In April George’s newspaper sent him to report on the rebel blockade of the Basque coast and he got away from Madrid at last. Bilbao was still a government stronghold. Getting there was tricky – the Basques were surrounded by Nationalists – but George arrived in time to see the first British merchant ship make it through. The dockside crowds were ecstatic.
There were only a few other correspondents in the city just then, old hands, the seasoned type, but they made George welcome enough, and he was grateful.
‘Narrow escape this afternoon.’ The Australian reporter gulped back some wine. It was a Monday evening and they were all eating together at the Hotel Torrontegui with the British captain and his daughter.
‘You too?’ said the Englishman from The Times.
‘Six Heinkels. The machine guns were relentless.’
‘They strafed us for a good fifteen minutes.’
‘If we hadn’t been near that bomb crater . . .’
‘And the rebels still deny Hitler’s helping them? Monstrous,’ said George. It was unbelievable, how easily persuaded the papers were.
‘You’ve seen this, haven’t you?’ The Times man passed across a leaflet. Ultimo aviso. Final warning. ‘General Mola dropped hundreds of these at the beginning of the Nationalist campaign here. Go on. Keep it.’
‘What does it say?’ asked Captain Roberts.
‘“I have decided to bring the war in the north of Spain to a rapid end . . . If your submission is not immediate, I will raze Biscay to the ground . . . I have the means to do it.’’
They all fell silent. George looked up from the leaflet. The room was cold as well as bare, so he had an excuse for shivering.
‘Let’s hope the food convoys get here soon,’ he said. And he’d thought Madrid was desperate.
The captain raised his water glass. A kind of toast. But at that moment a commotion on the stairs made the others pause. Some shouting, and a man sobbing. He burst into the dining room with searching, staring eyes, his face wet with tears.
‘Guernica is destroyed,’ he cried. ‘They bombed and bombed and bombed.’
‘Bloody swine!’ Captain Roberts’s fist thumped down on the table. The other correspondents were already on their feet.
‘Coming, George?’ That was the Australian, Noel. ‘There’ll be room, if you’re not particular. The more witnesses the better. But we must make tracks.’
Some way out of Bilbao, George noticed the darkness through the windscreen giving way to a glorious pink light in the sky ahead. He nearly made a fool of himself. Surely it was too early for the dawn?
It wasn’t the sun.
Five miles on, they reached the first group of refugees. They sat by the side of the road, lost in horror. Behind them, rosy clouds of smoke reflected the flames rising from the burning city. Ox cart after ox cart, piled high, came plodding towards Bilbao. There were refugees on foot too, hardly moving. Noel saw a priest among them, and stopped the car.
‘¿Qué pasa, Padre? What happened?’
George looked at the Father’s blackened face and torn clothes and wondered if the man was capable of speech. Eventually the answer came: ‘Aviones . . . bombas . . .’ he whispered, still disbelieving. ‘Muchos . . . muchos . . .’
They drove on. The hillsides around were dotted with light, fires, like tiny flickering candles.
When they arrived on the outskirts of Guernica it was clear that the man at the hotel had exaggerated nothing. The buildings of this town had walls made of fire. How can I describe this? George wound down the car window and all thoughts of his duty to his newspaper vanished. His face was swept with a heat so intense he could barely breathe. The smell was both sweet and putrid, sulphur and charred leather. He began to retch.
A group of Basque soldiers approached George and Noel as soon as they saw them. A few were sobbing openly, too much to speak, but the others made clear what was needed.
‘Over there.’ The soldier who spoke had a body in his arms, too charred and black to tell its age or sex. He gestured with his head towards the embers of a ruin, where a group of monks were at work.
George spent the next few hours helping to disentangle bodies from debris. His mind went blank and his body moved like an automaton. Nothing could blot out this taste and smell. He couldn’t rid himself of the notion that he was consuming flesh each time he breathed in. Burnt human flesh. Stray particles seemed to stick to his skin and clothes, and form into grit on his tongue. From time to time, a hideous crumbling crash resounded, as another wooden building collapsed.
