Operation Garbo (4 page)

Food was hard to get and there were long queues
everywhere
. One day, when the taxi driver’s wife was out shopping, the police knocked at the door and demanded entry. In a split second, which seemed like a century, I signalled to the boy that I was going to hide under his bed. He then opened the door and with complete sangfroid began to tell the police that his mother was out hunting for food and his father was at the front,
fighting
the ‘factious rebels’. The police asked him various questions as they searched through the different rooms. When they came to the one I was in the boy threw open the door with great aplomb, switched on the light and announced that this was his room. The police then left; the boy’s studied casualness had convinced them he had nothing to hide.

I was so grateful for what he had done that I spent hours giving him lessons, for the schools had all been closed. He was a quick learner and I much enjoyed teaching him; the lessons added a new dimension to my life and left me less time for worrying.

A few months later the taxi driver took his wife and son to join her parents in Lleida. I was now entirely alone in the flat, but as the neighbours were under the impression that it was empty, I was unable to move around in case I gave myself away. Three times a week a girl brought me food; otherwise I just sat there tormented with fear of discovery. I became so depressed and withdrawn, so utterly miserable, that I lost over twenty kilos. I began to look like a decrepit old man of forty although I was only twenty-five.

As I grew weaker, I became desperate and knew I could not hold out much longer. The girl who brought me food finally
managed to obtain some false identity papers from the
Socorro Blanco
making me out to be too old for the army.

An old friend, who was secretary to one of the many branches of the General Workers’ Union, suggested that I go and see some people who were running poultry farms in the area. When I found them, I was delighted to discover that several were old friends from my Royal Poultry School days.

I asked if I could join their union and was duly enrolled without any problem. At first I hung around attending the endless meetings they were always calling, but I soon tired of these and asked for an assignment. They suggested that I become the manager of a farm they’d taken over at Sant Joan de les Abadesses in northern Catalonia. I accepted with alacrity for it was a long way from Barcelona and only about
twenty-two
miles from the French border.

My family had all been scattered by the civil war. Elena’s fiancé had been taken away during a house search, Joaquin had had to join the Republican army, and my mother and Elena had gone with Buenaventura and her husband Frederic to Aiguafreda, so there was no one to whom to say goodbye.

Upon arrival at Sant Joan, I reported to the municipal
council
, who had requisitioned all the farms, factories and houses in the area when the civil war broke out, forcing the owners to flee. By the time I appeared on the scene none were working well, for they lacked technical expertise and direction. Everyone gave orders: no one wished to obey. There was much resentment and workers complained that, instead of one boss, they now had committees of seven or more.

Nobody seemed to mind that I had no proper identity papers; I was merely asked to report once a week to the municipal council, which consisted of representatives of most of the parties and unions in the area. It was a very easy life: I lived in the local hotel, I was paid regularly and found the work undemanding for there were less than a thousand beaks to look after. Every afternoon I walked to Ripoll and back, a round trip
of about thirteen miles, in order to get fit, for I was planning to cross into France. One Sunday I went even further; rising at the crack of dawn, I climbed to the top of Mount Puigmal, from where I could see the ‘promised land’. Then I set off at a brisk pace down to Ribes de Freser, on to Ripoll and back to Sant Joan by sunset, about forty miles.

But man proposes and God disposes. A few days after my mammoth walk, I heard that a fairly large expedition had been intercepted while trying to cross the border illegally with the help of some guides; some had been arrested, others wounded and several killed. As a result, the border guards had been strengthened.

I was now afraid to cross over by myself, nor did I know how the French authorities would react to my arrival. Would they hand me straight back to the Spanish authorities? If so, it would mean certain death, for orders about escapees were unequivocal.

It was now 1938 and, being a man of restless nature, I was becoming impatient. The civil war continued its macabre course. Every day each side claimed to have inflicted heavy losses on the other; they would give figures for the numbers killed, wounded and taken prisoner, issuing grandiloquent communiqués about towns, villages and hamlets destroyed. The price paid was immaterial so long as glory was achieved in action: the greater the havoc and the desolation, the more splendid the victory. How long, dear God, I wondered, could this continue? Was there to be no end to the sacrifice? The war seemed to rage with increasing intensity, which filled me with a deep depression compounded of fear and apathy. I was appalled that once-civilised men were now obsessed with spreading their obnoxious ideas by fire and the sword. Spaniards were
destroying
each other in their lust for power while the country’s youth died unsung and unrecorded.

The poultry farm was not a success. To put it bluntly, its profits were non-existent. There were too few hens – a
thousand
was not an economic number – which were too old to
lay well, and my wages were too high, for I could have looked after two or three times the number. Overhead, wages and
capital
investment divided by the number of hens led to negative profit. I asked the local councillors if they would increase their investment in the farm by expanding the premises and buying more chickens of a higher quality so that I could achieve better returns, but they just wanted more profits from the existing set-up. I was not prepared to keep being told off while they did nothing to put the business on a sounder economic footing. Our consultations grew increasingly acrimonious.

I am not a man given to arguing and I dislike dubious
dealings
so I decided to ‘exit’ from the stage, as they say in the theatre. I handed in my resignation but offered to stay on for a week to train an old farmer, whose lands had been
expropriated
and who had been wandering around the place living off the locals’ generosity, to do my job. I never heard of farm nor farmer again.

I was now determined to cross over to the other side, for I naively thought that once among the Nationalists I would be left alone to live my own life. I decided that the only way of being able to do this was to volunteer for the infantry as a veteran soldier and hope that I would be sent to the front, from where I could desert. I therefore presented myself to a
recruiting
office in north Barcelona. My false identity papers made me out to be older than I was, but the officer seemed delighted to enrol me. All of us who had joined at the same time were then sent to a training unit outside Les Borges Blanques, a pretty little village in the province of Lleida, set in a torrid landscape surrounded by olive trees.

