The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  `You will understand when you start on the job,' said Del Vayo. `In Madrid everything is confusion, and everybody is trying to do five different things at the same time. Besides, there are jealousies; some of the fugitives' houses which you will have to search are occupied by the Anarchists, others by the Socialists, and they would all object to letting any Spaniard who does not belong to their party snoop around and take documents away. For an outsider who is sent as an expert from abroad specially for this task, it will be much easier. Since you got around Franco, you will, with God's help, also get around our Anarchists.'

  I actually found that he was right. To sift the various archives, and eventually to get the documents out of Spain before one of the parties grabbed them to sit on them till the end of the war, proved a more difficult task than getting into Seville.

  I left the next day, provided with a Spanish passport (made out; however, in my own un-Spanish name) for some complicated reason of frontier controls which I have forgotten. I had instructions to keep my assignment secret as far as possible, for if it became known that important documents were going to be taken out of Spain, one party or another was sure to start a scandal. All this sounds odd, and can only be understood against the back­ground of internal strife, intrigue, and cloak-and-dagger methods behind the Spanish front, which, a few months later, were to lead to the Anarchist rising in Barcelona, and to civil war within the Civil War. Apart from all this, the Government was secretly envisaging the possibility of the fall of Madrid, and was anxious to remove whatever could be saved without this becoming known. The gold reserves of the Bank of Spain were being shipped to Russia, and the archives to Paris; but it all had to be done in an underhand way.

  Typical of this atmosphere was the manner in which the Foreign Office in Madrid communicated with its Embassy in Paris. The only remaining telephone line ran through the main telephone exchange in Barcelona, which was in the hands of the C.N.T., the Anarcho-Syndicalist trade union. It was, of course, essential that diplomatic communications be kept secret, and the Anarchists could be trusted never to keep a secret. Fortunately, the Spanish Ambassador in Paris was at that time Louis Araquistain, Del Vayo's brothcr­in-law. He and Del Vayo had married two sisters of Swiss-Gennan origin, who had been brought up in one of the Schwitzer-Dutsch mountain dialects. The Catalan Anarchists could be trusted to crack a code, but they couldn't learn Schwitzer-Dutsch. So confidential messages were passed on between besieged Madrid and the outer world by Mrs. Del Vayo, twittering in that strange language over the telephone to her sister in Paris. This idyll ended when Del Vayo and Araquistain fell out because Del Vayo had become too pliant to Moscow's will, while Araquistain fought for a minimum of independence, was duly accused of being a Trotskyist and dismissed from his post.

  I stayed in Madrid for three or four weeks, until the search was completed. Del Vayo had kept his promise and provided me with a car, a driver and an interpreter. That car was, to my unending embarrassment, a huge Isotta Fraschini, with a body specially designed and built for the former Prime Minister, Don Alexandro Lerroux. Lerroux had apparently been one of those enviable grand old men who remain a danger to maidenhood to the age of Methuselah. His correspondence files yielded, apart from the richest political material of all the archives that I searched, a wealth of passionate and romantic correspondence with various senoritas, up to fifty years younger than Don Alexandro, on pink and pale-blue sheets, some of which still retained a faint aroma of scent. I put them piously back into their boxes--to Otto's great disappointment, who thought that a little sexing-up of the war could do no harm.

  As for the car, it had lavender-coloured curtains, not only on the windows but also over the glass partition between the driver and the seats in the rear--which could be combined to form a couch. It had, moreover, a series of push-buttons on a panel inside the rear door, by means of which Don Alexandro could give his orders to the driver. The signals were `Faster', `Slower', `Stop', `Turn Back', and `Lights Off'. But there was one more button, hidden from sight. When that was pressed, a red light went on over the driver's seat. The driver then choked the engine, got out, opened the hood, messed about with the carburettor, and reported that the car had broken down, that he was obliged to walk to the next village, five miles away, to get help, and that fortunately there was some champagne left in the picnic basket for Don Alexaudro and the Senorita to while away the time. I got the explanation for the red-light button from Lerroux's driver, whom I had taken over together with the Isotta Fraschini. He was a former police inspector, and as inseparable from the car as a Cossack is from his horse. I cursed both of them because they made me the laughing-stock of the journalists in Madrid. I felt that never had a smaller man travelled in a bigger car.

