by Jack Ludlow
Out of the hotel and in amongst the crowds it was not only hard going, it was also impossible to get any clear news of what was happening; Florencia translated every rumour imparted to her, not one of which bore any relation to those that had gone before. Then there was the incongruity of the loudspeakers, attached to the trees that shaded the wide avenues, playing that same utterly inappropriate light music they had heard in the room.
That was backed up by the sound of shouted slogans and the singing of revolutionary songs that required no translation, creating an almost carnival atmosphere, though added to that was the sound of breaking glass as shop windows were smashed by the less politically committed who took advantage of the mayhem to loot.
Every worker in Barcelona, as well as their wives, girlfriends and daughters, seemed to be on the streets, and the way some of the well-dressed people were being harangued and harassed made Cal Jardine glad he had dressed in his leather blouson, which even if new, was still not the garb of a wealthy man.
Some of the demonstrators were armed with rifles, but that had been the case from the day Cal arrived in a country that had seemed like a tinderbox waiting for a spark. Thanks to Florencia and her local knowledge – she was Barcelona born and bred – they could use side streets, avoiding the crowded boulevards, taking alleys and cross streets to get down to the area bordering the docks, where Vince and his party were staying.
He found his one-time sergeant outside the hostel and not alone; his boys were there too – half a dozen boxers from his gym, who still, after a couple of weeks, where they were not bright red and peeling, looked pallid and underfed in a country where everyone was deeply tanned. Vince was not; with his Italian blood he had quickly gone a deep-brown colour.
There were a number of the other athletes there too, more bronzed given they trained outdoors, about fifty in number, though they were accommodated elsewhere. He recognised swimmers and runners, a long- and a high-jumper, as well as athletes of the other field events, every one of them looking very determined. With few exceptions – a couple were from universities – they were young working-class men, many funded by their trade unions, some who had come off their own bat or through Labour Party sponsors, looking forward to an opening ceremony that was supposed to take place the next day.
As soon as he saw him, Vince detached himself and came to quietly converse, cutting out Florencia in the process, which got his back an angry glare from a woman easily rendered jealous.
‘Any idea what’s goin’ on, guv?’
‘I was hoping you would tell me.’
Though a Londoner, Vince, who spoke Italian, understood a great deal of what was being said around him in Spanish. Cal spoke some, but not enough, and that was especially true when the locals spoke quickly, as they habitually did.
‘If I’ve got it right the poxy generals have started an uprising.’
Vince being the one person he had told of the news from London, there was not much he could say. ‘I told you it was possible, I just didn’t think it would be this quick.’
‘The bastards might have waited till we had the games.’
‘I’ve never met a patient general, Vince, have you?’
‘Never met a general at all an’ I don’t want to. Like as not, I’d shoot the bastard, ’cause all they ever do is get folk like me killed.’
Jardine grinned; Vince, with a few exceptions, loathed officers, whatever their rank, though his respect for the few he admired, and Cal had been one, was total. He had been a damn good soldier, if one too often in trouble with his superiors, resulting in a seesaw as far as rank was concerned; sergeant to private and back again like a jack-in-the-box.
But if Cal, as one of his company officers, had been required to discipline and demote Vince, he had also come to appreciate the feeling of having him alongside when things got sticky, because he was a real asset in a scrap, as well as a born leader in an army, like every other in the world, that could only run well by the application of its senior NCOs.
He had also been a very handy welterweight boxer, both for the regiment and after he was discharged. Such a skill made leniency when he transgressed easy to get past the colonel, an old stick-in-the-mud and martinet going nowhere, the army always being tolerant of those showing sporting prowess, especially one who could duff up the champion of a rival regiment. He was past boxing now, a trainer instead of a fighter, if you excluded going out into the streets of London to do battle with Mosley’s blackshirts.
‘So what do you reckon, guv?’ Vince asked, turning to indicate the party of which he had obviously taken charge. ‘The lads want to know.’
‘Depends on how bad it gets. If it is really serious we’ll need to bail out.’
‘If this is what you told me it might be, an’ that’s what I passed on to the boys when we heard the shooting, then if there’s going to be a fight, quite a few of them want to be part of it.’
‘Hold on a minute, Vince, we’re talking a shooting war here, not three rounds with gloves and headgear on. Besides, they’re only kids.’
‘What age were you when you went and joined up?’
‘I’d had training.’
‘I recall you saying if you’d listened to the instructors you wouldn’t have lasted a bleedin’ week.’
Vince had a real boxer’s face: a much-broken nose and prominent bones on his cheeks and under his scarred eyebrows; now it was screwed up with what seemed to be real passion, not his normal mode of behaviour, which was generally calm and jocular. The one thing that could get him really going was anything to do with fascism.
That was why he was here with his boxers – it set him off at home and it fired him up when he talked, which he did rarely, of his political beliefs. Not in any way a joiner of parties, he was, by his very nature, a fellow who believed all men are created equal and should be treated as such.
