IN EARLY FEBRUARY Duncan wrote to Julian, expressing his view of the situation, particularly as it regarded Vanessa. It is a little hard to see what strategy he is following in the letter, perhaps trying to push Julian to reconsider the fundamental reasons for his going while appearing to say the contrary. The letter is quite calm, but the emotional subtext is that he really must not put his mother in this deeply stressful position, something she would be unwilling to say herself.
Of course Nessa was a good deal upset at the news [that he would go to Spain] which you will know as well as I was inevitable. I am not writing to go into the question of how much her being upset must be taken into account in making up yr mind as to your plans—you must decide that. What I think you may not realize when you discuss things with her is being as reasonable as she is, she will certainly not want you to take it into account at all. . . . From talking things over with her today I think that what she would mind most is the possibility of not being able to agree with you about your reasons for going, quite apart from her personal fears for you. . . . It is still doubtful whether Spain is going to be the battlefield of all our hopes & fears. . . . I agree with Charles that you might be of far more use to the world as a free agent than a part of a machine. . . . What I really want to tell you is something of Nessa’s state of mind which may be of some help when you discuss things with her.
At the end of the letter he added what might be seen as a slight reprimand. Julian’s proclivity to inform many of his doings had made it plain to quite a few that he fully intended to go to Spain, while not surprisingly he was much more circumspect to his mother. Duncan wrote, “It is rather difficult for us to know from your various letters what you really plan to do, as your accounts to Nessa do not seem to tally exactly with what Charles seems to think are your plans.” He then added in a postscript: “I think if by chance you have not yet definitely made up your mind what you will do, it would be the greatest relief if you could write to Nessa something like ‘Not decided what to do, will discuss everything on arrival.’ Or whatever you like.”1
He returned to England on Friday, March 12, 1937. In the evening there was a family reunion at Charleston for which the Woolfs came down from London. That morning Virginia had noted in her diary, “Julian back today.” He greeted them in Chinese dress, a long silk robe, lilac-colored, buttoned up to his chin. He was affectionate but cool, at times almost severe, although he laughed a great deal. His elders felt at once that he had been changed by his experience in China, was much more sure of himself than he had ever been in the past. That evening there was a determination on everyone’s part to maintain the gaiety of the occasion, and a careful avoidance of the question uppermost in their thoughts: what he intended to do. He had brought back gifts for them all, and these were opened now in their bright paper wrappings: earrings and small jewels for Vanessa and Angelica; and for Virginia a glass fish. Julian explained, “I saw it in the market and I said that’s my dear Aunt.” It took them back to his early childhood, when Aunt Virginia would bring him toys to float in the bath, enjoying them as much as he did himself. But all that was long in the past; now they were struck by the change in him. He wore his Chinese robe like an armor, protecting himself against their love and solicitude.
The next afternoon he went over to Monk’s House for tea with the Woolfs. Their first impressions were confirmed. Julian had always been a fascinating mixture of childishness and a very real seriousness; now it was the latter that dominated. Virginia did not consider the change altogether a happy one so far as the immediate future was concerned. While she admired the evident signs of a new maturity and strength, she also recognized a certain stubbornness and obstinacy which was bound to be intensified, or perhaps had even been called into existence, by his determination to go to Spain in opposition to his mother—with whom, doubtless, her sister agreed. Spain was not mentioned that afternoon, however, although there was talk of politics with Leonard. But his aunt felt that his very avoidance of the subject proved that his mind was already made up; he knew she would be critical of his going, if only because it would cause so much unhappiness to Vanessa, and therefore he chose not to discuss it with her. So again, the occasion was all cheerfulness and affection on the surface, and sadness and disquiet beneath.
Julian was in England until early June, a young man with a purpose. Now there was little doubt in his own mind that Spain was his objective, and his friends and relatives recognized this almost immediately—that was the change in him: his unwonted determination—although they continued, the older generation at least, to attempt to dissuade him from it, and as we shall see, were in one particular successful. He was extremely tense, as was clear in a letter he wrote to Sue on March 17 from London.
Everyone is trying to stop me going. Only life seems so hopeless I cant help wanting to escape. Just possibly I might work in an ambulance or something, but I suppose not. Its all pointless: if I cant go I shall feel suicidal. Things mean nothing to me except my mother’s unhappiness. I should like to go back to a quiet life in the country, doing nothing but I can’t enjoy even that. . . . Sue, darling, I miss you terribly, more and more. . . . Perhaps we can make something together—I don’t believe we can separately—I cant.2
Meanwhile, as he waited for the machinery of his future to turn, he carried on in a very “Julian” fashion his multileveled existence: art, love, and politics. He was not at all a fatalist; he did not mean to “sacrifice” himself in Spain; he intended to survive and, afterwards, when he came back, to enter upon a political career of some sort, either in party politics or as a polemicist. Leonard spoke to Hugh Dalton about Julian being involved in Labour Party activity, and in April he was canvassing for the Labour Party in Birmingham. It was “a queer business: not awfully inspiriting,” he wrote to his mother. “The proletariat just lumpish & dull. No real politics. A fair lot of work, and plenty of tiresome driving. I canvass and exploit my smile and Cambridge manner, not too badly.” Birmingham itself he summed up as “filthy and unholy and stinking, but with compensations.”3 Two months later, on June 5, the day before he left for Spain, he wrote to Marie Mauron, “Ies véritables prolétariens votent solidement pour les conservateurs, comme toujours.” He had not abandoned his literary activities. He had seen to it that the stories of his favorite pupil, C. C. Yeh, were translated and sent on to John Lehmann, who chose one of them for the first number of New Writing. He revised and arranged into a possible book the polemical essay-letters he had written in China. He wrote a hostile review (for the New Statesman) of Towards Armageddon by General Fuller, then on the extreme Right, in which Julian advanced his theory that the military establishment would be better ordered under socialism than, as the general suggested, under fascism.4 He assembled a set of informative, albeit very compressed, notes for a memoir—prompted to this by a reading of Gibbon’s Autobiography. But he wrote no poems. He had come to view his writing, as he viewed his life, as dedicated to a purpose. He had absolutely no interest (for himself) in Bloomsbury’s belief in the sanctity of the work of art. In May he wrote to his brother that his essays were “meant to cause pain to intellectuals, thought if possible, but pain anyway. It’s no use persuading woollies and softies and c.p. [Communist Party] hysterics into being honourable and common sense soldiers. But it is just worth publishing my reflections for those who are capable, but want a lead. You see, it’s a matter of changing attitudes, not immediate policies. Consequently it’s far more important to me to get attention than assent.”5 His writings became polemical and were intended to serve his purpose; so too were certain occasions. He revisited Cambridge to see old friends and favorite haunts but also to speak to a gathering of Apostles—the Society had been recently revived—on the military virtues. Michael Straight, John Cornford’s wealthy American friend who at that time was a secret member of the Communist Party, was among the company. He described Julian as “wearing a strange cloak and a hat of black lamb’s wool” brought back from China, and told how “he spoke of the soldier as his new-found ideal; beneath the outward argument lay his inward affirmation, that henceforth he would carry out the obligation of his generation as he saw it, but with the soldier’s detachment, the soldier’s disinterested devotion to duty. No one present, as I remember, understood all that he was saying; no one certainly grasped his point: that in a world in which no cause was above reproach, one had still to choose, and at the same time, to maintain one’s own integrity.”6
This talk was of a piece with his conviction about what writing must be: useful work intended to convince people of a certain point of view, or at least to make them aware of it, to call into question what they thought they believed. “My own proposals,” he wrote to Lehmann on the day he left for Spain, “comprise one small book, polemical and likely to cause annoyance if only I can get it read.” Impatient and full of ideas and “all over the place,” he would not follow the example of his elders, who made writing a work of art, no matter what their subject. His aunt complained of this. Her objection centered on the seeming carelessness of his attitude towards writing, not on what he chose to write about. Polemics were not unknown in Bloomsbury. There were Virginia’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, the latter being in many ways a posthumous discussion with Julian; and there were works by Leonard Woolf and Keynes. The response to Clive Bell’s political pamphlets had been precisely of the sort that Julian would have welcomed: most of the copies of Clive’s antiwar tract of 1915, Peace at Once, had been seized and burnt by order of the lord mayor of London—a tribute to Clive’s power to annoy. In a sense Julian was writing somewhat in his father’s style, although he was never as secure in this power; he slashed out too haphazardly. He wrote to his mother in early March:
Ive finished the thing I was writing [the “Letter to E. M. Forster”] and think it bad, but cant face doing it again. The end in particular is very weak and shabby. The worst of it is that Ive said all I had to say about as clearly as I can say it. But it wont come alive, its just one thing after another, and prose is such wretched stuff to correct in bulk because one cant see the bits of it simultaneously. I mean, I can keep a whole poem in my head and make changes accordingly. But its all I can do to remember my argument, and I know lots of the transitions are the most frightfully abrupt jerks and dont make very good sense. Altogether its a bad business.7
He was perhaps too severe in his final judgment, but he was as conscious of his defects as any of his critics were. Conceivably, at some point in the future he might have bettered the work, but as he wrote in the prefatory note he provided for the essays, on his last day in England, he lacked “the time and opportunity for a really minute and scrupulous revision”; nor one suspects did he feel very urgently a need to revise. He had not come back from China to further his literary career; nor to participate in a round of social activities and amorous intrigues (“une vie personelle quelque peu compliquée”); nor to lay the groundwork for a future career in politics. He had come back as far as England primarily to convince his mother of the rightness of his decision to participate in the civil war in Spain.
