SOMEONE WAS SINGING ‘London Bridge is Burning Down, Burning Down –’ They’re getting it all wrong, I thought. ‘It’s falling down, isn’t it? Or is it burning down?’
Then I started awake. Maria was standing at the foot of the bed. ‘Why are you sleeping,’ she said, ‘when Malaga is burning down?’
We leapt out of bed asking ‘What has happened? What is it?’ still half asleep.
‘There’s been a rising,’ she said, ‘and they’ve set fire to the city.’
We rushed to the window.
Malaga lying spread out across the bay was under a pall of smoke. The city was hidden and the smoke drifted far out over the sea. Malaga is burning down.
‘But what has happened?’ we kept asking and no one could tell us. Lorries full of armed workmen began to appear, rushing down the road. As they passed they threw up their left arms in the Popular Front salute, the clenched left fist and bent arm. With the pistols in their right hands, loaded and cocked and ready to go off, they waved to us gaily.
‘Someone will get killed soon,’ said Enrique sardonically, ‘and it won’t be a Fascist, but one of us if we don’t stay indoors.’
‘Salud!’ yelled a passing lorry with brandished fists and waving pistols. ‘Salud!’ we yelled back. The lorries came thicker and faster, brandishing pistols, bristling with rifles, singing the ‘Internationale’. They were chalked with the initials of all the Left parties, UGT Socialists, CNT Anarcho-Syndicalists, FAI the extreme Anarchists.
In the front of one lorry stood a young Anarchist like the figurehead of a ship. He held the Red and Black Flag clasped to his breast. His eyes had ceased to see the village street, the passing cars: they saw close to him, just ahead, the Future World! Man free and happy, man just and good, work for all, bread for all, love for all. In his dream he was leading us all to the future world. Man’s Promised Land.
‘Salud! Salud!’ The lorries went thundering by. Where were they going? They knew as little as we did. The Revolution from the Right, thwarted in its inception, had given birth to the Revolution from the Left. Hope and promise were in the air – you could see that for them ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ And the lorries thundered by in a never ending stream. And the day went on, bright and hot, with hope and determination in the air.
What had happened, we kept on asking, and got various confused accounts. There had been a fight between some soldiers who tried to seize the Government buildings and the Guardias de Asalto and the soldiers had deserted their officers. Then in the early dawn the poor quarters rose and burnt a lot of houses, two hundred houses, four hundred houses. We ate our cazuela for supper and went to bed, but we could not sleep much. Lorries dashed by, lights glared in the windows, cries, shouts, grinding of brakes. Salud! – Salud! – the Revolution.
‘Salud!’, roaring engines, grinding brakes, a distant rifle shot. Daylight again. Has anyone slept? The same lorries are dashing by. Grimy but happy, the young men wave their pistols and throw up their clenched fists in a gesture of triumph. Malaga is in the hands of the workers. And the pale smoke still hangs like a pall and drifts far out to sea.
As we were eating breakfast a patrol arrived searching for arms. But they knew us and refused to search our house. The English, they said, were the friends of Spain. So we all had some aguardiente and they left. Salud! Salud! Later when Gerald had gone out to visit a friend, a second patrol arrived. They were strangers from Malaga and hammered on the big front door. I went down to receive them with the servants behind me and they came in with their guns held forward as if boarding a pirate. The young leader to my intense delight was armed with a child’s toy gilt sword. I looked behind me, the servants to my surprise and displeasure had disappeared completely; so I showed the little band upstairs myself. They went into my bedroom, and the young leader opened a bureau drawer: it was unfortunately filled with my silk underclothes. Overcome with modesty he hurried from the scene of embarrassment leaving all the other drawers and chests unopened.
We went downstairs again and into the dining-room where the young leader with evident apprehension opened the drawer of an old table. It was full of headless dolls, the property of Pilar’s little daughter. The young leader felt that Fate was mocking him, and his companions certainly were. The servants had reappeared, and ushered the patrol out, all but the leader on a broad grin. Salud! Salud!
‘Where were you?’ I asked the servants.
‘Oh, we were just hiding the silver and your jewellery,’ they said. The distrust of Spaniards for other Spaniards is bottomless and blinds them often to reality. I could see at a glance that the young leader with his toy sword was a fanatic of the purest water. The Koh-i-noor would not have tempted him while he was doing his duty. He might have killed me in the pursuit of Anarchy, but he would never have stolen from me. But I did not argue the point uselessly with the servants. All strange Spaniards from other towns were probably robbers to them. The innocent stupid English, they think, do not understand these things; and so are always robbed and cheated.
