IT IS EASY TO IMAGINE how much this reign of terror worried us for the safety of Don Carlos and his family. We had come to identify ourselves with them and with their fate. We felt that we must save him. It was as if we had been chosen by fate or providence to protect them in their danger. Much as I liked and admired Don Carlos, it was as much for the sake of the family happiness as anything else that I so wanted to save him. They were so charming as a family and so happy together. There would have been something so truly horrible in this mutual love and happiness being shattered by a brutal murder, and the wife and children left desolate.
I cannot speak too highly of Don Carlos’s courage and of his wonderful gaiety and good humour in the horrible position in which he found himself, when he must have felt like a rabbit in a burrow when the weasels are sniffing about the entrance eager for its blood – and how much more poignantly, since we have been given these too-tightly drawn nerves, this too-lively imagination as if it were to enable us to suffer as intensely as possible the apprehension of approaching evil.
I think it was really remarkable that far from being sad or silent we used often to have the gayest evenings – a hush falling only when we heard a lorry stopping outside, then some of us would creep to the windows on the street anxiously watching what the armed men in the lorry would do. When we saw that they had only come to change the patrol, and the lorry began to move off again, we would all give a long breath of relief, and come back to our seats, rather thoughtful for a while until the indomitable Don Carlos would make some joke or begin some amusing story.
But over our bean stew or whatever it was that Maria had managed to get for us that day, and our pint of wine between the eight of us, brought in secret from the shop by Pilar hidden in her basket or apron, we used often to talk and laugh until the servants would tell us we were making too much noise, the villagers in the kitchen would disapprove of our hilarity in these times.
Don Carlos had an endless fund of amusing stories. One I remember, which diverted me extremely was a description of a curious reform school run by the Brothers of some teaching order for the obstreperous sons of the rich, who had, I suppose, been spoiled by their too indulgent Spanish parents. The boys were extremely tough, but the Brothers were tougher and went about armed with life-preservers. A boy began to make trouble – BAM!!!! as the comic strips say, a Brother landed him one on the side of the head, and when he recovered consciousness the lesson continued. According to Don Carlos the school had a notable success and some famous alumni, one of whom, a friend of his, had given him a striking description of the course of his studies.
Another of Don Carlos’s stories amused us very much, I remember, as a tale of the times. A cousin of his, a gentle rather timid young man, had to go from one house to another during the first days of the rising. He was frightened of the journey because his way lay partly along the main road; but all went well until he met one of the usual lorries full of armed men who all greeted him with shouts of Salud! and enthusiastically saluted with thrown-up arms. He timidly returned the salute as best he could – when to his horror, the lorry pulled up with a great grinding of brakes and several heavily armed men got out. He was paralysed with fear but determined to die bravely. The leader, a perfect walking arsenal, came up to him – he waited for the shot or blow that was to end it all – then the leader said in good humoured reproof: ‘That’s not the way – you’ve got it all wrong! It’s the left arm. It’s not meant for a menace: it’s a greeting, a salute – see, like this!’ and he threw up his arm in the correctly made Popular Front salute.
It was later at night when we went to bed that the real horror of the situation which we had been keeping away with talk and laughter would flow back upon us. Then, when the lights were out and the old house dark and silent, fear would come out of the darkness. Then I used to lie awake listening for the coming of the murderers. And those hours had exactly the quality of a nightmare – the feeling that something horrible was coming – the inability to flee – the inability to wake –
I used to think then, and I still think with absolute horror of what the people of Spain have suffered: of the nightmare life which thousands and thousands of people on both sides have led, until at last the hiding place was discovered – and there was the knocking at the door, and the voice of their enemies at last –
We used to listen, as I say, for the coming of the murderers – and once we heard them come – but not thank Heaven! to us. We heard lorries down in the village below, shouts, cries, protests, loud knockings on a door, angry voices, women’s agonised screams. We lay awake wondering for whom they had come, what was happening in the darkness below us, whether they would come to us. Then at last the lorries went away, the angry, troubled voices died down, even the last sound, a woman’s sobbing, died away, and a brooding silence lay over the houses.
The next morning we learned for whom they had come; and the next afternoon we met a small procession of men going to the cemetery carrying on their shoulders the cheap coffin containing the body of the poor man who had been shot, recovered from some field or ditch. The men of the village who walked with the body had troubled, sullen faces. The people of Malaga had done this thing against their wills. The dead man had been an hijo del pueblo, a son of the village, whatever his faults, and the village alone had had the right to judge him. They had tried, and been unable, to protect him, and they felt wronged and insulted by his death. The solidarity of village life, the most important unity in their lives, had been broken.