Bloomsbury’s objections to his going to Spain had to do, as one might expect, with questions of personal relations—Vanessa must not be hurt—and with questions of rationality: was it a sensible course of action that he proposed for himself? Bloomsbury was brought up short by his determination to go, his conviction that he must do this thing which he felt, whether rightly or wrongly, was necessary to do and which transcended even his great love for his mother. It was, then, a conflict of ideas, not only between the older and the younger generation of Bloomsbury but also between reason and romanticism. For there can be no question, no matter how Julian attempted to rationalize his decision, that he was spurred on at the deepest level of feeling by a romantic ideal of Honor and the Test that must not be failed, against which Bloomsbury’s clearheaded appeals to reason could not hope to succeed.
David Garnett tells how he went down to Charleston “to try to persuade him that he would be far better employed in helping to prepare for the inevitable war against Hitler than in risking his life in Spain where he could take no effective or important part.” But Julian was “immovably set upon going,” and Garnett was so impressed by his seriousness that he only “roughly advanced” his prepared arguments. They were standing in the walled garden, “by a little marble bust of his grandmother Julia, as a young girl.” Julian listened carefully, but his mind was made up: “Even if he could do nothing much in Spain, he argued that his experience might be valuable and what he saw might teach him a good deal about modern methods of warfare.” Garnett did not feel he could deny this, and their discussion ended. “A few moments later we were standing by the Charleston pond, and looking at him as he eagerly watched the sticklebacks darting in and out of the weeds, I could not tell whether he was happier when he was a man or when he went back to being a child.”8
Garnett’s was the argument of reason; similarly, Virginia was persuaded that he might do more for the cause in which he believed if he remained in England and worked for it there—presumably by writing propaganda, helping to raise money, organizing petitions, doing canvassing as he had done in Birmingham, and expending his powers, as Auden put it, “on the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.” Action of that sort, no matter how sensible or useful, had little appeal to Julian, as his time in Birmingham demonstrated. Going to Spain, as he perhaps realized, would set him apart from most of his literary contemporaries: the majority of volunteers for the International Brigade came from the working classes, not the intelligentsia, although it was not unrepresented in significant ways. Virginia, increasingly concerned for Vanessa, meanwhile cast about for spokesmen for her own position. She arranged for him to meet with Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, and Stephen Spender, both of whom had been in Spain, she apparently hoping that they would convince Julian he could be as useful to the cause of the Republic in London as in Madrid.
Lettice Ramsey wrote to him, pointing out that he would be, in her view, more valuable staying in England, although she was also driven by the idea of trying to protect his life:
Julian, because apart from hating you to get killed in Spain I think you can probably be more real use in England. I think that given the time & opportunity, & the right ability 100% political activity is the right thing & I’m sure its your thing. Going to Spain would of course be that & the most whole hearted & brave thing you could do. But at the same time it seems (apart from the question of being able to get there) that now they really have enough men & advisers & that the most important work against Fascism is at home & organising people to activity. Everyone, specially anyone who can speak as you can, is needed. . . . Guy is always asking about you. He is working for the BBC now.
But then later she wrote to him with resignation: “I wish you weren’t going but I see you MUST. Don’t stay too long. As for life with me here. I’m, unlike you, still wanting a stable & major affair. I go on breaking my heart over John who remains monogamously attached to Eileen [Bernal]. I have a few odd bedfellows but they fill a biological rather than an emotional need—unsatisfactory. I hope you don’t leave too many broken hearts behind. . . . Come back soon. DONT get killed. We can’t spare people like you, darling.”
His mind did now appear to be made up: he told Spender he was “joining for the duration of the quarrel.” Conviction—a belief in the rightness of his decision—made it simple to disregard appeals to reason. Appeals to sentiment, based on his lifelong and unshakeable attachment to his mother, were far more formidable and difficult to cope with, especially when it was she herself who made them. We will never know the nature or content of their talks. It seems fair to assume, though, that his mother told him of her abhorrence of war, and of her disapproval of his going to participate, on every possible ground, ranging from personal concern (her fear for his safety) to points of principle. She and Clive had never wavered in their convictions. (As far as we can tell, Julian did not have significant conversations with his father.) They would have agreed with the sentiments Julian had expressed in the letter from which we have already quoted, which he had written just one year earlier, in March 1936: “I can’t think anything worth war—not even saving Russia or smashing Musso. . . . It is the last horror, and I can’t feel sure enough of any theory to outweigh that certainty.” In August 1938, a year after Julian’s death, Clive Bell in his pamphlet War Mongers (published by the Peace Pledge Union) declared himself “an out-and-out pacifist” in opposition to those who “hate Fascism and Nazism more than they love peace. . . . A Nazi Europe would be, to my mind, heaven on earth compared with Europe at war . . . the worst tyranny is better than the best war. . . . War is the worst of all evils.”9 But with the outbreak of civil war in Spain, which Julian saw as a first battle in the coming international war against fascism, he had abandoned any sympathy he might have had with pacifism. He had written his “Letter to E. M. Forster” to explain why.
But on the level of personal feeling, he could not help but be affected by his mother’s concern. Their private conversations—which they shared with no one, keeping no diaries, writing no letters—continued unresolved until almost the end of April. Hints of tension between them were glimpsed rarely. On the afternoon when Julian and Bunny Garnett had talked in the garden at Charleston, they had afterwards gone over to Rodmell to visit the Woolfs. When it was time to leave, Julian remarked ironically, “If I’m late, my mother will think I’m killed.” The remark, trivial in itself, suggested that the strain was beginning to tell: usually she was “Vanessa” or “Nessa”; she would be “my mother” only jokingly, or as now, when her anxiety made it so painfully difficult for him to do what he wanted. Those closest to them both knew that had it not been for Vanessa, he would have gone directly to the International Brigade and not returned to England at all. He would not yield in his determination to go out to Spain, but at length, having recognized the intensity of her feeling, and indeed of his own where she was concerned, he agreed to compromise: he would go, not as a soldier in the International Brigade but as an ambulance driver for Spanish Medical Aid. This was not only a concession to her principles—to drive an ambulance was an approved activity in wartime: Garnett had done so in the First World War—but a concession also to her fears for his safety. He was intensely aware of her feelings and deeply concerned about them. As he wrote to Sue, “Its the hardest thing I’ve ever had to decide.” And in another letter: “Its terribly difficult to talk to Vanessa, she’s so upset and miserable, and so brave and sensible also. And we both care more for each other than for anything else, and are very alike. And I have to make up my mind, and cant, as to whether I can face life if I dont go.” He was still not absolutely committed: “If I stay in England I shall find myself some place in the official Labour party and become a professional politician.”10 The casualty rate among drivers for Spanish Medical Aid—at least as reported—was remarkably low: only one man had been lightly wounded, as Julian told Marie Mauron in the letter in which he announced his departure for Spain, “avec la Croix Rouge, conduire un ambulance. C’est un compromis.” (The total number of British medical personnel ultimately killed was twelve; strikingly, this included six others in the same battle with Julian. Contrary to his statement, one, Emmanuel Julius, had been killed before Julian went to Spain, in October 1936.11)
Determined as he would appear to be to go to Spain, he still seemed to give the impression that he had not completely made up his mind and that he might stay in England. In her diary for March 14, 1937, Virginia remarked about a dinner she had had with Julian the previous night at Charleston: “Julian grown a man—I mean vigorous, controlled, as I guess embittered, something to me tragic in the sadness now, his mouth & fact much tenser; as if had been thinking in solitude. Nessa said he hasn’t altogether given up his idea of Spain: all depends on getting a job here. I felt him changed: taut, tense, on the defensive: yet affectionate: but no longer spontaneous.” And then weeks later, on May 4, he almost implied that he was going to Spain in lieu of anything else to do. “Julian was bitter at dinner at the By [Bloomsbury] habit of education. He had been taught no job; only a vague literary smattering. But I wanted you to go the Bar I said. Yes, but you didn’t insist upon it to my mother, he remarked, rather forcibly. He now finds himself at 29 without any special training. . . . Julian now in favour of a settled job: even the Treasury. He is learning the mechanics of lorries. Hadn’t even been taught that at Cambridge.”12 Yet in his more optimistic moments he saw going to Spain as a training for the future, as a way of learning how to deal with the coming war.
