Savage Coast (38 page)

But it reached the crowd of Belgians, the song came nearer, the great crying welcome to the army came, mixing, until the chorus became a crying greet:

“
C'est la lutte finale
,

“
Groupons-nous, et demain
,”

                                 
. . . El directivo de la C.N.T. Francisco

                                 
Ascaso, Eduardo Gorgot, José Biota,

                                 
Javier Noguera, Alejandro Prodonis y

                                 
Fuentes, Concepción Canet y Alcaráz.

                                 
Vicente Vázquez, Salvador Guerrero,

                                 
José González y Valencia, Enrique Arnau

                                 
y Erude, Julián Gil y González . . .

“L'Internationale . . .”

Here! The first line of set faces, brackets of arms set in perpetual fist, red bands about the head, straight stony foreheads dark.

“
Sera le genre humain
. . .”

In a high sung note, praising, crying, speeding an army of unarmed men, who walked rope-soled, blankets slung at the shoulder, their women with them, a few, among them, a few, running beside in the blaze, past the shining confiscated roadsters, the homemade armored cars, the lines of spectators, and the Olympic lines who backed them, singing the unique song, finally arriving to the double English version, the English and Americans singing, welcoming, as the army passed; an army, not in the pathetic small battalions of the night before, but rounded up, strong in numbers, unshakable, but barely clothed, barely helmeted, barely armed.

They passed for minutes, the lines of soldiers, passing to a new phase of war. The city was strong now in its own defense; in a day, everything would be running once more, the city would be held; but these were going to meet the outer front. Almost exhausted by the internal battle, with the strenuous look of purity on their faces, they must be renewed to the next front.

They must be renewed. They must be enough.

                                 
. . . Francisco Sanchis y Fernández,

                                 
Francisco López González, Salvador

                                 
Vidal y Perrino, José Martí, Luis

                                 
Pius, José Parera y Cabré, Alejo

                                 
Sáez de Sanmiguel, Luis Botella y

                                 
José M. Valenzuela.

                                 
Francisco Albella Vázquez, Ginés

                                 
Mula, Juan Fuster y Segú, Pedro

                                 
González, Teresa Querol y Querol,

                                 
Lorenzo Cabrizas y Mercader.

                                 
Bonifacio González, Antonio Vicente

                                 
Marco, José A. Clemente, José Orriols.

                                 
A esta lista hay que añadir Eugenio

                                 
Preimau, José Vila y Peiró, Luis

                                 
Mitjavila, Guillermo Prat, José Pros,

                                 
José Mirato Fornés, José Fabrés, que

                                 
ingresaron ayer, por la tarde, a más

                                 
de nueve muertos ingresados también

                                 
al mismo tiempo, los cuales hasta

                                 
ahora no han podido ser identificados . . .

Now, they touched, the two streams, at different speeds, with different meanings, changing each other subtly, strengthening each other, and changing each other's speed, according to laws of hydraulics, streams of armies passing friends, leaving their cities, saluting each other.

A woman ran alongside the Americans. She was trying to reach her son. The line was moving again, falling in behind the army. Hans was back. Helen said to him, “Do they think we're going to Saragossa?”

The woman cut in, joining the line. “American?” she asked. “Are the Olimpiada people with the army?”

“Yes,” said Hans across Helen.

“¡
Viva Olimpiada
!” answered the woman, with an abrupt nod of her head. “You see how they care how you sympathize with us.”

“Do they think we're going to the Front?” Helen asked. The cheers, the welcomes, the acclaim the line was receiving seemed too much. They entered the Plaza de Cataluña again. The army should have all the cheering.

“Only a very few, perhaps,” the woman answered. “They know you are with the Games.”

“With Catalonia,” said Hans.

“Bravo, you are good people,” the woman said, dropping out of line. The plaza was opening before them.

The army was continuing, cutting an avenue of shouts and cries, vivid red and blue and black, and the few uniforms and helmets spotting the march with khaki and metal. They were going on very rapidly, their faces in the pure set, the vigor and effort very plain. This was where the Olympic line broke off. They slowed, swung flags, turning off, breaking parade formation; nobody proceeded, the Americans turned, the English and Norwegian, Belgian, Dutch, and the few Italians and Germans, all turning, watching the army go, marching through the shot stone, the streets of noise, the brilliant farewell, hurrying, with set, young faces to the Fascist line.

                 
MES HOMES!

                 
MES ARMES!
⁹⁸

A
s the army moved away from them, they broke ranks, standing in the street now as anomalous crowd, broken through by pedestrians. From the front, one of the Catalan speakers waved and shouted; they turned to hear; he waved them on with him to the next square. They followed in small groups, losing the line of nationality they had kept in the march, taking down the flags. The citizens who had been magnetized to the parade joined them, calling to friends in the street as they went along, so that the line grew, becoming half Barcelona, half Olympic.

Peter ran up to Helen and Hans. “I found it!” he said, out of breath. “They say we can go swimming off the end of the piers—” He had a little package of the suits under his arm. “That must be where those boys were swimming as the
Djeube
went out.” He thrust his head up and looked over the crowd with a farsighted bird's look. “As soon as this is over,” he said. “What's up?”

