THERE IS A VERY CURIOUS and uncomfortable feeling about living among uncontrolled human beings. I used to feel it particularly sometimes when we were coming back on the train from Malaga. I felt that it was like being surrounded by a herd of buffaloes or a pack of wild dogs, or I suppose like living among savages on some remote island. The crowds were good humoured and friendly: it seemed as if there were nothing to be afraid of. But you were dependent on their changing humour: if it grew dangerous, there was no power to control them – and I am not a pure Anarchist to believe in man’s perfect natural goodness. Not that I thought the Spanish people naturally bad, but like all crowds capricious and easily swayed.
I was not exactly afraid myself to be among them; I never believed that English people were in danger in ‘Red Spain’ in spite of some of the consuls. But I was afraid simply of what might happen around me, of being involved as a witness in some movement of mob violence. But the crowds on trains and buses were actually as good humoured and good mannered as ever. Once I did see two old men taken off the train. They were priests who had tried to get away to Malaga dressed in ordinary clothes, but had been recognised and given away by some one on the train. When it stopped at the next station some members of the local committee were waiting, and the two poor old men were taken off, but without any manifestation of anything except curiosity, everyone craning out of windows to see what was happening. The priests were politely helped into a waiting car, and taken off to the prison in Malaga for ‘safe keeping’. Unfortunately it was not a very safe prison to be in. People were taken out and shot after every bad air raid. It was the same on both sides judging by accounts given us later by Italian journalists who had been in Nationalist Spain. Their accounts of what happened there were almost indistinguishable from accounts of what happened in Malaga.
Hate rises very high during air raids, especially raids at night. These droning aeroplanes like searching bees seem seeking out everyone’s hiding place. Peasants cannot feel (could any of us?) that the bomb which killed little three year old Mariquilla and mangled little José fell on those two children by pure chance and was really meant to destroy an ammunition dump. They think, and rightly, that when you drop bombs from a great height, almost at random from thousands of feet up, you are to blame when they fall on women, children, old people, the wounded, the sick. The aviator above seeking for a place to sow destruction seems like a peering devil. The bomb falls, kills its innocent victims: the angry people must be paid blood for blood. The quarter rises and goes off to the prison, and there is another murder of forty or fifty or a hundred poor people, most of them as innocent as the slaughtered children. And I believe that far from being peculiar to Spain, the same thing will happen wherever you have air raids and there are any prisoners of war or other helpless unfortunates the mob can revenge itself upon.
I did have a rather horrid experience one day on the road to Malaga, but not in a train or bus. We had particularly wanted to go in early one morning, but found when we got down to the square that the ancient bus had broken down completely; so we started walking along the road hoping that some lorry would come along and offer us a lift, but nothing did come, and we finally reached the main road to Algeçiras. As we were already extremely hot and tired and Malaga still many miles away, we stopped in the shade of a eucalyptus tree where a countryman and his wife were standing, and opened the usual conversation with them. They said that probably the Torremolinos bus would come if we waited long enough. They had apparently been waiting for hours, but they had the usual patience of the Spanish poor and we had not. However it was so hot that we waited with them and presently an empty lorry came along and offered us a lift.
Gerald and the countryman got in behind and the woman and I, as señoras, were invited to get up in front. I sat next to the driver, and was much annoyed because he began to press against me and stroke my leg. I have often been pressed and stroked in crowded buses and trains by strangers in Spain; and, sitting down alone for a minute to wait for someone in Malaga cafés have become the centre of a sort of Mad Hatter’s tea-party of men who sit down at my table and silently stare with fixed and glassy eyes, like Mock Turtles. (I should explain that this is peculiar to the south of Spain where respectable women do not go to cafés alone.)
But the villagers and workmen had never behaved like that (perhaps only because the English seem such a different race that they appear no more desirable than zebras or hornbuck); and I was particularly annoyed by the lorry driver’s approaches because they were so openly made in the presence of another respectable woman, and also for the perhaps rather odd reason that I felt that he was behaving badly in time of revolution. I felt that all restraint being removed, he should have restrained himself.
But his attention was suddenly called away from me and he began to grin with simple pleasure and cry ‘Look! Look!’ pointing to the side of the road and almost stopping the lorry in his eagerness to see something better.