Here perhaps one must take note of a curious detail: Virginia was told by Vanessa that the crucial factor in bringing Julian round to a compromise had been some letters he was shown describing the plight of a young English Communist in the International Brigade. The young man in question, who had gone out impulsively to Spain, was appalled by the horrors of the battlefield and disillusioned by the strict military discipline that was imposed by the Communist leadership of the Brigade. These were likely to have been letters that Tony Hyndman wrote to his lover, Stephen Spender. It seems unlikely, however, that Julian was influenced to any significant degree by this correspondence, no matter what his mother chose to believe. His own decision to go out to Spain was in no sense unpremeditated; he took a hardheaded view of death and suffering as the necessary evils of war. As an admirer of the “military virtues” and a serious student of military affairs, he would have entertained no idealistic notion of a peoples’ army free of rank and discipline. One can only conclude that as a kindness to his mother, he allowed her to think that he was making this compromise, not simply as a concession to her fears for his safety but for other reasons as well. Why had the discussions with his mother, to whom he would listen with more respect and love than to any other person, led only to this compromise, which fell far short of satisfying her wishes? True, he was not to bear arms, but he was still going to Spain; he would be on the battlefields; he would be exposed to danger. Chiefly, it would appear, it was because he had made a commitment to himself to go, which he refused to break. It was his obligation and a test, he felt, to prove himself to himself as a significant member of his generation who could make a contribution of example, experience, and knowledge rather than languish in a backwater, whether in London or China, as a mere second-generation and minor Bloomsburian. His determination seemed to Virginia evidence of how he had changed, but determination was not really a new aspect of Julian’s character. It was simply that now, for the first time, with absolute seriousness, he had fixed on something to be determined about. As he had written to Lettice some years before, in a very different context: “I see everything in terms of struggle and victory and defeat, and get an obstinate ‘no surrender’ feeling. But there it is—I’m like that, and now it’s too late for me to change.” Clearly, his going to Spain represented a break from the domination of his elders and of Bloomsbury. It was the difference of the generations again, art (the 1920s) versus politics (the 1930s), some degree of detachment versus commitment, the swing-round, albeit unconsciously, to the principles and scruples of the Sir Leslies. And so, not surprisingly, his elders could never arrive at an entirely satisfactory explanation of Julian’s going. Virginia made the point eloquently:
I go on asking myself, without finding an answer, what did he feel about Spain? What made him feel it necessary, knowing as he did how it must torture Nessa, to go? He knew her feeling . . . and yet deliberately inflicted this fearful anxiety on her. What made him do it? I suppose it’s a fever in the blood of the younger generation which we cant possibly understand. I have never known anyone of my generation have that feeling about a war. We were all C.O.’s in the Great War. And tho’ I understand that this is a “cause,” can be called the cause of liberty & so on, still my natural reaction is to fight intellectually: if I were any use, I should write against it: I should evolve some plan for fighting English tyranny. The moment force is used, it becomes meaningless & unreal to me. And I daresay he wd soon have lived through the active stage, & have found some other, administrative work. But that does not explain his determination. Perhaps it was restlessness, curiosity, some gift that had never been used in private life— & a conviction, part emotional, about Spain. Anyhow Q. said during one of our walks . . . “If he hadn’t gone he’d have been absolutely miserable,” & said it with such conviction that I believe it. My own feeling then about his going wavers: I’m sometimes angry with him; yet feel it was fine, as all very strong feelings are fine; yet they are also wrong somehow: one must control feeling with reason.
In late April, after “so many arguments,” he was in touch with George Jeger, the organizing secretary of Spanish Medical Aid, and made arrangements through him to go out to Spain as an ambulance driver. Spanish Medical Aid had come into existence in early August 1936, a few weeks after the outbreak of the war. By the end of that month it had already sent a unit out, under the leadership of Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, a contemporary of John Cornford’s at Cambridge, which set up a field hospital on the Aragon front. In the months since August 1936 S.M.A. had dispatched further units to various parts of Republican Spain, where it established hospitals on the Madrid and the Córdoba fronts and at Murcia and Albacete. Spanish Medical Aid requirements were simple, and Julian easily fulfilled them. His only difficulty was in learning to drive a lorry, which he found very different from a small car, but which he mastered in his own fashion and thereafter drove with the same high-spirited disregard for the rules of the road as had terrified his friends in the past. Also there were lessons in mechanics (if one’s lorry broke down, one had to be able to repair it); lessons in Spanish; lessons in first aid—how to know if someone is dead, he wrote gaily to Marie Mauron. All this demanded a good deal of his time. In May he worked on his driving and his first-aid knowledge, as well as helping out in a by-election in Birmingham.
He had been leading, as he wrote to Marie Mauron, “une vie de crises, travaux, leçons, etc.” But finally the date was set for his departure: he was to leave England on June 7. He wrote to Sue in May: “I am expecting, hoping at least, to leave in June. . . . I believe myself the war will be a long one, and I shall get a chance to see plenty of it.”13 On a Sunday, June 5—a warm summerlike evening—there was an impromptu family dinner at Clive’s flat in London. The Woolfs called in; it was all very casual, and deliberately so. In fact, it was the last time that they were to see Julian. Lottie, the maid, was out, and Vanessa and Virginia cooked dinner; Julian, in shirtsleeves, hovered around them, talking, joking, seeing that the toast did not burn. After dinner, the conversation turned to politics, a three-sided conversation with only the men taking part. Virginia, proud of her nephew as she always was, noticed how well Julian held his own with Clive and Leonard: he was no longer a boy to be indulged. But politics was never a subject to engross the Stephen sisters, especially Vanessa, and they went out into the square with Angelica and gossiped in the warm summer light. Presently the men joined them. At one point Virginia remarked lightly to Julian that she would leave Roger Fry’s papers to him in her will. At once he replied, “Better leave them to the British Museum.” They both knew what he was thinking—that he might be killed in Spain—and both quickly turned the conversation elsewhere. Later, when it was time to go, they walked across the square, Julian and his aunt to the front. She asked if he might not have time to write something in Spain and send it to them. In effect, she was making amends for the way in which she had dismissed his paper on Roger Fry. “ ‘Yes, I’ll write something about Spain. And send it you if you like.’ ” Then he and Vanessa drove off in her car. The others stood at the door, watching. Julian leaned out and waved, and called, “Goodbye until this time next year.”14
When he was still in China and had only the vaguest notions of how one became a volunteer, he had thought he would have to cross into Spain ille gally, on foot, alone, in the guise of a hiker, eluding the guards at the frontier. Hence he had written to Quentin to get him a Swedish knapsack and maps of the Pyrenees—a request which had distressed his mother. As it turned out, it was all a good deal less romantic and more conventional than he had imagined it would be. Spanish Medical Aid was an accredited noncombatant organization: it was necessary only to sign an undertaking that one would not participate in any belligerent activity, and to pass a driving test for an ambulance; thereafter, one traveled perfectly legally with a passport into Spain. At first the S.M.A. was just in the Barcelona area, but with the new year it expanded to Madrid to work with the International Brigade in a unit of mixed nationalities, in which the number of British fluctuated from twelve to twenty.
Julian traveled with a convoy of ambulance trucks driving across France. On the third day, June 10, they reached Perpignan. “It’s been a stiffish drive, but not bad fun,” he wrote to his mother.
We celebrated the sight of the Pyrenees with a smash, the man in front of me in the convoy coming off a corner and turning clear over. By miracle, he wasnt hurt at all. . . . I’ve spent my afternoon delivering French rhetoric to hurry camions [through the town]. In general I’m the only one of the convoy who talks fluent French—none of us talks decent Spanish! It’s really rather fun—very like last year’s journey to Fa-Tsien-Iu. Some of the country looks lovely, and we [that is, he and his mother] must see it again in peace. In general I’m enjoying life a lot . . . and all’s boy-scoutish in the highest.
