The Last Man in Europe Page 4

He looked around at the audience members, seeing a young woman in blue overalls and a bright red headscarf yelling slogans in an educated voice. Who wanted to read about bedbugs anymore? No one.

  ‘I shall take it as carried, comrades,’ Brockway concluded.

  With the exception of a scattering of cardigan-wearers – pacifists, he suspected – who determinedly remained seated, the audience stood, fists raised and eyes closed, as if in prayer. The organ sounded and a Scottish voice at the microphone – Maxton – began singing: ‘The workers’ flag is deepest red …’

  Although he was unsure of the words, he found himself singing along, humming through the bits he didn’t know. Eileen joined in too – with an enthusiasm that suggested seriousness rather than the irony he had expected. The Spanish business, with its suspiciously neat choice between good and evil, its bayoneted children and raped nuns, had had that effect on seemingly everyone he knew. He doubted there was a thinking person in the whole of Britain who hadn’t taken sides. It was even funny, in a way, listening to himself taking part so fully, when six months earlier he had barely given socialism or even politics a thought. It occurred to him that, along with Eileen, he was probably the only person among the two-thousand-strong crowd who didn’t think about Marx more often than about beer or sex, and yet this act of joining in still seemed, somehow, the right thing to do. Fascism had to be stopped if socialism was to have a chance.

  This, he now saw, was what he must write about. Any fool could see that there was only one issue that mattered, and only one place where a writer could really make his name: Spain.

  5

  The Republican trenches, Huesca, Spain, May 1937. It was the most curious sensation, being shot. Even though he was certain he was dying, he desperately tried to commit the effects to memory, just in case. Not many writers had been shot, or at least had survived to write about it.

  It was only when he regained consciousness, face-down on the bottom of the trench, to the sounds of his comrades arguing about the source of the blood soaking his clothes, that his mind tried to make sense of what had happened. As he recalled to the best of his capacity, it went in roughly this order, the whole thing only taking a second or two. He heard a loud explosion and was surrounded by a terrific burst of light. As the bullet entered his body a violent tremor ran through him, like an express train through a tunnel. Then he dropped forward in two separate movements to hit the ground – knees first, then head, like a calf stunned by a hammer. He tried to hold on to these impressions, fearing his memory might muck them up before he got the chance to write them down.

  While these thoughts were flashing through his mind, the others were fumbling beside him, clumsily cutting away at his shirt and applying a field dressing, waiting for the stretcher party to arrive down the support trench.

  ‘His neck,’ one said. ‘Bullet’s gone clean through.’

  The neck! You didn’t survive those; he’d seen goats, pigs and other creatures shot in the neck and they were always goners. He tried to open his mouth to talk but all that came from his lips was a spurt of blood; not a good omen.

  *

  Five months earlier he had arrived on the slow train via Toulouse, singing the ‘Marseillaise’ to the raised fists of the peasants they passed. Revolutionary Barcelona he remembered as a sort of carnival, complete with gay songs about love and brotherhood which played through the loudspeakers hanging on the lampposts. Almost every wall was painted red and black and daubed with the slogans of the various left-wing parties and unions: PSUC, UGT, CNT-FAI, JCI, JSU, AIT, POUM. The last was the only one he recognised, remembering it from Maxton’s speech in London.

  Shops and cafés carried signs proclaiming they had been collectivised. The various hotels carried their party flags, and at the Hotel Colon, headquarters of the communists, he saw enormous portraits of Lenin and Stalin, looking benevolently at the people below. At the barber’s having his morning shave, he sat beneath a slogan which his poor grasp of Spanish took to be a solemn explanation that barbers were not slaves. (All barbers, he later learnt, were anarchists.) And while everything else bore the unmistakeable signs of a city at war – the litter-filled pavements, the bomb-chipped walls and broken windows, the shabby and half-empty shops with queues of people outside, tobacco at terrifically inflated prices – the dun colour of the streetscape was more than made up for by the garishly rendered posters of triumphant worker-soldiers pasted on every wall. Obreros a la Victoria! Workers to Victory!

