Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (54 page)

With Europe hovering on the brink of war, however,
Collier’s
wanted Martha in Czechoslovakia, not Paris or the Riviera, and she had to cut short their reunion and fly to Prague. Hemingway, despite his brief from NANA to cover a wider European conflict, didn’t go with her. Was he reluctant to blow his alibi by filing dispatches from Czechoslovakia when Martha was also reporting from the same place? Or honoring his promise to Pauline to stay away from potential combat? Or was he angry with Martha for paying more attention to an assignment than to him? In the preface to his soon-to-be-published collection of stories he’d set forth a kind of manifesto: “In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled … and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.” Now, however, he took his instrument and went pheasant shooting in the Sologne, then headed back to Paris to work on two Spanish war stories for
Esquire
.

*   *   *

Prague, thought Claud Cockburn, was just like Madrid in ’36—all the same people seemed to be turning up (himself included).
Next thing you know, we’ll have shells falling on the hotel
. In his dual capacity as correspondent for both
The Week
and
The Daily Worker
, he’d gone to see the Soviet ambassador, anxious to find out what Russia’s position in the Czech crisis would be: for Russia was also a party to the Franco-Czech mutual defense treaty and could step in to defend Czechoslovakia with its formidable air force if France agreed to do its part. Almost the first person he saw at the embassy was Mikhail Koltsov, from whom little had been heard since he’d been recalled to Moscow from Spain almost a year previously. It was a relief to know he was not only alive, seemingly unscathed by Stalin’s purges, but still writing for
Pravda
; and excerpts from his “Spanish Diary” had been running in the magazine
Novyi Mir
to considerable acclaim. Perhaps not coincidentally,
Pravda
had also just published an article by his friend Ernest Hemingway on “the barbarism of Fascist interventionists in Spain”; if Koltsov had helped to snare this big-name American author for
Pravda
’s pages, surely that would help keep him in Stalin’s good graces?

Koltsov, his teeth as bad as ever and his humor as dark, was cynical about his standing with the general secretary. Stalin had by now arrested, tried, and executed all the members of Lenin’s original Politburo, and the man who had helped him to do this, the “poison dwarf” Nikolai Yezhov, seemed himself on the verge of being ousted (or worse) by his own lieutenant, Lavrenti Beria. Koltsov made jokes even about this.
Everyone gets his turn—why not me?
Over lunch with Cockburn, Koltsov acted out the scene of his own imagined trial: the implacable prosecutor hammering away at him, his fatally clownish responses, the inevitable verdict.
Guilty of telling bad jokes in the people’s tribunal!
And laughed, as he had when showing Hemingway and Martha his hidden supply of cyanide. Then, serious, he told Cockburn that Russian planes were already at the airfield outside Prague; if Benes wanted them, if he would fight, they were his. Of course, this would mean that the Red Army, or at least the Soviet air force, would have to occupy Czechoslovakia in order to defend it, a situation not without a certain dark humor of its own. Benes would have to decide whether to embrace it.

Which was why, shortly after his lunch with Cockburn, Koltsov was sitting on a wooden bench in a dimly lit hallway at Hradçany Castle waiting to talk to the Czech president. Suddenly he heard the tapping of high heels and looked up to find Martha Gellhorn, her blond bob bright, clutching her silver fox fur around her against the autumnal chill.

She, too, wanted to talk to Benes, it seemed, and like Koltsov she also had an offer for him—to use
Collier’s
as a platform from which to “win the public opinion of America”; but despite lobbying the president’s secretary and his chief of protocol, she was getting nowhere with her requests. Sitting down on the bench beside Koltsov, she chattered away in French—their only common language—telling him of what she’d been doing in Spain, how pitiful the refugees were, particularly the children, how bad the bombing was. Koltsov seemed not to be attending. After a while he stood up. He’d been waiting to talk to Benes for four days, he said; but it didn’t seem worthwhile to wait any longer. He took Martha to dinner in a workingman’s restaurant in the old quarter, not the sort of place he would have frequented in Madrid; they spoke, each despairingly, of the situation in Europe, and afterward, on a street corner, they shook hands goodbye.