Crossing the frontier without event, the convoy proceeded down the Costa Brava: “still, to appearances, a charming, peaceful country; posters and troops a bit, but masses of leisurely civilians,” as he wrote to his mother on June 13. He then went on to Valencia, since the previous November the seat of the government of Republican Spain, and now at that moment the headquarters of the British section of Spanish Medical Aid. Sir Richard Rees, when he had arrived on the same errand as Julian three months earlier, had found this command post in charge of “an English peer [Viscount Churchill], who might have come straight from Pall Mall, and an Anglo-Italian peeress, who might have come straight from the Lido.”15 One would expect Julian to report details of this kind to his mother, and no doubt he would have done so if he had had time and quiet enough—as it was, there were “too many minor events and really I’m too stupid to write good letters.” He did mention that he was awaiting Churchill’s return to discover where he would be posted. In the same letter from Valencia, on June 13, he remarked, “I’ll try to write longer and better letters.” And in the concluding paragraph, “I’ll try to write more. . . . But its an unpropitious atmosphere”—which no doubt it was, for letter-writing, but he was immensely enjoying himself; his spirits were high; and he reassured her that “So far war has meant nothing worse than hard driving.” Nor did he regret coming out, then or later. “I’m extremely content,” he wrote. And this, without qualification, was to be his attitude throughout his short, happy life in Spain: “it’s the sort of life that suits me.”
Once he had reported to headquarters, he had little to do in Valencia for the next few days but hang about “waiting for orders—just like war—and China.” He had been given one quasi-official task: to drive up into the mountains to buy eggs for the unit. On the return, “I broke a passengers nose on the windscreen, thanks to my infernally fierce brakes.” But on the whole the tone in these first days was of a “Mediterranean Holiday,” and there was time enough to picnic and bathe at a seaside villa, attend a “goodish” bullfight, and listen to gossip of the war, which was “plentiful and contradictory, and not really worth repeating.” In his exhilarated mood—“it’s a very good life to live”—he could even persuade himself that his “military and political education” had begun, that he was “seeing a number of things at first hand one had only read about before,” which of course was an important reason for his coming to Spain. But thus far nothing of any real military significance had offered itself: he spoke only of driving through Valencia “in almost pitch darkness.” And to have understood so early the politics of the Republic, even merely to have sorted out the various factions struggling for power within the government and outside it, would have required him to be an observer of superhuman acuteness and political sophistication.
At the time of his arrival in Valencia, June 13, the most extensive military activity was in the north, in the Basque provinces, a hard-fought campaign that would end with the fall of Bilbao to Franco’s forces on the 19th. Politically, the chief concern of the moment was the liquidation of the P.O.U.M. (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), a sequel to the internecine rioting in Barcelona in May. The fighting in the north, where the Catholic Basques were firmly on the side of the Republic, and the ideological war within the war in Barcelona were complicated aspects of a struggle that was far more complex than most of the foreign volunteers who came to participate in it suspected. Julian, newly arrived in Valencia, would have been familiar only with the gossip of the cafés or the simplifications of the press, to neither of which he paid much attention. He had not come to Spain to unravel the complexities of the politics in Spain but to gain military experience. He was waiting impatiently in Valencia for the end of “this preposterous holiday” and for the beginning of his official duties as an ambulance driver. There were a number of destinations to which he might be sent, and judging from the career of Richard Rees in Spain, it is evident that members of the Medical Aid service were moved about widely and frequently. Rees, an Etonian, a socialist, a great friend of George Orwell’s and John Middleton Murry’s, and former editor of Adelphi, had come to Spain in April. In the two months since then, he had been stationed in Valencia, about fifty miles from Madrid on the Madrid-Valencia road, and also on the Córdoba front. Julian thought it likely he would be based at the convalescent hospital at Cuenca, “at first, anyway,” which would have been a comparatively quiet assignment, one he hoped to avoid. He did spend some time there and met up with an old friend from Cambridge, Portia Holman, who was a medical student and was serving as a nurse. After Julian’s death, she visited Vanessa in Charleston and gave her a vivid picture of Julian at this time, as conveyed in a letter from Vanessa to Eddie Playfair.
They were together for about a fortnight at Cuenca, where there was much to do. Driving to villages to bring provisions etc. Sun bathing & a lot of waiting about. She said Julian was absolutely happy in a completely satisfied state, that it was different from anyone else’s state of mind there & as if he had found just what he wanted. She gave a depressing account of the appallingly bad organisation of the Medical Aid people & of all the petty jealousies, hurt feelings etc. She said Julian simply laughed all such things away & was delighted when people told him his face was dirty or his shorts really too short etc. He evidently enjoyed being such a huge success & never seemed tired. When he came in from a long day’s driving he would start digging or other jobs. He & his two friends Richard Rees & (I think) John Bolding [Boulting, later with his twin brother, Roy, a famous filmmaker] prided themselves in keeping their cars in good order. While the others (all Communists!) drove recklessly & let everything go wrong. After the fortnight it was evident that there wasn’t really much need for them at Cuenca so they all moved on to Madrid.16
So now he was sent to Madrid—as was Rees, from the Sierra Morena—for the new offensive the government forces were about to launch, rumors of which had been bruited about in the cafés for the past two months.
It was a notable instance of how political considerations had their effect upon military decisions. As Hugh Thomas writes in his history of the war, several Republican officers of the high command proposed an attack on Extremadura in the southwest. Largo Caballero, the Socialist prime minister, supported the idea; the Communists opposed it and endorsed a proposal of the new Russian chief adviser, General Kulik, to mount a campaign at Madrid (“striking down from the Republican positions along the Corunna road towards the little town of Brunete, cutting off the Nationalists in the Casa de Campo and the University City”). “This military quarrel,” Thomas points out, “merged into the larger Communist feud with Largo Caballero.” In mid-May, after the rioting in Barcelona, there was a cabinet crisis. Largo Caballero resigned and was replaced as prime minister by Juan Negrín. He, a moderate socialist, “was ready to make any political sacrifice in order to win the war. This of course led him, as it had led Largo Caballero and Prieto, into close relations with Russia, since as before, Russia remained the only source of arms. Furthermore, their political moderation and ruthless realism in face of the war made the Spanish Communist party, throughout Negrin’s ministry, the most useful political party in Spain.”17 What this meant, so far as the proposed offensive was concerned, was that the Extremadura scheme was abandoned and the Communist plan prevailed: an attempt was to be made to cut off the besiegers of Madrid from the west. Whatever the military value of the plan—and it was considerable—its political propaganda value was undeniable. In the eyes of the world, Madrid was Spain; it was the heart of the Republic; the effort to break the long siege would be certain to attract a maximum of sympathetic attention. This was the background, with which Julian had no way of being acquainted, of the battle of Brunete, in which Julian was soon to be involved.
By June 22 he had been sent up to Madrid. Undoubtedly, he had heard rumors of the coming offensive but “not much news now that’s much use” that day he wrote to his mother; “you must have far more in London. What we do hear doesnt sound nice.” But he was not prepared to write her a detailed account of what he was doing, for he knew that that would only alarm her, and as usual there was “really no time at all for writing.” This, his next-to-last letter to her, was written late at night while he and his fellow drivers waited for the telephone calls that would summon them to their ambulances, in which they would drive back and forth to wherever there was fighting, on the outskirts of the besieged city or in the countryside beyond, bringing back the wounded and then driving away again. It was arduous work. “Fortunately I’ve partnered myself, more or less, with Rees, who’s nice and competent.” Between them they had “a very hard two-days’ driving, about 500 miles” in a constant shuttle to and from the front. Yet his spirits were wonderfully high: “the people are often charming and almost always amusing. . . . The country is lovely—as you’ll remember and singularly unmilitarised: true, one is stopped fairly often by guards, but they’re all extremely friendly. Madrid is utterly fantastic in the way it keeps the war on one edge and a fairly ordinary civil life going on—you can take the metro to the front, etc. . . . Its utterly impossible to give the full fantastic effect of it all. But I find it perpetually entertaining and very satisfactory.” He had only one complaint—that he had not been close enough to the actual fighting. “Tell Q. that so far I’ve only hearsay about technique. I’ll see what I can tell him later.” And so to the final paragraph: “My Spanish improves, but still has awful fade-outs into Chinese. Good-night—I’m very sleepy, and goodness knows what will happen tomorrow. But it’s a better life than most I’ve led.” This was not simply a declaration intended to reassure his mother and lessen her anxieties; it was what he truly felt, what he truly believed.