‘We came here to send a message to that shit Hitler, right?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘But, nothin’! If the same sort of bastards are going to try and turn Spain into another Germany or Italy, are we just goin’ to scuttle off home an’ let them get on with it?’
‘I was going to say it’s not our fight, Vince, but I suspect that might not go down too well.’
‘It is, guv, and you know it,’ Vince responded, deeply serious. ‘It’s all our fight, just as it was in Africa.’
The two locked eyes, but it was not a contest of wills, more an attempt to ascertain the next move. If anyone knew him well it was this man, and added to the mutual trust they had was the bond of recent experience; Vince had been with him all the way in the acquiring and running of guns, across Europe and into Ethiopia, sharing the risks as well as, it had to be admitted, often acting as the voice of common sense.
‘What about your gym?’
‘A few weeks won’t make no difference, will it, and we was due to be here a fortnight in any case. Might all be over by then.’
‘We don’t know what is happening, Vince, or how we can help. We don’t even know if we’d be welcome.’
‘One way to find out.’
‘March to the sound of the guns?’ Cal asked, only half joking.
‘That would be a start.’
‘Can I talk to your boys?’
Vince nodded and Cal went towards them. He was not a total stranger, having attended the training sessions both indoors and at the track-and-field stadium, yet right at that moment it came home to him how little he really knew about them, and that extended to names. He had remained semi-detached to that in which they were involved, partly through a disassociation from their politics, added to a lack of interest, more through being too busy with his own pleasures.
‘Vince tells me some of you want to get involved.’ He needed to put up his hand to kill off a murmur from several dozen angry throats and the odd shaking fist. ‘I can understand how you feel and I think Vince will tell you that I am experienced at this sort of thing …’
He had to stop then
, there being nothing he could add which did not risk sounding boastful, so he turned to Florencia, who, unusually for her, had remained silent, albeit with a fixed pout, while he had talked with Vince, who was not going to be forgiven for the way he had not only ignored her, but cut her off from her man.
‘Florencia, we need to find out what is really going on, not just rumours, and we will need your help if we contact anyone in authority. What I am saying is we need you.’
The pout disappeared and her eyes flashed as she responded. ‘You’re going to fight with us?’
‘We’re not going to just sit on our arse and do nowt, sweetheart,’ Vince growled, good-humouredly and with a smile. ‘Of course we’re goin’ to fight.’
Cal Jardine was used to Florencia suddenly leaping to throw her arms and legs around him, then showering him with kisses; Vince was not and it showed in his rapidly reddening face, especially when the act was accompanied by a whole raft of whistles and whoops from the athletes, and more especially, his young boxers.
‘Right, boys,’ Cal yelled, over the din, looking at feet in an array of unsuitable footwear, in fact a lot of plimsolls. ‘Get back to your billets and collect your kit and shaving gear, a change of clothes, especially spare socks and the means to wash them, a knapsack if you’ve got one and a blanket, even if you have to buy it. If you have boots, wear them and don’t load yourself up with things you don’t need. You might not be coming back to where you are now sleeping, so bring any money or valuables you have as well, and everyone has to have a hat.’
He paused, watching as that sank in, looking for signs of doubt; there was not one who did not seem still determined.
‘Back here in an hour and be warned – I will inspect you and chuck in the gutter anything I think you don’t need. Some of those who came to the Olympiad will want to get out, so ask them to gather here as well. This will be our rendezvous point till we find out how the land lies.’
Taking Florencia by the arm, he headed back towards the centre of the city. Vince, professional as he was, had already got together the kit he knew he needed and was on their heels.
The crowds were no longer just milling about; as an indication of how serious matters had become many were busy building barricades and doing so with an impressive professionalism. Instead of just a jumble of various artefacts hastily thrown together, they were being constructed with care, a bus or a truck the centrepiece, the paving stones ripped up from the streets not just thrown in a rising heap, but laid carefully and angled, so that any shot striking them would ricochet upwards and over instead of smashing them to pieces, with rifle slots at the crest, offset for aiming right and left to protect the men who would use them.
Florencia explained, when Cal expressed his admiration, that such skill was honed by experience, Barcelona being a city well versed in the mechanics of revolt, not least in an event they called the Semana Trágica – twenty-five years past but still a beacon for socialist memory – when the government, the army and the Civil Guard, using artillery, had crushed a major uprising.
The workers would not make the same mistakes of shoddy construction now as they had made then; the barricades were designed to cope with such assaults. At the same time, lorries and cars, horns blaring, flags flying, armed men on top, were racing around the city carrying food, some already with makeshift armour plating fixed to windscreens and sides.
All had big white letters painted on their bodywork to denote which of the myriad left-wing organisations they belonged to: UGT, POUM, PSOE, PCE, and the biggest and most numerous, the group of which Florencia was a member, the syndicalists and purist anarchists of the CNT-FAI, two groups who had fallen out over political purity and had recently come together again.
