Chapter 3
Returning to Spain
To Stay the Course

One of the hardest parts of the trip had been to persuade the garage owner to splash paint onto the near-perfect finish of the car to break up its outline. In the late summer of 1937, Hemingway wanted as much protection from enemy air attack as he could get for his trips to a Republican guerrilla camp in a remote corner of Spain, and homemade camouflage was better than nothing. After strapping an extra gas can or two to the bumper, he set out from Valencia on the smoother paved roads near the Mediterranean coast, then turned onto the smaller roads leading into the mountains of Teruel. Not designed for the army trucks and staff cars that now passed over them, the hill roads must have sprouted potholes and ruts. The car, probably another powerful Dodge said to have gears like a bulldozer, took about two hours to go some forty-five miles, climbing slowly but steadily around the hairpin turns.

Hemingway’s destination, the small town of Alfambra, was pretty in an austere way, its barren hills framed by vegetation along the small river of the same name. He found the guerrilla commander he was looking for in a simple house that had been turned into a barracks, and quickly learned that Antoni Chrost, the plainspoken Polish communist who was in charge, did not want visitors, especially not reporters. The name Hemingway meant nothing to him. Ernest produced a laissez-passer from the Army of the Center, covered with stamps that conveyed the power of the issuing authority. The pass charged every Republican commander with helping the bearer in his work, which, he liked to tell people like Chrost, was more like that of a writer than a reporter.

It was the pass that probably made the difference. Chrost eventually agreed to let the writer return three weeks later and go along on a sabotage mission—though he would assign a man to keep an eye on Hemingway just in case. The second time around, Hemingway was with the guerrillas for four days at their camp and in the field. They loaned him a revolver, and asked him to carry hand grenades and food on the fifteen-mile march to the objective.

Setting off at dusk, the thirty-man band slipped through fascist lines, traveled near (but not on) a road, and finally, under cover of darkness, crawled up to a set of railroad tracks on a small bridge over the Jiloca River. Before long they could hear a train in the distance, and see sparks from the locomotive lighting up the night sky. The train was moving slowly enough to give the dinamiteros time to carefully prime their charges while Hemingway rummaged around in his pack for a camera. At Chrost’s urgent request, he turned off the flash but was able to use the light from the explosion to photograph the attack: the bridge collapsing into the water just before the locomotive reached the riverbank, the cars coming off the rails, their iron wheels plowing up the earth before they came to rest, now useful only as scrap metal. The guerrillas did not wait for the enemy to react but started for home at once.1

 

Hemingway returned to Spain three times after Joris Ivens went to China. The Dutch filmmaker would continue to write his American friend long, detailed letters, including a twenty-page note on January 28, 1938, urging him to stay the course.2 Hemingway should continue to make the case for the Republic with his writing, just as he had in 1937; he should get his antifascist play, The Fifth Column, onstage and perhaps on film; he should stay in touch with people in the movement who could explain the events in Barcelona to him; if and when he was ready, if there was something he would “like to talk over with one of our leading people,” he should not hesitate to “do it.” Finally, he should come to China, the new frontier in the war against fascism.

Much of Ivens’s advice fell on deaf ears. Hemingway would not go to China to work, let alone sign up with the Comintern. He would build on the foundation that Ivens had laid for him, making good use of his new Soviet and communist contacts. But he would support the Republic in his own way. He would be his own commissar. And he would be more than a propagandist for Ivens and his cause. Ivens did not seem to understand that Hemingway was also in Spain as a suitor, humanitarian, military advisor, and, above all, writer. As he had tried to explain to the guerrillas, the writer and the reporter were different. The reporter wanted facts for a story to file as soon as he could get it through the censor; the writer wanted to absorb the experience of wartime.

Hemingway and the German communist Gustav Regler, the commissar with a heart who became a close friend. Ernest Hemingway Photo Collection, JFK Library.

The man who came closest to replacing Ivens in Hemingway’s life was the German communist Gustav Regler, one of the more interesting—and, ultimately, appealing—figures Hemingway would encounter in Spain.3 He was movie-star handsome, as his cameo appearance in The Spanish Earth proved; he looked a little like a more cerebral Gary Cooper. Regler’s combat record was a threshold qualification for friendship with Hemingway. In World War I, he had fought in the trenches for the kaiser. After the war, he became a dedicated communist, risking his life and livelihood for the party. This included working with Ivens on a propaganda film about Germany in 1934. The experience had left a bad taste in his mouth. Ivens was a little too slick, a little too manipulative for him. When he had encountered Ivens with Hemingway in Spain, he wondered if “the smiling Ivens” was going to make “another film of self-deception.”4

