In Europe (48 page)

At the end of his
Homage to Catalonia
, George Orwell does something unique: he issues a warning to the reader:‘Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.’ Such honesty is a rare thing.

No other war has ever had as many lies told about it as the Spanish Civil War. Everything, but everything, is covered in a thick layer of propaganda, and even today historians have the greatest difficulty coming close to something like the truth. We know almost nothing about how all those people like Kopp, those 130,000 victims of terror from the left and from the right, met their end, or why, or where their tormented bodies were buried.

The only concrete evidence we possess are the eyewitness reports. The only former foreign volunteer I knew well lived in California, in Oakland. He drove around in a cream sports car, he wore an oriental shawl and he talked all the time about Betsy, Betsy, his new love. His name was Milton Wolff, he was in his late seventies, and he had been the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers. He was twenty-three at the time.

In two years’ time his battalion had gone through eight commanders – four were killed, four were badly wounded – and Milton was number nine. In 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote of him that he was only still alive by virtue of ‘the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed.’ Milton had remained standing through the fiery bloodbath at Brunete, the slaughterhouse of Fuentes and the snows of Teruel. This was the same man who drove the cream car.

The last time I saw Milton was in 1993, during a sunny meal with Californian friends. He was still a tall, handsome man, and there was a girlfriend in the background then as well, half his age, as always. He had worked for the British Secret Service during the Second World War, including a stint in Burma, and later on he had served as an American intelligence service liaison officer with the communist resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy. After the war the American government treated him, like many other former Spanish volunteers, to the fascinating title of
‘premature anti-fascist’. An army career, therefore, was out of the question for him. Even in his eighties he was still out to improve the world: collecting medicine for Cuba and financing ambulances and local clinics in Nicaragua.

That afternoon in 1993, Milton was in a sombre mood. ‘They're dropping like flies these days, all my old comrades.’ He mumbled something about the ‘bastards’ who had ruined it all, then turned his attention to my girlfriend's blonde locks. The squirrels were running along the tops of the fences. From the kitchen we could hear our hostess flattening used cans with a hammer, for the collective recycling service: metal with metal, compost with compost, paper with paper.

‘It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth,’ George Orwell wrote. ‘But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.’

Right after the civil war broke out, German and Italian aid to Franco began pouring in: Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts, technicians and pilots, guns and munitions, thousands of volunteers. It was, in part, a purely commercial transaction: Franco sold the Germans one mining concession after another. The Americans, ostensibly neutral, provided oil and 12,000 trucks. In their eyes, a ‘fascist’ coup posed less of a risk than a ‘communist’ revolution.

The republic received support from Mexico, which immediately sent 20,000 rifles. All republican eyes were fixed on France, where the left wing Popular Front was in power at the time. French friends of the republic quickly arranged for the transport of more than seventy airplanes, but then the assistance stopped. Britain was determined not to be drawn into another unclear conflict on the continent, and France followed suit. ‘Appeasement’ was the key word in those years; that is to say, the containment of dictatorships by means of patience and prudence, the very opposite of the bellicosity of 1914.

And so it happened that, on 8 August, 1936, France closed the Spanish
border to all military transports. This inevitably forced the republic into the arms of the only ally they had left: the communists and Stalin's Soviet Union. With that, their fate was sealed in the very first weeks of the war.

The part of the country where Milton Wolff once fought lies along today's national highway N420, about a hundred kilometres south-west of Barcelona, behind the bungalows and the filling stations. Here were his positions, amid the olive trees in the quiet hills close to Gandesa. From his memoirs: ‘A lone plane appeared and circled over the hills. A lull … And finally the entire hill seemed to come alive with shouting and shooting and exploding grenades, and then it was over.’ For him, that was a crucial moment: it was when he lost contact with his battalion. Ascó, this must be the ‘poor brown village’ where he hid. Behind that the Ebro, which he finally swam across to get through the lines. The water is wild and red.

Further along, Calaceite and Alcañiz lie baking in the sun, all their shutters closed. Two old women are sitting before their houses in knitted vests; the rest of the city is either asleep or dead, there's no telling which. Along the road you constantly come across flattened foxes, rabbits, badgers, weasels and partridges. Above the mountaintops hangs an endless roll of cloud, folded back on itself like a duvet. The customers at the roadside restaurant are salesmen and truck drivers, the waitress silently serves up today's special, for there is nothing else to be had: salad, stuffed aubergine, stewed rabbit.

Heading west, the countryside becomes more rugged. The hills fade into an almost treeless plain. The earth is hard and bristly, the hot wind whistles around my van. Every once in a while the road curves through a brown, silent village. This area is littered with the cadavers of abandoned farms, houses, shops, cloisters. Behind almost every ruin lies a tragedy, although there is no telling which. What, for example, is the story behind that row of fallen houses, ten kilometres or so past Gandesa? Were they burned down during the civil war, or abandoned in the 1960s when better days never arrived? And that enormous imploded house close to Alcañiz, did it simply fall down, or did soldiers blow it up? This is the old Ebro Front, where the republicans mustered all their forces in summer 1938 for a four month, last-ditch stand. Only in Belchite, an abandoned village to the East, is the war still tangible: a few piles of debris and
collapsed walls, a roofless church, one and a half trees, a cross of iron. In March 1938, Milton Wolff and his Abraham Lincoln battalion were among the last group of republican soldiers in the village; his commander was killed, then they were all swept away by Franco's tanks. More than 6,000 men were killed on both sides. The ruins were recently used as a backdrop for TV commercials for the Dutch Army: ‘We perform peace-keeping missions.’

All the other hard-fought hills remain unsung. The dead have been hidden away beneath the soil, without a single marker. ‘Forget’ is the motto here. No one wants to rake up the past.