Don Carlos’s courage and good spirits in his terrible situation were really beyond praise, and so indeed was the behaviour of the whole family. Doña Maria Louisa was in any case almost a saint, one of those lovely, practical Spanish saints. She used generally to sit up all night, so that Don Carlos could sleep tranquilly knowing that someone was always on the watch, and also so that she would be dressed and ready if the worst did happen. How many times I remember getting up myself in the night at that time hearing a car stop nearby, creeping silently to the window and looking cautiously out. Feeling all the time that I would have been much better in bed. After all if the Terrorists came we should soon know it! (I had the same feeling about air raids but much more strongly. There is no danger of sleeping through an air raid, and the possibility that there might be one never kept us awake for a minute.) The house was fortunately a perfect fortress like all old country houses in Spain; the windows barred with iron rejas and tremendous bars of iron carried across the outside doors (the one on the street door was so heavy that Maria could hardly lift it into place). There was no question of anyone entering the house except with a battering ram unless we opened the door to them ourselves, and that was going to give us time to prepare for them.
Actually we were much safer at night than in the day when the open stable door into which anyone could come (though they could only get to the house by going through the kitchen wing where Maria was generally lying in wait for them), was an unavoidable danger, since to shut it against the constant stream of visitors and hucksters would have aroused too much suspicion.
For we still had visitors all day, but now only our old women came and a few near neighbours with young children who were more afraid of going to the sierra than of staying in our house. Most of our village friends had fallen away. It was not that they had ceased to be our friends, but because they were afraid to come near Don Carlos. As someone says The condemned are contagious, and we too carried something of the infection about us. Our richer village friends, the farmers, bailiffs, master masons, people of mildly conservative sympathies and consequently apt to be suspect, never came at all, though they sent us messages by Enrique. It was as if we had a case of smallpox in the house.
I think that it was only our chorus of old women who never seemed to think of us as being infectious at all. A great deal of the ‘character’ for which the Spanish are famous I think is found most of all in its older women. They have suffered and resigned themselves, worked beyond their strength, spent themselves for others. This patient stoicism, a stoicism that is not hard, but gentle and quietly resigned, accepting life as it is with all its ills and griefs with dignity and without complaint, is one of the most remarkable of Spanish characteristics. And it has been seen a thousand times everywhere in Spain during this war.
Napier has a story which I think illustrates it very well of something he saw when he was marching into Spain with Wellington. They were passing through a country where both armies had been marching to and fro and everything had been consumed and destroyed. They came one day to a large country house, and went in on the chance of finding something to eat still remaining. No one answered their knock so they went in and walked through the house until they came to a large room where they found seventeen people, twelve already dead, the rest dying of starvation. The dead had been neatly laid out with their hands folded on their breasts, and the living were sitting beside them patiently waiting for the end. Napier says that the English soldiers tried to save them with the small means at their command, and one man, though far gone, was anxious to eat and live; but the women were quite indifferent, they had already resigned themselves and were only waiting quietly and patiently for death.
I cannot, as I say, praise too highly or too often Don Carlos’s courage and good temper and patience during this period which must have been so horrible for him. But there was something that did rather trouble us about his attitude to it all, and that was what I can only call a sort of good natured ferocity. When we were talking about the burning of houses in Malaga and we were explaining just which houses had been destroyed, it came out in a way that startled while it amused us.
‘They burned that big book shop,’ we said. ‘You know, that one near the Café Ingles.’ ‘Bueno!’ said Don Carlos approvingly, ‘We would have burnt that too.’
‘And they burned the Conservative Press – what was it called, the Union Something-or-other –?’ ‘Bueno!’ said Don Carlos with real enthusiasm this time, ‘We would have burnt that too. Much too middle-of-the-road, not out-and-out enough! Bueno! y que mas?’ ‘Good! and what else –?’
It was quite natural, I quite realised, that Don Carlos should sometimes dream of revenge, surrounded as he was by enemies. But his light-hearted references to the thousands they were going to shoot when they got to Malaga rather horrified us. We could not help feeling that it was just what was going to happen. This gay ferocity, and the increasing numbers of people and classes who became included in the term canalla, and were to be ‘liquidated’ sooner or later made us feel that on both sides Reason had been the first casualty: it depressed us a good deal. And Gerald who was both very humane and easily excited (and who could hardly stand the killing that was going on already) became extremely agitated sometimes (the situation was getting on all our nerves of course), and scenes were, with difficulty, avoided by tact and good feeling on both sides. But I must remark at this point that with so many reasons for being revengeful, Don Carlos was infinitely more reasonable, humane and understanding than so many of the foreign partisans of both sides I have encountered since, who fight their battles with such sound and fury in the Press of the world.
Finally as might have been expected everything came to a head. One morning there was an air raid on Malaga just at dawn, and Gerald and Enrique and I were watching it from the balcony. It was exciting at that distance with the crashing bombs, the anti-aircraft guns going off, the rattle of machine-guns and popping of revolvers, and the fighting planes from the field near us getting up belatedly. Suddenly after one bomb there was a tremendous flare-up near the sea, flames and black smoke began to pour up in a really appalling fire. A large heavy-oil dump had been hit.
We were horrified for we knew from often having passed the spot on the train that the heavy oil and petrol supplies, in very large quantities as Malaga is quite an important port, were concentrated in that one section near the sea, and one of the poor quarters of the city is built all around it. What would happen to that poor quarter if the large petrol tanks began to explode as seemed likely, frightened us to think of.
