War had the pointless and dangerless dumbness that it has when guns first come into action, before there is proper observation and the shooting is accurately controlled, and your correspondent walked down along the railway track to find a place to watch what Franco’s men were doing across the river.
Sometimes in war there is a deadliness which makes all walking upright within a certain range either foolishness or bravado. But there are other times, before things really start, when it’s like the old days when you walked around in the bull ring just before the fight.
Up the Tortosa road, planes were diving and machine-gunning. German planes are absolutely methodical, though. They do their job, and, if you are a part of their job, you’re out of luck. If you are not included in their job, you can go very close to them and watch them as you can watch lions feeding. If their orders are to strafe the road on their way home, you will get it. Otherwise, when they are finished with their job on their particular objective, they go off like bank clerks, flying home.
Up toward Tortosa, things looked quite deadly already from the way the planes were acting. But down here on the delta, the artillery were still only warming up like baseball pitchers lobbing them over in the bull pen. You crossed a stretch of road that in another day would be worth your life to sprint across, and headed for a white house that stood above a canal that paralleled the Ebro and dominated all the yellow town across the river where the Fascists were preparing their attack.
The doors were all locked and you couldn’t get up to the roof, but from the hard-trod path along the canal you could watch men slipping down through the trees to the high green bank across the river. Government artillery was registering on the town, sending sudden spoutings of stone-dust from the houses and the church tower, where evidently there was an observation post. Still, there was no sensation of danger.
For three days you had been on the other side of the river while General Aranda’s troops had been advancing and the feeling of danger, of suddenly running onto cavalry or tanks or armored cars, was something as valid as the dust you breathed or the rain that settled the dust finally and beat on your face in the open car. Now there was contact finally between the two armies and there would be a battle to hold the Ebro, but, after the uncertainty, the contact came as a relief.
Now, as you watched, you saw another man come slipping through the green trees on the other bank, and then three more. Then, suddenly, as they were out of sight, came the sharp, sudden, close clatter of machine guns. With that sound, all the walking around, all the dress-rehearsal quality of before the battle, was gone. The boys who had dug shelters for their heads behind the railway bank were right, and, from now on, theirs was the business. From where you stood, you could see them, well protected, waiting stolidly. Tomorrow it would be their turn. You watched the sharp slant of bayonets angling above the rails.
Artillery was picking up a little now. Two came in at a fairly useful place, and, as the smoke blew away ahead and settled through the trees, you picked an armful of spring onions from a field beside the trail that led to the main Tortosa road. They were the first onions of this spring and, peeling, one found they were plump and white and not too strong. The Ebro delta has a fine rich land, and, where the onions grow, tomorrow there will be a battle.
A Program for U.S. Realism
Ken • AUGUST 11, 1938
QUESTION: What is War?
Answer: War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.
Question: What is the primary aim of war?
Answer: The primary aim of war is to disarm the enemy.
Question: What are the necessary steps to achieve this?
Answer: First; the military power must be destroyed, that is, reduced to such a state that it will not be able to carry on the war. Second; the country must be conquered. For out of the country a new military force may be formed. Third; the will of the enemy must be subdued.
Question: Are there any ways of imposing our will on the enemy without fulfilling these three conditions?
Answer: Yes. There is invasion, that is the occupation of the enemy’s territory, not with a view to keeping it, but in order to levy contributions on it, or to devastate it.
Question: Can a country which remains on the defensive hope to win a war?
Answer: Yes. This negative intention, which constitutes the principle of the pure defensive, is also the natural means of overcoming the enemy by the duration of the combat, that is of wearing him out. If then, the negative purpose, that is the concentration of all the means into a state of pure resistance, affords a superiority in the contest, and if this advantage is sufficient to balance whatever superiority in numbers the adversary may have, then the mere duration of the contest will suffice gradually to bring the loss of force on the part of the adversary to a point at which the political object can no longer be an equivalent, a point at which, therefore, he must give up the contest. We see then that this class of means, the wearing out of the enemy, includes the great number of cases in which the weaker resists the stronger.
Frederick the Great, during the Seven Years’ War, was never strong enough to overthrow the Austrian monarchy. If he had tried to do so after the fashion of Charles the 12th, he would inevitably have had to succumb himself. But after his skillful application of the system of husbanding his resources had shown the powers allied against him, through a seven years’ struggle, that the actual expenditure of strength far exceeded what they had at first anticipated, they made peace.
The answers are all by Clausewitz, who knew the answers very well. They make dry, hard reading, but there is so much nonsense written, thought and spoken about war that it is necessary to go back to the old Einstein of battles to see the military precedent by which the Spanish Republic continues to fight. If you study those two paragraphs by Clausewitz on the power of the defensive, you will see why there will be war in Spain for a long time.
There has been war in Spain, now, for two years. There has been war in China for a year. War is due in Europe by next summer at the latest.
