He was getting rather sullen at someone making fun of the whales so Lopez Mendez got him to come home and, riding upstairs in the elevator, he ate the card of a doctor who advertised himself as a specialist in the curing of certain diseases. Lopez Mendez thought that this last was pure bravado and that Enrique was really slowing up, but Enrique on entering the bedroom saw a caricature of Mussolini on very heavy pasteboard. To prove he was in form, he ate this with no difficulty, simply remarking as he swallowed the last bit that it was muy pesado. “Very heavy.” After this he took a small drink from a bottle of Eau de Cologne and went happily off to sleep.
In the morning he came down to the boat and when Lopez Mendez was describing the gastronomic feats of the night before I again asked Enrique how he felt.
“Marvelous,” he said. “I always feel marvelous.”
You don’t need to believe this either. But I swear to God it is true. In the interests of science it must be added that Enrique looked slightly pale.
Carlos was the most bitter about the photographs. He had seen only three whales off Havana in all his life and here we ran into twenty and did not even get a decent picture. But as he said, lamenting the loss of a possible life’s capital and eternal fame on the waterfront, “Certainly one must be properly prepared for whales. Then, undoubtedly, there is a trick to it. There must be a trick for whales as well as for everything else, but we had never had the opportunity of learning it. But imagine if we had brought that whale into Habana harbor. Picture yourself that!”
“Maybe we’ll get another one sometime,” I said.
“We must learn the trick of them,” he said. “There is certainly a way of getting them. You must find out about them.”
“I’ll study up on them,” I said. But the more I learn about them the luckier I think we were that the harpoon pulled out. I think that a sperm whale might have made several very interesting moves before he permitted us to employ the mattress pump.
T H R E E
Spanish Civil War, 1937-1939
The First Glimpses of War
NANA Dispatch • MARCH 18, 1937
VALENCIA, SPAIN.—As our Air Force plane from Toulouse flew down over the business section of Barcelona, the streets were empty. It looked as quiet as downtown New York on a Sunday morning.
The plane hit smoothly on a concrete runway and roared around to a stop before a little building, where, chilled through by our trip over the edge of the snow-covered Pyrenees, we warmed our hands around bowls of coffee and milk while three pistol-armed, leather jacketed guards joked outside. There we learned why Barcelona looked so momentarily quiet.
A trimotor bomber had just come over, with two pursuit planes as escort, and had dropped its load of bombs on the town, killing seven and wounding thirty-four. Only by a half-hour had we missed flying into the dog-fight in which the Insurgent planes were driven off by Government pursuit ships. Personally, I didn’t mind. We were a trimotor job ourselves, and there might have been confusion.
Flying low down the coast toward Alicante, along white beaches, past gray-castled towns or with the sea curling against rocky headlands, there was no sign of war. Trains were moving, cattle were plowing the fields, fishing boats were setting out and factory chimneys were belching smoke.
Then, above Tarragona, all the passengers were crowded over on the landside of the ship, watching through the narrow windows the careened hulk of a freighter, visibly damaged by shellfire, which had driven ashore to beach her cargo. She lay aground, looking against the sand in that clear water like a whale with smokestacks that had come to the beach to die.
We passed the rich, flat, dark-green fields of Valencia spotted with white houses, the busy port and the great, yellow, sprawling town. We crossed rice marshes, and up over a wild mountain chain where we had an eagle’s view of civilization, and down, ear-crackingly, to the bright blue sea and the palm-lined, African-looking shoreline of Alicante.
The plane roared on toward Morocco, while I rattled into Alicante from the airport in a ramshackle bus. I arrived in the midst of a celebration that packed the beautiful sea promenade, lined with date palms, and filled the streets with a milling crowd.
Recruits between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-six were being called up, and they, their girls and their families were celebrating their enlistment and the victory over Italian regular troops on the Guadalajara front. Walking four abreast, arms linked, they were singing, shouting, playing accordions and guitars. Pleasure boats in Alicante harbor were packed with couples holding hands, taking their last rides together, but ashore, where long lines formed in front of jammed recruiting stations, the atmosphere was one of wild celebration.
All along the coast to Valencia, we passed through celebrating crowds that reminded me more of the old days of ferias and fiestas than of war. It was only the convalescent wounded, limping along in heavy, shoddy militia uniforms, who made war seem real.
Food, meat especially, was being rationed at Alicante, but, in small towns between, I saw butcher shops open and meat being sold with no lines formed outside. Our driver resolved to get himself a good steak on the way home.
Coming into Valencia in the dark through miles of orange groves in bloom, the smell of orange blossoms, heavy and strong even through the dust of the road, made it seem to this half-asleep correspondent like a wedding. But, even half asleep, watching the lights out through the dust, you knew it wasn’t an Italian wedding they were celebrating.
