We Saw Spain Die (63 page)

Of Valentín González, el Campesino, his view confirms that of other observers: ‘He had the strangely magnetic eyes of a madman.’ In contrast, few observers would expect it to be said of the brutal Stalinist
Enrique Líster that he appreciated the importance of good food – ‘He had a cook who had been with Wagon-Lits restaurant cars before the war and in the various times in various retreats in which I managed to pick up a meal at Líster’s headquarters I do not think I ever had a bad one.’ Buckley could also admire Líster ‘handling the remains of an Army corps with coolness and considerable skill’. The greatest admiration is reserved for Negrín, not only for his dynamism but also for his essential kindness:

My chief impression of him was of his strong pity for human suffering. He would look at the newsboy from whom he was buying an evening paper and say ‘Having those eyes treated, sonny? No? Well go to Dr So-and-So at such-and-such a clinic and give him this card and he’ll see that you get treated right away.’ Or out in the country, he would stop in small villages and talk to the peasants, look in at their miserable homes, peer behind the easy mask of picturesqueness which veils so much disease and suffering in Spain. Before leaving he would slip some money or a card which would ensure free medical treatment into the hand of the woman of the house. That was Negrín as I knew him.
¹¹

Buckley’s eye for the telling detail brings the politics of the Second Republic to life. During the run-up to the November 1933 elections, Buckley visited CEDA headquarters and noted the lavish quality of the posters used in Gil Robles’ campaign. On 21 April 1934, he attended the rain-soaked rally of the Juventud de Acción Popular at El Escorial. The parading, saluting and chanting led Buckley to see it as the trial for the creation of fascist shock troops. A turn-out of 50,000 had been expected but, despite the transport facilities, the giant publicity campaign and the large sums spent, fewer than half that number arrived. Besides, as Buckley observed, ‘there were too many peasants at El Escorial who told reporters quite cheerfully that they had been sent by the local political boss with fare and expenses paid’. On the eve of the miners’ insurrection in Asturias, on the night of 5 October, Buckley was with the Socialists Luis Araquistain, Juan Negrín and Julio Álvarez del Vayo in a bar in Alcalá discussing the wisdom of Largo Caballero’s
strategy. During the siege of Madrid, he described how the Hotel Palace was turned into a hospital. During the battle of Guadalajara, he interviewed Italian regular troops who had gone to Spain in response to formal military orders. At the end of May 1937, he hastened to Almería to examine the damage done by the German warship
Admiral Scheer
on 31 May 1937 in reprisal for the Republican bombing of the cruiser
Deutschland
on 29 May 1937, and produced a grim description of damage wreaked on the working-class districts of this undefended port.

As a witness to such scenes, Buckley was overcome with moral indignation, although his sympathies for the poor of Spain were engaged as early as 1931. Reflecting on the situation of Alfonso XIII on the night before his departure from Madrid, he asks rhetorically: ‘Where are your friends? Can anyone believe that this fine people of Spain have hearts of stone? No. If you had ever shown generosity or comprehension of their aches and struggles they would not leave you friendless tonight. You never did.’ Although a practising Catholic throughout his life, Buckley wavered in his Catholic faith because of right-wing Catholic hostility to the Republic, commenting: ‘Much as I disliked the mob violence and the burning of churches I felt that the people in Spain who professed most loudly their Catholic faith were the most to blame for the existence of illiterate masses and a threadbare national economy.’ His humanity was brought into conflict with his religious faith, as can be seen in his vivid accounts of the daily lives of near-starving
braceros
in the south.

To some degree, the greatest object of Buckley’s indignation was the role of the British Government and the diplomatic corps. He commented:

When I did talk to any of our diplomatic officers I found them very complaisantly disposed towards the Spanish Right. They looked upon them as a guarantee against Bolshevism, much preferable to have them in power than either Socialists or Republicans for this reason, and they would gently pooh-pooh any suggestion that the Spanish Right might one day side with Germany and Italy and we might suddenly find our Empire routes in danger.

