How It Was Then
WEISSMAN, IRVING
GOING BACK TO SPAIN? How It Was Then by Irving Weissman Madrid In Madrid I walk across the Manzanares on Frenchman's bridge. Forty years before, corpses had sprawled against the abutments; the...
...I am amazed at how it blends into the surrounding devastation...
...One of their commanders used a dagger when his pistol had gone empty...
...we threw grenades inside...
...Moi, je parle...
...If you don't come over, you will all be killed in the morning...
...The humility of this memorial arouses my anger...
...one asks me in broken Spanish, and both wave their hands at the town...
...It shows an angel in prayerful attitude leaning in benediction over a prostrate soldier...
...I reach the end at last, the arch that was once the entrance to the old town...
...In the gullies, in the rubble-strewn interiors where weeds have thrust their way through the cracked ground, on the wrecked facades, I see blood...
...But why leave the town such an eyesore...
...We had gotten into that position during the night, and it was not until daylight that we realized where we were...
...Que se han alzado...
...Behind them it illuminates the Mediterranean, breaking on the beach with continuous slaps...
...the moist earth had a sweet, subtle smell of exhumation from the skulls and bones scattered among the sleepers...
...Finally it comes into view容mpty holes of masonry sprawling across dips of sand and rock, a few dead tree trunks thrusting leafless branches between mounds of debris...
...Comprendez-vous...
...I can see from the tire tracks and hoof marks that the living make use of this path...
...Moi, soldat, 容jercito, armee, national友ranco, oui...
...I offer them the bottle...
...no food or water could reach us...
...Comprendez...
...I drive off the road and park in the shade of a shattered stone barn...
...I do not want your guidance...
...This knowledge I keep to myself...
...I'm an American...
...A battle of the Spanish Civil War was fought here...
...A sense of delicacy is keeping the two English youths from asking the question that is in their eyes...
...I introduce myself with the lie that I am a professor of history and wish to get first-hand accounts of what happened in the Aragon during the Civil War...
...Doran, who had been demanding that Division Headquarters send a propaganda truck, saw one headed elsewhere on the road...
...The rounded outer bars are painted black...
...When they leave, I am left alone in the pervading heat...
...the wounded on each side had fought to their last breath, knowing that prisoners would not be taken...
...I come to the stone house, with walls three feet thick, whose every window was filled with machine guns...
...I ask them what they think of the King's amnesty...
...But I want to answer it anyway...
...After a moment, the second youngster says respectfully...
...I can feel all I have choked down for 40 years swelling inside me...
...Another day, I drive from Tor-tosa to Mora La Nueva and come back on the other side of the river...
...Your countrymen were in the same brigade with us, the 15th International Brigade...
...That night it blared its message: "The Fascists have taken your land away...
...Frances...
...On our side, we were stupefied with weariness from six days of house-to-house combat...
...We came to deliver the future as a gift to the world...
...They also fought at Belchite, which you will be interested in seeing...
...I want to hear what these two have to say...
...We've read in the papers about entire villages being abandoned, with peasants leaving to look for work in the cities...
...Some flagstones still lie on the churned ground, and the silenced bell dangles in the wrecked belfry...
...Enfermis...
...Only the merciless crags that loom over the valley, on which men had killed each other, confirmed the truth I had known...
...we lay in our own excrement, squirming deeper into the dirt, never daring to raise our heads...
...Itake a swig from my bottle of mineral water and begin to walk...
...We heard shots as enemy soldiers fought with their superiors, and soon they swarmed over the barricade...
...Now, different treeless and grassless hills, low wide-based truncated cones that look like mounds dumped out of sandpails by giants' children at play...
...They and nine others threw bottles of nitroglycerine into those sandbagged windows, in the short moments when our covering fire forced the Fascist gunners to duck and not shoot their own guns...
...The rich valley confronting me seems a mirage: the unmolested vineyards, the neat olive, pear and fig groves, the thick stands of maize, all those lush fields and terraced mountainsides...
...A pompous and conventional plaque is affixed to one side of the arch...
...I see Catalans form rings in the spacious Rambla to dance their banned dance, the sardana...
...One morning during the fighting in this town he looked to be asleep on the dirt street...
...Can you tell us what all this is...
...Is this your first visit here...
...we lay all day under enfilading fire from the Fascists in the church 60 yards away...
...I weep...
...the second man asks...
...Here is the shallow trench where ing having lifted, the enemy reached the front...
...So did hundreds of Britons and Irishmen...
...North Americans fought here with the Reds," the second man says thoughtfully...
...Near another ruin, a middle-aged couple is finishing a picnic...
...But this looks like London during the blitz...
...Please, sefior," I say coldly...
...The youngsters come to the second verse...