Shelling of Madrid
NANA Dispatch • APRIL 11, 1937
MADRID.—At the front, a mile and a quarter away, the noise came as a heavy coughing grunt from the green pine-studded hillside opposite. There was only a gray wisp of smoke to mark the Insurgent battery position. Then came the high inrushing sound, like the ripping of a bale of silk. It was all going well over into the town, so, out there, nobody cared.
But in the town, where all the streets were full of Sunday crowds, the shells came with the sudden flash that a short circuit makes and then the roaring crash of granite-dust. During the morning, twenty-two shells came into Madrid.
They killed an old woman returning home from market, dropping her in a huddled black heap of clothing, with one leg, suddenly detached, whirling against the wall of an adjoining house.
They killed three people in another square, who lay like so many torn bundles of old clothing in the dust and rubble when the fragments of the “155” had burst against the curbing.
A motor car coming along the street stopped suddenly and swerved after the bright flash and roar and the driver lurched out, his scalp hanging down over his eyes, to sit down on the sidewalk with his hand against his face, the blood making a smooth sheen down over his chin.
Three times one of the tallest buildings was hit. Its shelling is legitimate, since it is a known means of communication and a landmark, but the shelling that traversed the streets seeking the Sunday promenaders was not military.
When it was over, I went back out again to our observation post, only ten minutes away by foot, in a ruined house and watched the third day of the battle where government forces are trying to complete an encircling movement to cut the neck of the Insurgent salient thrust into Madrid last November. The apex of this salient is the clinical hospital in University City and if the government can complete the pincers-like movement from the Tremadura road to the Coruña road this whole salient will be cut off.
A hill with a ruined church—ruined before our eyes two days ago by spouting shell bursts—is now three roofless walls. Two big houses on the hill below and three smaller houses to their left, all fortified by the Insurgent forces, hold up the government advance.
Yesterday I watched an attack against these positions where government tanks, working like deadly, intelligent beetles, destroyed machine gun posts in the thick underbrush while government artillery shelled the buildings and Insurgent trenches. We watched until dark but the infantry never advanced for an assault on these strong points.
But today, after fifteen minutes of the heaviest artillery fire, which with direct hit after direct hit, hid the five houses in one rolling cloud of white and orange smoky dust, I watched the infantry attack.
Behind a chalky-showing line of newly dug trenches, the men lay. Suddenly, one ran, bent low, to the rear. A half dozen followed and I saw one fall. Then four of these returned, and, bent forward like men walking along a dock in a heavy rain, the irregular line went forward. Some flopped to take cover. Others went down suddenly to stay as part of the view, a dark blue spot on the brown field. Then they were in the underbrush and out of sight and the tanks were moving ahead and shooting at the windows of the houses.
Below a sunken road there was a sudden flame and something burned yellow, with a black oily smoke rising. It burned for forty minutes, the flame mounting and then dying to mount again suddenly, and, finally, there was an explosion. Probably it was a tank. You couldn’t see nor be sure because it was under the road, but other tanks passed it and, shifting to its right, went on firing into the houses and the machine gun posts in the trees. One at a time, men ran past the flame and into the woods along the slope close by the houses.
The machine gun and rifle fire made one solid crackling whisper in the air and then we saw another tank coming up with a moving shadow behind it that the glasses showed to be a solid square of men. It stopped and lurched and turned to the right, where the other foot soldiers had run one at a time bent double and where we had seen two fall. It passed into the woods and out of sight, its followers intact.
Then there was a great shelling again and we watched for the assault while the light failed and you could see nothing through the glasses but the plaster-shattered smoke of the houses where the shells were bursting. Government troops were within fifty yards of the houses when it was too dark to see. The outcome of the offensive designed to free Madrid from fascist pressure depends on the results of tonight’s and tomorrow’s action.
A New Kind of War
NANA Dispatch • APRIL 14, 1937
MADRID.—The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away. There is a rifle fire all night long. The rifles go tacrong, capong, craang, tacrong, and then a machine gun opens up. It has a bigger calibre and is much louder, rong, cararong, rong, rong. Then there is the incoming boom of a trench mortar shell and a burst of machine gun fire. You lie and listen to it and it is a great thing to be in bed with your feet stretched out gradually warming the cold foot of the bed and not out there in University City or Carabanchel. A man is singing hard-voiced in the street below and three drunks are arguing when you fall asleep.
In the morning, before your call comes from the desk, the roaring burst of a high explosive shell wakes you and you go to the window and look out to see a man, his head down, his coat collar up, sprinting desperately across the paved square. There is the acrid smell of high explosive you hoped you’d never smell again, and, in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers, you hurry down the marble stairs and almost into a middle-aged woman, wounded in the abdomen, who is being helped into the hotel entrance by two men in blue workmen’s smocks. She has her two hands crossed below her big, old-style Spanish bosom and from between her fingers the blood is spurting in a thin stream. On the corner, twenty yards away, is a heap of rubble, smashed cement and thrown up dirt, a single dead man, his torn clothes dusty, and a great hole in the sidewalk from which the gas from a broken main is rising, looking like a heat mirage in the cold morning air.
“How many dead?” you ask a policeman.