  He recalled, vividly, stopping at a bootblack, a small man of late middle age who was wearing the regulation grey overalls and tattered beret. Before placing his shoes on the man’s polishing box, which like everything else was painted black and red, he used the greeting he had learnt in schoolboy Spanish classes: ‘Buenos dias.’ But the man, on noticing him, looked him in the eye, gave him the raised-fist salute and replied, ‘Salud, comrade!’ Instinctively almost, he returned the gesture. ‘Salud!’ It was an unremarkable exchange, but one that was inconceivable back in England. A gentleman and a bootblack on equal terms! Brothers!

  In that brief encounter, his understanding of his surroundings suddenly became complete. He realised, for instance, that the irregular, un-mortared cobblestones on which he constantly stumbled spoke of hastily torn-down barricades. Then there was the complete absence of the well-to-do upper classes. In Wigan this had felt like some sort of betrayal, but in Barcelona it seemed comely, a symbol of something positive: victory, perhaps. Yes, he remembered thinking, in a kind of rapture, this is what socialism looks like; a society with the working classes in the saddle. He had come to Spain in search of a story, hoping to gain fame as a correspondent, and maybe write a book, but he had known from that moment that he must also fight.

  Within a week, Nye Bevan’s glamorous wife, Jenny Lee, had directed him to the militia of the POUM, where he was soon joined by other British volunteers. Eileen turned up some weeks later to make herself useful, helping with the unit’s pay and administration. The POUM may have been the sister party of the ILP, but in Moscow its members and fighters were ‘Trotskyists’ or ‘masked fascists’, and therefore to be exterminated at the first opportunity. The man known as ‘Stalin’s Midget’ – Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the party’s secret police, the NKVD – had already drawn up the plans. But he and Eileen hadn’t known that then.

  *

  The Republican front line, Monte Oscuro, February 1937. He was sitting on an empty ammunition box, smoking. At that time of day the sun slanted into the trench, warming his bones and reviving his spirits. When the early fighting of the war petered out the previous autumn, the Republicans and fascists found themselves perched on high razorback ridges of limestone on opposing sides of a rocky valley, and there they remained. It was less a trench line than a series of fortified positions within signalling distance, and the white cliff-face topped by stone parapets gave him the impression of being atop a medieval castle.

  In the era of the machine gun (even including the rusty specimens they had been given), the almost vertical terrain made a successful infantry assault all but impossible; as a result, the only options for either force were stagnation or suicide. As the crow flew, the two ragged lines were only about seven hundred yards apart, but he reckoned it closer to a mile by foot. At that range bullets limped overhead meaninglessly, made even less lethal by the woeful standard of Spanish marksmanship. What fascist shellfire there was was desultory, rationed to a few rounds a week, the worn-out barrels of the antique artillery pieces causing most shots to fall well short or fly long. The real weapons and the real war – and the real opportunities to write and report, the way Hemingway and others were doing – were elsewhere, in Madrid, and he longed to be there.

  His sentry duty was coming to an end, and he heard a scrabble in front of the trench as the patrol – the warlike name given to scrambling for food and firewood in an old potato field in no-man’s land – returned through a gap in the pitiful barbed-wire obstacle twenty yards to the front. He yelled
out the challenge: ‘Seremos!’

  ‘Invencibles!’ came the reply.

  As the men were sliding down into the trench, they heard the noise of an aeroplane. In this part of the front that could mean only one thing: a fascist aeroplane. All the Russian-supplied aircraft were near Madrid, supporting the communist-led units, which also had Russian tanks, artillery and even serviceable rifles. Why would Stalin give arms to Trotskyites in Spain, the POUM members argued, at the very moment he was executing them in Moscow? If only he’d known before he’d signed on!

  He motioned to the machine gunners, who picked up their ancient French weapon and carried it into the open, where they perched it on a rock so as to traverse the sky. After a dozen shots the clip jammed, as usual. As they set about extracting the bulbous bullet from the breech, they saw something white and glittering tumbling from the rear of the ancient-looking biplane. Newspapers.

