Chapter 62
From the Memoirs of Grace Bailey -
By the beginning of July, the fascist drive on Valencia had stalled. There were also murmurings of a plan in the works from the Nonintervention Committee to evacuate all foreign volunteers from Spain. I felt a slight lifting of my spirits at the news when, on July 5, just such a proposal was made to both the Republic and the fascists.
Still, I couldn't help but doubt that Franco would be willing to dispense with the Italian and German aid without which he would have been defeated two years ago. Every instinct I had told me that he didn't want peace and reconciliation. He wanted blood and submission.
On the day the evacuation plan was made public, the fascists attacked out of Castellon. The result was a dismal failure. The Republican lines were too well entrenched, and the defenders too well supplied with arms and ammunition from over the French border. However, the fascists were well supplied too and reorganized quickly. On July 13, they struck again, this time on a broad front. In spite of fierce Republican resistance, they drove their opponents from their lines in the Sierra Del Toro.
Vanaver Mainwaring to Grace Mainwaring July 15, 1938
After a life spent living among illusions, some of them of my own making, it is strange to be utterly surrounded by reality. The sweat and dust and boiling sun overhead as I march my men down a country road are real. So is the shade of the olive trees where we stop for rest. So is the gurgle of water from canteens held high to let the cool streams fall into waiting mouths. So are the worn and pitted stone crosses in the cemetery up ahead. So is the death that put those crosses there.
I have seen death reach out again and again to touch my comrades and take all that they were. I have felt it reach for me again and again, but it has never quite reached far or fast enough. I have seen it attended by its servants, pain and fear. I have seen it come unaccompanied with a gentleness I would not have anticipated.
I'm sorry to sound so gloomy. The Spanish countryside is old and harsh above the valleys. Such thoughts come easily here. We may be thrown into a new offensive, or we may just hold the present line. Either way, I am not to be pitied. Once, my world was bright and carefree on the surface, but it came to be hollow inside. Now, I have comrades and a cause worth fighting for, and, above all, a love worth living for. The hollowness is gone, and I do not think that it will ever return.
When I take out your photograph and answer the smile on your lips with one of my own, I think of the sweetness of your voice and the warmth and softness of you in my arms. Above all, I think of the goodness of your compassionate soul and am astonished yet again that we belong to each other. I refuse to believe that I will never find my way back to you. At such moments, I know that there is nothing in the world more real than our love. To have lived in such a reality is the greatest justification I know for ever having lived at all. I love you.
From the Journal of Honey Sutton July 20, 1938
When you own a beauty shop, you hear all the town gossip sooner or later. I'd rather it were later or not at all. I don't really need to know which local real estate agent was flirting with an old flame at the Dominion Day Picnic right in front of his wife or who wore a particularly ugly hat to church last Sunday. However, as long as so many of my customers consider a dryer chair the next best thing to a backyard fence, I don't have a choice.
Myrt Dumphrey couldn't wait to tell what her cousin Melissa heard her best friend's husband say over supper the last time she and her husband had the couple over. Apparently, last Thursday morning, Will Lane went with a friend to the Cramps' tavern for a beer. Mark Sawyer was there after getting off the morning shift and already had one too many under his belt. When he saw Will, he cursed him and told him to stay away from his sister if he knew what was good for him.
Will calmly told him that he would see her as long as she was willing to see him. Sawyer threw his beer in his face and pushed him to the floor. Will sprang up, but the rest of the patrons separated the two. None of them were happy to see Mark Sawyer roughing up a one-armed veteran only two-thirds his size. The bartender held Sawyer by the upper arm. Steve Keegan is a big man over six feet tall and built like a bull, so there wasn't much he could do about it.
Keegan roared at him that if he laid another finger on Will, he would call Sgt. Stoneman to arrest him. Then he ordered him to get out and not come back. When Sawyer looked around at the rest of the patrons, there wasn't a friendly face among them. He stalked out of the tavern, pausing only to glare at Will. I just hope that he calms down.
Thank goodness the tavern was moved from under my family's apartment years ago. I almost admire the way the Cramps rent out four rooms above the tavern so that it is technically a part of the New Bedford Inn. That's a shrewd way to keep it legal under the Liquor Control Act as enforced by the Liberal provincial government.
Of course, the Cramps used moving the tavern and the noise that came with it as an excuse to raise the rent on my family's apartment. Negotiating Mrs. Cramp down to a reasonable increase was exhausting. That woman fights for every penny as though her life depended on it.
From the Memoirs of Grace Bailey -
On July 18, the fascist forces driving towards Valencia struck a third well-prepared line of Republican defenses between Viver and the Sierra de Espadan. Their offensive once again ground to a sudden and bloody halt. Five days of further attacks on the line resulted in thousands of fascist dead and no breakthrough. Nonetheless, the Republican high command was still worried about the ability of the lines before Valencia to hold out against continued fascist pressure and had been since the fall of the Sierra Del Toro line.
Their solution to the problem was to prepare an offensive further north to take the pressure off. They were undeterred by the closing of the French border in early June and the resulting stoppage of the flow of munitions and supplies into the Spanish Republic. The new offensive would have to be carried out with what was on hand.
On July 25, the newly organized Army of the Ebro, including the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, stormed across the Ebro taking the fascists on the other side completely by surprise. The battle of the Ebro, the longest and one of the most savage of the war, had begun. The town of Flix, along with the cavalry company and infantry battalion that garrisoned it, quickly fell to Van and his comrades in the third and fourth companies of the Mac-Paps. By late evening of the next day, the entire battalion had swept through Corbera and reached the outskirts of Gandesa.
There, the offensive stalled in ten awful days of increasingly desperate assaults on the fascist lines surrounding the town. Again and again, Van and his fellow Internationals charged increasingly strong defenses into which Franco poured reinforcements. The redesigned German 88, the deadliest field artillery piece of the day, made its first appearance on the battlefields of Europe, inflicting fearful casualties as it shattered one assault after another. Again and again, the bloodied defenders of the Republic reeled back in defeat.
In New Bedford, the news of the Army of the Ebro's initial success produced a cautious revival of my spirits in spite of two years of harsh experience. It was bad enough knowing that Van was in danger. To dwell on the thought that this offensive would probably fall apart, trapping him in yet another round of cruel, desperate bloodletting was unbearable.
Instead, I nursed hope, knowing that I was probably a fool for doing so, but helpless to stop myself. Surely, this time the Republic would prevail. This time it would be the fascists turn to break and flee. This time the democracies would realize that they too were in deadly peril from fascism and come to the rescue.
In two weeks: Against all reason. Happy married couples and ice cream sodas. A world growing smaller.