Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (24 page)

The sun was shining as the little group drove south toward Morata de Tajuña, where the Brigades headquarters were. She and Allan were lighthearted; they sang Brigade songs, and she taught him the words to “
Freiheit
” (“Freedom”) and “
Los Cuatros Generales
,” which ridiculed the four rebel commanders:

Los cuatros generales,

Mamita mia,

Se han alzado …

Para la Nochebuena,

Mamita mia,

Seran ahorcados.

The four generals,

Dear little mother,

They tried to betray us.

By Christmas,

Dear little mother,

They’ll all be strung up.

When they crossed the Jarama north of Arganda, Gerda got out and photographed the bridge that the Nationalists had claimed they took, and—for good measure—the road sign that pointed to Madrid one way and Valencia the other.
The road’s still open! See?
Near Morata, although the front seemed quiet, the officers in charge were reluctant to allow “the lady comrade” to go into the trenches; but Gerda talked her way past the authorities, and the soldiers smilingly posed for her, their arms draped loosely around one another’s shoulders, cigarettes—a quantity of which she and Allan had had the foresight to bring along—dangling from their mouths. They showed her their bivouacs, and pointed out “Suicide Hill,” the heights of Pingarrón, where half the British battalion had fallen in February. Then, suddenly, just as thick gray clouds rolled in over the ruined olive groves, there was firing from the Nationalist lines to the west, and Gerda—seemingly impervious to the idea she might be in danger—darted from cover like a gazelle so she could photograph the brigade artillery being brought into position to fire back. There was no further action, however; the front settled back into that state of armed deadlock it had been in since the end of February, and eventually Gerda and Allan, and Karpathi and Kline, headed back to Madrid. In her camera bag Gerda had two rolls of what she thought would be good and saleable pictures. But Allan had nothing but sadness: in Morata he’d learned that twenty of his comrades, the boys he’d shipped across the Atlantic with and left behind when he went to take his political commissar’s job in Madrid, had been killed in the assault on Pingarrón.

*   *   *

The springlike weather that had smiled on Gerda’s trip to the Jarama front didn’t last. In its place came freezing rain—in the midst of which, at dawn on March 8, the Black Flames, a motorized division of Italian troops fighting under the rebels’ flag, broke through government lines northeast of the provincial capital of Guadalajara, on the road from Saragossa to Madrid. Over the next two days, despite the fog and sleet that reduced visibility to as little as a hundred yards in some places, the Nationalists, including another Italian division, the Black Arrows, continued the onslaught in an effort to encircle, and perhaps capture, Madrid before the winter’s end. The poor visibility produced one
opera buffa
moment, when the Black Flames cried out to another group of Italian speakers, telling them to stop firing on their own countrymen. “
Noi siamo italiani di Garibaldi!
” (“We’re
Garibaldi
Italians!,” Loyalist supporters), their supposed allies yelled back. But the rebels’ strategy otherwise appeared to be devastatingly successful: by the evening of the tenth, the rebel forces had overwhelmed the old walled town of Brihuega and were advancing toward Madrid.

On the fifth floor of the Telefónica, where the sleet rattled at the windows, the reporters were queuing up for the available telephone lines. “Better announce a retreat for tonight,” Ilsa told them all, grimly. “Prepare for the worst.” At dinner at the Gran Via restaurant, she found her Vienna colleague Stephen Spender, who’d recently joined the British Communist Party and had come to Spain as a journalist. How had Madrid’s Republican defenders done today, he asked anxiously; and was shocked when Ilsa gave him the unvarnished truth: “
Sie läuften wie Hasen!
”—they ran like hares. When she and Barea had their nightly briefing with General Gorev at the War Ministry, he was cool and unruffled—
as if we had all the space of the Russian steppes to maneuver
, Barea thought; but back in the press room
The New York Times
’s Herbert Matthews was more pessimistic. He’d seen what the Italians had done in Abyssinia, he told his comrades. And now they were here in Spain, in open violation of the Non-Intervention Agreement, and probably on the verge of entering Madrid. Sitting at the telephone, with a line censor listening in, he tried to send that story to the
Times
’s Paris office.
Hold it
, the man on the other end kept saying;
stop saying these are Italians. You and the Commies are the only people who use that kind of propaganda tag
. Normally a calm, patient man with the mournful features of Erasmus in a drypoint etching, Matthews exploded in a fury; then, pinching his lips into a severe line, sat down and typed out a cable: If the
Times
had no confidence in his reporting, they could have his resignation instead.

