Authors: Preston Paul
The defeat of Franco’s assault on Madrid ‘offered this extraordinary sense of hope, this sudden feeling…that not only was the threat of fascism removed, but all of a sudden there really seemed to be a sunny, a really marvellous exhilarating future open to Spain’.
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The hopes raised by the Republic, both in terms of its attempt to bring a better way of life to the dispossessed and as a beacon of antifascism, were shared by many others. The hardened veteran of the
News Chronicle,
Vernon Bartlett, wrote:
I have never had so keen a sense of the importance of freedom as I had in Spain. So keen that I have become terribly bitter against those who seek to limit it, and am no longer ashamed of my inability to be detached and clam. I have been glad enough to come out of Spain again and yet on each occasion I have found life elsewhere curiously flat, selfish and unimportant.
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Even the rather thick-skinned Sefton Delmer wrote, rather shamefacedly:
Despite all I had seen of the brutality and contempt for justice of the Reds, despite my own antipathy to Marxism as a demagogic fraud, despite all this and much more, I nevertheless found I was being swept along in the exhilaration of Madrid’s refusal to abandon the fight. I found myself sharing the thrill of the reverses which the Reds were inflicting on the side I would certainly have chosen had I been a Spaniard and forced to decide between the ugly alternatives of Franco and Caballero.
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The sense that the cause of the Spanish Republic was worth supporting was linked to a close camaraderie among the correspondents. This was especially true of those who lived through the siege of Madrid, all of whom were converted into partisans of the Republic. The reasons were explained by Arthur Koestler, who suffered the bombing raids in the last week of October and the first days of November 1936. He wrote later:
Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his nerves, his heart, his stomach – and then pretends to be objective, is a liar. If those who have at their command printing machines and printer’s ink for the expression of their opinions, remain neutral and objective in the face of such bestiality, then Europe is lost. In that case let us all sit down and bury our heads in the sand and wait until the devil takes us. In that case it is time for Western civilization to say good night.
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Even those who arrived in the spring of 1937 felt the same. The British correspondents Sefton Delmer and Henry Buckley, who had been in Madrid since the earliest days of the siege, joined the Americans Herbert Matthews, Ernest Hemingway, Sidney Franklin, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles to watch battles at the front not from the Hotel Florida, but from a wrecked apartment building in the Paseo de Rosales overlooking the Casa de Campo. Hemingway referred to it as ‘the old homestead’, because it reminded him of his grandfather’s house in Chicago. Dos Passos described it: ‘The ground-glass door opens on air, at your feet, a well opens full of broken masonry and smashed furniture, then the empty avenue and beyond, across the Manzanares, a magnificent view of the enemy.’
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On 10 April 1937, Hemingway took the group there to observe a Loyalist offensive. Dos Passos was understandably apprehensive: ‘The lines cross the valley below, but if you step out on the paseo you’re in the full view of the enemy on the hills opposite, and the Moors are uncommonly good riflemen.’ All was quiet because it was lunchtime. Nevertheless, the signs of activity in the apartment, the flashes of sunlight glinting off field glasses and Ivens’ movie camera drew the
attention of the rebels. In his later novelized account,
Century’s Ebb,
Dos Passos recounted the scene, maliciously portraying the Hemingway character (George Elbert Warner) as a foolhardy idiot for walking along the Paseo de Rosales in full view of the rebel lines. When he was warned by a Republican corporal not to walk out in the open lest he draw enemy fire, he responded ‘Who’s chickenshit?’ and strolled on. Once lunch was over, the rebels opened fire. Dos Passos wrote: ‘as we were working our way back in the shelter of the smashed-up houses, all hell broke loose. I hate to think how many good guys lost their lives through that piece of bravado.’ A similar incident is recounted by the British brigadier, Jason Gurney, who describes a visit to the front by Hemingway ‘full of hearty and bogus
bonhomie.
He sat himself down behind the bullet-proof shield of a machine-gun and loosed off a whole belt of ammunition in the general direction of the enemy. This provoked a mortar bombardment for which he did not stay.’
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If correspondents faced dangers during the day, on their return to their hotel, they were confronted by lack of food. After leaving the British Embassy where, at the height of the siege of Madrid, Delmer had slept on the floor of the ballroom, he moved into the Florida, which he later described as ‘the friendliest, funniest, and most adventure-laden Hotel’ in which he had ever stayed. He had two rooms, a back room where he slept and a large front room, sunny but exposed to shell fire. This sitting room he used for reading, writing and ‘roistering’, the latter activity facilitated by the fact that he had installed electric burners and chafing dishes. He had also set up a bar in his bathroom, stocked with bottles that he had bought from anarchists who had looted the cellars of the royal palace. He was visited frequently by International Brigaders who helped him demolish his collection of rare and priceless vintages.