It nearly came on May 21. It is possible that it will come now, in August. Or it may be delayed until next summer. But it is coming.
Now what is war again? We say war is murder, that it is inexcusable, that it is indefensible, that no objective can justify an offensive war. But what does Clausewitz say? He calls war “a continuation of state policy by other means.”
Just when will this new war come? You may be sure that every detail of the starting of it is planned now. But just when is it coming?
“If two parties have armed themselves for strife, then a feeling of animosity must have moved them to it. As long now as they continue armed, that is, do not come to terms of peace, this feeling must exist. And it can only be brought to a standstill by either side by one single motive alone, which is, that he waits for a more favorable moment for action.
That is Clausewitz again.
“The Statesman, who, knowing his instrument to be ready, and seeing war inevitable, hesitates to strike first, is guilty of a crime against his country.”
That is by Von Der Goltz. And that is something to read over.
There is a great demand now by Mr. Neville Chamberlain and the mouthpieces of his policy in our state department, that we should be realists.
Why not be realists? Not Chamberlain realists, who are merely the exponents of a stop-gap British policy which will be scrapped as soon as the British are armed, but American realists.
There is going to be war in Europe. What are we going to do about it as realists?
First, we want to stay out of it. We have nothing to gain in a European war except the temporary prosperity it will bring.
One way to stay out is to have nothing to do with it, not sell war materials to either side. And if you do that the British and the pro-British state department boys will be pulling you into it just the same; only it will not be for sordid ends, it will be on the highest and noblest humanit
arian grounds. The other side will be working on us too; but the British are the most skillful and the most plausible.
The Germans have a genius for irritating people, for offending nations and for supplying pretexts. The Hohenzollerns were bad enough, but the Nazis will be worse, and where there was one Lusitania the last time you can figure on half a dozen this time. You can’t expect the savages that bombed Guernica and the civilian population of Barcelona to resist a crack at the Normandie and the Queen Mary. So when war comes Americans will have to try American ships for a change. Or else make up their minds to fight for the French Line and for Cunard.
No. If you are going to be a realist you have to make up your mind beforehand whether you are going to go to war or not. There will be plenty of pretexts to get us in. And there is going to be a war.
So let us make up our minds to stay out. But why stay out and go broke? If we are realists why not sell to both sides, anything they want, anything we can manufacture? But sell it all for cash. Nothing should be sold for credit, so that we will be dragged in to help one side win so they can pay us what they owe us, and then go through the whole farce of war debts again.
There is going to be a war in Europe. Why not make something out of it if we are realists? But all sales should be for cash and the cash should be gold.
Then, to ensure our not being dragged in, nothing should be shipped to any belligerent country in American ships. Nor should any American ships carry war materials. Let the belligerent countries who can buy, send their own ships, pay cash for what they buy, and then, if their ships are sunk, it is their lookout. The more that are sunk the better.
At that point we sell them ships, also for cash; good, fast-built, cheap bottoms such as we turned out during the last war. All these we sell and build for cash. Cash down with the order; the ship the property of the country that buys it from the minute that the keels are laid.
Then when the Gestapo lads sabotage and burn ship-yards we do not go to war about that either. We are insured, see. The more sabotage the better. And if their liners are sunk too, we will build them some others too; for cash.
Let the gentlemen of Europe fight and, if they pay cash, see how long it will last. Why not be realists, Mr. Chamberlain? Why not be realists? Or don’t you want to play?
Fresh Air on an Inside Story
Ken • SEPTEMBER 22, 1938
I MET this citizen in the Florida Hotel in Madrid in the end of April of last year. It was a late afternoon and he had arrived from Valencia the evening before. He had spent the day in his room writing an article. This man was tall, with watery eyes, and strips of blond hair pasted carefully across a flat-topped bald head.
“How does Madrid seem?” I asked him.
“There is a terror here,” said this journalist. “There is evidence of it wherever you go. Thousands of bodies are being found.”
“When did you get here?” I asked him.
“Last night.”
“Where did you see the bodies?”
“They are around everywhere,” he said. “You see them in the early morning.”
“Were you out early this morning?”
“No.”
“Did you see any bodies?”
“No,” he said. “But I know they are there.”
“What evidence of terror have you seen?”
“Oh, it’s there,” he said. “You can’t deny it’s there.”
“What evidence have you seen yourself?”
“I haven’t had time to see it myself but I know it is there.”
“Listen,” I said. “You get in here last night. You haven’t even been out in the town and you tell us who are living here and working here that there is a terror.”
“You can’t deny there is a terror,” said this expert. “Every-where you see evidences of it.”
“I thought you said you hadn’t seen any evidences.”
“They are everywhere,” said the great man.
