PASSING THROUGH SPAIN
By JOHN LODWICK
HAVE always liked Spaniards. The odour of garlic clings about
them, of course ; but then I like garlic, too. I was not, like so many other people, mixed up in their civil war, nor, like so any other people again, did I write a book about it. But I did ght with Spaniards in the Foreign Legion during the Battle of rance, and so I know something about them—know, for example, hat they remain quite fearless and unmoved under artillery fire r bomb-strafing, ferocious at hand-to-hand fighting, but will turn nd run immediately they are machine-gunned from the air. I had he misfortune to be a corporal during that fighting in France. I ay misfortune because I was therefore obliged to command paniards. To tell a Spaniard to do something is, of course, the est way of ensuring that he won't do it. This makes life rather ifficult and complicated for corporals, for they have to think up 1 the things which they don't want done in the hope that the paniards will thereupon select one of the few things which they do. It once fell to my lot, during a German artillery preparation t Soissons, to order a party of Spaniards to dig a trench in which o shelter themselves. Now the stuff was dropping pretty thick, and he atmosphere definitely unhealthy, so that you might have thought at my boys would do the job, if only in their own interests. But o! not a bit of it ; the Spaniard is a proud man. Manual labour moments of extreme danger he considers as undignified. He refers to die standing, discussing philosophy, rather than to crouch n a hole. It was only when I said that I would go away and leave hem, and very probably be shot as a deserter for doing so, that y Spaniards agreed to obey me. They - set to work almost nergetically, and one minute later a shell landed plumb in the iddle of them, and that was the end of one of my worries. I elt rather guilty about it afterwards.
You can imagine that, with these memories, it was with some isgiving that I re-entered Spain a month ago after escaping from rance. Blood-curdling tales had been told me, tales of starvation, f political oppression, of murder and underground movements, and , who had starved in German prison camps and in unoccupied rance for months, who had been quite sufficiently opKessed for a etime by my captors, and who had witnessed rather a lot of galised murder, was quite prepared to believe them.
The first thing you notice when you enter Spain nowadays is all the lovely uniforms, the second the general disinclination for work of any kind, the third the café in the main street, and the fourth the very varied selection of drink behind its counter. When you have had a few glasses of this fire-water yourself and feel dis- posed to talk, you are not likely to lack a companion. The Spaniard is always particularly anxious for you to know how the world is treating him. He will tell you about his wife, his children, and, if he has time, about his grandmother. He is inexhaustible.
But what about the civil war, you ask him? What civil war? Oh, that little affair. . . . Oh, well that was over a long time ago, and now we have Franco. (Here he shrugs his shoulders with that peculiar Iberian gracefulness which I always associate with a man who, shrugging thus, threw himself with a stick of hand grenades beneath a German tank, and so blocked the road to .a Panzer column.) Franco? Well, you know, he might be worse. We've got to have somebody, and if we didn't have him it might be another Churchill or Mussolini. Still, as you say, things are a bit quiet. (Here he looks hopeful.) Maybe in another year or two we shall be having another revolution!
The truth is that the Spaniard is not so much apathetic or oppressed as thoroughly bored with politics. A riot or two, a strike, a peasant uprising—yes, that suits his national ebullience very well. He doesn't want to know what the riot or the strike or the uprising are all about, as long as they occur . . . he doesn't want slogans shoved down his throat. The Spaniard must have some out- let for the violence of his nature. If it isn't internecine warfare, it's killing his wife. Since the civil war ceased the annual number of crimes passionelles has gone up tenfold. . • The engine of the first train in which I travelled in Spain broke down. The driver and his mechanic got out and began to play cards on the track until they were nearly run down by a passing express. The passengers mended the engine, and that's Spain for you. I asked a taximan in Barcelona to drive me to a hotel ; he drove me instead, knowing that I was an Englishman, to the Falangist (Fascist) headquarters, and that's Spain for you again. I ran out of money, and consequently of drink as well, on my way to Madrid, and the passengers in my third-class carriage clubbed together to get me an abundance of both. That's Spain even more so.; the kindest, most generous, even if it is the most feckless nation in the world.
And I don't care a rap what disgruntled derrxicrats may say here to the contrary : Spain is not starving ; one eats there very well and inexpensively. Spain is not discontented ; she is quite happy to remain Spanish of whatever political complexion for a few years, if only it means that foreign idealists can be made to keep out of her internal affairs. The old political contention is deader than the deadest doornail. Ex-Republican and Franco men mix freely and without bitterness. Indeed, the only voluntary and unsolicited reference to the civil war which I heard was when I was passing through the battlefields of Guadalajara. Then everybody crowded to the window " That's where we beat the Italian so-and- so's," said one man, spreading his hands wide in a glorious gesture. " That's where we pushed the macaronis back forty kilometres." And it was not even a Republican speaking ; he had fought on the side of the Italians.
It may be argued that I did not stay in Spain long enough to find out what things were really like. I have a horror of people who write books about countries on one month's acquaintance ; but what the Spaniard is thinking about food, about politics and about the world situation is very easy to divine and astonishingly uniform. Seven of ten people whom I asked in a test question hoped that the United Nations would win the war. That may seem surprising in view of the character of their Government. It will seem less surprising when I tell you that the same ten people were a great deal more enthusiastic a moment later about the chances of a certain bull at the Arena the next Sunday. Both questions were important, but the bull was so much nearer home.
The Customs officers at Marvao, the Portuguese frontier station, were spruce and efficient. They were well-shaven, they were tidy, but it was with a real regret that I turned my back on Spain . . . the land of the lazy, the land of the argumentative, one of the few lands where one can still do more or less what one likes nowadays.
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