A week later, on July 1, he wrote what proved to be his last letter to his mother from Spain (or he may have written others in the next three weeks which she did not receive). It begins, “There is a sudden crisis here—at last—and rumours of an attack.” In fact, the Republican army was now almost ready to launch its “long-discussed offensive.” The buildup had been in progress since mid-June. There was a massive assemblage of troops and equipment in and about the town of El Escorial. Within the enormous San Lorenzo del Escorial palace itself, two hospitals were set up to receive casualties; one of the courtyards was designated a motor pool for the ambulances of the Medical Aid service. Even there he was impatient, as he felt he was too far from the front and couldn’t see war as close as he might wish. The Republican army, which included the 11th, 12th, and 15th International Brigades, “numbered 50,000 in all. It was supported by 150 aircraft, 128 tanks and 136 pieces of artillery.”18 Julian was going to take part in one of the largest and, as it proved, most costly offensives of the war. “So far”—he was writing to her five days before the battle began—“it’s all an uneventful life of minor events.” There had been a “furious struggle” in the best army tradition to keep the house where the Medical Aid drivers were billeted from being taken over by a transport corps, and here his fluent French again proved useful. “It’s all the oddest out of the world business you can imagine.” But it was not without its grim aspect: he mentioned that Richard Rees had “had his dose of horrors, evacuating badly wounded patients to a rear hospital about a hundred miles off. It was a grim story—not possible to write.” What he chose not to let her know was that this was one of the occasions when he had shared the driving with Rees. And even in the course of writing to her, he had to break off for a “new crisis.” When he resumed the letter the next day, he explained that he had spent the interval in a twelve-hour drive, midnight to midday, “evacuating lightly wounded some fifty miles over very bad roads. I’ve discovered that I can fall asleep with my eyes open—or pretty near.” He was growing impatient; his military instincts were being “badly shocked, both on a large and a small scale”; he was getting “very angry over organization”; he had “the worst forebodings for anything so public as our present operation.” Against this was the prospective satisfaction of seeing “something at first hand . . . it does mean, personally, excitement and events.”
One thing [he concluded]—I do think I’m being of real use as a driver, in that I’m careful and responsible and work on my car a chevrolet ambulance, small lorry size. Most of our drivers are wreckers, neglect all sorts of precautions like oiling and greasing, over speed etc. Any really good and careful drivers out here would be really valuable. The other odd element is the Charlestonian one of improvising materials—a bit of carpet to mend a stretcher, e.g.—in which I find myself at home. I don’t know what will happen to this—I expect continue in a few days, after another false alarm. No, all clear and morning.
Julian and Richard Rees, with five other ambulance drivers, were stationed at a hospital at El Goloso about ten miles north of Madrid. In preparation for this battle, they drove sixty miles (rather than the thirty miles it would have been ordinarily, because of the way the front line zig-zagged) to a hospital in the great royal palace—monastery of El Escorial. The ambulance unit was then moved closer to Brunete, outside of the town of Valdemorillo.
At dawn on July 6 the offensive was begun. Republican troops moved south from El Escorial towards Brunete, some fifteen miles distant, on the road leading into Madrid from the west. If the town could be taken and held, control of the road would fall to the government, and the Nationalist forces that had been fighting on the outskirts of Madrid since the previous autumn would be cut off from supplies and reinforcements. The point was to end the encirclement of Madrid. All went with remarkable ease at first. The Nationalists apparently were surprised by the offensive—which seems odd considering the publicity that had surrounded it, which had given rise to Julian’s forebodings—and Brunete was in the hands of the Republicans by noon. Ultimately, Brunete—the battle went on until the end of July—would change hands several times, and the battle would fail after a considerable number of deaths and casualties. Among the 331 British volunteers in the International Brigade, only 42 were not killed or wounded.19 Approximately 70,000 men were involved in the battle, the Nationalists outnumbering the Republicans three to two and, in airplanes, three to one.
Two days earlier, an International Writers Congress, attended by some eighty writers from twenty-seven countries, all of them dedicated supporters of the Republic, had got under way in Valencia. On July 6 the congress was moved to Madrid—a strategic change of scene which gave the visiting writers a more vivid sense of being in the midst of the struggle; indeed, in the quieter intervals between speechmaking and applause, the sound of gunfire could be heard in the distance. During the afternoon session there was a dramatic interruption when a group of soldiers, fresh from the front, “rushed up to the platform carrying two Fascist banners taken at Brunete and the uniform of a captured Fascist colonel, and a whole handful of women’s gold lockets which this same colonel had appropriated in the course of a raid on the civilian population. The soldiers announced that an advance of sixteen kilometres had been made since daybreak. Their offensive . . . was succeeding beyond expectations.”
The news from the front grew progressively worse in succeeding days, but by then the delegates were caught up in a battle of their own: whether or not to vote a motion of censure against André Gide, who had written an unfavorable account of his travels in Russia in Retour de l’U.S.S.R. As Malcolm Cowley remarked ironically, “Sometimes the struggle was drowned out by the sound of guns.” Between sessions they were driven out in limousines, like minor royalty, to raise the morale of nearby peasant villages; and in Madrid itself, “the waiters’ trade union and the town council made it a point of honour to make such arrangements as to prevent their foreign guests from noticing any difference in the standard of living between Paris and Madrid.”20 Julian himself was a poet and intellectual; he might as logically have attended a congress of writers in Madrid as driven an ambulance on the Brunete front. Yet one feels quite safe in saying that if he had, he would have detested it. When he heard of it originally, in letters from London, he dismissed it in a few satirical phrases to Rees. He had chosen to be a man of action, and there is every reason to believe he was happy in his choice. The rhetoric of the congress, cast in the mold of heroic clichés—however sincerely it may in some cases have been intended—would have convinced him that he had chosen well.
On July 7, elements of the 15th International Brigade, including the British Battalion, captured the village of Villanueva de la Cañada on the Brunete—El Escorial road. But the advance, as Hugh Thomas points out, was slowed by an extraordinary confusion:
Brigade upon brigade were sent through a small breach in the Nationalist lines, and became mixed up with each other. The known political background to the attack caused Republican officers and non-Communists in general to grumble about the direction of the battle. . . . By midnight on the first day of the attack, Varela [the Nationalist commander] reported to Franco that a front had been re-established. Twenty-four hours later, 31 battalions and 9 batteries had arrived in reinforcement of the Nationalist position. The battle, fought on the parched Castillian plain at the height of summer, assumed a most bloody character.21
Julian was now as much in the thick of things as he could have hoped: at last he was having his experience of war. Admittedly, he was a noncombatant, but in the Brunete campaign the ambulance driver was as exposed to danger as the soldier; the job demanded strength, endurance, resourcefulness, and courage. If Julian was denied the satisfaction of bearing arms, he was granted the satisfaction, denied to the ordinary soldier, of knowing that what he was doing was actually useful. The amateurishness, confusion, and contentiousness that seem to have marked much of the military action throughout the war were not unknown in the Medical Aid service but proved of less moment there once an action had begun. Unlike the ordinary soldier, who waits for the orders of his superior officers, who in turn wait for the orders of theirs, and so upward to the very highest political and military levels, the ambulance driver—as in the instance of the Brunete campaign—has a clear-cut idea of what he must do, and his is the responsibility for getting it done. It is an aspect of war where initiative and a talent for improvisation particularly count. In the circumstances, Julian thrived.
The medical unit established a kind of subheadquarters for ambulances among the olive trees outside Villanueva de la Cañada. From there they would drive the wounded to the hospital at El Escorial. When rebel planes flew over, strafing or dropping bombs, the drivers took shelter in the trenches the Fascist troops had dug, and had abandoned on the second day of the battle. It was there too that they would try to sleep at such odd, infrequent off-duty moments as came their way. They were continually on the move, driving out to the various first-aid stations along the front to collect the wounded, and returning with them to the hospitals at the Escorial, while day after day, night after night, the battle continued. By day, “villages, towns and fields were sprayed with steel from planes, guns and machine guns. At night whole square kilometres of earth would go up in flame.” Ambulance drivers were only seldom able to take advantage of the “illusory safety of trenches and dug outs.”