In 1936 Regler was living in Moscow, where he started to understand, in a way Hemingway never would, what it was like to live under the dictatorship of the proletariat on a day-to-day basis. Often it ominously mirrored the ancien regime, or Nazi Germany. With a mixture of disbelief, disgust, and fear he took in one of the first of Stalin’s show trials: “I saw the prison-vans  . . . pulled up behind the Bolshoi Theatre. They did not look very different from the vans used by the Tsarist police. . . . I [also] thought of [a prisoner] marching past me to his death in Munich.”5 Among the Soviet victims was one of his protectors, the great revolutionary Lev Kamenev, who was tried and executed in August. Regler wondered if he was next on the list, and was only too relieved when the Comintern approved his request to go to Spain. There he became a political commissar in the Twelfth International Brigade.

Unlike other commissars, some of whom took a much more heavy-handed approach, Regler saw his duty as maintaining the morale of the troops and working with the civilian population. In 1938 he would boast of saving priceless paintings from destruction and transporting women and children to safety from villages where battles were raging.6 He was most likely sincere when he said that it was up to the commissars “to halt the cruelties . . . on both sides.” It felt good to be waging the good fight again: for him the winds of “heroic Spain” were blowing away the “stink of Moscow.”7 He watched “the good Russia” come onto the scene, but worried that “the diabolical Russia” might not be far behind.

If Ivens tried to teach Hemingway about “the good Russia,” and all she was doing to fight fascism, Regler did not hesitate to tell the American about “the diabolical Russia” and her ways. He told Hemingway a story that illustrated the difference. Members of a French battalion had, of their own accord, asked him to meet with them to discuss a problem. During a recent battle, two French soldiers had panicked, imagining enemy troops all around them and shouting for everyone to run. Regler had them arrested, then decided that they were suffering from combat fatigue. He sent them to a sanatorium and reported what he had done to the chief commissar of the Brigades, the French communist André Marty.

Marty had been a revolutionary since his days as a sailor in the French Navy. He was famous in communist circles for having organized a mutiny to keep his ship from firing on Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917. When he appeared in Spain twenty years later, now as a senior official, the big man was running to fat, with a double chin and a receding hairline that he usually hid under an oversize beret. As if his black leather jacket and large pistol were not intimidating enough, he was more prone to shout than to speak, and to suspect almost everyone of treason.8

Regler’s report in hand, Marty proclaimed he knew what to do, and took charge of the case. Then he ordered “a Russian execution squad” to shoot the two soldiers.9 Regler remembered how Hemingway had exclaimed, “Swine!” and spat on the ground when he heard the story.10 This gesture drew Regler close to Hemingway, and afterward he proved his friendship again and again, sharing confidences with the American:11 “I told him the inside stories of operations and crises I had witnessed. I let him know about our losses and gave him advance information whenever I could, feeling certain that he really understood. . . .”

 

What even Regler does not mention in his memoirs is that he was the man who introduced Hemingway to another representative of the diabolical Russia, the NKVD chief of station Orlov. The meeting took place at the Gaylord, probably during the spring of 1937. Orlov was not introduced in his official capacity, but he assumed Hemingway knew who he was. (It was hardly a secret among the denizens of the Gaylord.) Not much happened at their first meeting. Drinking vodka and Spanish brandy, they spoke in English about their common interest in firearms, but not about politics. Gellhorn came along and charmed Orlov; they chatted about the Austrian food and music that both of them enjoyed.12

During the summer of 1937, Orlov followed the news about Hemingway’s exploits in New York and Hollywood. In particular, he read in NKVD channels about the writers’ conference at Carnegie Hall:13

[S]ources reported that Hemingway’s speech was the high point of the convention. . . . [H]e had . . . torn into the Fascists and shredded them into small bits of unrecognizable bone meal. . . . [T]he fact that Hemingway had taken such a positive and firm political stance . . . in public took the [NKVD] by surprise.

 

On the strength of Hemingway’s performance in New York, Orlov decided that the NKVD would grant Hemingway carte blanche, good for any official help that he might need or want in Spain.14 When Hemingway returned to Madrid in September 1937, he reappeared at the Gaylord and told Regler that he wanted to learn more about the Republican guerrillas, said to be performing great feats of derring-do in battle. With his ready access to the NKVD, Regler was able to tell Orlov in person what Hemingway wanted. Given his experience fighting White insurgents during the Russian Civil War, Orlov fancied himself something of an expert on guerrilla warfare, and liked the idea of showing off his program. Although he was going against the grain of the highly secretive NKVD, Orlov made an exception for Hemingway, who was both sympathetic to the cause and the most prominent journalist in Spain, one whom it made sense to court. And so Orlov arranged for Hemingway to visit Benimàmet, a secret guerrilla training camp in the NKVD domain.