I looked and saw the body of a dead man lying beside the road. It was the body of a large old man dressed in trousers and a white shirt, and it lay on its back with one hand thrown over the head and the other still clasping the torn stomach. The face was glazed with blood and the shirt was almost crimson with it. The thing that was lying there seemed too large and stiff ever to have been a man. It looked like a large dirty doll someone had thrown away. I only saw the body for a minute, but in that minute I had a very intense and curious impression – I not only knew that what I saw was not alive, I knew that it never had been alive. That thing I saw lying beside the road was a castaway mechanical doll, a broken automaton, nothing more. It never had been anything more.
One day late in August when it was even hotter than usual, Pilar and Enrique had been to Malaga to try to buy some coffee and tins of meat or fish. Food was getting short – the shops would only sell a small quantity of each article to each customer. Tinned foods had almost disappeared, cheese had vanished completely, even bacalao (dried salt cod), that stand-by of the poor kitchen, was getting very scarce. The last time I had been to Malaga I had bought one of these flat ill-smelling fish; but the shopkeeper had said sadly, ‘It is the last I can let you have, Señora; there are no more than a dozen left in the storehouse. I don’t know what is going to happen.’ I thoroughly appreciated the seriousness of a shortage of bacalao, highly nourishing as it is, and each smallest piece capable of giving a queer flavour to whole cauldrons of rice or soup; though nothing will ever make me resigned to its taste or smell, reminiscent, as one of our unfortunate guests in the old days in the sierra put it, of ‘feeding time in the Lion house’.
But it is the food of foods to the poor – when there is no cheap fish to be had, when the weather is so bad that the fishing-boats do not go out, and there are no sardines and boquerones to be bought, there is always bacalao. It is cheap and a very little goes a long way; and whole families who never taste meat get warmth and nourishment from their stew flavoured with small bits of it. And I began that day really to worry about food – not for ourselves, we could manage I thought until we somehow contrived to get our refugees out of the country, or until Malaga was taken and they ceased to be dependent on us. Even in famines you can generally buy something if you have the money, and we hoped always to be able to get that somehow from Gibraltar – but what would the poor do when bread was scarce and bacalao gone? They could not live on tomatoes and French beans, which was all our garden, for instance, was producing late in August.
Enrique was counting the days until he could put in his potatoes, and he meant to plant as large a crop as possible: all the land we had available was to be in potatoes and beans. For Enrique expected hunger; he had seen hunger before and saw it coming now. No one was cultivating the land, no one was preparing for their winter crops.
‘They are going to be hungrier than the cats this winter!’ he kept saying, an extremely telling expression in Spain where poor pussy always goes hungry.
That day in the hot and dusty end of August it was getting late, and I was beginning to look out anxiously for Pilar and Enrique – we were always anxious if anyone was out of sight for long in those days. Finally I saw them coming slowly down the street looking hot and tired, and went down to the kitchen to greet them and hear any news. Pilar took a whole kilo of coffee out of her basket, two kilos of sugar, and a great pile, almost an arroba, of russet ripe muscatels. It was far more than I had expected them to get, and I was much pleased; but they both seemed sad and discouraged even beyond the habit of the time.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Those people of Malaga!’ said Enrique in a tone of fastidious disgust.
‘What happened?’ I asked. It was evidently something painful.
‘Well,’ said Enrique, ‘we were in a narrow street somewhere above the Calle San Juan – I can’t tell just where it was, Malaga is so vast a capital! when we saw a crowd about someone or something at the door of a house. We thought someone was hurt so we went to see; but it was not that –’
‘What was it then?’
‘It was a poor old priest who had come in from the country in disguise and tried to hide himself in some friends’ house, and some one had given him away, and a mob had come after him. They were mostly women – Señora, que caffres! What kaffirs! They were beating the poor old man and trying to kick him only there were so many trying to get at him that most of them couldn’t reach him. But the women were the worst; they hit him on the head and spit in his face and some of them blew their noses on his cape. I never saw anything so ugly –’
‘What happened to him?’ I asked, sickened by the picture I imagined. ‘Was he killed?’