The
Times
tried to cool Matthews down—they weren’t accusing him of
propagandizing
, they said; they just worried that he was parroting one of Barea’s press releases; and by the twelfth, as a heavy storm system moved slowly over the Castilian
meseta
, the winds of fortune miraculously changed direction. Republican bombers, taking off from permanent concrete runways at Albacete, were able to pummel the Italians, whose tanks were bogged down in the mud, and government and International Brigade troops began pushing back along the road to Brihuega. There were many casualties—very nearly including Ted Allan and Geza Karpathi, who’d been in a station wagon with Norman Bethune, attempting to get blood to the front lines, when enemy bullets shattered their windshield. But they, and the blood they carried, were saved by a Loyalist tank; and the enemy began to fall back, leaving incriminating evidence behind. Mikhail Koltsov, rushing to the front, found abandoned Fiat tractors and Lancia trucks jamming the highway, which would make interesting reading in his next communication to Moscow (how was Mussolini going to deny helping the rebels now?); and Pietro Nenni, the Garibaldis’ soft-spoken political commissar, showed up in the censors’ office with a mailbag his men had seized from one of the Nationalist battalions. It was crammed with mail and postal orders with Italian addresses and bloodstained diaries, handwritten in Italian, which Ilsa and Barea could give to any reporters who needed proof of the travesty these documents made of the Non-Intervention Agreement.

Then, a few freezing, sodden days later, the weather cleared; and the Republicans, who had managed to nearly encircle the Italians under cover of the wintry brume, went on the attack in earnest. At that point, machine-gunned from the air by Russian Chatos, overrun with T-26 tanks, freezing in the tropical uniforms they hadn’t had time to exchange for winter battle dress, the Italians turned and ran. Eight months into the civil war the government finally had a decisive victory, and in the streets of Madrid people were buying newspapers, with their red banner headlines that screamed
¡Victoria a Guadalajara!
, and throwing them into the air in celebration.

In the days leading up to the battle Gerda had been frantic to get to the field, and Allan’s and Karpathi’s tales of their narrow escape can only have sharpened her desperation. Finally, she was able to commandeer a car with the
Humanité
correspondent Georges Soria, who at twenty-three had been covering the war, alongside Chim and Capa, since the beginning; and together the two journalists scrambled over the muddy fields where machine guns still chattered erratically, Soria with his notebook, Gerda with her Leica. Everywhere you looked there were the trucks, mortars, rifles, machine guns, and boxes of ammunition the Italians had left behind in their flight; and among them, strewn like broken toys in the rain-filled craters and the ditches beside the rutted roads, were the bodies of the dead, hundreds of them, their faces gray under the pallid sun. It was the first time Gerda had seen slaughter on this scale. When she returned to Madrid that evening, at dinner with Ted Allan and Herbert Matthews and others in the restaurant at the Gran Via, she seemed exhausted and pale; the sight of so much carnage had shaken her. “It was terrible,” she kept repeating. “A hand here. A head there … They were so young. Young Italian boys.” But she had taken “wonderful pictures,” she was sure of it: pictures that would help establish her as a combat photographer in her own right. Eager to get them into the hands of editors in Paris, she headed for Valencia the next morning.

*   *   *

Valencia was in full battle dress. Although the streets were still thronged with people and the grocers’ shops overflowed with produce, everywhere gigantic posters proclaimed the Valencianos’ fighting spirit. On the wall of one building was an enormous map of Spain—with a big dot for Valencia and an arrow pointing to the Nationalists’ positions at Teruel, in the Aragonese mountains—under the legend, “VALENCIANOS! The front lines are
150 kilometers
from Valencia! Don’t forget!” You could try to forget by ducking into a movie theater—
Give Me Your Heart
, a Warner Brothers weeper starring Kay Francis and George Brent was playing in one—but when you came out what met your eyes was the stern, uncompromising hulk of the “Tribuna de Propaganda,” a massive ziggurat painted with patriotic slogans, adorned with a sculpted fist clutching a rifle, and crowned with the word “VENCEREMOS,” which dominated the center of the Plaza de Emilio Castelar.