Much of the driving was done at night. “It was a second or third class road,” Rees has recalled,
filled with shell holes and usually thronged with military traffic; and lights were forbidden. Since I got no regular sleep during the whole three weeks I was sometimes obliged to pull up and go to sleep in order to avoid dozing off at the wheel; and I did this with complete callousness, giving no thought at all for the state of the wounded men in the ambulance. If an aeroplane flew over, the more conscious among them would begin shouting to me: “Hombre! We shall be bombed! Drive on! Do you want to kill us all?” But I was at a point of fatigue where I believe I wouldn’t have stirred if I had been sitting on a bonfire which I knew someone was setting light to.22
This callousness, as Rees calls it, had to be adopted if one was to do one’s job efficiently—after all, it would have been a doubtful service to the wounded to fall asleep at the wheel while driving; and it was entirely in accord with the attitude of hardheaded realism, the refusal to give way to sentimentality, pity, or squeamishness that Julian had advocated in his “Letter to E. M. Forster.” There he had written:
I have always been grateful for being made, as a child, to look at a stag having its throat cut, and that I have reached the stage of contemplating a corpse in the road without a Baudelairian extravaganza of horror. This seems to me the common human experience, and I have never perceived in myself any evil consequences. It is this making a moral principle of a physical squeamishness that is the greatest weakness of all religion, and most of all pacifism. To hate war because it is wasteful of good lives and useful objects is rational; to hate war because killing is wicked is defensible; but to hate war only because a battlefield of carrion makes you sick is hardly adequate: one hates a channel crossing on the same grounds, yet is, none the less, ready to go to France.
Forster, in his “Notes for a Reply,” singled this passage out: “The analysis of squeamishness helps me. By next year [1939] it is probable that some of us will be killed and all of us have to see dead people lying about. Our own deaths we must meet with equipment of longer standing, in fact, with all our civilisation, whatever that may be. But Julian’s tips may come in useful over corpses.”23 Detachment (or callousness) is the recommended attitude for the battlefield; pity is a civilian luxury. One feels certain that Julian would have approved Rees’s statement that his “most disagreeable experience of war so far had been its disgustingness rather than its terror. The chloroformlike-like odour of decaying corpses all through the hot breathless nights and the peculiarly loathsome sickly-sour smell of the dust in the trenches. . . . And the sight of dead bodies lying slumped grotesquely beside the road, like life-size wax dolls, was disgusting and sinister rather than pitiful.”24
On July 9, the Republicans captured the village of Quijorna; on the 11th, they took two further villages. But Boadilla, beyond Brunete on the road to Madrid, although repeatedly attacked, would not yield. By July 13 offensive action was at an end. “Henceforward the Republicans would be attempting to defend the positions which they had won. On July 15, after further fierce fighting around Boadilla, orders were given for trenches to be dug. The Republic had gained a pocket of land about twelve kilometres deep by fifteen wide.”25
When Julian had arrived at the Escorial, he had been delighted to discover that one of the medical people (who had not quite fully qualified as a doctor) assigned to the hospital there was an old friend from King’s, Archie Cochrane. Neither had known the other was in Spain. They had a brief, exultant reunion and brief but enlivening encounters thereafter. The battle raged about them day after day—there was hardly time for more than a cigarette together when Julian would drive his ambulance into the motor court. Cochrane himself had been with the medical unit since the previous September; he had seen so much of the suffering and cruelty of war that he had come to live on a kind of “grey plateau” of feeling. Julian’s exuberance and vitality and unflagging spirit brightened his life immeasurably. Rees, of course, saw him much more often, and he was similarly impressed. It seemed to him that Julian was having the most wonderful time of his life. He was extremely serious about his work—down to the smallest details—determined to do whatever had to be done with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of fuss. At the same time, he was enjoying it all: observing, making suggestions, explaining to Rees his idea of “Socialism from above” as they drove across the battlefields, and being unmistakably “upper class” in his manner—although Julian never tried to be anything other than what he was, and he felt no need or desire to pretend to be a member of the proletariat. He had come to Spain hoping to be in the midst of a major battle, and it turned out that he was in a better position as an ambulance driver to see what was going on than if he had been a soldier in the British Battalion. He wanted to learn about modern warfare; quite logically, in the sense that the totalitarians, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, were using Spain as a laboratory, he was there to observe their experiments. Political subtleties and allegiances did not overly concern him. He had never thought of Spain as the incarnation of an ideal, nor had he been swept up in a rush of ideological enthusiasm; hence, he did not run the risk of being disillusioned—only of being killed.
Early in the morning of July 15, his ambulance was smashed by a bomb—he himself was unhurt. Since no other car was available for him to drive, he volunteered to go up to the front as a stretcher-bearer. It was the morning of the last fierce fighting around Boadilla. Julian was put in charge of a squad of thirty stretcher-bearers and went out to work in that very dangerous sector. Towards nightfall there was a lull in the battle. The Republican forces fell back. For the next three days there was comparative calm at the front, and the stretcher-bearers took advantage of it to bring in the dead. On the morning of the 18th, the Medical Aid unit received a new lorry: this was to be Julian’s. The group was stationed in an olive orchard near the village of Valdemorillo. As the lull in the battle still continued, he proposed driving out to fill in the shell holes in the road, which would make the evacuation of the wounded quicker and less painful. It was a practical, concerned, and enterprising thing to have done; it showed that Julian was thinking about the situation and working to improve the efficiency of his unit. They then moved to another olive orchard near Villanueva de la Cañada. There, as Rees wrote:
Julian and Richard Rees in Spain, July 1937. From Julian Bell: Essays, Poems, and Letters, Edited by Quentin Bell. The Hogarth Press, 1938.
Julian was indefatigable at organizing, cleaning up, helping the cook, and scrounging for fruit and fuel and tools and rope in the ruined shops and gardens of Villanueva. As the rest of us became more and more jaded from the long night drives without lights, his energy seemed to flare up with an unearthly incandescence. In the intervals of his activity he lounged about reading Racine. “It will sound well when I come to write my memoirs,” he said. With his pith sun-helmet and khaki shorts he looked eccentric, rather like a bulky Hollywood empire-builder, and it amused him to pretend that his real interest in the war was to frustrate the Germans and Italians and secure Spain as a British colony. . . . He fretted a good deal at not being in a fighting unit.26
On July 18, 1937, the first anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war, the battle of Brunete was renewed with a violent counterattack by the Nationalists. Their planes roared overhead, dropping bombs indiscriminately. One hit the grove where Julian was. Dr. Gerald Shirlaw, a British doctor who had chosen to be attached to the International Brigade rather than the Medical Aid group, remembered:
There was a lorry in front of us and we jumped underneath it simultaneously and then for protection we put our arms round each other. The bombardment was pretty close and I got smothered with sand underneath the lorry. It was only gradually that I realised that Julian Bell was lying perfectly still. I got up and turned him around, and saw that a fragment of shell had cut a large hole in his chest wall, exposing his heart. We tried to give him sedatives straight away, and some dressings, and get him into an ambulance. It was clear to me that his presence beside me had saved me from injury. It was a sad day for the few of us who were there, and realised what had happened.27
The initial account in the Times on July 22 stated that Julian had been hit while driving his ambulance, and so we reported his death in the earlier book, not having seen this account. The ambiguity of the language, too, may well have led us to the wrong conclusion: the obituary stated that he was killed while driving an ambulance; the bulletin of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee stated that he had been machine-gunned from a rebel plane while driving his ambulance. Driving an ambulance was indeed his activity while in Spain, yet the phrase does not necessarily mean that he was actually driving when hit. But so, erroneously, we interpreted it. However it happened, Julian was mortally wounded.
Later in the day, a wounded ambulance driver so covered with dirt as to be unrecognizable was brought into the 35th Division Hospital at Escorial on a stretcher. Cochrane was in charge of the receiving room; he ordered the man to be cleaned. It was only after this was done that he recognized Julian. As soon as he examined him, he realized that Julian had been mortally wounded: a shell fragment had penetrated deep into his chest. All that could be done was done. Several doctors attempted to deal with the terrible situation: he received a blood transfusion and his wound was dressed. But the doctors attending him knew that the situation was hopeless.
Dr. Reginald Saxton has given the fullest account of Julian’s death in a recorded interview housed in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. Saxton was particularly involved in working out ways to make blood transfusions work.
