THE BLIND EYE
By GRAHAM GREENE
ILEFT Vera Cruz on April 3oth in the German liner Orinoco,' travelling third class. The shadow of the Spanish war stretches across the south Atlantic and the Gulf : one couldn't expect to escape it in a German ship calling at Lisbon.
My cabin held six, but at first there were only five of us : an old man who never spoke a word, a fat Mexican who spat all night upon the floor and said " No puede dorm& " because he couldn't sleep, and a young Spaniard with a hard handsome idealist's face and his small son whom he disciplined like a drill-sergeant. There was no doubt at all where he was going, and, when I returned to my cabin just before we sailed, I found a stranger wearing a beret and an old suit which didn't look natural : you felt he was used to a better cut. There were others in the cabin, too : they blocked the door after I got in : they wore their berets like a uniform and each had a little gold chain round his neck with a holy medal dangling under the shirt. At first I couldn't understand their Castilian —they seemed perturbed, they wanted to know who I was. The word " Ingleg " didn't reassure them, but when I said " Catolico " and showed my lucky charm, they looked a little easier. The stranger was a stowaway, he was going to " pay the Reds " ; I must promise to tell no one, they said blocking the door, till we had left Havana. As we sailed out of Vera Cruz that night we passed a Spanish ship which had been impounded since the war started and the third-class emptied on to the deck and gave the dark and silent boat a noisy farewell : " Arriba Espana," " Viva Franco." The stewards smiled gently, bringing round the salad, hearing nothing.
After Havana the volunteers began to disclose themselves, more than two dozen of them. Many of them had their wives and children with them, they wore their uniforms quite openly when we were once at sea, black forage caps and Sam Browne belts, blue shirts with the Falangist fasces embroi- dered on the pocket. They were very noisy and carefree— without bravado : you felt that going to war was one of the natural functions of man. There was something agreeably amateur too about their Fascism—I think the Germans looked a little askance when the arms went up in salute—for nothing at all, for a silly old man, for a joke. Arriba Espanas and Viva Francos burst boisterously out for no reason on the hot unshaded deck, with a hint of mockery. Killing the Reds— that was a man's occupation, but all this dressing up to do it, that was a joke, a game. They enjoyed it, but not in the serious German way. 0 the consultations on deck, the handing out of envelopes, the open conspiracies. There was one printed form which aroused my curiosity : instructions from Burgos ? I learned what it was when Sunday came.
The blind non-intervention eye was very blind indeed, and the German ear was very deaf. On Sunday there was a church parade : the volunteers marched up to Mt.ss in the first class : twenty-five of them lined the wall in uniform, one man stood at attention on each side of the altar : it was impressive, as a funeral is. A monk preached (I had seen him playing chess, cheery and unshaven in an old striped shirt and no tie). He preached on suffering and sacrifice and offering up your agony to God. After the Mass was over, before the priest had time to leave the altar, the volun- teers broke into the Falangist hymn—that was what they had been learning all the week from the printed forms. And then, inevitably, the Fascist salute : Arriba Espana, Viva Franco : every arm went up but mine, yet no one minded at all. These were Spaniards, not Germans.
It was odd comparing them with their German allies : the young German farmer, for instance, from Chiapas, who joined heartily in the right cries and hated Christianity. I tried to involve him in argument in front of the volunteers- " this," I wanted to indicate, " is your ally." They stood listening with mild astonishment, the holy medals dangling round their necks, while he plunged bull-like at Christianity.
" But you must admit that—so far—nationalism hasn't produced any art, literature, philosophy to compare with the Christian ? "
" I see you do not know the works of Ludendorff. Listen to me. The Christians have only winned because they have killed all not Christian. Once we had nothing to give people, only Religion. Now we give the Nation. But we are not atheists like the Reds. We have a God, one God."
" The old Jewish Jehovah ? "
" No, no. A Force. We do not pretend to know what he is. A Princirle."
The volunteers listened politely to the new Germany, but one of the cooks jumped overboard : he hadn't been home for ten years ; perhaps he couldn't stand the prospect.
The day before Lisbon silence came down on the third class. There were no Arriba Espaiias all the afternoon. The stern father walked up and down, up and down, his child hanging to his arm, up and down, drowned, you could tell, in a sea of unreality : here, for ten days, he had been on a pleasure cruise, there the train for Salamanca left at nine. There was a farewell dinner—perhaps the last good meal before the trenches : " Auf Wiedersehn " inside a little scarlet heart on the menus, and then a speech—about " our great Ally " and Austria—and sacrifice. It wasn't only the Germans who had been turning blind eyes all these days : but the blind eyes of the Spanish volunteers were now beginning to open—like those of new-born children opening on t..e awful lunar landscape of the human struggle.
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