We Saw Spain Die Read Free Page B

refugees heading for France and on the destruction wreaked on the town by retreating anarchists enraged by their lack of ammunition. 16 Steer stayed in Spain after he ceased working for the newspaper in order to complete his book
Caesar in Abyssinia,
which was finished in Burgos. In October 1936, he drove through Old Castile and was appalled by the scale of the repression being carried out by the rebel forces in a rural area where there had been very little left-wing activity. He recalled later, when considering the relatively small scale of violence in Republican Bilbao, what he hadseen in the rebel zone. He noted that ‘the province of Valladolid, with a population of 300,000, a deal less therefore than Bilbao and her refugees, had lost five thousand men and women to the punitive revolvers of the Falange and the Guardia Civil and the military courts; they were still being executed at the rate of ten a day’. On the road from Palencia to Valladolid, he found graphic evidence of the terror: ‘In small villages of Castile, numbering only a few thousand souls, like Venta de Baños and Dueñas, I found that the dead were one hundred and twenty-three and one hundred and five, including “Red” schoolmistresses and wives of murdered men who had complained that their husbands were unjustly killed.’ 17
    His friend and colleague, Noel Monks, would later refer to Steer having spent six months in the Franco zone. In November 1936, Steer was seen in Toledo by Peter Kemp, one of the very few British volunteers on the Franco side. Like so many other correspondents, Steer was impatient of the restrictions imposed on unescorted visits to the front. He was desperate to go north to witness the Francoist siege of Madrid and, finally, after many complaints, permission was granted for a trip to the capital. Kemp wrote later: ‘Steer, whom I had known before as a man of initiative and courage, could fairly be described as a natural rebel. The incident which precipitated his expulsion is worth recording, as illustrating the fury of an Englishman confronted with Spanish plumbing.’ As was standard practice with the Nationalist press authorities, the journalists were allowed to visit the Madrid front only as part of a specially conducted tour. The large group of journalists included English, French and American correspondents, as well as the more favoured Italians and Germans. They were escorted by a number of senior army staff officers whose job was:
    to explain the situation as it should be presented. A senior official of the Ministry of Press and Propaganda was in charge. A fleet of cars was assembled, ready to leave from the hotel at 8.30 in the morning. Soon after nine o’clock the party was ready to start, but there was no sign of Steer. After waiting a while in a fury of impatience, they were about to start without him when he appeared on the steps of the hotel with a set, exasperatedexpression on his face. In clear tones he addressed the assembled party: ‘You pull-and pull-and pull-and nothing happens. You pull again, and the shit slowly rises. There’s Spain for you,’ he roared, ‘in a nutshell.’ 18
    It is, in fact, very likely that, long before his public complaint about the lavatories in Toledo, the Nationalist press censors were highly suspicious of Steer because of his anti-fascist despatches from Abyssinia. Kemp remembered Steer as ‘a truly adventurous man of great initiative and charm, but a natural rebel whose utter contempt for authority and the pomposity that too often went with it was bound to land him in trouble’. 19 A temporary
Times
correspondent called William F. Stirling wrote to London to complain that Luis Bolín regularly put obstacles in the way of his work because he ‘suffers from acute Anglophobia with
Times
complications’. On 18 November 1936, Stirling wrote again to warn that the Francoist authorities, by which he almost certainly meant Bolín, considered Steer to be a ‘dangerous person in