  ‘We can burn them,’ he said, and the men scrambled about the ridge under harmless rifle fire, collecting the fallen bundles. It was the fascist newspaper Heraldo de Aragon. One of the better Spanish speakers translated it for them but he could make out the general picture himself: Malaga had fallen. They didn’t believe a word of it. But by that evening word had filtered up from the rear that it was true – and, worse, the communists were alleging that the town had been betrayed by the Anarchists and the POUM.

  After dark, he managed to bed down on the rocky floor of the dugout, which had been driven into the reverse slope of the limestone ridge they were defending. There he lay, with the Spanish machine-gunner Ramon snoring away behind him, when his commander, the ILP heavy Bob Edwards, stuck his head in the dugout. ‘They’re attacking.’

  They scrambled up the steps through mist that swirled about their ankles like a cold stream, presenting their rifles at the fire-step. The fascists had moved up some extra machine guns – he counted five lines of tracer – and their fire was closer than usual. They began firing their rifles at the sources of the flashes, hopelessly, and a few shells lobbed well wide of them, half of which failed to explode.

  A series of ricochets sounded behind them – they were surrounded! His entrails turned to jelly – in this war there was no taking of prisoners. But the threat to their rear turned out to be one of their own guns firing in support, but at the wrong target. On cue, their Hotchkiss gun jammed, and in their exposed condition there was nothing they could do but stand and be shot at, and try to make a fight of it with the bayonet. When you’re under fire, he realised, the thing that runs through your mind is not when you will be hit but where, causing one’s whole body to tense up, giving it a most unpleasant sensitivity. After an hour or two of drama the attack faded away, and in the morning they could see that it had merely been some sort of patrol, and it had soon retired. They had suffered only one casualty, which turned out to be a minor wound. Though petty and unremarkable, it was his first real fight against fascists.

  Two days later in their dugout, he and Bob Smillie listened incredulously as Edwards translated a news report about the fascist attack which appeared in the POUM newspaper La Batalla.

  ‘“In a great battle that took place on the night of February 20,”’ Edwards was saying, ‘“our lines opposite Zaragoza repulsed a major fascist offensive. The famous English contingent of the 29th Division, led by Comrade Robert Edwardo, defended their trenches like lions, using machine guns and bombs to beat off numerous waves of determined fascist stormtroopers backed by cavalry and tanks. If not for the bravery shown by the valiant Englishmen, our line may have broken leaving the road to Alcubierre and even Barcelona itself open to the enemy. This glorious victory once again shows the superior power of international working-class solidarity over the conscripted hirelings of Fascism …” It goes on, comrades. Mentions young Bob here – “son of the famous working-class leader”, etc., etc. Even quotes Lenin!’

  ‘Of course,’ Orwell said. ‘Wouldn’t be publishable without a quote from the big cheese.’

  Smillie was laughing. ‘Obviously written by someone back in Barcelona or Madrid.’

  ‘Or perhaps back in London,’ said Orwell. ‘Pure fantasy. I doubt there’s a single tank between here and Gibraltar. And even if there were, how would the fascists get them up the cliff below our position?’

  ‘It’s preposterous, I’ll admit,’ said Smillie. ‘But my grandfather will be pleased when he reads about it in the New Leader. “Comrade Smillie, the miners’ leader’s grandson, a hero repulsing fascist tanks on the Aragon front.”’

  ‘He’ll be right to be proud,’ said Orwell. ‘It’s all there in black and white, and who’s to say otherwise? As far as future generations are concerned, Comrade Smillie here will be a hero of the revolution, and when we’re all dead and unable to refute it, our pathetic little skirmish will exist as a great battle on more evidence than history has for Thermopylae and Senlac.’

  ‘Well, at least it’s good to know we’re not getting cold and lousy out here for nothing,’ Edwards said.

  ‘Problem is, of course, that if we ever get beaten, like those chaps did at Malaga, history will record us as traitors. The English Trotsky-fascists who stabbed the revolution in the back. The truth will be whatever Comrade Stalin wants it to be.’