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As the war went on, journalists, like the rest of the Republican population, had to scrounge ever more desperately for food and cigarettes. Things would get gradually worse. When Martha Gellhorn arrived in Madrid on 27 March 1937, her first meal at the Gran Vía consisted of a minuscule portion of
garbanzos
(chickpeas) and strong-smelling
bacalao
(dried cod). The American novelist Josephine Herbst, who was there in April 1937, commented: ‘Though food was on everyone’s mind, I never heard anyone complain of the lack of it or because some
of the dishes served at the restaurant on the Gran Vía stank to high heaven.’ The altogether more celebrated American writer, John Dos Passos, there at the same time, also referred to ‘the stink of the food at the Gran Vía’.
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Virginia Cowles, an elegant and wealthy twenty-seven-year-old American, reached Madrid towards the end of March 1937. She was a friend of the Churchill family and had made her reputation writing travel pieces for
Harper’s Bazaar
and the Hearst Sunday Syndicate. Having secured an interview with Mussolini in 1935, she managed to get a commission to cover the Spanish war. The dowdy Josephine Herbst enviously described her ‘dressed in black, with heavy gold bracelets on her slender wrists and wearing tiny black shoes with incredibly high heels’.
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Her room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Florida, overlooking the front and in the direct line of Franco’s artillery, provoked a degree of nervousness. This was dissipated somewhat by the bustle of ordinary life which sprang forth every day in the square below like ‘a huge movie set swarming with extras ready to play a part’. Virginia Cowles described the food at the Gran Vía as ‘meagre and at times scarcely eatable’, yet it was not so inedible as to deter hungry
Madrileños
from trying to force their way through the heavily guarded doors. When she arrived in Madrid, ‘Tom’ Delmer, with whom she struck up a friendship at the Florida, pointed out her error in failing to bring any food with her.
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As food got scarcer, Ernest Hemingway, who reached Madrid in March 1937, consolidated his popularity by dint of the inexhaustible store of bacon, eggs, coffee and marmalade, and drink, whisky and gin, that he kept in his room at the Florida. International Brigade volunteers were always welcome and would always find plenty of bottles and tinned food. His stocks were both replenished and distributed by his faithful crony, Sidney Franklin, the American bullfighter, described by John Dos Passos as ‘a sallow slender blackhaired man with the skin so dark around the eyes he looked as if he had a couple of shiners’. Herbst referred to him as Hemingway’s ‘devoted friend and a sort of
“valet de chambre”
’ largely because of his skills as a scrounger.
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Such was the austerity of the Florida that a visit to the altogether better-provisioned Hotel Gaylord where the senior Russian advisers were housed was seen as a rare privilege. On 25 March 1937, Ilya Ehrenburg went there to visit
the highly influential
Pravda
correspondent, Mikhail Koltsov. He went eagerly because ‘you could get warm there and have a good meal’. On this occasion, in Koltsov’s crowded room, Ehrenburg noticed a large ham and profusion of bottles, but forgot about both when he was introduced to Hemingway, a writer whose works he revered.
Ehrenburg gushingly tried to express his admiration to the already inebriated novelist, who was infinitely more interested in the large glass of whisky he held. Ehrenburg asked in French what he was doing in Madrid and Hemingway reluctantly explained in Spanish that he was there as the correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance. Ehrenburg then enquired if he had to telegraph just substantial articles or also news items
(nouvelles).
Hemingway was furious, having translated
nouvelles
into the Spanish
novelas
(novels). He jumped up and grabbed a bottle, with which he tried to hit Ehrenburg. Before serious bloodshed took place, he was restrained.
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Hemingway clearly made a habit of creating scenes. In the winter of 1937, the beautiful American correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, had gone with Hemingway to another party in Mikhail Koltsov’s room. She was distressed to be ushered away from the delicious food on offer when, once again, in characteristically boorish style, Hemingway had made a scene. Believing that the Communist commander Juan Modesto had made a pass at Martha, he had jealously challenged him to a duel of Russian roulette. After they circled each other menacingly, each with one end of a handkerchief between his teeth, they were unceremoniously separated and Hemingway, with a hungry Martha Gellhorn in tow, was required to leave.