  I shall say nothing about life in Madrid under the bombardment; the subject has been covered in a number of books from every conceivable angle. I left Madrid during the first week of November, when Largo Caballero's Government fled to Valencia and the capital was considered lost. We expected from hour to hour the Moors to appear on the Puerta de Sol, for before the International Brigade went into action on March 8, the town was virtually defenceless. The major part of the population, fed on the usual optimistic communiques, was unaware of this; but those who knew how matters stood were terrified, including myself, and made hasty arrangements to follow the Government to Valencia. This was not quite easy because the Anarchists, furious about what they called the Government's desertion, had armed patrols on the main roads who stopped cars coming from Madrid, requisi­tioned them at the point of the gun, and arrested the passengers. Occasionally people were also shot during such incidents, and Madrid was full of rumour and latent panic.

  I still had the Isotta Fraschini which I had to return to the Foreign Office, now in Valencia; but I needed some kind of escort for my precious documents which filled two large suitcases. I shuddered at the thought of what would happen to them, and to myself, if some half-illiterate patrol were to open a suitcase and find it full of letterheads displaying the swastika and the arrows of the Phalange. In the end, the Party put me in touch with comrades on the Malraux Squadron. They were anxious to find transport for a wounded pilot who had to be evacuated to Valencia, and for two French pilots, both Party members, who had to fetch two newly-bought planes from France. So it was decided that the four of us should travel together.

  It was a strange and burlesque journey. We set out late at night, all of us secretly frightened of running into a column of rebel tanks, or a bellicose Anarchist patrol, but frightened most of all by Don Alexandro's driver, who raced the huge Isotta at ninety miles per hour over the winding roads of Castile. I carried in my various pockets a Safe-Conduct from the Foreign Ministry, another from the Communist Party, and a third which the pilots had obtained from an Anarchist leader. It was rather like travelling in Russia with my two sets of documents had been. Fortunately, the armed patrols which stopped us every half an hour wore huge Party badges on their caps and lapels, so all I had to worry about was to reach into the correct pocket. I did not count the number of times we were stopped, but Dr. Junod of the International Red Cross, who travelled about the same time through Spain, counted altogether one hundred and forty-eight patrols and roadblocks between Madrid and Valencia.' Our main protection was the wounded pilot. He had one leg in plaster, and a nearly-healed cut over his eye, but as we thought that the effect was not sufficiently dramatic, we took the plaster­patch off the cut and replaced it with a bloodstained bandage. He was instructed to moan heartbreakingly each time we were stopped, and to curse Franco with delirious 'muertas'. It proved so effective that my suitcases were never opened, and we reached Valencia without trouble. I felt profoundly ashamed for having panicked, and this feeling of shame became the direct cause of my falling into Franco's hands three months later.

  As disciplined Party members, the French pilots never inquired after the nature of the mysterious documents in the suitcases. Several years later, one of them looked me up in Paris. The Spanish
War was over, and he was on his way to China to fight the Japanese. After a few drinks, he asked me with a wink whether I had safely delivered `the documents'. Now, of course, I could explain to him what it had all been about, and as I did so, his face fell: he and his comrade had been convinced that the `documents' were gold bars from the vaults of the Spanish National Bank, which we were carrying to safety in this inconspicuous way. He also confessed, to my horror, that they had decided among themselves, in case the Anarchists tried to lay hands on the suitcases, to shoot it out with their service guns.

  When the famous documents were examined in Paris, it turned out that the contents of most of them were either already known through different sources, or had been made obsolete by events. Some of the material was published in a book by Otto, which appeared in England under the title The Nazi Conspiracy in Spain-by the Editor of The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. The opening page of the book contains my one and only original research contribution to the diplomatic history of Europe, of which I am duly proud.