He was hardly surprised to be told by his friend, Jay Allen, that he had seen Italian pilots landing in Gibraltar and allowed by British officials with courtesy and facility to pass through on to Seville. After the bombing of the German battle-cruiser
Deutschland,
the German crew members killed were buried with full military honours in Gibraltar. After the German revenge attack on an undefended Almería, Buckley witnessed the funeral of one of the victims. Looking at the worn faces and gnarled hands of those who followed the coffin, he wondered ‘how it is that so few people care how much the working masses suffer’. He was appalled that, while the port of Gandía was bombed by German aircraft and British ships were destroyed, the Royal Navy destroyer standing nearby in Valencia was ordered to do nothing. Effectively, the picture painted by Buckley is one of the British establishment putting its class prejudices before its strategic interests. In this regard, he quotes a British diplomat who says: ‘The essential thing to remember in the case of Spain is that it is a civil conflict and that it is very necessary that we stand by our class.’
¹²

Buckley certainly did not share the anti-Communist hysteria of the British middle classes. He was sceptical of claims that the Soviet Union wanted to create a Spanish satellite:

Even supposing the case that the Communist Party succeeded in obtaining complete control of Government and nation, it would still, presumably, be composed of Spaniards; it seemed to me that it would be very difficult for Russia to impose any particular line of conduct not approved by Spaniards as a whole… Russia had, of course, every interest in saving the Republic but I do not think that apart from a natural desire to see the Spanish Communist Party as powerful as possible and to spread its ideas as much as possible, the Russians had any idea of making Spain into a subject state of their own and I fail entirely to see how they could have done so at such a long distance… A good deal has been written about Russian activities in Spain during the civil war but I certainly did not see any numbers of Russians about either in the police force or as private persons, except for the diplomatic staff, a few journalists, and a few military
advisers. There were also a number of aviators and tank experts from October 1936 for some time until most of them were gradually replaced, but all of these latter kept very much to themselves.

For that reason, he was less than convinced by Colonel Segismundo Casado, commander of the Republican Army of the Centre, when he argued that his coup on 4 March 1939 was intended ‘to save Spain from Communism’.
¹³

While working for the
Daily Telegraph,
Henry Buckley established friendships with many of the most prominent war correspondents who worked in Spain, including Jay Allen, Vincent Sheehan, Lawrence Fernsworth, Herbert Matthews and Ernest Hemingway. Quietly spoken – one Spanish journalist commented that his speaking voice was
‘casi un susurro
’ (almost a sigh) – Buckley was extremely popular among his colleagues, who called him ‘Enrique’. Kitty Bowler made a trip to Madrid in October 1936, which she described as ‘a nightmare’, but it was made bearable by Henry Buckley. He rescued her from the unwelcome attentions of men in her hotel and she later wrote of him as ‘the sweetest reporter in Spain. His everyday banter acted like a welcome cocktail.’
¹⁴
Josephine Herbst met him in April 1937 and remembered him as ‘a wonderful fellow, and with more background about Spain’s past than any other correspondent in Spain’.
¹⁵
The young Geoffrey Cox remembered ‘a small, quietly spoken, highly able man who showed himself remarkably resistant to propaganda pressures from all sides’.
¹⁶
Constancia de la Mora described Henry Buckley as ‘a little sandy-haired man, with a shy face and a little tic at the corner of the mouth which gave his dry humour a sardonic twist’.
¹⁷

Yet his quiet manner belied the courage which saw him visiting every front at considerable risk to himself. In the latter stages of the battle of the Ebro, on 5 November 1938, he crossed the river in a boat with Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Sheean, Robert Capa and Herbert Matthews. He commented later:

We were sent out to cover the news on Líster’s front – Hemingway was then reporting to the North American
Newspaper Alliance. At that time, virtually all the bridges across the Ebro had been smashed by the fighting and a series of treacherous spikes had been sunk in the river to discourage all navigation on it. However, since there was no other way of getting to the front, the five of us set out in a boat with the idea of rowing along the shore until we got to the deepest part of the river, then crossing, and rowing back to the opposite shore. The trouble was that we got caught in the current and started drifting into the centre. With every moment that passed, the situation became more menacing, for, once on the spikes, the bottom of the boat was certain to be ripped out; almost as certain was that we would drown once the boat had capsized. It was Hemingway who saved the situation, for he pulled on the oars like a hero, and with such fury that he got us safely across.