The Spanish left, not too dissimilar to those on the right they opposed, consisted of a plethora of shifting unions, cooperatives, labour fronts and political affiliations too confusing for a mere visitor to comprehend, despite Florencia’s best efforts at enlightenment, accompanied, when not praising her own CNT-FAI colleagues, with spitting insults, the most vehement against the Popular Front government in Madrid, made up of lily-livered socialist democrats and far-left backsliders seduced by power.
They all hated each other with a passion, as groups sure their brand of socialism was the route to some political utopia, and each tried to poach members from the other, which did nothing for inter-union rivalry. The Trotskyists of the POUM saw themselves as the true heirs to Karl Marx and loathed the Stalinists and Moscow lackeys of the communist PCE. Both laughed at the far-left trade union outfit called the UGT, big in Madrid and at one time part of the government, who stood as the main rival to the equally union-based anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT.
The Federación Anarquista Ibérica, to which Florencia belonged through the women’s organisation the Mujeres Libres, preached pure, unadulterated anarchism as voiced by Mikhail Bakunin: no money, no government, no police, no judges and no prisons, each person responsible for and contributing to the greater good. The POUM believed in a Spanish form of communism that had nothing to learn from Leninism or the Communist International, which gave instructions to their rivals, orders that came straight from the Kremlin.
The social democrats believed in liberal capitalism, and in amongst that and just to complicate matters, many, of whatever hue, were, in Barcelona, Catalan Nationalists seeking regional autonomy from Madrid. Yet faced with a fascist revolt, all their differences would be put aside to face what they knew to be a common enemy.
Florencia led Cal and Vince to the main meeting place of the members of both the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. Nothing could have been more inappropriately named that day than the Café de Tranquilidad. It wasn’t tranquil now, it was like a very busy and disturbed hive, crowded, noisy and bordering on mayhem, with bees arriving to yell bits of news, or departing to carry instructions to some part of the city where their leaders expected they would need to act, and all the while, to add to the air of unreality, waiters swanned through bearing platters of food or trays of beer or coffee.
Florencia was nothing if not determined and nor, Cal later found out, was she shy in exaggeration when she got a hearing from the faction leaders. He thought he had not told her much about his past, but over two weeks of being constantly in each other’s company, walking, dining and pillow talk, it amounted to more than he could recall.
She blew up what he had imparted about his military experience out of all relation to the truth, so that far from being a peripheral figure seeking information as to how he and the Olympiad athletes could help, he was soon surrounded by eager faces and, named by Florencia as a famous military genius, bombarded with questions about what these inexperienced fighters should do.
Language was a real problem, not aided by the fact that no one who posed a question was prepared to wait for an answer, and nor were their comrades, who either had contrary opinions or a query of their own. It was an uncoordinated babble of indeterminate noise in which he tried to do more listening than talking, that not easy either, as his fiery mistress was wont to interrupt any interpretation with a mouthful of Catalan abuse aimed at anyone who proposed a suggestion she disagreed with.
It was during one of these tirades that Cal tried to bring a confused and less-than-impressed Vince Castellano up to date. ‘They need guns and the government won’t give them any.’
‘I got that much, but I’m not sure I would either, guv. This lot look like they’re not sure who to shoot, an’ the way they’re carrying on it could be each other.’
‘Did you get that a revolt started in Morocco yesterday?’ Vince nodded. ‘It was a bit of a mess, but the officers have risen up all over Spain and are trying to seize the main population centres.’
‘Here is important to us, guv,’ Vince said, as behind them a furious, passionate and utterly incomprehensible argument became, if possible, even more vicious.
‘If I’ve got it right, so far the soldiers are still i
n their barracks, and it seems the Catalan government are trying a bit of negotiation.’
‘A bullet in the brain works wonders,’ Vince joked.
‘This lot,’ Cal replied, jerking his thumb, ‘are sure they will fail, so the army will march out either today or tomorrow to take over the city and they have machine guns and artillery. There’s a general called Goded flying in from Majorca to take command. The real question is what the armed police will do, the Civil and Assault Guards, and right now that is an unknown quantity.’
Vince was confused and he was not alone; the Civil Guard they both knew as the everyday near-military coppers, with their funny black hats, green uniforms and miserable expressions – they acted as if smiling was a punishable offence. Neither were certain about the latter group called the Assault Guards, which had been set up fairly recently to police the towns and cities, the places most likely to explode into organised revolt. But, in truth, names made no difference; both were fully armed and trained, while the workers who might have to oppose them were not.
‘So weapons are the priority.’
‘Guv, if the government knows what’s coming, then they should know how to put the mockers on it.’
‘They probably do, but they are not talking to the people who can stop it physically, the various far-left organisations like this lot. They are just as frightened of them as they are of the generals.’
Just then a messenger rushed in, spouted some news, and set off another loud and incomprehensible argument, full of waving fists and triumphant cries, which at least indicated the proffered information was positive.
‘Good news,’ Florencia explained, having detached herself from the ballyhoo. ‘The Assault Guard are handing out weapons to the workers and we have certain armouries we are sure we can capture with their guns. News has come from the dock workers’ union as well. There is a ship in the harbour carrying explosives and I have volunteered us to help capture it.’