  It reads:

  On October 5 and October 10, 1915, the Spanish Foreign Minister, the Marquis of Lema, received the German Ambassador in Madrid. The content of this discussion was embodied in manuscript notes by the Foreign Minister: if Spain would come into the war on the side of the Central Powers, Germany offered Spain Gibraltar and Portugal.

  A month later, on November 17 and November 19, 1915, the Spanish Ambassador in Berlin received the same offer from the Wilhelmstrasse. He reported it to his Foreign Minister in a cipher telegram and a letter. The offers were repeated. On March 11, 1916, the Spanish Ambassador was again subjected to pressure at the German Foreign Office. The pearl of Gibraltar and the possession of Portugal were described to him in seductive terms.

  The notes of the Marquis of Lema and the cipher reports of the Spanish Ambassador in Berlin have been preserved in the archives of the Madrid Foreign Office.

  These important facts, which we publish for the first time . . ., etc.

  Here Otto had gone wrong. The cipher reports were in the Foreign Office, but the notes of the Marquis de Lema I found in the archives of Lerroux. They were the mouse which the labouring mountain bore.

  My friendship with Otto and Willy had now grown into real intimacy. I took over Otto's flat at 10 Rue Dombasle, which had become too small for him, and I saw him nearly every day. He had a prodigious capacity for work without ever looking harassed or hurried, and his warmth and charm were such that I no longer noticed his seamy side. His head cocked on one side and blinking with one eye, badly shaven and with a crumpled tie, he looked like the nonchalant impresario and idea-man of the great Comintern variety show.

  During the last months of 1936, Otto and I were both writing propaganda books on Spain, which were designed to complement each other. Both were published by Willy's Editions du Carrefour in German and French, and by Victor Gollancz as Left Book Club choices in London. Otto's book dealt entirely with the part played by Nazi Germany in preparing and fomenting Franco's revolt. Mine started with my journey to Rebel headquarters, and gave an account of the historical background and the first few months of the war. The title for the German edition, which was published first, was suggested by Otto: Menschenopfer Unerhort.l In exchange, I suggested the German title for Otto's book, Spione und Verschworer in Spanien.

  Willy was impatient to get the books out. He would burst into my flat-­a thing which he never used to do before--to see how mine was getting on. The Spanish War had become a personal obsession with him as with the rest of us. He would pick up a few sheets of the typescript, scan through them, and shout at me: `Too weak. Too objective. Hit them! Hit them hard! Tell the world how they run over their prisoners with tanks, how they pour petrol over them and burn them alive. Make the world gasp with horror. Hammer it into their heads. Make them wake up. ..' He was hammering on the table with his fists. I had never seen Willy in a similar state.

  He believed in atrocity propaganda. The first Brown Book had created a world sensation through the horrors that it disclosed, and he wanted me to use the same formula. I argued with him, pointing out that Hitler's was a one­sided terror, whereas in a war the atrocity stories of both sides cancel each other out. But it was difficult to argue with Willy. He insisted on adding to the book a supplement of horror-photographs on glossy paper. The photographs showed the mangled little corpses left after the bombardment of the children's home in Getafe, each one on a separate page. They showed the charred bodies of prisoners allegedly burnt alive, and the dismembered corpse of a captured Republican pilot, which a Franco plane had dropped behind the lines, wrapped in a parcel, with the pilot's name attached on a label. It showed civilian prisoners being led to execution, roped together on a cord, and then the actual shooting. When I myself became a prisoner a few weeks later, I had these photographs before my mind's eye.