“Only one,” he says. “It went through the sidewalk and burst below. If it would have burst on the solid stone of the road there might have been fifty.”
A policeman covers the top of the trunk, from which the head is missing; they send for someone to repair the gas main and you go in to breakfast. A charwoman, her eyes red, is scrubbing the blood off the marble floor of the corridor. The dead man wasn’t you nor anyone you know and everyone is very hungry in the morning after a cold night and a long day the day before up at the Guadalajara front.
“Did you see him?” asked someone else at breakfast.
“Sure,” you say.
“That’s where we pass a dozen times a day. Right on that corner.” Someone makes a joke about missing teeth and someone else says not to make that joke. And everyone has the feeling that characterizes war. It wasn’t me, see? It wasn’t me.
The Italian dead up on the Guadalajara front weren’t you, although Italian dead, because of where you had spent your boyhood, always seemed, still, like our dead. No. You went to the front early in the morning in a miserable little car with a more miserable little chauffeur who suffered visibly the closer he came to the fighting. But at night, sometimes late, without lights, with the big trucks roaring past, you came on back to sleep in a bed with sheets in a good hotel, paying a dollar a day for the best rooms on the front. The smaller rooms in the back, on the side away from the shelling, were considerably more expensive. After the shell that lit on the sidewalk in front of the hotel you got a beautiful double corner room on that side, twice the size of the one you had had, for less than a dollar. It wasn’t me they killed. See? No. Not me. It wasn’t me anymore.
Then, in a hospital given by the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, located out behind the Morata front along the road to Valencia, they said, “Raven*wants to see you.”
“Do I know him?”
“I don’t think so,” they said, “but he wants to see you.”
“Where is he?”
“Upstairs.”
In the room upstairs they are giving a blood transfusion to a man with a very gray face who lay on a cot with his arm out, looking away from the gurgling bottle and moaning in a very impersonal way. He moaned mechanically and at regular intervals and it did not seem to be him that made the sound. His lips did not move.
“Where’s Raven?” I asked.
“I’m here,” said Raven.
The voice came from a high mound covered by a shoddy gray blanket. There were two arms crossed on the top of the mound and at one end there was something that had been a face, but now was a yellow scabby area with a wide bandage cross where the eyes had been.
“Who is it?” asked Raven. He didn’t have lips, but he talked pretty well without them and with a pleasant voice.
“Hemingway,” I said. “I came up to see how you were doing.”
“My face was pretty bad,” he said. “It got sort of burned from the grenade, but it’s peeled a couple of times and it’s doing better.”
“It looks swell,” I said. “It’s doing fine.”
I wasn’t looking at it when I spoke.
“How are things in America?” he asked. “What do they think of us over there?”
“Sentiment’s changed a lot,” I said. “They’re beginning to realize the government is going to win this war.”
“Do you think so?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m awfully glad,” he said. “You know, I wouldn’t mind any of this if I could just watch what was going on. I don’t mind the pain, you know. It never seemed important really. But I was always awfully interested in things and I really wouldn’t mind the pain at all if I could just sort of follow things intelligently. I could even be some use. You know, I didn’t mind the war at all. I did all right in the war. I got hit once before and I was back and rejoined the battalion in two weeks. I couldn’t stand to be away. Then I got this.”
He had put his hand in mine. It was not a worker’s hand. There were no callouses and the nails on the long, spatulate fingers were smooth and rounded.
“How did you get it?” I asked.
“Well, there were some troops that were routed and we went over to sort of reform them and we did and then we had quite a fight with the fascists and we beat them. It was quite a bad fight, you know, but we beat them and then someone threw this grenade at me.”
Holding his hand and hearing him
tell it, I did not believe a word of it. What was left of him did not sound like the wreckage of a soldier somehow. I did not know how he had been wounded, but the story did not sound right. It was the sort of way everyone would like to have been wounded. But I wanted him to think I believed it.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
“From Pittsburgh. I went to the University there.”
“What did you do before you joined up here?”
“I was a social worker,” he said. Then I knew it couldn’t be true and I wondered how he had really been so frightfully wounded and I didn’t care. In the war that I had known, men often lied about the manner of their wounding. Not at first; but later. I’d lied a little myself in my time. Especially late in the evening. But I was glad he thought I believed it, and we talked about books, he wanted to be a writer, and I told him about what happened north of Guadalajara and promised to bring some things from Madrid next time we got out that way. I hoped maybe I could get a radio.
“They tell me Dos Passos and Sinclair Lewis are coming over, too,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “And when they come I’ll bring them up to see you.”
“Gee, that will be great,” he said. “You don’t know what that will mean to me.”
“I’ll bring them,” I said.
“Will they be here pretty soon?”
“Just as soon as they come I’ll bring them.”
“Good boy, Ernest,” he said. “You don’t mind if I call you Ernest, do you?”
The voice came very clear and gentle from that face that looked like some hill that had been fought over in muddy weather and then baked in the sun.
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 26