Not that Gerda was spending much time at the movies. Instead she was photographing the unveiling of a unit of the new Popular Army, the Ejercito Popular, a centralized, top-down, made-for-efficiency fighting machine modeled on the Red Army that was being phased in at the urging of the government’s Russian allies and its Communist members. After the disaster at Málaga the process was being accelerated, apparently to Prime Minster Largo Caballero’s chagrin—“he fears the exceptional influence that the Party has in a significant part of the army and strives to limit this,” is how the Soviet advisor General Jan Berzin (code name “DONIZETTI”) reported things to Moscow. Caballero was increasingly on the defensive, and he and his foreign minister, Álvarez del Vayo, who had begun siding with the PCE (Partido Comunista de España—the Moscow-oriented Communists) on most issues, were barely speaking. In the PCE’s congress in Valencia early in the month, the party’s secretary general, José Diaz, had pushed strongly for the unified army; and his associates were privately saying Caballero was a handicap to victory. “To win the war”—the French Communist André Marty, supreme commander of the International Brigades, told his Comintern associates—“the [popular] front demands radical rapid changes,” such as a government “without Caballero … And on this issue the public opinion of the front is being prepared.”

The publication of photo essays like Gerda’s on the Popular Army might have seemed like a subtle part of this preparation. But although Gerda had moved closer to Communist orthodoxy since her SAP days in Germany—it would have been hard not to, working for
Ce Soir
and staying with Alberti and Maria Teresa Léon at the Casa de Alianza, where Mikhail Koltsov was a frequent visitor—if she’d come to share the PCE’s belief in regimentation, it was more an emotional reaction to the devastation of war than a political one. She wasn’t an ideologue. She did, however, recognize a potent visual symbol when she saw one. The new armed force marching in lockstep, standing in unwavering lines, its soldiers forming human chains as each grasped the shoulders of the man in front of him (and with women now excluded from the military they were
all
men)—these images had the heroic, and monolithic, grandeur of a Soviet poster. And Gerda celebrated them as she’d once celebrated the anarchic spirit in Barcelona at the beginning of the war. Gerda
evolved
, is how Koltsov described it:
When she came here she was a child-woman playing at war; she became an antifascist warrior
. And the warrior in her seemed to have decided that this was what it would take to win the fight with fascism. If that meant abandoning the social revolution—well, so be it.

*   *   *

Hemingway arrived in Madrid on the evening of the day Gerda Taro left it.

When he and Joris Ivens had reached Valencia on March 16, he’d sent NANA a dispatch, full of the sort of scene-setting local color he could do in his sleep, describing their journey and his impressions of the conditions in Spain. And the New York office had fired back, in terse cablese:
“WE UNWANT DAILY RUNNING NARRATIVE [YOUR] EXPERIENCES.”
What they
did
want, the cable continued, was
“CONSIDERED APPRAISAL SITUATION.”
In other words,
get to where the fighting is and report on it—that’s why we’re paying you the big bucks.

The fighting was over at Guadalajara, but maybe he could catch the tail end of things if he was lucky. Visiting the press office to discuss travel arrangements to Madrid, he met Stephen Spender, who’d just come from the beleaguered city and seemed relieved to get away. Something about the fair-haired, fair-skinned English poet seemed to rub Hemingway the wrong way: he told Spender he couldn’t wait to get
to
Madrid: he wanted to see if he had lost his nerve since he’d been under fire in Italy. And fortunately, Rubio Hidalgo’s new deputy, a very tall, dark, aristocratic woman named Constancia de la Mora, who was married to the Republicans’ air force chief, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, was able to help him.

Constancia, nicknamed Connie, spoke English fluently—the result of three years in a convent school in Cambridge—and her girlhood in the drawing rooms of Madrid society had given her the sort of natural authority that gets things done. In addition, she and her husband had become members of the PCE, so Joris Ivens’s party credentials were as impressive to her as Hemingway’s literary ones. Very quickly she produced a car, ration slips for gasoline, and a driver, Tomás, a tiny man whose nearly toothless mouth made him look like one of Velázquez’s dwarves; and on the morning of March 20, Ivens and Hemingway were on their way to their destination, up through the coastal mountains and across the high plain of La Mancha. Although Valencia was warm and springlike, here it was bitterly cold; there was no heat in the car, so Hemingway—not neglecting Tomás—passed around his silver flask, engraved “E.H. from E.H.” and full of scotch. By the time they discerned Madrid rising like a citadel on the horizon, everyone was a little the worse for drink, and Tomás was moved to whiskey-fueled tears by the sight.