The demand for fresh troops for the front was so great that our training was brief. For a fortnight about a hundred of us deployed, advanced, skirmished and practiced shooting around the outskirts of the village, and then we were sent off to Montblanc, some twenty miles to the east, where one of the new International Brigade units was training. We were now in
the Tarragona area near the river Ebro and much closer to the front line.

We had been made ready for war in two weeks. But before joining the International Brigade itself, the sergeant asked whether any of us could drive, and fifteen or so recruits offered their services. He then asked for bricklayers, carpenters and blacksmiths; each time a handful more volunteered who were, or thought they were, experts. I realised that the infantry group was fast diminishing and, as I wasn’t anxious to end up as cannon fodder, I decided to wait no longer. When the sergeant asked for those with a knowledge of telegraphy, I resolutely stepped forward.

I was convinced that this would keep me out of the firing line, for I was determined not to become involved in a struggle in which I did not believe and which went clean against my personal convictions. Years of hiding and persecution had made me bitter; my dreams had been shattered; my life seemed to have been nothing but disappointments and privations; I hated being a soldier and longed to escape to a new life. I blamed all my misfortunes on the older generation whose endless political wrangles had led us into civil war.

The signal corps soon realised my inadequacies. Finding my answers to questions about Morse code, telephone installations and flag signals extremely hazy, the sergeant jokingly inquired if I knew how to lay cables between the front line and the different commands. This time I was able to be positive, and so I came to join the signals unit attached to the International Brigade, which, owing to the lack of foreign volunteers, consisted mainly of Catalans.

My baptism of fire took place when our unit arrived at the northern bank of the Ebro at about noon. A very noisy plane flew in low from the south-west over the old destroyed Ebro Bridge and made straight for a temporary pontoon filled with troops and vehicles coming and going. Orders were shouted to disperse and, in a matter of seconds, we swarmed over the fields
and sheltered under the olive trees. The rebel plane released its deadly load over the frail pontoon, smashing it to matchwood. The bombs hissed as they descended, thunderous explosions followed and the air was filled with millions of splinters as huge columns of water gushed upward. The violence of the impact made us rigid with fear. I don’t remember whether any other bombings took place later or not. What I do remember is that as soon as the plane disappeared we made straight for the nearest undamaged pontoon and crossed the Ebro. Once on the opposite bank, we marched along the railway line, parallel to the river, until sunset.

We found the battalion we had come to relieve up in the Sierra de la Fatarella Mountains. Firmly dug into trenches which zigzagged along the contour line halfway up from the valley floor, they could see the enemy, who were only three hundred metres away and equally securely entrenched. The two fronts juxtaposed each other in an uneven straggling line; sometimes our land protruded into enemy territory, in other places their line jutted into ours.

The changeover occurred next day. Those we relieved were returning for a well-deserved rest, for they had seen heavy fighting and in many cases had lost over 50 per cent of their men from death, wounds or defections.

Conditions on the front line were bad. Morale was low, discipline slack, and my fellow soldiers were full of complaints about the way the war was being conducted and talked frequently about going over to the enemy. All we Republicans ever had to eat was a plate full of lentils seasoned with lard or a trace of pork, day in day out, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Every night as the sun went down, the rebels would yell, ‘Hey Reds, what’ve they given you to eat today? Lentils again?’ Then they would regale us with details about their varied diet, the three or four courses available to them every meal and the wide variety of different dishes which they had to choose from. This would make many on our side decide to desert during the night.

After the opening verbal salvo about lentils would come amusing debates about a particular shot or a specific meal. Party rivalry and doctrinaire disputes were forgotten in curses and argument, insults and counterclaim. The mutual
dissensions
and recriminations would have been very comical had the situation not been so tragic.

I would walk up and down the front line checking my
telephone
cables and would chat with those in the trenches. From our side we could see the enemy clearly, and as soon as evening mess time was over and the sun had set the shouting contests would start. My company captain, a carpenter by trade, was quite happy to participate in exchanging pleasantries, but
whenever
the enemy dwelt on the exquisiteness of their food, feeling ran high and the number of desertions increased. Then drastic measures were taken. Our company barber, caught trying to escape, was executed in front of the whole battalion, but the stream of deserters continued; our hunger was too great.

Starving, disenchanted with life and longing for more congenial company, I decided to try to cross over to the ‘enemy’. Looking back now I would never take such a hazardous risk again. To cross from Republican to Nationalist lines was the craziest thing I ever did in my long and adventurous existence.

About seven o’clock on a clear, moonlit evening, three of us prepared to desert. I took two hand grenades for
reassurance
although I had no intention of using them, but before I could slip out of my trench, my two companions jumped clumsily out of theirs and started a landslide of small pebbles which clattered as they rolled down the rocky hillside. A sentry heard the noise and raised the alarm. I hesitated for a moment and then started off, hotly pursued by a patrol. Confused, I made for a patch of pine trees, where I tried to hide. In no time I had completely lost my sense of direction, but I carried on and began to climb up the hill. Unfortunately, I was
climbing
up the very hill I had just come down, straight back into my own lines.

When I realised my error, I turned and raced back down the hill again, dodging the bursts of gunfire; taking huge strides, half sliding, half leaping, I soon reached the bottom, where I went to ground in a reed bed. I could hear the voices of the patrol hunting for me, thrusting the butts of their rifles into the reeds, rightly guessing me to be close by. After about fifteen minutes I heard them change direction, so I crept out of the reeds as quietly as I could and dashed up the hill – the right one this time – into a belt of pines.