...The moon caresses a center of exuberant faces and a circumference of older bodies swaying in rhythm...
...seran ahorcados Seran ahorcados...
...The shelling had ploughed up graves and shattered the crypts in the cemetary wall, adding to the atmosphere of death that night after we took Quinto...
...Your countrymen were very brave...
...A little further on, a gentler memorial awaits me...
...They were running...
...But those generals did not hang, and all too many of them died in bed...
...He points into a building where sunlight dribbles through the shattered roof onto an uprooted floor, "lei, les soeurs...
...The Aragon is my last stop...
...Its austerity halts me...
...an irrigation system has defeated the desert...
...Digame...
...The heat waves shimmer, the shattered buildings yawn sadly into each other's dim recesses, flies drone in and out of the tufts of grass, and a lizard darts from under a stone across my path...
...A round-faced, bright-eyed, chunky man on a bicycle stops beside me on the dusty road between the ruins...
...In Tamagona, where they had bombed us as we lay in oui crammed hospitals, more memories are corroborated...
...I name the battles they fought in葉he Jarama, Bru-nete, Purburell Hill...
...This cross, with its bones of iron, with no veneer of wood, is the skeleton of a cross...
...I fought with these people," I say...
...At Fuentes, they stopped us...
...and, since the structure had an upper story, we set gasoline-soaked straw afire to smoke out snipers...
...We held the front door open and fired into the town...
...When shelling from our side forced the enemy from their positions, groggy comrades stumbled forward to join us...
...he asks, and without waiting for an answer begins his patter...
...We all understood that, the 40,000 of us who came from every corner of Europe and the Americas...
...Drained, I fall silent...
...I remember the cemetery in Quinto where I started up in the middle of the night out of a spasmodic sleep...
...Their eyes rove the ravaged landscape, and one of them says gently, "You are very moved, and so are we...
...Spaniards are brave?that is their nature, that goes without saying傭ut the North Americans were madmen...
...It is hard to believe, but I have meandered about for two and a half hours...
...We are English," they answer eagerly...
...The cross stands embedded in a concrete base without an inscription...
...my breathing gets shorter...
...If you hold out, you are doomed...
...For the first time in this journey of exploration and rediscovery, all I have buried reasserts its fierce life...
...Two men my owr age, wearing corduroy jackets despite the heat, their broad and toughened peasant hands resting on their knees, are sitting in the shade in Quinto's rebuilt square...
...Even so, there were three days of street fighting...
...All around me were the spent bodies of my comrades, contorted forms wrapped in blankets, as if rehearsing to be the corpses of our next battle...
...A curved flight of steps between two simple brick walls leads to a small open-air chapel...
...Slowly, I walk back through the town...
...Beyond it I see a neglected, treeless square fronting a row of houses with wash hanging from the balconies...
...more of us got hit, the low barricade was built, the church was ours...
...My mind clings to the thick coats of dust on the foliage, to the huge bomb craters, wide and deep, to the splintered trees and the split rocks...
...They made a sortie, driving women and children in front of them, but they encountered our Spanish Battalion and the hand grenades of each side ripped flesh without discrimination...
...We reached the rear entrance just as, the shellThey received supplies from the air and assurances that relief columns were on the way...
...Yes, those generals did betray you...
...They shot back from windows and alleys, regrouping to rush us...
...Hospital...
...This is a national monument...
...one of them asks...
...The dreadful utterance worked...
...it was not weather that unhinged it...
...I ask...
...I go into the barn and urinate...
...The way stations were Quinto, Belchite and Fuentes de Ebro...
...They thank me and each takes a swallow...
...There is no escape for yoj...
...The guitars insist on victory and, as if in celebration, the tambourine jingles, the castanets clack, the fingers snap, the feet stamp...
...Because the corpserrchewer Franco wanted it that way," I say, and hear that 1 am now completely hoarse...
...Quinto was one for the books葉he artillery laid down its barrage, the planes flew over on time, the tanks and infantry moved in...
...We do not know what will develop," the first speaker says after a pause...
...Levick and Eaton fell...
...The furious officers escaped through an underground passage to a fortified house...
...The sun tortured us...
...Astounded by my hostility and my Spanish, he gapes, then remounts his bicycle and rides off...
...But Belchite was the real bloodbath...
...Under an enormous crucifix, grenades exploded...
...Then the hills again, disfigured by massive protuberances of rock in strange shapes...
...I feel the throb of my pulse...
...The Republic is distributing land...
...one of our people grappled with him, wrested the weapon away and stabbed him in the heart...
...it is a national monument...
...And you...
...Yes, I have read about the Civil War...
...I am a North American...
