We Saw Spain Die Read Free Page A

heaviest fighting he saw was among the journalists. Steer, he wrote, ‘a very gay South African dwarf – is never without a black eye. Some say it is the altitude more than the bottle.’ 12
    A mixture of grudging admiration and snobbish resentment was palpable in Waugh’s review in the
Tablet
of Steer’s book
Caesar in Abyssinia:
    Mr George Steer was one of the first special correspondents to arrive in Addis Ababa in 1935, and one of the last to leave in 1936. He represented the most important newspaper in the world. He exhibited in a high degree the peculiar gifts required for that kind of journalism – keen curiosity of mind, a retentive memory, enterprise, a devotion to duty even at the expense of personal dignity and competitive zeal that was notable even in the international cut-throat rough and tumble of his colleagues.
    Although the review went on to talk of liking, admiring and respecting him, the rest of Waugh’s text was sharply critical. In the book, Steer had written: ‘I came young, I went away older, I promised myself that I could never forgive and forget.’ Not sharing Steer’s anti-fascist sentiments nor his sympathy for the Ethiopians, Waugh sneered: ‘Too credulous readers should remind themselves that a period of rapid adolescence is not the best time for accurate observation, nor a mood of personal resentment the best for a sober consideration of evidence.’ Unable to forgive Steer either his anti-Italian stance or having pipped him to the
Times
job, Waugh complained: ‘It is not enough that he thinks the war unjust. He will not allow the Italians the credit of working their destructive machinery with any skill.’ 13 In his novel
Scoop,
Waugh took small revenge for Steer’s hostility to the Italians and for the seriousness with which he approached his job, rendering him as ‘Mr Pappenhacker of the
Twopence’.
The South African-sounding old boy of Winchester College, Pappenhacker had a profound knowledge of Greek and Latin, travelling with an Arabic grammar held close to his nose, the latter being an inaccurate reference to Steer’s efforts to learn Amharic. 14
    On 4 May 1936, just nine days before the Italian expulsion order was delivered, George Steer had married Margarita Trinidad de Herrero y Hassett, who was the daughter of an English mother, a Spanish father and had been brought up in France. They had met in Abyssinia, where she had been correspondent for a Paris newspaper,
Le Journal.
She was his senior by ten years but irresistibly attractive. Small and sensuous, she was also independent and intrepid, one of the very few female correspondents in Ethiopia to cover the Italian invasion. Indeed, at one point, on visiting the victims of an Italian mustard-gas attack, she and a Spanish friend immediately volunteered to work as nurses. They had married at the British Legation in Addis Ababa while the town was being looted by marauding bandits. It was a high-spirited affair. Steer had worn a khaki shirt and trousers, a pair of old boots and a Deutsche Luft Verband cap that he purloined off an Ethiopian bystander. Margarita, in ‘utilitarian woolies’, carried a bouquet of lilies and daisies snatched from the legation garden. Accordingly, when the chaplain called on the couple to endow each other with all their worldly goods, there was audible merriment among the congregation. They then spent their honeymoon within the barbed-wire perimeter of the legation encampment. 15
    Barely had George and Margarita settled into a flat in Chelsea when he travelled to Spain as a ‘special correspondent’ for
The Times.
From 8 August to mid-September, he was at the Franco–Spanish border and witnessed the fall of the Basque town of Irún. He noted that, as Irún and Fuenterrabía were being shelled from the sea and bombed from the air, the Francoists had dropped pamphlets threatening to deal with the population as they had dealt with those in Badajoz. He produced despatches about panic-stricken