Buckley would later joke that Hemingway ‘was a terrific person, kindly, almost infantile at times. I think he almost loved the war, exactly like some of the characters in his own books.’
¹⁸

Buckley was, of course, playing down his own bravery. Hemingway described him during the war as ‘a lion of courage, though a very slight, even frail creature with (or so he says in his book) jittery nerves’.
¹⁹
The eternally cynical Cedric Salter, who occasionally accompanied him in the last stages of the war, commented that Buckley ‘was always quietly gay when things looked bad, but perhaps because he is made in a more sensitive mold than the others I always felt that in order to do the things he did required more real moral courage for him than from the others’.
²⁰
Salter’s insight is substantiated by Buckley’s own account. He recalled a conversation with several colleagues after a visit to the front. With considerable understatement, he wrote:

Our dangers came from long-distance shelling and from the constant bombing and machine-gunning of the roads behind the lines. The risk was actually not very great. I had no hesitation in saying that I always felt highly nervous when getting near the front. Nor had I any shame in confessing that when I lay in some field and watched bombers coming towards the point where I
was lying and heard the ‘whur-whur-whur’ as the bombs came speeding down, was I ever anything but thoroughly frightened. Even more terrifying, I think, is being machine-gunned. You know that a bomb must practically fall on top of you in an open field in order to hurt you. But it is only rarely that any shelter against machine-gunning can be found when one dives haphazard from a car with the planes coming over and minutes or even seconds in which to throw oneself into the best shelter available.
²¹

After the capture of Catalonia by the rebel forces at the end of January 1939, Buckley, along with Herbert Matthews and Vincent Sheean and other correspondents, had joined the exodus of refugees. He and Matthews established themselves in a hotel in Perpignan and devoted themselves to reporting on the appalling conditions in the concentration camps improvised by the French authorities into which the refugees had been herded. They managed to intervene to rescue people they knew from the groups being taken to the camps.
²²

Although he says little of his own role, Buckley’s pages are alive with fury when he reaches his horrendous account of refugees arriving at the French frontier. He was outraged that Britain and France did not do more:

The whole world was excited about the rescuing of some 600 chefs d’oeuvres of Spanish and Italian art which were being guarded near Figueras after their long odyssey. But we cared nothing about the soul of a people which was being trampled on. We did not come to cheer them; to encourage them. To have taken these half million and cherished them and given them work and comfort in Britain and France and their colonies, that indeed would have been culture in its real sense of the word. I love El Greco, I have spent countless hours just sitting looking at the Prado Titians and some of Velázquez’s works fascinate me, but frankly I think that it would have been better for mankind if they had all been burnt in a pyre if the loving and warm attention that was lavished on them could have been devoted to
this half-million sufferers. Better still if we had hearts big enough to cherish both, but since apparently we have not, it would at least have been a happier omen if such drops of the milk of human kindness which we still possess could have gone to the human sufferers. Yet while men well known in Catalan and Spanish cultural life in addition to tens of thousands of unknown persons were lying exposed to the elements and an average of sixty persons a week were dying of sickness and disease among the refugees in and around Perpignan, the art treasures left for Geneva in 1,842 cases on February 13; they were well protected from wind and rain. Women and children and sick and wounded men could sleep in the open air, almost uncared for. But the twenty trucks of Prado pictures had great tarpaulin covers and the care of a score of experts.
²³

In the summer of 1938, Henry Buckley had gone to Sitges with Luis Quintanilla and Herbert Matthews. Quintanilla introduced him to the Catalan painter Joaquim Sunyer. He in turn presented Buckley to a Catalan girl, María Planas. They fell in love and quickly decided to marry. Despite the fact that the Catholic Church was still proscribed in Republican Spain, Constancia de la Mora used her influence to permit them to be married in a chapel used by the Basques exiled in Catalonia. After the Spanish Civil War, Buckley was posted to Berlin, where he worked until two days before the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was invited to leave by Hitler’s government. After a brief time in Amsterdam covering the German invasion, he then spent a year and a half in Lisbon before becoming a war correspondent for the
Daily Express
with the British forces. Thereafter, he and María were able to see each other just once a year in Gibraltar. As a correspondent for Reuters, he landed with British forces at the Anzio beachhead and was very badly wounded when a German shell exploded near a jeep in which he was riding on the drive on Rome. As a consequence, he was left with shrapnel in his right side and was in acute pain for the rest of his life. Immediately after the war, he was attached to the Allied forces in Berlin, and was later Reuters correspondent in Madrid and during 1947 and 1948 in Rome.