Why this place? Why now? George could make no sense of this. It was well back from the front line, he knew. The barracks and the factory outside the town had apparently not been touched. It was senseless, incomprehensible.
At around two in the morning, The Times correspondent came over to where George was working. ‘I’m off. Tell Noel. I’ll be back tomorrow. I need to think.’
‘This is something new, isn’t it?’ said George, straightening his back, bracing his legs. He ran a filthy hand through his sweat-soaked hair, streaking his face.
‘Yes. Unparalleled. In every way. But you know what it’s about? Creating terror. Total terror. As simple as that.’
George nodded.
‘They’re determined to destroy civilian lives and civilian morale. And we’ve got to make that clear. You know you can telegraph from Bilbao, don’t you? You won’t need to worry about the censors there.’
‘Right,’ said George, ashamed that he had been too preoccupied to think about it before.
The Times man had been staring at the ground as he spoke, scuffing the smoking ashes with the heel of his boot, his mind apparently elsewhere. He stopped for a moment, and squatted down. ‘Help me get this out.’
He’d uncovered part of a metal cylinder. Cursing the heat, they dug it out together. It was about the length of his forearm. The journalist held it gingerly, with a look of disgust, and rubbed at it with his jacket sleeve.
‘Hmmm. Here’s proof all right. Take a look.’
It was the stamp of the German imperial eagle, just visible in the shivering light of the burning buildings. And a date: 1936.
‘I’ll keep this, if you don’t mind. See you tomorrow.’
He walked away, still searching the ground as he went, and George turned back to his labours. Bit by bit in the course of the night, George pieced together what had happened. By dawn he had an idea of what he could write down. But he was no closer to understanding it.
Monday was always market day. Country folk gathered in Guernica from all the villages around. The aeroplanes were heard some time between four and five in the afternoon and the church bell began to ring the alarm. Clergymen kneeled and prayed, in cellars and dugouts, keeping the people calm. And in the open plaza too. Within five minutes the first plane flew overhead. Just one, circling low over the town, really low. It dropped six heavy bombs and a shower of grenades and departed. Five minutes later another arrived, and did the same. Three more soon followed – Junkers, one man thought. The militiamen’s hospital was one of the first buildings struck, George heard. No, no English nurses there, they told him when he asked. Yes, they were sure. The Red nurses don’t come much to Euskadi. That’s what they call Basque country.
After that, the bombardment was steady, intense, and systematic. A relentless rhythm of heavy bombing and hand grenades. Craters twenty-five-foot deep. Then fighter planes, swooping in close with machine guns, killing people as they ran for shelter that was not shelter; finally more heavy bombs, and – most terrifying of all – thousands of firebombs, little ones, with bright yellow flames. They fell everywhere, a fiery downpour, until everything that could be was set alight. Everything was burning, burning like a town made of coals. Three hours later, when night fell, the German planes departed.
When dawn broke, and George had pulled fifteen blackened corpses from a mess of tiles and charcoaled rafters, and comforted some women mad with grief, and failed to console others, he knew he had to return to Bilbao to tell his story too. Driving back, drained of feeling, he saw carcasses of farmhouses on the hillside, their great stone ramps leading nowhere. Fields had been turned into slaughterhouses. Even sheep had been gunned down. Words tangled as George tried to form a cable in his head.
He would go to Bilbao to file this news, he decided. And then he would stop. He wasn’t cut out for reporting this war. He wished he was. He’d thought for a good while that he might be. But he was wrong. He couldn’t bear just to watch any more.
When he had finished in Bilbao, he would make his way to Valencia and offer himself to the Brigades. He could be a driver, a stretcher-bearer, a mechanic . . . he’d rather do anything than this. Anything was better than trying, and failing, to tell this story. And somewhere in his travels he might run into Felix yet. Then he would decide what to do about it. Though he couldn’t help wondering what was the point of looking for her, if she didn’t want to be found?