A portion of a bomb came horizontally along the ground and hit him in the chest. It must have hit him through a wallet so quite probably it went right through his lungs taking a bit of the wallet and its contents right into his lungs. He was in pretty poor shape when I saw him and I transfused him and prepared him for the surgeon—a man whom I still know, a Spaniard, a Catalonian, a very nice guy by the name of Broggi. Well, we hadn’t got facilities that are necessary for operating on a lung. . . . So all Broggi could do was really to clean off the surface. . . . Julian Bell was on the operating table and had his wound cleaned up as far as was reasonably possible and simply patched over. It was impossible to clean the wound properly owing to lack of facilities for doing lung surgery and he died within twelve hours or so. There was really nothing more we could do for him. Some of the remains of his property in fact I brought home with me . . . and gave to his relatives.28
He was also attended by Dr. Philip D’Arcy Hart, a member of the London Committee of Spanish Medical Aid who happened to be there on a visit. A chest specialist, he inserted a system of drainage into the lung and removed the shell splinter from his chest. Julian was still conscious, still cheerful. He murmured to Cochrane, “Well, I always wanted a mistress and a chance to go to the war, and now I’ve had both.” Then he lapsed into French, reciting indistinctly lines of what Cochrane thought might be Baudelaire. Soon after, he fell into a coma from which he never awakened.
He was one of the estimated 35,000 men—25,000 on the side of the Republic, 10,000 on the side of the Nationalists—whose lives were lost in the battle of Brunete. The battle itself continued for another six days and ended in a stalemate. It is supposed to have provided interesting material for military theorists on the use of the tank. The Nationalists regained much of the territory taken by the Republican forces, including the town of Brunete; the attempt to gain control of the road into Madrid from the west, which had been the principal object of the offensive, had failed. The Republic had won a strip of territory five kilometers deep along fifteen kilometers of front. And together with a few other villages it continued to hold the ruins of Villanueva de la Cañada.
Julian was taken to the mortuary of the hospital in the Escorial, and there Richard Rees, who by chance was in the hospital, ill, saw him, covered except for his head and shoulders. There was no sign of any wound. He looked “very pale and clean, almost marble-like. Very calm and peaceful almost as if he had fallen asleep when very cold.”29
Needless to say, Vanessa was totally devastated by the news; her worst fears were realized. She remarked to Virginia, “I shall be cheerful, but I shall never be happy again.”30 Virginia was anxious to protect her as much as possible and over the next weeks spent almost every day with her, not even writing in her diary from July 20 until August 6. To Leonard Julian’s death was a terrible waste, and it reminded him of the death of Rupert Brooke and his brother in the First World War. Virginia’s first preserved letter about Julian’s death was to Vita on July 21: “I wired to you because Julian was killed yesterday in Spain. Nessa likes to have me so I’m round there more of the time. It is very terrible. You will understand.” They were in London, but Virginia felt that Vanessa should go to Charleston as soon as possible. Vanessa wrote to Vita on August 16: “I cannot ever say how Virginia has helped me. Perhaps some day, not now, you will be able to tell her it’s true.”31 It reminds one of the night that the sisters Margaret and Helen spent at Howards End. Personal relations had paid at the end.
On July 26 Virginia wrote to William Robson, a teacher at the London School of Economics and cofounder with Leonard of the Political Quarterly. “He was a great joy to us; her children were like my own. But it had become necessary for him to go; and there is a kind of grandeur in that which somehow now and then consoles one. Only—to see what she [Vanessa] has to suffer makes one doubt if anything in the world is worth it.” And as she wrote to Vita, probably on the same day: “Lord, why do these things happen? I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of dull anger and despair. He had every sort of gift—above everything vitality and enjoyment. Why must he be set on going to Spain?—But it was useless to argue. And his feelings were so mixed. I mean, interest in war, and conviction, and a longing to be in the thick of things. He was the first of Nessa babies, and I cant describe how close and real and always alive our relation was.” She made further remarks about him in a letter to Judith Stephen, her niece, on December 2, 1939, and to Vanessa on his birthday in 1940. “Julian was a magnificent creature. What would he have done, I wonder? He has such an immense store of life in him, and God knows why he went and threw it away. But I daresay it was better in Spain than in Flanders.” “What a pleasure your brats are to me—I long more and more for Julian, whose birthday it is today, and cant help just saying so, though I know you know it. My own darling I do think of you and him so much.”32
Richard Rees remains a significant witness and further testified about Julian’s death. He wrote in his published account:
Towards the evening I heard rumours of exceptional air activity and that a bomb had fallen on a car park and killed thirty drivers. I also felt that Nurse Ramshaw was keeping something from me. When I got the truth it was that Julian had been wounded at our Villanueva park. He was unconscious in the ward above and could not last out the night. My day’s rest in the hospital began to look very ugly. I was up early next morning and saw Julian’s body in the mortuary. I was accustomed to the sight of death, but this time it was impossible to believe. His terrific vitality and his jokes, his enthusiasm and his brains, simply could not have ceased and left his body so calm and unchanged. His wound was in the lung, and his face remained as if in sleep with a tranquil and slightly disdainful expression. I came away stunned. I wanted to berate the doctors and nurses for having let it happen. . . . I spent an afternoon alone under a tree; and missing Julian’s company and thinking of the waste of his life, I suddenly burst into childish sobs of which I had not thought I was capable. I learnt from this the cleansing effect of an almost disinterested sorrow. I had not known Julian long enough to feel remorse for past betrayals or failures of friendship, and I was not sufficiently involved with him for his death to create any personal problems for me. It neither complicated nor simplified my own difficulties. His company had been a pure gift. Its withdrawal was a pure loss.33
Rees also wrote to Portia Holman on August 31, 1937, and she must have given the letter to Vanessa, as it is with her papers, alongside the letter Rees wrote to her:
I have tried many times to write to Vanessa Bell about Julian but it is so difficult as I don’t know her personally. I feel I ought to, as no one saw nearly so much of Julian out here as I did, and no one can have appreciated him more. The thing I would try to convey to her is that, however much may have lost by his death, I really do believe that he himself had reached a kind of pinnacle of living that he could hardly have surpassed however long he might have lived and however great his achievements might have been. It was really remarkable how perfectly adapted he was to all the difficulties and strangeness, and how assured and serene and brilliantly competent he was. From the point of view of his friends, from the point of view of social usefulness, one may deplore his death as a wasteful loss. But from the point of view of Julian as an individual, as a unique manifestation of the human essence, I do believe he reached a perfection in life and action which is very seldom achieved in the longest of normal lives. You know how very difficult it is to write letters out here. I despair of ever saying all that I feel about Julian.
Rees did go to see Vanessa, as she wrote to Eddie in an undated letter in the fall. And then he wrote to Vanessa herself on October 4:
For me personally Julian’s death was by far the most terrible thing that happened in all the six months I was in Spain. He was so brilliantly vivid in my eyes that I can hardly realize it even now. But, looked at from his point of view (I mean from any point of view except that of personal loss), I do believe that he was “luckier than most of us.” He was struck down suddenly and without time for morbid regrets or disillusionment, when he was at the very height and perfect fulfillment of his most unusual combination of gifts. I know that all the people who saw much of him at El Goloso and in Escorial would say the same. In saying that he was spared the pain of disillusionment I don’t at all mean that he struck me as being naïve about the War. On the contrary, he seems to me to have a very mature and sane view—far more so than most of his contemporary intellectuals. But I do think that if he had lived longer he would scarcely have found any more situations in which his various gifts could all have been so perfectly expressed together; his humane and altruistic and profound and sensitive intellectualism, and his spirited and adventurous side, and his unusual practical abilities. His energy seemed inexhaustible. My own recollection of those weeks is mainly of constant and increasing and unendurable fatigue. But even in that condition of self-centred lethargy I remember distinctly that I noted how Julian’s energy seemed to be renewed and increased to meet increasing demands. . . . There was something almost unnatural and super-normal about Julian’s brilliance at that time—as though he were approaching a pinnacle of existence which few people ever reach and which, once reached, cannot be surpassed however many more years a person may live. But alas it still remains true that the rest of the world is the poorer for the lack of his concrete achievements that would have been his if he had lived. But to be more personal, you can imagine what a job it was during those weeks to have odd moments when one could talk about painting and Cambridge and literature. We had the New Statesman with Virginia Woolf’s essay on “Gibbon at Sheffield Place” and one of the last things Julian said to me was how much he enjoyed it. But his stoicism also enabled him to enjoy or seem to enjoy, quite other things. He persuaded me to help him to collect figs for our camp in a ruined garden where it was dangerous to be and which stank of explosives and carcasses; and as he threw the figs into the basket I held he remarked that the scene was “Baudelariean.” I sometimes wonder if even you and his own family can realise what a joy his company was during those weeks.34
On December 9, 1937, Vanessa wrote to Sue:
I have now had a long talk with the doctor [Cochrane] who was with Julian when he died—he is nice & intelligent & he knew Julian at Cambridge & was very fond of him. . . . He made it quite clear that everything was done that could possibly be done—that he was as well or better looked after than he could have been in England & that he had no pain & did not know of his own danger. . . . I cannot myself face many people & only see a few of those I know best.35
Vanessa also busied herself with the making of the memorial book about him, gathering letters that might be included and deciding what else might be in the book. It would consist of a foreword from Keynes; his official short obituary from the King’s College Annual Report, published on November 13, 1937; a memoir by David Garnett and his own notes for a memoir; an essay on him by Charles Mauron; selected letters and poems; as well as the three long essays on Roger Fry; on poetry, with a reply by C. Day Lewis; and on war and peace, with a reply by Forster.