Hans watched him quietly. “One more meeting,” he answered. He held Helen's hand very tightly, so that her knuckles pressed together in the fast grip. “The square's a few blocks off.”

Peter turned and waved to Olive to come up. As he waved, a man standing on the curb noticed the gesture, and hurried over. It was Spanner. He looked from one to the other, the cheek-veins visibly purpling in his surprise and effort to straighten things out.

“Here,” he said, “you don't have to be doing this, you don't have
to be marching with a crowd like this, you're all right without it, you're Americans—”

“That's right,” said Peter.

“Well,” Spanner went on, his short legs pumping to keep up with them, “the city's not so bad by now, it'll all be cleaned up in a couple of days.”

“Of course,” Helen agreed, staying close to Hans, but hearing Peter and Spanner talking loudly beside her, “everybody's been saying the same thing.”

“This can't last,” Spanner said violently. “The reaction will set in any day now. The rebels will march in here and clean up, they'll put the city on its feet in no time. Why, the people here are religious, they won't have to wait for Mola's army—do you think they'll stand for these church-burnings? No sirree, they won't—”

Peter cut him short. “Do they look as if they wouldn't?” he asked, gripping Spanner's elbow and pulling him around to face the street.

“Oh, look!” Spanner said, contempt darkening his face, making the egg-blue eyes brighter and shallower. “They couldn't get any word out. But the post office is open now, and the cables—”

“See here, Spanner. If we thought the Fascists were coming in, we'd have got out of this city so damn fast, by foot, or any other way there was,” Peter stopped him again. “We stayed because it was in the hands of people we trusted. And the same people are leading this march, and we're wearing this black”—he put out his arm like someone who asks to have his muscle felt—“for the same people. That's how it is.”

“Well, then,” said the newspaper man, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his hands, “my mistake. But it seems to me—I thought you were just stringing along with these people for the time being . . .”

A new flood of people joined their line, and Spanner got cut off,
wiping his hands, stepping back to stand on the curb; he made a few notes on a little pad, and was enclosed by the crowd and finally blotted out.

“If
that's
going into the
Paris Herald-Trib
,” Olive remarked, “and if
that's
a sample of what the papers are saying . . . Look, Peter! He said the post office was open. Come on, we'd better send cables. Helen, you've got to.”

The old connections were being set up.

“Yes,” Helen answered, “I do. I'll hurry, Hans, I'll come to the square. I won't say anything about plans.”

“No, don't,” he looked down at her gravely, “they ought to give us all our orders today sometime.”

“Don't you want to send a message, that you're safe?” Olive asked him.

He shook his head. “
Kann nicht
,” he said.

THE POST OFFICE
held long lines at all the windows. A representative from the Belgian team was cabling, and Toni was filling out a form for the Hungarians. He motioned them over to him. “I've had to cross out two,” he told them, pointing with his pen at the form, “just don't say anything about the war. They seem to be nervous about spies.”

They were sending the word
safe
. Olive looked down at the word, still in wet ink on the ruled line. “It's a very strange thing to say about us at this point,” she said in a small voice. “The last things we've been feeling are courage, smugness, safety—what this sounds like.”

Helen put her hand on Olive's shoulder, looking with her at the form. “Oh, it's simple enough. Whatever we said would be three-quarters untrue.”

The clerk at the wicket counted words. He looked up at them, with the same detective look that the officers at the frontier had. “Straight English? No code?” he barked, and hammered the stamps
down with military sharpness when they nodded. He urged them on with the sideway motion of his head.

Toni was waiting at the door, smiling into the sun.

“Hurry!” he said. “The meeting!”

THE LITTLE SQUARE
shot out of the dark streets into full sunlight, watercolor bright, clasped around with the government buildings. The ornate, full-breasted statues, the scrollwork in stone, the pompous rows of windows—and, lined along a balcony, the officials, waving down at the Olympic members, who were lost in the city crowd that waved back with them.

The sun picked out every detail, heated the stones of the street, flamed through the wind, white. High up, on one of the rooftops, laundry flashed, whipped into flags like the white truceflags that recurred all through the residential sections. But this was a line of white, flapping, about the shoulders of the two soldiers in their blue uniforms, faced in red, with silver buttons. They leaned on their carbines, looking down at the crowd, backed by the pure blue and white of sky and laundry.

There should be churchbells ringing, bells, that is.

The line of government representatives, bowed and smiled, straightened, with the look of energy on their faces; as all those in authority had tapped, it seemed, the pure energy, either they had opened their reservoirs for this effort, or they were more tired than human beings can survive. The kids on thrones, Peter had said of the boy who relaxed against red velvet on the balcony of Communist headquarters. Here were the older statesmen, with the same look.

On the margin, the two American school teachers who had stayed at the Madrid were telling their story to Johnson; the adventure of being at Sitges, the resort, when the war broke out, of trying to get a cab in from the coast, and standing helpless until the first man with a gun came along to offer them reassurance and a place
for the night; imagine, the first man we saw, armed to the teeth! they cried; the story of the boy on the shore who ran up the steps of the church as they were about to set fire to it, crying, “Don't do it, it brings tourists, and also, it is beautiful,” and preventing the burning with his argument.