All that morning the lorries roared and thundered and hailed Saluds with undiminished zeal. In the afternoon our village friends, the carpenters and masons and gardeners began to visit us. There was a rumour, they came to warn us of it, that house burning was going to spread, a band of extremists from the city were said to be coming to burn down some local houses.
‘They wouldn’t burn ours?’ we asked with some doubt.
‘Claro que no!’ they said surprised. The idea of anyone however fanatical burning the houses of the innocent and slightly ridiculous English had never entered their heads.
‘But they’ll burn your neighbour’s house, old Don Cristober’s. He is a Fascist. And with this wind it might catch your roof; but we’ll stay and help. We’d better borrow buckets and have some brooms and some buckets of sand ready.’ We were to be calmly prepared for what seemed to us all a natural catastrophe.
Gerald mourned a little. ‘It’s such a beautiful old house,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is a pity,’ said Juan the carpenter with resignation. ‘I do all their work and the wood is very good. It is a pity.’ But cyclones and civil wars are all felt as ‘acts of God’, or acts of the devil – there is no use protesting against anything that happens in them.
Crowds of people were gathering in the street. Don Cristober’s old gardener and his witchlike wife came to us to ask us if we could not do something to help them. Gerald told them when the house-burning party came they had better suggest their burning the furniture (which was awful anyway) and leaving the house, which might be used for a school or hospital. ‘Then at least you’ll save the house and also keep a roof over your own heads,’ he said. Time passed and nothing happened, so we went up on the roof to look at Malaga – the smoke still streamed out from the town like a long woeful banner trailing out on the air to tell of disaster.
We were looking towards the distant sea when suddenly from a big white house not far away sprang up a thin white column of smoke – ‘oh, Lord, it’s come,’ I thought with that sickening feeling of the worst arriving. The smoke got thicker and thicker, eddying in clouds – then a red flame appeared, then a great burst of flame and smoke, the roof had fallen in. Far away to the left a second column of smoke appeared. We waited rather grimly, but no one came, nothing happened, no more fires appeared.
‘Not a good day for burning houses,’ said Gerald, making me laugh, for he sounded as if he were apologising for them. The thermometer stood at ninety-four degrees and it was breathless – ‘so hot standing round a fire. Perhaps they’ll come tonight. Fires are much finer at night anyway.’ But that evening a sinister rumour began to run about the village, so sinister that everyone forgot all about burning houses.
‘El Tercio!’ ‘El Tercio is coming!’ From the tone of the voices we heard in the street they might have been saying ‘Hell has opened!’ ‘Lucifer and his legions are upon us!’ For it was a Legion that was coming.
El Tercio (The Force) is the Foreign Legion, the only regular soldiers, except twelve thousand Moors, that Spain possessed. I do not know if they deserve the dread the people showed of them. But there were ugly tales of what they did at Oviedo. There were only six thousand of them, but they made up in courage and ferocity for their lack of numbers, and I have heard foreign soldiers say that they would take on the Prussian Guard or their own weight in wild cats.
This was the Legion worthy of Lucifer that was expected, and the expectation ran like a cold wave of horror through the countryside. No one went to bed. Everyone was abroad on the road watching the red flare of Malaga, listening if they could hear on the distant highway the tramp of the approaching enemy. And the whisper ‘El Tercio, El Tercio’ ran from mouth to mouth in a tone of blood-curdling fear that communicated itself to us in spite of ourselves, chilling our blood, echoing fearfully in our unwilling ears.
We went at last to bed hearing the splutter and misfiring of a little aeroplane droning bravely off to blow up bridges and hinder the Legion’s advance. The lorries were still rushing by – some to go towards Algeçiras carrying eager youths to defend their villages, some into the mountains to defend the passes against the ‘Fascists’, who had ceased already to be Don Fulano (Don Somebody-or-other) and his sons and nephews and cousins, and become a quite mythical figure of wickedness and horror rather like the figure of the ‘Red’ in the mind of a Daily Mail reader. Figures of fun, ‘Hodadoddys’ of the mind’s cabbage garden, figures to laugh at if they were not used to frighten all reason out of the air.
The dark night was lit by the glow from Malaga, and the ruddy dark was suddenly punctured by the white flare of headlights rushing by. As I sank into a deeper darkness of sleep – I heard a voice below whisper ‘El Tercio’ like the voice of fear itself.