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The Hotel Florida, like the Telefónica, was in the firing line of Nationalist artillery, but Hemingway assured his nightly guests that his room had a ‘dead angle’ and was therefore invulnerable. Tom Delmer’s room, however, was eventually hit and his utensils destroyed. Given the impossibility of sleeping through artillery bombardments, every night became a fiesta either in the larger rooms or else in the patio around which the hotel was built. It was still frequented by prostitutes, nicknamed ‘whores de combat’ by Hemingway. To Gustav Regler, the German Communist writer, and commissar of the XII International Brigade, it was ‘a noisy bordello’. Cedric Salter, who stayed at the
Florida in the spring of 1937 while writing for the
Daily Telegraph,
complained of being unable to sleep because of
a dim roaring noise from below, not unlike that to be heard in the Lion House at the Zoo, shortly before feeding time. In desperation I rang and asked what caused this strange sound. That, I was told, was the Russian aviators having fun in the bar. Yes, to be sure, it always went on like that until dawn unless they drank more than usual, in which case they might fall asleep on the floors around 4 a.m.
Having managed, with the help of cotton wool in his ears, to fall asleep, Salter was awakened when a naked woman flung open his door and ran screaming into his bathroom, followed by a very large Russian dressed only in cotton underpants. Only with some difficulty could he persuade them to leave. Delmer agreed with Salter: ‘it was not until three or four in the morning that the shrieking and brawling and flamenco singing died down’.
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In contrast, more serious guests remembered principally the efforts of the staff to keep things as apparently normal as possible. Winston Churchill’s cousin, Peter Spencer, otherwise known by his title as Viscount Churchill, was with the British medical aid unit and often stayed at the Florida. Kitty Bowler described him as ‘the most distinguished living skeleton I have ever met’. His principal recollection from April 1937 was the fact that ‘the chambermaid kept everything on her floor looking most elegant, although the end of the corridor was blasted, and from it you could see half across Madrid’.
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The bulk of those who stayed at the Florida tried hard to maintain a high level of objective and honest reporting. However, the standards aspired to by Matthews, Jay Allen, Henry Buckley, Lawrence Fernsworth and Geoffrey Cox and many others was not universal. It was certainly not achieved by the Oxford-educated Communist Claud Cockburn. He was the founder and editor of the satirical news-sheet,
The Week,
whose mimeographed sheets were highly influential in exposing the pro-fascist sympathies of the upper-class ‘Cliveden Set’ and the salon conspiracies that lay behind the farce of appeasement. Cockburn was on holiday in Salou near Tarragona when the Spanish Civil War began.
The British Communist Party invited him to act as correspondent for its newspaper, the
Daily Worker.
He did so eventually, using the pseudonym ‘Frank Pitcairn’, but only after first going to Barcelona and then to Madrid. There he volunteered for the militia unit known as the Quinto Regimiento and fought in the sierra to the north. It was always the view of Koltsov and Otto Katz that good journalists could serve the cause better in front of their typewriters than in the trenches. Accordingly, like Arthur Koestler, he was persuaded to return to journalism. Having done so, as a result of a close friendship with both Mikhail Koltsov and Otto Katz, and a readiness to toe the party line, Cockburn received privileged information on a regular basis.
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What Cockburn published was not, however, always based on accurate information. On one notorious occasion, Katz and Cockburn worked together during the Republican push against Teruel. With urgently needed artillery held up on the French side of the border, Katz summoned Cockburn to Paris and announced; ‘You are the first eyewitness of the revolt at Tetuán.’ Cockburn, who had never set foot in Tetuán, sought elucidation. Katz explained that a delegation of French Communists and Socialists was about to try to persuade the premier, Léon Blum, to open the frontier. To get Blum into a receptive mood, Katz hoped to plant a newspaper story that would suggest that Franco was facing difficulties. Realizing that a story about some apocryphal Republican victory would have little influence, Katz decided to put out a story that would make it seem that Franco’s power was crumbling in the very fount of its strength, Spanish Morocco. Together, they fabricated a military rebellion in Tetuán, using only the
Guide Bleu
and a couple of other travel guides to describe the streets and squares in which the mutiny had allegedly taken place. Complete with ‘details’ of places and participants, Cockburn remembered that it had ‘emerged as one of the soundest, most factual pieces of war correspondence ever written’. When the delegation met Blum, all he could talk about was that morning’s headlines about the ‘revolt in Tetuán’ and the frontier was reopened.
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