Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (50 page)

They wrote to Ilsa’s parents, the Pollaks, in Vienna, saying that they were married, and had gone to Paris—as Kulcsar had urged them to—and were working, but their economic situation was “precarious”; Barea included a photograph of himself, and an attempt at self-explanation or self-justification, telling his new parents-in-law of his love and deep respect for their daughter. But they heard nothing. And then, on March 13, they found out why.

Two days before, after a month of escalating threats and ultimatums that gave the Nazi Party greater and greater power in Austria, Hitler—claiming the alternative was to turn the country into “another Spain”—had forced the resignation of his nominal ally, the Austrian prime minister Kurt von Schuschnigg. On the night of the eleventh, 200,000 German troops had crossed the border, and on the twelfth, the dreaded head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, arrived in Vienna, followed—in a triumphal motorcade—by Hitler himself. No longer a sovereign nation, Austria was now only another part of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich; the streets of Vienna, Barea and Ilsa read in
L’Humanité
, echoed with cries of “One People! One Reich! One Führer!” Within days the anti-Jewish laws of Germany were being enforced in Vienna, the city of Mahler, Schnitzler, and Freud; Jewish shops and homes were looted; Jewish factories, stores, and restaurants were designated by signs forbidding Aryans to patronize them; and Jews were forbidden to own property, to employ or be employed by others, or to practice their professions.

What this meant to the Jewish headmaster Valentin Pollak and to his Gentile wife Alice, Barea and Ilsa could only guess.

*   *   *

Martha landed at Cherbourg on March 28. For her, and for Hemingway, it had been a long separation—more than three months. One day she would write a story about lovers who have been apart for a long time: “You’ve been gone so long I don’t know how to treat you.” They figured it out.
Mr. Scrooby, as friendly as a puppy and as warm as fur
.

They had more than endearments to share: they were, as she’d declared at the beginning, members of the same union, and just now they were needed on the front lines. The situation in Spain was as terrible as Martha had envisioned: in the past week or so the insurgent juggernaut had swept across Aragon and the Loyalist defense line had “crumpled like paper,” as Herbert Matthews would say later. In Barcelona, horrific air raids were killing more than a thousand people a day in sorties that lasted for hours and were being used to test yet one more obscene weapon in the bombardier’s arsenal: antipersonnel bombs that exploded horizontally on impact, shearing trees off below the branch line and vaporizing any organism within range. Between the allies’ anti-intervention policy and the fact that the French government had sealed the border, Spain couldn’t acquire the ammunition or antiaircraft guns to defend itself against the weapons and planes sent by Germany and Italy; and factional fighting was immobilizing the government. It looked entirely possible that the Republic would collapse within a matter of weeks.

John Wheeler at NANA had cabled Hemingway in Paris, asking him to report the developing news from the fascist side instead of returning to his comfortable berth among the Loyalists; but Hemingway wasn’t enthusiastic about following up the request. He had a
Ken
article to write—in which he excoriated the Catholic archbishop of New York, Patrick Cardinal Hayes, for supposed complicity in the Saint Patrick’s Day bombing of Barcelona that killed 118 children—and he was much more concerned about what would happen to the more than 500 wounded American brigaders in Loyalist hospitals in Spain if the Fascists won. On March 29, goaded by Martha to “see … the top people and yell at them,” he made a flying visit to the American ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, in the border town of St. Jean de Luz, where he extracted from the ambassador a promise to evacuate the wounded and the medical personnel looking after them.

He was only gone for half a day, but by the time he returned there was better news: the French government had unsealed the border and promised to ship forty-five planes and some heavy artillery to Spain; and Prime Minister Negrín, pledging that his government would “resist, resist, resist,” had made a radio broadcast asking for 100,000 new volunteers for the army. By the time Hemingway boarded the night train to Perpignan on the thirty-first—Martha was traveling separately with the car that had come on the
Aquitania
—he was feeling a good deal more cheerful. He had company on the train, the
Herald-Tribune
’s Vincent Sheean, whom everyone called Jimmy, and Sheean’s younger
Trib
colleague, Ring Lardner’s son James, a gangly bespectacled twenty-three-year-old who’d become a reporter immediately after graduating from Harvard and, despite his age and inexperience, knew far more about the war and its leading characters than the veteran Sheean did. The three of them sat up much of the night in Sheean’s
wagon-lit
, talking and lubricating themselves with swigs from Hemingway’s capacious silver flask. “I don’t know why you’re going to Spain, anyhow,” grumbled Hemingway to Sheean, at one point. “The only story you could get would be to get killed, and that’ll do you no good. I’ll write that.”