Alexander Orlov, the NKVD chief who ran the secret war in Spain for Stalin and made time to entertain Hemingway. National Archives, College Park.

Hemingway’s tour guide at Benimàmet was Orlov’s deputy, Leonid Eitingon, a barrel-chested NKVD officer who ran day-to-day guerrilla operations and impressed others as competent and direct. While photos of Orlov convey his intensity, those of Eitingon suggest toughness, charisma, and even some humor, which was remarkable since part of his job was to murder Stalin’s enemies.15 During the visit, Eitingon went to considerable lengths to impress Hemingway, taking him on a carefully orchestrated tour. The Soviets showed him every phase of the training in the camp, where whitewashed plaster structures set on a featureless plain gave it the kind of austere, no-nonsense look that appealed to the writer.

At midday, Orlov hosted a gourmet lunch served with fine French wines that he had been saving for a special occasion. He also poured a rare Polish vodka, Baczewski, a little something he asked an NKVD colleague in Vienna to ship to Spain for him on a regular basis. After lunch, Orlov and Hemingway went to one of the camp’s rifle ranges to fire Soviet weapons. Considering the amount of lunchtime drinking, Orlov was surprised that Hemingway shot very well by any standard. When the visit was drawing to a close, Orlov gave Hemingway one of his precious bottles of Baczewski to take back to his hotel. The Soviet thought Hemingway was “beside himself” when he expressed his gratitude for the hospitality that the NKVD had shown him.16

Orlov may have gone on to facilitate Hemingway’s visit to Alfambra, the town where he spent the four days in the fall of 1937 with communist guerrillas. They in turn allowed him to witness the attack on the Nationalist train that would drive the plot of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Some of the evidence is circumstantial: Benimàmet and Alfambra were about one hundred miles apart; Hemingway visited the two places at roughly the same time; Orlov would likely have exercised influence, if not control, over the Polish commando Antoni Chrost and his men, who may have trained at Benimàmet. Orlov himself hinted at a connection when he affirmed years later that “much of what Hemingway had written in the book” grew out of the visit to Benimàmet, adding how pleased he was to recognize himself in the character Varloff.17

Orlov met Hemingway again a few months later. The occasion was the official anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7, 1938, which was also the second anniversary of the successful defense of Madrid. There were spirited celebrations across Republican Spain.18 Over lunch at the Gaylord, Hemingway carried on at some length about the wonderful time that he had at Benimàmet and the most impressive bottle of vodka that he had taken home. After a few drinks, Hemingway started to speak freely. He “vehemently denounced Franco and the Nationalists” and had “nothing but praise” for the International Brigades and the Republicans. This turned out to be Orlov’s last face-to-face meeting with Hemingway, but the astute intelligence officer had heard and read enough to draw some conclusions about the American writer. Orlov would remember Hemingway not as a man under Soviet control but as “a rugged individualist, great sportsman, but most of all a true believer in the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War.”19

Orlov, in fact, had reservations about true believers like Hemingway. When making decisions at work, Orlov was both cynical and realistic, less driven by ideology or belief. Years later he would imply that Hemingway, caught up in his own belief system, had not known when to quit: “the author, and people like him, were the prime motivators of the war in the sense that they swayed world opinion to the side of the Republicans . . . , which needlessly prolonged the war.”20

If he had known about it, Hemingway would have been pleased by Orlov’s opinion about his influence. He considered himself to be more influential than he actually was, believing that others lived by what he said and wrote about Spain. For one, the young communist writer Alvah Bessie was surprised to learn that Hemingway believed that it was his speech to the faithful in New York City on that hot day in June 1937 that had motivated Bessie to travel to Spain and join the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the largely American unit raised by the Comintern to fight for the Republic.21 In his memoir, Men in Battle, Bessie quoted Hemingway as saying that he knew “that speech influenced a lot of the boys to come over here.”22 This was, Bessie continued, “the kind of egomania the guy suffered from. . . . I had decided to go to Spain long before [I heard his speech]. I was trying to find a way out of my marriage.”

