaker van, but became reconciled when Regler joined the International Brigade and was shot through the stomach. John Jagger, Labour M.P., ran into trouble with the British Customs because he was carrying in his suitcase, as evidence for our Committee, a German aerial bomb which he had picked up in Madrid, and which was found to be alive and liable to blow up at any minute. `I believe I have seen you in Madrid' became an opening gambit at Left-wing cocktail parties, Lorca became the most read poet in Europe, and fried octopus the intelligentsia's favourite dish.

  On the other hand, there were Ralph Fox, Julian Bell, Christopher Caldwell, John Cornford, and others, who had enlisted straight away in thc International Brigade and were killed. And there were George Orwell, Gustave Regler, Alfred Kantorowicz, Humphrey Slater, Tom Winningham and other writers, who fought under greater hazards and with less reward than in a normal war. And Andre Makaux, who organised a flying squadron of volunteers in the Republican Air Force, then wrote his masterpiece L'Espoir, and finally directed its transformation into one of the greatest films ever made--thus performing a kind of hat-trick by uniting in his person the normally incompatible gifts for action, art and propaganda.'

  Thus, like other wars, the Spanish War was a mixture of vanity and sacrifice, of the grotesque and the sublime--only more so, because `ideological' wars are somehow more artificial, confused and absurd than the old-fashioned wars between nations.

  After the hearings of the Committee of Inquiry in London--which were as successful as a tactical victory in a strategically lost diplomatic battle can be--I was sent back on a special assignment to Spain. It was an interesting, and somewhat surprising assignment. When Franco's insurrection had failed in Madrid, several Right-wing politicians had fled in a hurry, leaving their correspondence files and private archives behind. I was to search these for documents proving that Nazi Germany had taken a direct hand in preparing Franco's rising, and was to bring the material to Paris. The documents were urgently needed as evidence in support of the Spanish Government's case at the League of Nations, and for purposes of international propaganda. (It is interesting to compare in this context Malraux and Hemingway, who were both involved in the Spanish War and have both immortalised it, each after his fashion. Their art is so different that it can almost be said to occupy two opposite poles Within the novelist's range; their outlook is similar in so far as they both regard physical courage and a life of adventure as supreme values. But these same values are expressed in contrasting attitudes and idioms. Courage, in Hemingway's world, has an embarrassingly exhibitionist, adolescent, dumb-hero quality. Courage, in Malraux's world, is lucid and intelligent bravado, with a discursive Gallic flourish.)

  The surprising thing was, of course, that instead of having somebody from the Spanish Foreign Office search the archives, they wanted a foreigner for this task. But Otto explained to me that it was Del Vayo himself, the Spanish Foreign Minister, who had asked Paris to send a skilled political journalist to do the job. A few days later Del Vayo turned up on a visit to Paris, and invited Otto and myself to tea. Otto was at that time the unofficial chief of the Spanish Government's propaganda campaign in Western Europe, and had large funds (partly of Spanish, partly of Comintern origin) at his disposal. These funds played a considerable part in securing the sympathy of influential French journalists, and of entire newspapers for the Loyalist cause. In fact, Otto was the grey eminence of the propaganda war, and was treated as such by everybody in the Spanish Embassy, including Del Vayo himself.

  Del Vayo asked me to leave for Madrid as soon as possible. Half of his own staff was at the front, the other half overworked, and he could spare nobody for a full-time job of this kind, which would require several weeks. As I only had a smatteri
ng of Spanish, I would be provided with an interpreter, a car and every other assistance that I needed. I still did not understand why he did not get a Spanish journalist on the spot to do the job.