“Not half as good a story as if
you
get killed,” responded Sheean, “and I’ll write that.” Lardner, a kid allowed to sit with the grown-ups, laughed and laughed.

April 1938: Barcelona

The Hotel Majestic was, Jimmy Sheean thought, maybe the worst hotel in Europe. The food was bad, and there wasn’t much of it. The rooms were frequently dark because of power outages, and Barcelona had run out of soap, so the chambermaids stripped the dirty sheets off the beds, ironed them, and put them back on, grimy but freshly pressed. But in the lounge or the big dining room, where the mirrored walls were x-ed with paper strips to protect against air raids, you could nearly always find a group of journalists or furloughed International Brigaders talking or drinking: Sheean, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Tom Delmer, Herbert Matthews, young Jim Lardner, Evan Shipman, Marty Hourihan. (An exception was André Malraux, who stayed with the profiteers and their floozies at the Ritz: “I prefer whores to bores,” he said.) They needed to talk and drink together in the evening, because the daytime was always full of bad news.

By the beginning of April, the rebel army, augmented by Italian troops and German and Italian aircraft, had pushed eastward from Saragossa; and the Loyalists had fallen back, down the valley of the Ebro toward the Mediterranean. On April 3, Lérida, the stronghold of the POUM militia in the days when Capa and Gerda visited it at the beginning of the war, was lost to the Nationalists; the nearby mountain reservoirs and their hydroelectric plants, which supplied much of the power for Barcelona, went with it. Next was Gandesa, where the American and British battalions had both been surrounded, with many killed and more missing. But still the rebels came on, and the beleaguered Loyalist army and International Brigades retreated, trying to preserve men and matériel, regroup, and fight on.

Before dawn most mornings Hemingway and Martha would leave Barcelona, generally with Delmer and Matthews accompanying them, and drive long hours along bomb-pitted roads choked with refugees, soldiers, tanks and artillery, to where the story was today. Sometimes there was fighting along their route and they had to detour; sometimes the Italian Savoias or German Heinkels bombed the road, or the Fiat fighters swooped dangerously low over it, and they had to get out of the car and huddle behind stone walls for shelter. They made an odd sight speeding along in their fancy open car: Hemingway in his ratty wool stocking cap and battered tweeds, Martha with a bandanna tied around her blond bob to keep away the dust from the road, Delmer in a too-small leather aviator’s cap, and Matthews puffing away on his ever-present cigar. People wondered if they were Russians. The weather was unsettlingly balmy and springlike, and the palisaded bluffs along the Ebro, the slopes of the coastal sierra, frothy with almond blossom, and the glassy, foam-edged sea looked like plaster scenery. Even the spring sun, Martha thought, seemed made of “translucent paper.” Except that the thunder of the big guns, the rumble of the tanks, and the
bung-bung-bung
of the bombs dropping from the silver Heinkels and Savoias were real, and territory was being lost and people were dying. The destruction everywhere was the worst she could remember, and her spirits were very low. Although she could still muster fury when writing to Eleanor Roosevelt, privately she felt despair. “It was hard to believe the war is almost over and almost lost,” she wrote in her diary.

On April 4, in the hills behind Rasquera, on the east bank of the Ebro, they found Milton Wolff, Freddy Keller, Alvah Bessie, and several other members of the Washington-Lincoln Battalion, who had had to cut their way through enemy lines and swim naked across the Ebro to safety after being surrounded in the night by Nationalist infantry. Keller had been wounded in the hip, but at least he was alive and accounted for. Many of those who’d tried to swim across had drowned or been shot by the insurgents, and the battalion commissar, Dave Doran, and chief of staff Robert Merriman, whose exploits at Belchite had made Martha “proud as a goat,” were still missing. But these bleak reverses didn’t seem to unsettle Hemingway. From his earliest days hunting and fishing in Michigan, he had always found strength in the company of men, in being a man among men; to be back among the Loyalist commanders he admired seemed to stiffen his spine. And he had Martha beside him, with her long legs and her smart mouth, and that helped. On the tenth, they lunched on mutton chops with tomatoes and onions and drank red wine out of a tin can with Lieutenant Colonel Juan Modesto, the tough, handsome, sarcastic thirty-two-year-old Andalusian Communist, at his headquarters in the middle of a vineyard. Although Modesto seemed weary and grubby in his worn uniform and
alpargatas
, he stated confidently that the Nationalists would never get to the sea. Just then a shell landed a hundred yards away. “They’re shooting at the map,” he said, dismissively. “That sort of shooting isn’t serious.” It was the kind of talk Hemingway loved, and he took on some of Modesto’s cockiness. “Franco’s forces are absolutely held up in their attempt to come down the Ebro,” he told the American readers of his NANA dispatches.