I then told him that there were half a dozen of us newspaper men who were living and working in Madrid whose business it was, if there was a terror, to discover it and report it. That I had friends in Seguridad that I had known from the old days and could trust, and that I knew that three people had been shot for espionage that month. I had been invited to witness an execution but had been away at the front and had waited four weeks for there to be another. That people had been shot during the early days of the rebellion by the so-called “uncontrollables” but that for months Madrid had been as safe and well policed and free from any terror as any capital in Europe. Any people shot or taken for rides were turned in at the morgue and he could check for himself as all journalists had done.
“Don’t try to deny there is a terror,” he said. “You know there is a terror.”
Now he was a correspondent for a truly great newspaper and I had a lot of respect for it so I did not sock him. Besides if one should take a poke at a guy like that it would only furnish evidence that there was a terror. Also the meeting was in the room of an American woman journalist and I think, but cannot be positive on this, that he was wearing glasses.
The American woman journalist was leaving the country and, that same day, he gave her a sealed envelope to take out. You do not give people sealed envelopes to take out of a country in wartime, but this stout fellow assured the American girl the envelope contained only a carbon of an already censored dispatch of his from the Teruel front which he was mailing to his office as a duplicate in order to make sure of its safe arrival.
Next day the American girl mentioned that she was taking out this letter for him.
“It isn’t sealed, is it?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
“Better let me take it over to Censorship for you as I go by, then, so you won’t get in any trouble over it.”
“What trouble could I get into? It’s only a carbon of a dispatch that’s already censored.”
“Did he show it to you?”
“No. But he told me.”
“Never trust a man who slicks hair over a bald head,” I said.
“The Nazis have a price of £20,000 on his head,” she said. “He must be all right.”
Well, at Censorship it turned out that the alleged carbon of a dispatch from Teruel was not a carbon of a dispatch but an article which stated, “There is a terror here in Madrid. Thousands of bodies are found, etc.” It was a dandy. It made liars out of every honest correspondent in Madrid. And this guy had written it without stirring from his hotel the first day he arrived. The only ugly thing was that the girl to whom he had entrusted it could, under the rules of war, have been shot as a spy if it had been found among her papers when she was leaving the country. The dispatch was a lie and he had given it to a girl who trusted him to take out of the country.
That night at the Gran Via restaurant I told the story to a number of hard-working, non-political, straight-shooting correspondents who risked their lives daily working in Madrid and who had been denying there was a terror in Madrid ever since the government had taken control of the situation and stopped all terror.
They were pretty sore about this outsider who was going to come into Madrid, make liars out of all of them, and expose one of the most popular correspondents to an espionage charge for carrying out his faked dispatch.
“Let’s go over and ask him if the Nazis really put a price of £20,000 on his head,” someone said. “Somebody should denounce him for what he has done. He ought to be shot and if we knew where to send the head it could be shipped in dry ice.”
“It wouldn’t be a nice looking head but I’d be glad to carry it myself in a rucksack,” I offered. “I haven’t seen £20,000 since 1929.”
“I’ll ask him,” said a well-known Chicago reporter.
He went over to the man’s table, spoke to him very quietly and then came back.
We all kept looking at the man. He was white as the under half of an unsold flounder at 11 o’clock in the morning just before the fish market shuts.
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br /> “He says there isn’t any reward for his head,” said the Chicago reporter in his faintly rhythmical voice. “He says that was just something one of his editors made up.”
So that is how one journalist escaped starting a one man terror in Madrid.
If a censorship does not permit a newspaper man to write the truth the correspondent can try to beat the censorship under penalty of expulsion if caught. Or he can go outside the country and write uncensored dispatches. But this citizen on a flying trip was going to let someone else take all his risk while he received credit as a fearless exposer. The remarkable story at that time was that there was no terror in Madrid. But that was too dull for him.
It would have interested his newspaper though because oddly enough it happened to be a newspaper that has been interested for a long time in the truth.
The Clark’s Fork Valley, Wyoming
Vogue • FEBRUARY, 1939
AT the end of summer, the big trout would be out in the centre of the stream; they were leaving the pools along the upper part of the river and dropping down to spend the winter in the deep water of the canyon. It was wonderful fly-fishing then in the first weeks of September. The native trout were sleek, shining, and heavy, and nearly all of them leaped when they took the fly. If you fished two flies, you would often have two big trout on and the need to handle them very delicately in that heavy current.
The nights were cold, and, if you woke in the night, you would hear the coyotes. But you did not want to get out on the stream too early in the day because the nights were so cold they chilled the water, and the sun had to be on the river until almost noon before the trout would start to feed.
You could ride in the morning, or sit in front of the cabin, lazy in the sun, and look across the valley where the hay was cut so the meadows were cropped brown and smooth to the line of quaking aspens along the river, now turning yellow in the fall. And on the hills rising beyond, the sage was silvery grey.
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 29