On September 29, Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier flew to Munich to meet with Hitler; twenty-four hours later, a protocol giving Hitler what he wanted in Czechoslovakia had been signed, and Chamberlain had a goodwill memorandum from the Reichschancellor that would, he told his fellow Britons, ensure “peace with honor.” Martha, after making several more vain attempts to contact Benes, returned to Paris; and Koltsov—his mission unaccomplished—went back to an uncertain future in Moscow. Before he left, he saw Cockburn one last time. They both had to know what was going to happen now, and it was worse than a victory for Hitler in Central Europe. Stalin had finally lost patience—
faith
was not a word you would apply to him—with the democracies; to protect himself, and Russia, he would act on the threat hinted at by Foreign Minister Litvinov almost a year ago. He would begin taking his chess pieces off the board and make common cause with his former enemy, Germany.

The most obvious victim of this decision was Czechoslovakia; almost unnoticed, in the din that had been emanating from Munich and Prague, was Spain. For at the height of the Czech crisis Stalin had agreed that Prime Minister Negrín, in a bid for the sympathies of Britain, France, the United States, and other governments nominally opposed to “foreign intervention” in Spain, could announce the unconditional withdrawal of the International Brigades. This the Spanish premier did in a speech to the League of Nations on September 21, the day that the terms of the Sudeten handover were also made public. In practical terms the gesture meant little—there were only about seven thousand
brigadistas
still in Spain—but it was invested with a wealth of symbolism.

None of which was lost on Koltsov. “The only thing to say,” he told Cockburn, “is that in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne.”

September 1938: Paris

On the day the Munich pact was signed, Barea and Ilsa moved out of the Hotel Delambre. When the mobilization posters went up all over Paris the manager of the hotel had demanded they pay their back rent immediately: he and his wife wanted to close the hotel and go to the country to escape the war they were sure was coming, he said, and in any case they didn’t want foreigners—the words
sales metèques
, “dirty wogs,” weren’t used but implied—sponging on them anymore. “I’ve spoken about you to the police anyhow,” the manager growled.

Hoping a glass of wine would help him figure out what to do, Barea had gone to the Dôme; and there, by some miracle, he encountered a prosperous Cuban he and Ilsa had befriended in Madrid and hadn’t seen since. Horrified to hear of the fix Barea and Ilsa were in, he insisted on lending them the money they owed their landlord; and a Norwegian journalist, one of Ilsa’s contacts from the old days, said he could rent them a room in his airy, modern flat. They could hardly believe their good fortune.

Soon after they moved in, Barea received a parcel of books from Barcelona: the first copies of
Valor y miedo
, the book of stories he’d written before leaving Spain. Paging through them, Barea allowed himself a little flicker of pride that he’d been able to make something simple out of something so tumultuous:
Maybe a little lightweight,
he thought,
but not so bad
.

It was the only good news from Spain. After some initial success the Ebro campaign had turned sour, with the Nationalist armies pushing the government’s forces back again toward the Ebro and the Rio Segre. Then Negrín had announced the dissolution of the Brigades, and Britain and France had made a deal with Hitler for the corpse of Czechoslovakia.
This is the end of Spain’s last, best hope
, Barea told himself. Now Russia would withdraw her aid to Spain. Even worse, people like himself and Ilsa would be considered troublemakers, Reds who wanted to drag all of Europe into their conflict.

But as the trees turned bronze and yellow along the boulevards and the banks of the Seine, and peace—however spurious—seemed to have been at least temporarily bought, he and Ilsa allowed themselves a tiny sigh of relief. They had a comfortable place to stay; they were working. Perhaps it was foolish to always imagine the worst that could happen, instead of the best. Strolling one late golden afternoon along the gravel paths in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Hemingway had liked to walk when he was young and unknown in Paris in the twenties, they saw an old couple, he bearded and erect, carrying a silver-handled cane, she petite, lively, elegantly dressed in black. “When we’re as old as they, we might be rather like them,” Ilsa murmured. “We’ll take walks, and tell each other about old times, and smile at the dreadful things that happened to us when we were younger.” They were just enjoying the idea—themselves, old, at peace, together—when the old gentleman bowed, kissed the lady’s hand, and strode away, leaving her alone; and Ilsa’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

October 1938: Barcelona

Early in the second week of October Robert Capa returned to Spain. He’d done all he could in China, including shooting a Bosch-like series of color photographs for
Life
—the first he’d ever taken, and the first color prints
Life
had ever published—of the aftermath of a bombing raid on Hankow; but, as he’d written in his English-language practice sentences,
he missed his Europe grievously
. It was time to come back.