...Spragg and Jock Cunningham, Paddy O'Daire and Frank Ryan...
...the emptiness within is broken by curved, interweaving iron strands forming large uniform circles that frame the ruins...
...No doubt we broke down this door...
...I unlock my car and am drinking from my bottle of mineral water when two youngsters, their collars open at the neck, wearing shorts that expose athletic calves, appear around the corner of the barn...
...Strong young voices are singing our words, the jaunty and sad words of Irving Weissman was a member o\ the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion...
...Beyond the church was their barricade, and its scores of defenders...
...Serior, que es eso, esto pueblo...
...This is Belchite...
...its timid questioning of the cross' austere carriage seems like hypocrisy...
...Perhaps this very beam was one of those we used as battering rams...
...I speak of our crushed hope that we would stop fascism in Spain and prevent World War II...
...The inscription pays tribute to the heroes who, from the 20th of August to the 4th of September 1937, defended Belchite against the Red hordes trying to capture Zaragoza...
...Then he adds, "Go to Belchite...
...Although we captured the town, the price was high...
...His toothless smirk reveals the expectation of a generous fee...
...Before each battle, he would intone this verse like a prayer: Overloaded, undermined, meant to founder, we Euchred God Almighty's storm, bluffed the eternal sea...
...The area was in Franco's hands for a long time and, after summoning villagers to witness the executions of Left-wingers and Republicans, he conscripted everyone else...
...I turn the corner of a crumbled wall now and come upon a wrought-iron, open-work cross taller than a man...
...I stumble across a wide wooden roof beam that is sticking out of a doorless entrance...
...Do you speak English...
...Zaragoza is the city we never took...
...Once more I see the stiffened corpses, and my brain is shrill with the whine of bullets, the stutter of machine guns, the moans of the wounded, the hoarse curses and shouts of those still fighting...
...Because he left it this way to wag the finger at the Spanish people, and to let them know he was ready to inflict more of the same if they dared to challenge their rulers again...
...But葉rust the Finns!?Houtijarvi and another nickel miner from Ontario came packing a machine gun and belts, then the sandbags arrived and we heaped them up...
...Early the next morning, I set off for Belchite...
...It is a region of strange formations...
...It has already freed nine military dissidents and several Communists and Basque nationalists...
...Hugh Thomas, you know...
...Its nakedness is, at the same time, an homage to those, living and dead, on whom the demands were imposed, and a witness to the desolation of soul and earth that is the real victor in battle...
...The gates to the stairs are locked, so I climb up alongside the wall and look over it into the chapel...
...Even the sun is drenched in red, as it brings back the delerium of heat, thirst, hunger...
...You will all die...
...Are you French...
...I hear how husky my voice has become, and I see that, behind their good manners, the two of them are silently wondering at my agitation...
...This is a bombed-out town," I say...
...Coffins, some coming apart, others split open, rested at odd angles...
...The words are flooding out of me...
...I bent over to shake him awake and saw where a bullet had pierced his temple...
...Orwell...
...The government left it as a ruin...
...Their orders were to hold us up, and the house-to-house and gully-to-gully fighting took six days...
...They nod, and one of them says, "We were in the Nationalist army...
...These heroes fell, I read, for God and for Spain...
...Where do Carl Bradley and Charlie Regan lie now...
...So did other Americans...
...the torpor is broken only by the drone of flies...
...The church is the ruin we and they made of it...
...He raced to it in the Brigade car and pulled his revolver on the Army Corps driver...
...Vast, sunbaked, barren, yellow and brown tablelands, with fold after fold of bleak sandy hills on the horizon...
...We swept the dark room with automatic fire...
...I gave them the names of the British and Irish warriors, the quick and the dead, Julian Bell and Mal-com Dunbar, Oliver St...
...Stooping, I finger the hard splintery surface...
...The commandeered truck was set up in the ruins...
...When I do not answer, he looks at me calculatingly and gets off his bicycle...
...he shouts in a hearty entrepreneurial voice...
...They approach me with perplexity in their faces...
...No matter: The monument's rigidity speaks of the stern demands of war...
...And late at night a familiar melody crosses the street to me, like an old friend I hadn't seen for years...
...I ask...
...The Spanish people were our brothers...
...Paul Anderson, the fisherman from Gloucester, used to have kidney trouble...
...What we do know is that we need bread...
...so long ago, set to an old folk tune: Los cuatro generates, Los cuatro generates, Los cuatro generates, Mamita mia, Que se han alzado...
...If it can't be rebuilt, why not raze it?'" Then it pours out of me, my fury at the defeat of compassion and the triumphant injustice...
...Suddenly a green oasis...
...Those fellows...
...Were you in the fighting yourselves...
...Moi, Soldat...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 1