 

On the battlefield, Hemingway continued to alternate between witnessing and participating in the fighting. He logged many miles with fellow American journalists Jay Allen of the Chicago Tribune and Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, and did not hesitate to set aside his notebook and pen when a Loyalist needed his help. In December 1937, after showing Allen how to protect his eardrums during an air raid by clamping a pencil in his jaws to hold his mouth open, Hemingway called on his colleague to help move an artillery piece stuck in the mud, and got angry when Allen refused, claiming that he was hired to write, not fight the war. Nor did Hemingway appreciate the lecture on the laws of war that followed, how reporters had no legal right to carry sidearms.23

Hemingway pitched in again one sunny day in the spring of 1938. With Joe North (of New Masses fame) and Matthews, Hemingway was driving along a mountain road in Spain behind a truckload of youths singing Republican songs and raising their fists in the Republican greeting. It was, he commented, a uniquely moving sight. In the next instant, the truck driver miscalculated a turn; the truck turned upside down; boys were strewn along the roadway. Hemingway leapt from their car and started giving first aid, while Matthews got out his notebook and started asking questions of the injured. North remembered hearing Hemingway shout at Matthews to get the hell out of the way before he, Hemingway, killed Matthews—and feeling that he, North, and Hemingway were kindred spirits.24

 

By the spring of 1938 more than one neutral observer was starting to give up on the Republic. The Nationalists were consolidating their hold on the northern half of the country, and attacking to the south in order to subdivide the remaining territory of the Republic. At the end of March, even Hemingway thought it prudent to prepare for the worst, and joined with two other journalists to ask the American embassies in France and Spain for help in planning for the repatriation of Americans who had been caught up in the war, especially the wounded.25 Hemingway was again willing to shoulder more than his share of fund-raising and organizing. He made a point of stressing the need for secrecy since he did not want to give the impression that he had lost hope in the Republic, and was relieved when the military situation “incredibly” stabilized a few days later.26

 

When Hemingway and Matthews encountered Bessie on the battlefield in early April, Hemingway once again sounded like a Republican cheerleader. They met near the town of Tortosa, where the half-trained infantrymen of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion were helping to hold the line against a powerful fascist offensive. Bessie did not think much of Matthews, who seemed “bitter,” “gloomy,” and “ascetic” to him. On the other hand, the taller, heavier, red-faced Hemingway seemed like “one of the largest men you will ever see.” He was “eager . . . like a big kid,” asking question after question about the fighting. Hemingway refused to be discouraged. He praised the communists for their “example, unceasing agitation and unquestioned loyalty,” which had helped to create a unified, antifascist army. He went on to conclude the war would enter a new phase, that the government’s resistance would redouble because good people everywhere were getting madder and madder the more “women and children and old men” the fascists killed in cold blood.27

As long as there was any chance of victory, what Hemingway said and wrote about the war was generally upbeat and reflected well on the Republic. The point was to maintain the Popular Front against fascism. His articles for the North American wire service, to say nothing of what he wrote for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, read as much like propaganda as reporting.28 He attacked the fascists, and especially their habit of bombarding civilian targets, which he equated to murder. He described the hardship, suffering, and valor of the Republic. He defended Loyalist troops against charges that they were committing atrocities, and he called on the democracies to repeal their policy of nonintervention.

Like so many others, Hemingway believed, with passion, that Spain was the place to stop fascism. If the democracies did not act, and the fascists triumphed, the former would deserve “whatever fate brings them.”29 He did not explore the Republic’s shortcomings in any depth, and he did not want to report on the war from the Nationalist perspective. When asked to do so, he made only one, halfhearted attempt to enter Nationalist territory.30 Hemingway even changed his mind about serving as an editor for the start-up Ken after the journal ran two anticommunist cartoons, because, he thought, “red-baiting” could undermine the Popular Front.31

Hemingway’s 1937 play The Fifth Column concerns the business of catching spies.32 It is the story of an American by the name of Philip Rawlings, who, like Hemingway, lives at the Hotel Florida in Madrid with a blond girlfriend, is a regular at the Chicote Bar, and has a cache of food that he shares with the less fortunate. But unlike Hemingway his main occupation is not that of writer. Rawlings describes himself as “a policeman,” a specialist in “counter-espionage” who “signed up for the duration” of a series of “undeclared wars.” Rawlings speaks such infelicitous lines as “my time is the Party’s time,” and “there’s only one thing about orders. THEY ARE TO BE OBEYED.” He has been in Spain for some twelve months, working for a hawk-nosed security officer named Antonio, a character who, most scholars agree, was modeled on a ruthless secret policeman named Pepe Quintanilla (who happened to be the brother of the artist Luis Quintanilla, whom Hemingway had befriended before the war). Rawlings is very good at catching spies—“members of a secret ‘fifth column’”—by keeping his ears open as he makes his way around town, and by interrogating prisoners. He even leads a raid against an undercover artillery observation post manned by the fascists, capturing the men who are calling in artillery strikes against civilian targets in Madrid. The reader is left to conclude that the Republic needed men like Antonio and Rawlings to survive.