Walking into the Majestic bar, he was greeted with a chorus of welcome from all the journalists: Jesus, it was about time. Where the hell had he been? He dumped his camera bag on the floor and sat down and almost immediately had a circle around him: Matthews, and Georges Soria from
L’Humanité
, and André Malraux, who was in Barcelona trying to shoot a movie of his Spanish war novel,
L’Espoir
, and Sheean, and Sheean’s English wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson (whom everybody called Dinah). The couple had recently come in from Prague, where Sheean had been covering the Munich crisis; and Dinah was feeling very much like the new girl in school who doesn’t know anyone. Telling stories and joking in French and his newly acquired English, Capa soon made her feel as much a part of the group as the old hands were. And the next day, when he discovered her sitting forlornly in the lobby because no one had arranged transport or passes for her, he grabbed her arm. “I take you,” he announced; and dragged her along to Constancia de la Mora’s office. “Connie,” he called out to the propaganda chief, “Diana would like to do something about Spain. Speak or write or whatever you want. Find something.” And he left.

On the sixteenth he went to Falset, a hamlet ninety miles south and west of Barcelona, where the International Brigades were to have a final muster. He’d been with these soldiers—and some who had not made it this far—in Aragon, in the Guadarrama, in Madrid, at Peñarroya; shared meals and cigarettes and jokes with them; come under fire with them. And he wanted to be with them today.

It was hazy, but the autumn sun was still warm on the terraced hills. Near the village of Falset a makeshift reviewing stand had been set up by the side of the dusty road; flags were clustered around it, including the flag of the Spanish Republic, the hammer and sickle, and a mordantly funny hand-lettered banner with the words “
J’Aime Berlin
”—Chamberlain—drawn under a swastika with an interdict symbol. A meager band struck up, just a couple of slide trombones, trumpets, some clarinets, and a tuba, and the Brigade columns, including a detachment of cavalry, began to march past the reviewing stand: the men of the Lincoln Battalion (now formally the Lincoln-Washington Battalion), 300 out of the 4,000 who had originally sailed to Spain, with their lanky twenty-three-year-old newly created major, Milton Wolff, striding along at their head; Canadian Mac-Paps (the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion); Polish Dombrowskis; Yugoslavs, Britons, Czechs, Austrians—and the 150 survivors of the Thaelmann Column, the heroes of Madrid, all of them refugees from Germany who were now without a homeland, marching to their anthem, “Freiheit.” The men had already given up their weapons, so their arms swung loosely by their sides until it came time for them to throw the clenched-fist salute; their numbers appeared pitifully small, and as they stood at ease listening to the speeches of their commanders, they were dwarfed by the hills of the foreign country they had come to defend.

Eight days later came the official dissolution of the Brigades, at a mill at Montblanch that had been converted into a hospital for the wounded. Capa got there early, while soldiers were still sweeping the courtyard with leafy branches (even brooms were hard to find in wartime) and flags and garlands were being hung on the balcony where the dignitaries would stand. The Brigaders trickled in, some still in their tattered uniforms but most in mufti, since all government-issued equipment and clothing had to be left behind; as the ceremony began they formed themselves into columns, filling the courtyard, and Capa clambered up onto the balcony to shoot the crowd: a sea of upturned faces, some lined and coarse with stubble, others youthful, under berets or caps or visored officers’ hats. Some of the soldiers had their dogs with them, curled at their feet or cradled in their arms. The band played, the speeches began: Colonel Modesto, dark and romantic-looking in his uniform, his voice breaking as he spoke of their “shared experiences” and “common suffering”; then Prime Minister Negrín, in riding breeches and puttees, offering “profound and eternal gratitude” for their help. “
¡Salud, hermanos!
” he cried, raising his fist to the side of his head; with tears streaming down their faces, they saluted him back—and the commissar for the Army of the Ebro read them, for the last time, the order to dismiss.