  *

  The weeks following being shot he barely remembered, apart from the discomfort and the pain: the jolting ambulance rides over potholed Spanish roads; the filthy Spanish hospitals with their greasy, tin-tasting food and slovenly nurses; the doctors who gave him up for dead before calling him their lucky charm (one millimetre to the left, they said, and the bullet would have severed his carotid artery); and the strange electro-shock therapy they gave him to stimulate his damaged throat and arm muscles into life again. At the end of it all, finding himself still breathing, he had had to retrace his route back to the front line to get his discharge papers signed, only to be lined up, handed a rifle and cartridges, and told he was in the reserve for the assault that would finally take Huesca. In typical Spanish confusion the attack was postponed, and he managed to get his papers signed and hitch a ride back to Barcelona.

  He reached the city after days of hitchhiking and sleeping rough, and was surprised to find Eileen waiting for him in the lounge of the Hotel Continental, holding his travelling bag. She rose and intercepted him before he could be seen by the man at the reception desk, took his arm in hers and walked him towards the entrance again. ‘Shh!’ she said.

  A hotel worker – an anarchist, most likely – opened the door and said, ‘Quickly!’

  As they entered the harsh sunshine of the Ramblas, he slowed, making to stop and turn around, but she dragged him on, with a firm tug of his painful arm, causing him to stumble slightly. ‘Do you want to be shot?’ she said in a firm but low voice.

  He struggled against her again, but again she powered on.

  She whispered: ‘They’ve outlawed the POUM.’

  It couldn’t be!

  ‘They’re executing everyone. They say Nin is already dead.’

  Nin! The POUM’s charismatic leader, whom he’d met during the street fighting of the weeks before.

  She pulled him across to the far side of the wide boulevard, which was packed with Civil Guards, and soon they plunged into the warren of the old city – its prole quarter, the anarchist bastion – where they were more likely to be safe. In a side street they found a quieter place and ordered coffee, hoping the proprietor wasn’t listening in.

  ‘What shall we do?’ he asked Eileen.

  ‘Get our papers stamped and leave. But you can’t go back to the Continental; it’s swarming with spies. They mustn’t know you’re back in the city or they’ll scoop you up too.’

  ‘I’ll have to find another hotel.’

  ‘They will betray you; all hotels must report their guests. No, you’ll have to go into hiding. I’ve worked it all out. To leave, we’ll need our travel documents stamped by the British consulate.’

  ‘But that will take days.’ He was tired and unwel
l from his wound, and the prospect of sleeping rough filled him with dread. ‘No, I’m going back to our room; this is paranoid nonsense. I’ve done nothing against them. If they’re after everyone who took part in the street fighting, they will have to arrest forty or fifty thousand people. No!’

  She grabbed his wrist tightly and roughly, pinning his hand to the table. ‘Listen to me! Stafford Cottman and Williams – they were at the Sanatorium Maurin with you, remember? They said the police came looking for POUM members there and hauled them away, even the severely wounded ones, probably to execute them. They managed to hide, but they said the police took a particular interest in your whereabouts, and took away all your possessions, even your laundry.’

  ‘The Spanish? Carry out a purge?’ He laughed. ‘After the mañana, perhaps.’

  She forced his hand down onto the table again. ‘This is not something you can dismiss, Eric. Everything is not going to be alright. They’re arresting and shooting everyone they think is a Trotskyist.’

  ‘But I’m not a Trotskyist.’

  ‘And neither is Nin – was Nin. This isn’t England!’

  ‘This is nonsense …’

  She forced his wrist down once again, this time more painfully. Her voice was as insistent as one could be without raising a scene. ‘Can’t you see, the truth doesn’t matter here, Eric. Everyone we know has been arrested. And they will arrest you too, and maybe shoot you – and probably me as well. You’re going into hiding, and as soon as we get our passports stamped we’re taking the first train we can board.’

  In his tiredness he hadn’t wanted to believe it, but it finally hit him. This was a purge. They were in a police state during a reign of terror, and on the losing side. While getting shot by fascists might set him apart from other writers, getting shot by communists was an entirely different matter. They would be shooting from point-blank range and wouldn’t miss.

  ‘Empty your pockets,’ Eileen ordered.