Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (38 page)

As if all this good fortune weren’t enough, Capa had had another of his ideas, this time about something even more ambitious than their original expedition to Spain. On July 7, just days ago, the Empire of Japan—an ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, hungry for territory and historically opposed to Russia—had declared war on China; this war was going to be a big story, he knew it, and no European or American journalists were on the spot yet. He’d had gone to see Richard de Rochemont of
Life
and had asked him to send the two of them to cover it. De Rochemont had promised him an answer soon. It would mean a long sea voyage to a place unlike any they’d ever been to; it would be just the two of them, far from home; but they would be working together, on
Life
’s masthead alongside Alfred Eisenstadt and Margaret Bourke-White;
Life
paid well, and their photographs would be seen by millions of readers. Would Gerda do it?

If Capa had worried about Gerda’s diffidence, her self-protectiveness, her need to put personal and professional distance between them, he need not have. She couldn’t
wait
to go. She just had to return to Spain to see the Loyalists win at Brunete and get those pictures; but she’d only stay ten days. Then she’d come straight back to Paris; by then Capa should have good news from
Life
and they’d start packing for China. She didn’t promise more than that; and perhaps he was wise enough not to ask.

On July 14, Bastille Day, a crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands marched through the streets of Paris, which were hung with tricolors and red bunting. Everywhere there were banners calling for aid to the Spanish republic, or dissolution of the fascist leagues; everybody sang the “Marseillaise” and the “Internationale.” In the morning the gray skies had seemed to promise rain, but by evening the clouds were blowing away, and Capa and Gerda went dancing up in Montmartre, on the Place du Tertre, just beneath the white domes of Sacre-Coeur, with an acquaintance from Spain, a young American wire-service correspondent who had quit to join the International Brigades, and his Viennese girlfriend.

The four young people were gay: it had been an exhilarating afternoon, and Capa and Gerda, at least, had much to celebrate. They had money in their pockets, their work was everywhere, and they were on the brink of a great adventure on the other side of the world. At the back of all their minds was the possibility that there was danger ahead for each of them; but tonight there was music—“Parlez-moi d’amour” was big that year—and their bodies moving together as they danced, and the smell of the soft breeze, and the sky over Sacre-Coeur, pierced by a thousand stars.

July 1937: Valencia/Madrid

Constancia de la Mora was at the end of her rope: with the fighting at Brunete every correspondent in Spain wanted to get to Madrid, and she just didn’t have enough cars and drivers and fuel to go around. So when Gerda Taro showed up, fresh from her holiday in Paris, and asked for transport to the combat zone, she couldn’t help her. Maybe she snapped at the girl just a little—it was hot and the phone kept ringing and she was tired; but Gerda didn’t pout, or leave the Propaganda Ministry in a huff. Instead she went out and bought Connie de la Mora a bunch of flowers, and left them on her desk with a polite little note, apologizing for giving her trouble when she was so busy. And she hitched a ride in another correspondent’s car.

When she got to the Alianza in Madrid she learned that things weren’t going well at Brunete. Stretched to their utmost in the attempt to advance against the Nationalists in the blistering July weather, the Republican forces were short of food, water, ammunition, bandages, stretcher bearers, ambulances, everything. The government’s Chatos and Moscas had been outnumbered and outgunned by the Condor Legion’s new Messerschmitt bombers, and the bare baked earth of the Castilian plain offered the Loyalist forces no cover. Losses were mounting: 3,000 men had fallen between the tenth and the sixteenth, among them the hugely popular George Nathan, operations chief of the British and American Fifteenth Brigade. On the eighteenth, the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Nationalists launched a counteroffensive whose casualties included Virginia Woolf’s nephew, the ambulance driver Julian Bell. Both sides seemed locked in a grim dance of death. At dinner with Claud Cockburn, who’d moved into the Alianza to be closer to her, Gerda remarked, “When you think of all the fine people we both know who have been killed even in this one offensive, you get an absurd feeling that somehow it’s unfair still to be alive.”