HALFWAY THROUGH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
wrote: ‘Guernica is the most fortunate city on earth. Its people arrange their own affairs in a meeting of representatives that is held beneath an oak tree, and the decisions they make are always of the wisest sort.’ That, at least, is what all Basque sources claim. In fact the great philosopher was talking about Switzerland, but none of that matters here.

Euskadi, otherwise known as the Basque Country, has a dreamlike quality. You fall into a deep abyss, and at the bottom you suddenly find yourself in a luxuriant garden, a different world with different people and a different language. After the parched Spanish plains, here there is suddenly a green little Switzerland, inhabited by a strange and ancient people. Their language grates like cuneiform. Outsiders have no idea what these people are writing or saying. Their communication with others is largely through tastes and smells: in the kitchen, a Basque becomes a true sorcerer. The hills are dotted with white farms and cows wearing bells; you can smell the ocean. Madrid is far, far away.

The average Basque is no different from the average European. He lives in a villa or in a cruddy high-rise neighbourhood close to Donostia (San Sebastian) or Ibaizabal (Bilbao), he spends his days in an office, a shop, at school or beside the conveyor belt, he spends his weekends with friends or family, in restaurants or at the disco. Still, if you ask him what he considers the ideal life, he will start talking about a section of valley with a few cows and a farm, about the life of his grandparents and great-grandparents.

For every Basque, the Basque separatist movement has another face. You have anti-nationalists, radical nationalists, theoretical nationalists, light nationalists, violent nationalists, pacifist nationalists, nationalists who plant
bombs and fight in the street and nationalists who condemn that. Never lump them all together, not the Basques, and not the Basque nationalists either. Ever since the fifteenth century, the Basque provinces – just like other regions of Spain – have been fighting for the rights of the local nobles and citizenry, and for the traditions that go along with them. That struggle was usually about practical matters: privileges, locals laws and taxes. At the end of the nineteenth century this ‘feel for independence’ took on a more romantic hue, as it did everywhere in Europe. The founder of this new movement, Sabino Arana, advocated a government of national character for all Basques, both Catholic and pure-bred. In his study he tinkered away at assembling a nation: from the various Basque dialects he constructed an official Basque language, he composed a national anthem and even created his own ‘typically Basque’ typography. His final play,
Libe
, was about a woman who chose death rather than marry a Spaniard. Arana himself married a farm girl, simply for the ‘purity’ of her blood. After he died, she wasted no time finding a new husband: a Spanish policeman.

Arana called his new nation Euskal Herría, meaning ‘the country where Basque is spoken’. The region was to include the three Basque provinces, plus Navarra and the French Basque Country. Many Basque nationalists regard him these days as having been a bit soft in the head, but his Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) is still the biggest party in the Basque Country, his bust still figures prominently in the headquarters of the PNV, the most important nationalist prize bears his name, and his racist speeches have never quite been forgotten either.

During the Spanish Civil War, Basque nationalism turned into a militant resistance movement. At first the Spanish nationalists saw the staunch Catholic Basques as their natural allies, but that changed quickly enough. Franco and his supporters wanted a strong, central government, and that was what the Basque nationalists so vehemently opposed. In exchange for their loyalty, the republican leaders gave the Basques the republic they had been dreaming of. That independent Euskadi was short-lived. After only a few months, the new republic was trampled underfoot by Franco's troops in May 1937. The nationalist leaders went into exile or were imprisoned, an end was put to all forms of autonomy, the Basque language was banned and Basque teachers were sacked. Thousands of Basques were murdered: some estimates put it at more than 25,000. In the
prison at San Sebastian the executions took place every day until 1947.

The PNV survived and developed into the moderate conservative Christian party that has been in power in the Basque Country for years. For a small group of Marxist students in Bilbao, however, that was far too tame. In 1959 they took a more radical tack: they set up Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), otherwise known as ETA. One of their first attacks, in 1961, was on a train full of Franco veterans on their way to San Sebastian. Franco reacted vehemently and in kind: at least a hundred people were arrested, many of them were tortured, some were executed, others received decade-long prison sentences. The most famous ETA attack came on 20 December, 1973, when Franco's crown prince, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, was blown up. The explosion was so powerful that the admiral, with car and all, flew fifteen metres into the air and landed in the courtyard of a neighbouring Jesuit monastery. The badly damaged Dodge, licence number PM 16416, is now on display at the Army Museum in Madrid. Blanco was Franco's last prospect of a natural successor.

According to some Basques, there never was a ‘good’ ETA that later went bad. ‘ETA has always been bad,’ writer and ETA pioneer Mikel Azurmendi said later, and that had to do with the total imbalance between ends and means. After Franco's death, and countless schisms within the movement itself, ETA gradually degenerated into a powerful terrorist organisation which financed itself by means of extorted ‘taxes’, which did not shrink from blowing up a Barcelona supermarket full of women and children, which would threaten anyone with death merely for voicing different views, and which, despite all this, still maintained considerable support, particularly among young Basques.

When I travelled through the Basque Country in May 1999, it was intermission time. ETA had declared a ceasefire, and people were willing to talk. I had been put in contact with Monica Angulo, a Basque sociologist who spends six months a year in America. Along with a friend, she showed me everything there was left to see in Guernica: the stump of Rousseau's legendary oak – now protected by a Grecian dome; the old hall where the free Basques once met and still meet; the museum with its paintings of priests, banners and the taking of solemn pledges; and the new oak tree that has already been in place for 140 years. ‘Basque
nationalism is mostly anti-Madrid,’ Monica said. ‘It has a very personal background. Almost everyone here has a friend, a brother or a cousin who has been in prison at some point or who has had other major runins with Madrid. That automatically makes people nationalistic.’