Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent

Finally, Salamone, his voice soft, said, “That’s true, Alberto, it cannot be denied. And, yesterday, it was our turn, we were attacked, told to shut up or else. But, even so, there will be copies of Liberazione in Italy later this month, it will be passed from hand to hand, and it will say what it has always said: don’t give up. Really, what else?”

In Spain, an hour after dawn on the twenty-third of December, the Nationalist field guns fired their first barrage. Carlo Weisz, only half-asleep, heard it, and felt it. Maybe, he thought, a few miles south. At the market town of Mequinenza, where the river Segre met the river Ebro. He stood up, unwound himself from the rubber poncho he’d slept in, and went out the doorway-the door was long vanished-into the courtyard of the monastery.

An El Greco dawn. Towering billows of gray cloud piled high on the southern horizon, struck red by the first shafts of sunlight. As he watched, muzzle flares flickered on the cloud and, a moment later, the reports, like muttering thunder, came rolling up the Segre. Yes, Mequinenza. They had been told to expect a new offensive, “the Catalonian campaign,” just before Christmas. Well, here it was.

To warn the others, he walked back into the room where they’d spent the night. At one time, before war came here, the room had been a chapel. Now, the tall, narrow windows were edged by shards of colored glass, while the rest of it glittered on the floor, there were holes in the roof, and an exterior corner had been blown open. At some point, it had held prisoners-that was evident from the graffiti scratched into the plaster walls: names, crosses topped by three dots, dates, pleas to be remembered, an address without a city. And it had been used as a field hospital, a mound of used bandages piled up in a corner, bloodstains on the burlap sacking that covered the ancient straw mattresses.

His two companions were already awake; Mary McGrath of the Chicago Tribune, and a lieutenant from the Republican forces, Sandoval, who was their minder, driver, and bodyguard. McGrath tilted her canteen, poured a little water into her cupped palm, and rubbed it over her face. “Sounds like it’s started,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Down at Mequinenza.”

“We had better be on our way,” Sandoval said. That in Spanish. Reuters had sent Weisz to Spain before, eight or nine assignments since 1936, and this was one of the phrases he’d picked up early on.

Weisz knelt by his knapsack, found a small bag of tobacco and a packet of papers-he’d run out of Gitanes a week ago-and began to roll a cigarette. Age forty for another few months, he was of medium height, lean and compact, with long dark hair, not quite black, that he combed back with his fingers when it fell down on his forehead. He came from Trieste, and, like the city, was half-Italian, on his mother’s side, and half-Slovenian-long ago Austrian, thus the name-on his father’s. From his mother, a Florentine face, slightly hawkish, strongly made, with inquisitive eyes, a soft, striking gray-a face descended from nobility, perhaps, a face found in Renaissance portraits. But not quite. Spoiled by curiosity, and sympathy, it was not a face lit by a prince’s greed or a cardinal’s power. Weisz twisted the ends of the cigarette, held it between his lips, and flicked a military lighter, a steel cylinder that worked in the wind, until it produced a flame.

Sandoval, holding a distributor cap with dangling wires-the time-honored way to make sure one’s vehicle was still there in the morning-went off to start the car.

“Where is he taking us?” Weisz asked McGrath.

“North of here, he said, a few miles. He thinks the Italians are holding the road on the east side of the river. Maybe.”

They were in search of a company of Italian volunteers, remnants of the Garibaldi Battalion, now attached to the Republican Fifth Army Corps. Formerly, the Garibaldi Battalion, with the Thaelmann Battalion and the Andre Marty Battalion, German and French, had made up the Twelfth International Brigade, most of them sent home in November as part of a Republican political initiative. But one Italian company had elected to fight on, and Weisz and Mary McGrath were after their story.

Courage in the face of almost certain defeat. Because the Republican government, after two and a half years of civil war, held only Madrid, under siege since 1936, and the northeast corner of the country, Catalonia, with the administration now situated in Barcelona, some eighty-five miles from the foothills above the river.

McGrath screwed the top back on her canteen and lit an Old Gold. “Then,” she said, “if we find them, we’ll head up to Castelldans to file.” A market town to the north, and headquarters of the Fifth Army Corps, Castelldans had wireless/telegraph service and a military censor.

“Certainly today,” Weisz said. The artillery exchanges to the south had intensified, the Catalonian campaign had begun, they had to wire stories as soon as they could.

McGrath, a veteran correspondent in her forties, responded with a complicit smile, and looked at her watch. “It’s one-twenty A.M. in Chicago. So, afternoon edition.”

Parked by a wall in the courtyard, a military car. As Weisz and McGrath watched, Sandoval unhinged the raised hood and stepped back as it banged shut, then slid into the driver’s seat and, presently, produced a string of explosions-sharp and loud, the engine had no muffler-and a stuttering plume of black exhaust, the rhythm of the explosions slowing as he played with the choke. Then he turned, with a triumphant smile, and waved them over.

It was a French command car, khaki-colored but long bleached out by sun and rain, that had served in the Great War and, twenty years later, been sent to Spain despite European neutrality treaties- nonintervention elastique, the French called it. Not elastique enough-Germany and Italy had armed Franco’s Nationalists, while the Republican government received grudging help from the USSR and bought whatever it could on the black market. Still, a car was a car. When it arrived in Spain, someone with a brush and a can of red paint, someone in a hurry, had tried to paint a hammer and sickle on the driver’s door. Someone else had lettered J-28 in white on the hood, someone else had fired two bullets through the rear seat, and someone else had knocked out the passenger window with a hammer. Or maybe it had all been done by the same person-in the Spanish war, an actual possibility.

As they drove off, a man in a monk’s robe appeared in the courtyard of the chapel, staring at them as they left. They’d had no idea there was anyone in the monastery, but apparently he’d been hiding somewhere. Weisz waved, but the man just stood there, making sure they were gone.

Sandoval drove slowly on the rutted dirt track that ran by the river. Weisz smoked his cigarettes, put his feet up on the backseat and watched the countryside, scrub oak and juniper, sometimes a village of a few houses, a tall pine tree with crows ranged along its branches. They stopped once for sheep; the rams had bells around their necks that sounded a heavy clank or two as they walked, driven along by a scruffy little Pyrenees sheepdog who ran ceaselessly at the edges of the flock. The shepherd came to the driver’s window, touched his beret in salute, and said good morning. “They will cross the river today,” he said. “Franco’s Moors.” Weisz and the others stared at the opposite bank, but saw only reeds and poplars. “They are there,” the shepherd said. “But you cannot see them.” He spat, wished them good luck, and followed his sheep up the hill.

Ten minutes later, a pair of soldiers waved them down. They were breathing hard, sweating in the chill air, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Sandoval slowed but didn’t stop. “Take us with you!” one of them called out. Weisz looked out the back window, wondering if they would fire at the car, but they just stood there.