‘No,’ said Enrique, ‘Gracias a Dios! a Guardia de Asalto came and said he would shoot the next man or woman who touched him, and he took the poor creature off to prison all covered with dirt and blood.’ Where he’ll be shot after the next air raid, I thought. Anyway he will probably have a quiet, quick death. It is the best you can hope for in a civil war if you are on the wrong side – to be killed as quickly and painlessly as possible, as early in the day as you can manage it.
‘Que caffres! que caffres!’ Enrique kept repeating.
After the bombing began the atmosphere had grown steadily worse. It is inevitable where open towns are bombed. Hate is the other side of fear. And it was horrible to see and feel this wave of hate-fear rising around us like a menacing sea. The talk of the villagers came to be more and more about Fascistas, and the Fascista was a purely mythical creature of unimaginable wickedness (twin brother I should think to the ‘Red’ of some of our daily papers) always mentioned in a special tone of horror. There was of course a great deal of talk about atrocities the Fascistas were committing; but also (a most curious feature of the war mentality) a good deal about atrocities they were supposed to be committing themselves, many of them quite imaginary. For instance I was told a melodramatic story about a hunt for a Fascista which had taken place near us, and how they had fired the cane brake to burn him out. ‘That men should hunt each other like beasts!’ they added in enjoyment of horror. But the whole story was quite fantastic. The hunt had never happened. The cane brakes were always catching fire in dry weather from the sparks from the train which ran through them at that point, and the sight of the blackened field had suggested the whole story to the atrocity making instinct.
I was struck by what I can only call a look of dreamy blood-lust upon their faces as they told such stories. I realised then, what I realised even more clearly later at Gibraltar, listening to the English talk of atrocities, what atrocity stories really are: they are the pornography of violence. The dreamy lustful look that accompanies them, the full enjoyment of horror (especially noticeable in respectable elderly Englishmen speaking of the rape or torture of naked nuns: it is significant that they are always naked in such stories), show only too plainly their erotic source.
I do not claim of course that no atrocities have been committed in Spain: I am sure they have been. Or even that there were not isolated cases in the Great War. War often produces atrocities. But more than ninety-nine hundredths of all atrocity stories, are, I am sure, always products of the diseased and perverse imagination.
I don’t believe that anyone entirely escapes the evil influences of war. Enrique was a most sensitive and peaceful young man, and the ugly scene he saw in Malaga appalled him. And yet even in Enrique I noticed a change. The evil in the air was corrupting everybody. It is the same in all wars, a contagious delirium rises from the spilled blood and infects everyone with its ugly madness. I was talking to Enrique in the garden one evening not long after that day, when he began to tell me a story about a man he knew of who had joined one of the murder gangs. He had heard that his brother-in-law had been killed in Seville, and was throwing himself into the work of revenge.
‘He says that two hundred Fascists must die to revenge his brother-in-law!’ Enrique said, with a sort of dreamy lustful enjoyment that absolutely amazed me. I was about to protest that nobody’s brother-in-law was sufficient excuse for murdering two hundred people, most of them probably innocent of having done anything at all; but old Maria was before me.
‘Deben de matarle enseguida!’ she said severely – ‘They ought to kill him at once!’ Enrique was silenced, and picking up his tools went quietly to work among his flowers. When I say that everyone was corrupted, I ought to except Maria: I do not think she was ever affected at all. Her disapproval of all these goings on of Left and Right only became deeper and deeper every day. She snorted when she spoke of ‘these Anarchistas!’ She breathed fire when she spoke of ‘these Fascistas!’ Everything that interrupted the natural order of things, of birth and burial, sowing and harvest, was evil as a matter of course to her, and should be stopped as soon as possible. All these newfangled ideas were ruining the country. We should all suffer for the folly and presumption of misguided men – but not, on her part at least, suffer in silence! She was always indignant, and as she was unable to catch the Fascists and Anarchists and give them a piece of her mind, we all suffered for it, and Pilar grew wanner than ever.
But I used to feel sometimes – and with comfort – that Maria was perhaps after all the real voice of Spain, and that when all this delirium was over, Maria and her kind would still be found saying: ‘Let us have no novedad! None of your nonsense!’ And we would all sigh with relief and go back to the austere hard-working life of peace.
‘I am for that party,’ Enrique once said, ‘who let me cultivate my cabbages.’