A little more than a week later, though, a midnight bulletin issued by Constancia de la Mora’s office indicated that there was trouble on the coast road south of the river, and the next day, Good Friday, April 15, Hemingway and Martha joined Matthews and Delmer to see for themselves what was happening. It was four in the morning when they left Barcelona, the silver moon dimming the blue glow of the blackout. Delmer drove. Near Tarragona the sun came up, illuminating clusters of refugees traveling north; they weren’t carrying very much, which meant they’d left their homes in a hurry. At Tortosa, at the head of the Ebro delta, a once-picturesque town now laid waste by daily aerial bombardments, the journalists crossed the swollen yellow flood of the river on the great, three-spanned steel bridge and turned left onto the Valencia highway, wondering where the fighting had got to and what they would find around the next bend.

They soon found out. First bombers, then fighter planes roared over the road, and they all dove out of the car to take shelter. Bombs were falling on Tortosa, behind them, and on the Loyalist lines in front of them, and the fighters were strafing Ulldecona, where they were headed. Meanwhile, motorcycle couriers were racing up and down the highway, but not even they seemed to know what was going on. On the outskirts of Ulldecona a group of Loyalist staff officers, huddled over a map, filled the journalists in: the Nationalists had broken through the government lines and were now fighting their way toward Vinaroz, on the coast; two more rebel columns were headed north. Afraid of being trapped by the advancing Nationalists, Hemingway told Delmer to turn around and began retracing their route.

They had been driving for almost eight hours by now and they were dusty and hungry, so they stopped for lunch in an olive grove, where they found Jimmy Sheean, the
Daily Worker
’s Joe North, and two other colleagues, on their way to Ulldecona. As they all ate their sandwiches more bombers flew over, headed for Tortosa, and soon a cloud of smoke and dirt mushroomed on the horizon, accompanied by the continuous thunder of explosive. Finally the bombing stopped, and Hemingway tried to talk Sheean out of continuing toward the front, but Sheean (who suspected Hemingway of trying to keep a scoop to himself) insisted on pressing on.

It was dangerous no matter where you went. As Delmer navigated the fresh bomb craters on the road just outside Tortosa, a guard came running over to the car, waving his arms: the bridge they’d driven over in the morning, the great steel structure that Hemingway had declared as impervious to bombs as “a bottle on a string at a French fair,” had been demolished little more than an hour ago, and the only way across the swollen Ebro was on a rickety footbridge, itself severely battered by the bombardment. Soldiers were hastily laying boards along its length to reinforce it and cover the holes; trucks probably couldn’t cross it, but their car might be able to. The journalists decided to take the risk: the Nationalists’ Savoias could return at any minute, and the car was an easy target. Hemingway and Matthews got out and walked to lighten the load, and Delmer let in the clutch and rolled onto the bridge just behind a mule cart whose iron wheels made the boards rattle alarmingly. There was a gaping hole halfway across and they all averted their eyes so as not to see where they’d end up if the bridge gave way.

Finally they reached the other side, and found themselves in an inferno. Tortosa was still ablaze from the morning’s attacks and Delmer had to speed through streets full of burning debris to the Barcelona highway. There they had to slow down, because the road was clogged with military vehicles and fleeing civilians. Nobody found very much to say. Suddenly exhausted, Martha leaned against the car window and stared at the people they passed: an old woman cradling a chicken, a young woman clutching a canary, a mother incongruously making up her face in a small mirror. “A retreat,” Martha told herself, fighting despair, “can be braver than an attack.”