Virginia had conversations as well with Cochrane and Hart about Julian’s death, the first recorded in her diary on August 25.
Nothing new: only that he was conscious when they got him to hospital, & anxious to explain that the road was dangerous: then anxious to get on with the operation. He became unconscious, talked in French about military things apparently . . . [ellipsis in text] & died 4 hours later. Why do I set this down? It belongs to what is unreal now. What is left that is real? . . . Much forced talk with Hart & Cochran[e]. Cochran[e] a nice simple but rather tense (naturally) practical reddish young man giving his account stiffly kindly; Hart a Jew; neurotic, rather shiny nosed, intellectual, with a professional surgeons manner. A conflict of sympathy, tragedy, professional manner, & social politeness. Queer rather.
And then on October 13 she saw Dr. Hart again.
The facts now seem to be: Julian was brought in with a very bad wound—looked deathly white. He asked H. What chance have I? Hart told him 80 percent recover. A lie. He had only the chance of a miracle. He was very brave. After the operation, H. saw him comfortably in bed. Went back two hours later & found him dozing half conscious. And so he remained till he died that night. . . . Hart was tormented by some sense of guilt. That they had not kept J. from the front. They would have done so later. This was his first experience. Things are now much more dangerous. The Ambulance is almost as dangerous as the Army.36
Vanessa wrote to Keynes a quite fascinating letter triggered by what he had written in the Annual Report.
I felt that Julian had really changed more during the last 2 or 3 years than you may have realized. You saw so much of him & Quentin when they were growing up that it is probably difficult to forget them as they were then. At any rate I find that I have to be perpetually readjusting my attitude to my children & I can only do it because I’m seeing them all the time—when Julian came back from China I was aware that he had become a grown up & completely independent human being. . . . I dare say too that in many ways he would always have remained a child. . . . Still I feel he had grown up—he could make up his own mind & knew what he wanted to do & why. That is the only thing is the least reconciles me to his death. I feel he wanted, not to die—no one could have wanted that—but to run the risk he knew he would run for reasons he judged worth while. Though I cannot agree I can at moments feel that one must give in to what he chose for both himself & me. When he was on his way to China—and I think that going so far away on a real job of his own was what first made him grow up—he thought he might while there get involved in risks & be killed. He wrote to me then—I was only given the letter after his death—and explained what it was in himself which made him feel he must take certain risks even at the cost of what he knew it would mean to me. I do not think he could really know—but what he said has been a great help to me. It was an expression of his own attitude to life & death & of something very fundamental in himself which would never have changed & which I seem to myself to share. During those last three months in England, in spite of terribly difficult differences of opinion, we had an intimacy with each other greater in a way than any I have ever had with anyone else—& which could only have been possible with another grown up human being.37
Julian’s two letters to her had been written on his way to China on September 26, 1935, before, in her opinion, he had quite made it to being “grown up.” He had entrusted them to Eddie to give to her in case of his death. In them he stated his desire to be a man of action. He also wrote, “I’ve had an extremely happy life, and done most of the things I wanted to do. . . . The other thing, which doesn’t really need to be said between us, is that I love you more than anyone else, and always have done so, ever since I can remember.”38 She had written to him in China that year, on November 1, about how important he was to her. “Oh, Julian, I can never express what happiness you’ve given me in my life. I often wonder how such luck has fallen my way. Just having children seemed such incredible delight, but that they should care for me as you make me feel you do, is something beyond all dreaming of—or even wanting.”39
His death was a terrible waste, although it is far from clear what shape his life might ultimately have taken. He might well have been one of those multitalented English men of letters. He might well have returned to poetry. He was a fine poet, and he was, as it happens, the sole Bloomsbury poet; in that area he did genuinely make his mark. He also had hopes of making a political impact and learning about war. This was the major reason for his going to Spain, as well as his desire to be a man of action and to face danger. He was both a Bell and a Stephen. Vanessa painfully captured the waste of his death, and the intensity of her relations with him, in a letter she wrote on August 27, 1937, to one of his girlfriends.
I think there is one thing I want desperately to say to any one who will listen—if only I could—and that is simply that I am quite sure, reasonably and definitely sure, that the loss of people like Julian is a waste. It is not my own pain that makes me say it. In fact I am not really to be pitied—not on the whole. I never doubt for an instant that I am immensely the richer for all the feelings I have had and shall ever have about Julian. But I am old enough to know a little what he might have done and been if he had lived. I know that his life would have given infinite good and possibilities to the world which are now lost.40
Julian was very much part of Bloomsbury; he much enjoyed it and enjoyed benefiting from his association with it. He was part of its second generation. It is not possible to say in what ways he would have made a contribution, and how considerable it would have been. He was at the heart of Bloomsbury as one of Vanessa’s children. Julian was named in memory of his uncle, Julian Thoby Stephen, always known as Thoby, who had also died young, at the age of twenty-six. Julian frequently reminded Virginia of Thoby, and now there was the terrible coincidence of their early deaths. Thoby had been the linchpin for Bloomsbury, principally through his close friends at Trinity, Cambridge—Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf. It was virtually in reaction to Thoby’s death from typhoid in 1906 that Clive almost immediately married Vanessa and that some years later Leonard married Virginia. It was through Thoby that the young Cambridge men came to the new home of the Stephen children in Bloomsbury. Virginia conceived her first novel, The Voyage Out, at the time of Julian’s birth. The years between the wars were the golden years of Bloomsbury when the most prominent members of that group of friends came into their eminence. It might be said that the ending of that richest period was marked by the death of Julian, deeply shadowing the lives of Vanessa and Virginia.
The blow was most devastating for Vanessa. Clive played a far less important part in Julian’s life, and there is little evidence of how he reacted to his son’s death. Virginia wrote about the relationship between mother and son in her diaries, on August 17:
Julian had some queer power over her [Vanessa]—the lover as well as the son. He told her he could never love another woman as he had loved her. He was like her; yet had a vigour, a roughness, & then as a child, how much she cared for him. I mean, he needed comfort & sympathy more I think than the others, was less adapted to get on in the world—had a kind of clumsiness, of Cambridge awkwardness, together with his natural gaiety. And thats all lost for the sake of 10 minutes in an ambulance. I often argue with him on my walks; abuse his selfishness in going but mostly feel floored by the complete muddle & waste. Cant share the heroic raptures of the Medical Aid, who are holding a meeting next week to commemorate the six who were killed. “Gave their lives” as they call it.41
There was a memorial gathering at King’s, which Vanessa felt she couldn’t face, as well as one at Wuhan University, attended by about two hundred, held, perhaps deliberatively, on November 11.
It was after his death that Virginia took Julian most seriously. She noted in her diary on August 11 that he “stalks beside me, in many different shapes.” There had always been a certain tension in their literary relations. He was Vanessa’s beloved child, but to a degree he was also her rival as a writer. On September 8, in a letter to Vanessa, she praised his letter to Forster, feeling that it was the best thing he had written, although she still had issues with him in terms of style and content. “At last I think I understand his point of view, which I didn’t—about being a soldier I mean. I dont agree: from my point of view; however that may be my fault. . . . Lord how I wish I could argue the whole thing with Julian.”42
Julian wished to be a hard man of action, almost an antithesis of the values of Bloomsbury. The book she was writing at the time, Three Guineas, was to a degree an argument with Julian. As Julian was fighting fascism in his way, through action, so too was she in her new work, though in a far less militaristic fashion, taking issue with his values. She had been working on the book since 1931, but his death coincided with her greatest concentration on the question of how to prevent war. She felt a need to discuss it with him, as if he were almost with her as she was finishing it. At the end of his life, indeed beyond it, Julian found himself involved in a discussion with Virginia. He was part of Bloomsbury, but he was also apart from it. His life, though short, had been full, dramatic, and in many ways, happy.