For the next few days she drove herself mercilessly, rising early and taking her cameras—her Leica and the “March of Time” Eyemo that Capa had given her—to the front. Once she had to lug the Eyemo eight miles in order to reach the sector where she thought she’d get the best footage, and she still wasn’t satisfied. “Tomorrow I’ll get up at six so I can get better shots,” she sighed. Sometimes Cockburn went with her; sometimes Ted Allan did. Allan had resumed his puppylike attendance on her, had even brought her his short stories to read; and she’d been encouraging about them:
They’re good, Teddie, very good
. He was, however, anxious about going with her to the front lines, although—or because—he’d promised Capa to take care of her. Maybe, he suggested, they shouldn’t go too close to the action. “How do you want me to take pictures?” she asked, laughing. “Long distance?”

Through days of scorching heat, she photographed officers in the field and soldiers in the trenches—one of them a heartbreakingly young boy, too young to shave, in a too-large adult’s uniform; she photographed the bombers in the sky and the shattering impact of their payloads, the smoke and flying clods of dirt. “In case we do somehow get out of this,” she told Cockburn, who’d come along with her that day and was crouching beside her as she focused on the Messerschmitts above them, “we’ll have something to show the Non-Intervention Committee.” She photographed the wounded, even riding in the ambulance with them. She photographed the dead. The pictures had none of the careful structure and artful composition of her early work; they were jittery, sometimes out of focus or overexposed, but vital, immediate, even terrifying. One day she and Cockburn were visiting the British Battalion when enemy aircraft bombed the supply vehicles, and as Gerda rushed to the scene one of the trucks burst into flames. Black smoke filled her viewfinder. Soldiers ran, panic-stricken, to extinguish the fire; one of them was hit and fell to the ground. And Gerda stood in the middle of this apocalypse, clicking her shutter.

It was odd to come back from the inferno of Brunete every evening and sit in the garden of the Alianza, where Alberti wanted to talk about Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
and everyone would listen to the news on the radio and then sing along with whatever popular songs were playing. Odder still to find Ted Allan waiting for her, hoping to romance her, as if this were Leipzig in 1933 and she were still the girl who just had to wiggle her little finger to have five or six guys running after her. Not that she didn’t like the attention, and even enjoy teasing him a little: stripping to her lacy underthings in front of him after her day at the front, lying down on the bed beside him, touching him lightly and suggestively, then watching him—
like a fox that is going to play a trick on you
—to see how he reacted. But this was July 1937, and she had more important things to do than flirt with a lovesick twenty-one-year-old.

She did, however, want his company in the field, especially if she was taking two cameras with her. On Saturday, July 24, the rebels had smashed their way back into Brunete, only to be driven out of it again by nightfall in fierce house-to-house fighting. Journalists hadn’t been permitted to go to the front to report on the battle, so it wasn’t clear exactly what was happening; but any prohibition was just one more challenge to Gerda, and on Sunday she asked Allan to come with her to the front lines. Her ten days in Madrid were up, she said, and tomorrow she was leaving to join Capa in Paris; this would be her last chance to get photos and footage of what was already the biggest and costliest engagement of the war.

Allan met her outside the Alianza. She’d found a car, and a chauffeur who kept trying his American slang on them—“Okey-dokey,” he would say, whenever Gerda gave him directions—and they drove north along the Paseo de Recoletos to the road for El Escorial, then turned south to Brunete. The sun made the car feel like an oven; to keep their minds off the heat Gerda suggested they sing.

When they reached the front Gerda managed to talk her way as far as General Walter’s position before they had to stop. She got out of the car, sure of her welcome from the officer who had been so taken with her just a month ago in the Sierra; but the shaven-headed Walter was the opposite of welcoming. The line ahead of them had broken, he told them, and it was no longer safe where they were. “You must go away immediately,” he said; and, turning to Allan, “Get her away from here.” Gerda protested: it was her last day, she needed the pictures.
Please
. Walter lost his temper. “Go immediately,” he ordered. “In five minutes there will be hell.”