Where did Hemingway stand at this point? Looking back more than a decade later, he would admit that, during the war that started for him in Spain, he had become “so stinking righteous” that it gave him “the horrors to look back on.”33 For Hemingway the Spanish Civil War was not just an outlet for a writer who wanted to be a fighter, or just a source of material for his next dispatch or book. In words and actions, literally on and off the battlefield, Hemingway fought for the Republic and against fascism, both when it furthered his career and when it did not. He was willing to make personal and professional sacrifices.

More than once Hemingway came close to declaring that, in this war, the end justified the means. He had fallen in love with the antifascist, pro-Republican cause like so many other writers and intellectuals on the left. It was the one political equation that, in a decade of confusing crises, seemed to make absolute sense: freedom versus oppression, democracy versus dictatorship, progress versus reaction, the common man versus the oligarch, life over death. It was a cause that a thinking man could idealize. The great British poet W. H. Auden wrote for many in his immortal poem about Spain when he asked:34

What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.

I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic

Death? Very well, I accept, for

I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.

In his eulogy for Jim Lardner, a young American killed in one of the last battles that the Brigades fought, Hemingway came close to matching Auden’s idealism and fatalism:35

[O]ur dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. . . . [N]o men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain. . . .

 

The official reason for disbanding the International Brigades and sending the Republic’s foreign volunteers home toward the end of 1938 was to placate the Non-Intervention Committee, set up by European governments to limit foreign intervention in the war. But their departure was also another sign that the prospects for victory were dwindling. The government hastily arranged a farewell parade in Barcelona in late October, when the foreign soldiers marched through friendly crowds, estimated at three hundred thousand. The crowds tossed so many flowers that the march turned into a shuffle through inches of petals, past large photographs of Republican leaders and Stalin. They listened to the words of “La Pasionaria,” the over-the-top communist leader and orator Dolores Ibárruri, who told the Brigades that they could go proudly; they had done their duty; they were now history, legend. After the speeches, buglers blew “Taps” for the Internationals who had been killed in action, and, in the (sympathetic) words of one eyewitness, “all Barcelona bared its head and wept.”36

Barcelona, 1938: the day the Internationals marched out of the war. Robert Capa Photo, ICP.

The event shook the faith of the true believer in Hemingway when he learned about it in early November in Valencia, the Republican capital, in 1938. Unable to find a way to be optimistic about the future, he broke down. At their hotel during an air raid, Hemingway and Gellhorn encountered one of the Internationals, the Italian Randolfo Pacciardi, who had commanded the Garibaldi Brigade. Now he was on his way out of Spain and did not have a home that he could return to (Italy having fallen under fascist domination). He was, Gellhorn remembered, heartbroken, stateless, and penniless, but he did not complain about his fate.37

After seeing Pacciardi, Hemingway and Gellhorn continued on their way upstairs to their room. Soon she heard Ernest crying. He was leaning against the wall on the steps, and crying for Pacciardi, saying, “‘They can’t do it! They can’t treat a brave man that way.’”38 Hemingway was, Gellhorn wrote, crying for the way the government had dismissed the Brigades, with perfunctory thanks, letting men like Pacciardi go “without . . . money, or papers or any future.”39 The first and only time that Gellhorn heard Hemingway cry, it made her love him all the more.

Hemingway’s own explanation for breaking down in Valencia was that “there is no man alive today who has not cried at a war if he was at it long enough. . . . [S]ometimes it is from a great injustice to another, sometimes it is at the disbanding of a corps or a unit that has endured and accomplished [much] . . . and will never be together again.”40

Like Pacciardi, many Internationals went to uncertain fates when they left Spain. The British, Canadians, and Americans could go home but, tainted by their association with the many communists in their ranks, would face official suspicion for having fought for the Republic. The Soviets and their allies could return to the Soviet Union, but many would die in a new round of senseless Stalinist purges. The Germans and Italians could not go home, and looked, often in vain, for other countries to shelter them.

Hemingway left Spain for the last time at about the same time as the Internationals. He knew the Spanish war was all but over. And yet he was still far from ready to give up his personal fight for Republican values. Like his character Rawlings, he was fond of saying he had signed on for the duration, and pledged more than once to continue the fight against fascism for however long it took to defeat the enemy, even for fifty years of undeclared wars.41