  I could not prevent the photographs from going into the book, but in the text I cut down the part dealing with atrocities to a dozen pages. In the main, this part was based on the memorandum of Franco's deeds of terror during the first days of the insurrection, drawn up by the Madrid Faculty of Law, and published by its President, Ortega y Gasset. But there were also some less well authenticated items from doubtful or unidentified sources which Willy had received through the apparat and passed on to me. My misgivings about these were brushed aside by him with the argument that, as we both knew the allegations to be true, the details did not matter and had sometimes to be `interpolated'--I remember this conversation vividly, for Willy otherwise never used such scientific expressions. If I still retained scruples, these were dispelled by the unscrupulousness of Franco's propaganda. In England and France, Franco relied on the hoary story that the insurrection had started just in time to forestall a Communist rising. In Germany, the line taken was simply that it was the Spanish Government who began the Civil War by bombarding the Army's barracks in Madrid without any provocation. Compared with the enormity of these lies, our propaganda was, in the early stages of the war, relatively honest.

  What astonished me was not only the malignity of Franco's propaganda, but the abyss of ignorance and stupidity that it revealed. Goebbels was a formidably intelligent opponent, but the stuff that Burgos turned out looked as if it were concocted by illiterates. To show up the contradictions in the enemy's propaganda was a task that I enjoyed, and thought more effective than the listing of atrocities. Willy held the opposite opinion; and in the medium of mass propaganda he was, of course, right. `Don't argue with them,' he kept repeating. `Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, make them shudder with horror.' And he handed me a cutting from the Nazi paper Berliner Nachtausgabe, dated Madrid, November 4, which ran: `. . . The Red militia issue vouchers to the value of one peseta. Each voucher is good for one rape. The widow of a high official was found dead in her flat. By her bedside lay sixty-four of these vouchers...'

  `That, Arturo, is propaganda,' said Willy.

  What infuriated us most was that Franco, like Hitler before him, pretended that he had staged his coup just in time to forestall a revolution of ours. As we were openly advocating revolution, we had no reason to wax indignant, except on the technical grounds that we had not been planning a revolution in that particular country and at that particular time. But a professional burglar would, I imagine, be equally indignant if charged with a burglary he did not happen to commit. It was humiliating to serve as an involuntary midwife at the birth of one Fascist dictatorship after another.

  The German edition of the book came out at the beginning of January. The French translation, under the title L'Espagne Ensanglantee, was at the printers when I got the order to return for the third and last time to Spain. The Loyalist Government had at last managed to set up an international news agency--a thing which should have been done months earlier, but had been delayed by the eternal wrangling between the various political parties. It was called `Spanish News Agency' in England, and Agence Espagne in France. The Europea
n head office was in Paris, directed by Otto, the London office was run by Geoffrey Bing. The first two war correspondents to go to Spain for Agence Espagne were Willy Forrest, formerly of the Daily Express, now of the News Chronicle, and myself. Forrest was to cover the central front from Madrid, and I the southern front from Malaga.

  I had known Willy Forrest during my previous stay in Madrid, where I had found him the most congenial among the foreign correspondents. He was, I believe, the first Scotsman whom I have met, and he impressed me with his rolling r's, his dry humour, his upright bearing which was more a soldier's than a journalist's, his generosity in buying rounds which contrasted with my Continental ideas of the Scottish, and above all by the fact that though he worked for that counter-revolutionary monster, Lord Beaver­brook, Forrest was a member of the British Communist Party, and made no bones about it. Also, he never used words like `dialectical', `concrete', or `mechanistic', whereas he used expressions like `decency', `fairness', `that wouldn't be right', and the like. He was a new phenomenon to me. A Communist who is a Puritan; a Puritan who drinks; who drinks and doesn't get drunk. I suspected him of secretly believing in God. Odd fish, these British comrades.

  Before leaving Paris, I also obtained an additional assignment from the News Chronicle. So Willy Forrest and I were both working for the Agence Espagne and for the Chronicle at the same time, and we were both in the Party, and in all other respects we were as different as two human beings can be; which may be the reason why we got on so well. When we parted in Valancia, I was heading straight for prison; fifteen years later we met again in Paris and celebrated our reunion so thoroughly, that I went straight to prison again for punching a policeman's nose. I hope the next time it will be Willy's turn.