‘Let’s go up on the roof, perhaps we can see better there,’ said Gerald much distressed. We went up on the roof and found Don Carlos and the boys already there. Don Carlos was almost dancing with excitement and pleasure over this Nationalist success. It was perfectly natural that he should be glad, I realised even then; but his happy mood clashed badly with our anxiety for the poor people in the suburbs of Malaga. And then Don Carlos, who was supposed to be in Malaga, had been seen in our house, delighting in the bombing, by people in the street, and had compromised us about as badly as possible and had made it infinitely more difficult to save him. Gerald was livid with exasperation and there was a painful scene while he explained bitterly the harm that had been done.
‘I must go and find out what is happening,’ he said as soon as we had calmed down and had some coffee, so we went down to the Village Square, but found as we expected that all buses and trains had been stopped by order: both the road and railroad track passed close to the fire. So Gerald borrowed a bicycle and went off. All the time the black smoke and red flames poured up unceasingly like an infernal fountain. In fact the fire burned without slackening for two days, and at night Malaga and the mountains behind it looked as if they had been painted in scarlet. The BBC that evening informed us that ‘Malaga has probably been completely destroyed.’ The flames had been seen for miles out to sea.
But what was extraordinary was that this terrific fire was entirely prevented from spreading. All the able-bodied men in Malaga turned out to pile wet sea-sand deeply over the underground petrol containers, some of the heavy oil which was in tanks above ground was run away into the sea; and the courage and enterprise of the Malagueñans saved their city from an appalling disaster.
Gerald came back a few hours later in a painful state of nervous horror. Even before he left we had heard that one bomb had not failed to find victims. There had always been a large gypsy encampment on the outskirts of Malaga and we had often enjoyed seeing them there, the children playing about in the dry earth, the mules eating a little dry fodder from the ground and the women nursing their babies or stirring the black pots which hung above the little fires. That morning a large bomb fell in the middle of the camp just when they were gathered together to eat their morning meal. Of the forty gypsies, only one, a terrified little girl, was left alive.
When they were telling us about it in the Square the villagers kept saying ‘Oh! the poor Hungaros! What did they have to do with this war?’ Hungaros means Hungarians (it is the name the Spaniards call foreign gypsies by) and some of the men added with their pathetic ignorance: ‘Won’t the Hungarian Consul do something about it?’
Gerald had arrived at the encampment before what was left of the gypsies had been cleared away. The ground was sodden with blood and covered with mangled, blackened bodies, and arms and legs and heads, torn off by the explosion and horribly littering the earth. Even when I passed the place a day or two later the earth was still dark with blood and the bodies of the poor dead mules still lay with their legs sticking straight up in the air and would have seemed absurdly like abandoned toys except for the odour of corruption beginning to taint the air.
Gerald, as I say, had come back from Malaga in a rather painfully nervous state. It was unfortunate that as he came up the street he caught the faint raucous sound of Seville broadcasting. Don Carlos was most unwisely listening to the Nationalist news; for it had been forbidden to listen in to the other side at that time, and of course our position was so delicate that we should have been particularly careful not to offend in any way. Gerald in his excited state felt outraged by the fact that Don Carlos appeared that day to be trying to make it as difficult as possible to save him. Then there was a further concealed cause of friction in the fact that the C—s did not seem to us to be as anxious to leave the country as we were to get them out. We did not like to insist all the time on the danger they were in: it seemed cruel to do so. And yet we could not help feeling that they did not properly appreciate how critical it all was. Afterwards we realised that we had done Don Carlos an injustice. He saw the danger even more clearly than we did. But his amazing courage made him able to treat the whole thing with apparent light-heartedness, since he believed that it was impossible for him to get out of the country, and probably fatal for him to try.
When Gerald came upstairs his mind full of horrible impressions, and heard the jubilant voice of the Seville broadcaster announcing their triumph, there was, as one might have expected, a painful scene.
It was natural that Don Carlos could not share our horror. He was sorry about the gypsies of course, but he could not help being pleased about the heavy-oil fire: it was an important Nationalist success. That kind of thing after all is the purpose of air raids. Whereas Gerald loathed air raids and did not want them to be successful anywhere. The wanton destruction of the poor gypsies, however unintentional, seemed particularly shocking: they had seemed so happily outside modern civilisation and its horrors.
That day as I was standing on the balcony watching the flame and smoke I heard high voices and saw a strange procession coming down the street. It was a small group of women, both young and old but all dark and handsome and dressed in the bright coloured cotton dresses with flounced skirts the Spanish gypsies wear. They were gypsies from the mountain who had heard of the tragedy and were coming down to Malaga to find out who had been killed – what mother or father, sister or brother, child or grandchild they had lost.
They came by with long strides and wild, strained faces, and with their torn dresses and long black hair loose and streaming in the wind they looked like frenzied Maenads; and at first I could hardly tell that the wild exalted look they wore was not an expression of religious ecstasy, but of an extremity of horror and fear.