Allan wanted to leave, but Gerda refused to move. “
You
can go,” she told him; “I’m staying.” In the distance they could hear the low drone of approaching aircraft. There was no time to get out now. Gerda pulled Allan into a shallow foxhole on the hard, tawny-colored hillside and they tried to hide themselves in its insufficient cover as a formation of Condor Legion bombers, pursued by a tiny cloud of Loyalist Chatos, flew over the field. Then bombs began falling all around them: the earth around their foxhole heaved, spewing clods and rocks everywhere; the roar of the explosions was deafening, the acrid smoke suffocating. Allan burrowed deeper into the dirt, but Gerda stayed standing up in the foxhole, filming the assault. When fighter planes followed the bombers, flying low so their gunners could strafe the field with automatic fire, Gerda switched to her Leica. By the time the artillery shells started, she’d finished the roll; pausing only long enough to put in fresh film, she kept on shooting.

The assault seemed to go on for hours until, unnerved by the unremitting barrage of bombs, guns, and shells, some of the infantrymen that had been dug in along the slope in front of them abandoned their trenches and began to run. Out in the open, they were easy prey for the enemy tailgunners, who blew them into the air like chaff. Other soldiers tried to stop them, with one officer threatening to shoot anyone who ran; at this Gerda leaped from the dugout to join him, calling on the retreating soldiers to halt and reform their lines. Faced with the apparition of
la pequeña rubia
, this slight blond girl with her camera around her neck and her khaki overalls streaked with dirt, they complied, and at the same time the bombers passed on, leaving the hillside eerily quiet.

Suddenly, like a child that has been too long without a nap, Gerda had had enough. She wanted to go. Their chauffeur had long since disappeared, so when Allan had climbed out of their foxhole they trudged on foot across the fields toward Villanueva de la Cañada and the road for Madrid. Villanueva was pandemonium: cars, trucks, transports, and soldiers on foot, going this way and that, some withdrawing from the front, others advancing to cover positions. On the road they saw a big black touring car, which Gerda recognized as belonging to General Walter. She flagged it down. The general wasn’t in it; instead there were three wounded men in the backseat who were being taken to the hospital at El Escorial. After a brief conversation the chauffeur agreed to give her and Allan a lift as far as El Escorial; they could find a ride there back to Madrid. But they’d have to stand on the running board—there wasn’t room inside the car.

Okey-dokey.
Gerda tossed her cameras into the front seat next to the driver and she and Allan jumped on the running board and held on to the sides of the car, just like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow making a getaway in the American newsreels. Gerda was tired but exhilarated: she’d got wonderful pictures, she said, and now they could go back to Madrid and drink the Champagne she’d bought for her farewell party.

Neither of them saw the tanks until it was too late. Fleeing from airborne machine-gun fire and careering along the road in the opposite direction, a convoy of Loyalist T-36s was bearing down on the touring car like a herd of clumsy prehistoric animals. The chauffeur swerved left, hoping to avoid a collision, but the first tank clipped the car and sent it rolling into a ditch. The next thing Allan knew, he was lying in the road, covered in blood, with no feeling in his legs. And Gerda was underneath the wreckage, her lower body crushed and her belly slit open by the tank’s treads.

Someone managed to get her, and Allan, to the hospital at El Escorial, where she was given a transfusion, and a surgeon tried to repair what the tank had done to her. It was clear, however, that her case was next to hopeless. “Keep her comfortable,” the doctor told her nurse, Irene Goldin—meaning,
Give her fluids and as much morphine as you can, because there’s nothing else we can do
. Gerda was still conscious, and her only concern was for her cameras: “Did someone take care of my cameras?” she asked, before the blessed morphine dulled her pain. “Please take care of my cameras. They’re brand new.”

During the night, after the surgeons had set his broken femur and put it in a plaster cast, Allan kept asking to see her, but the nurse told him to wait until morning. Gerda needed to rest, she said. It was around 6:30 or 7:00 that the doctor came to his bedside with the news: Gerda had died a few minutes earlier.

July 1937: Paris

Richard de Rochemont’s telephone call was everything Capa had been hoping for:
Life
was indeed going to send him, and Gerda, to China to cover the war with Japan. He was so excited by the offer that he wanted to book a plane ticket to fly to Spain right away and tell Gerda in person, but he was persuaded to wait and surprise her with the news when she got to Paris.