A Civil War That Once Tore the World Apart

BELCHITE, SPAIN —  To walk down the rubble-strewn streets of this place is to step into a black-and-white photograph of the collective memory of the Spanish. A whitewashed stone stairway leads to nowhere. A church tower winds crazily into the sky, its corners bitten away by the fire of bitter house-to-house fighting. A mass grave for 400 lies buried in the rubble.

Victor Ortin was 13 when he looked up and saw fire falling from the sky. He isn’t sure now, as the 50th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War approaches, whether the shells came from Republican troops trying to recapture this still-ravaged town or from the Nationalist--fascist--soldiers defending the land they had taken after Francisco Franco’s military coup of July 18, 1936.

Today, he shrugs his shoulders at the skeletal ruins of the home he was born in. “Por todos,” Ortin says, “by everyone.”

Around him, a mile square or more, lies the wreckage of the town of 4,500 that was destroyed in two great waves of fighting: Belchite is the greatest and most harrowing monument to the war that tore apart this arid, beautiful country.

“The horrors of war,” mutters Tom Entwistle, for perhaps the 100th time. “It shows the horrors.” Entwistle, 48, an American ex-Marine sergeant and Vietnam veteran, has made a study of this lonely place. For almost 15 years, he has led groups of his countrymen--students, Spanish Civil War veterans, U.S. servicemen--on pilgrimages to places marked by the ferocious war that was peculiarly Spanish but also strangely American.

After three years, Gen. Franco trumphed over a popularly elected government. With Hitler’s and Mussolini’s firepower behind him, at a price of up to a million lives, he won the bitter battle.

But before his final victory--a victory that would cost the people of Spain almost 40 years of dictatorship--40,000 workers, intellectuals and students from 53 countries had volunteered their lives to defend Spain’s democracy. Among them--about half later killed near Belchite, Quinto, Teruel, Gandesa, Caspe, Fuentes de Ebro, Jarama and Brunete--were almost 3,000 from the United States.

Under the auspices of Madrid’s Center for International Studies and the Spanish Civil War Historical Society which he directs, Entwistle recently took a group of American students to prominent war sites. As he guided, he also searched.

Half a century ago, a Chicagoan named Sid Harris spent a night among the pines and the olive trees of Spain. He had a bullet in his arm and a shattered bone in his leg. And if not for a young Spanish woman Harris knew only as Asuncion, there he would likely have died. In the early ‘70s, at O’Rourke’s saloon on Chicago’s North Side, Harris told Entwistle how Asuncion brought him eggs and water, then cradled him through the cold Spanish night. She left in the morning, but by the time he was captured, the vanguard Spanish troops were gone and a sympathetic Italian spared his life.

“After hearing the story,” Entwistle recalls, “I promised to go out looking for Asuncion. Everything from that kind of mushroomed.” This fall, Oct. 15-28, he is organizing what may be the largest gathering of foreign veterans in Spain yet. Entwistle expects 2,000 old men and women, perhaps 500 of them Americans, to visit this history.

One site is a razor-backed ridge of rock, wind-swept and bare on a mountaintop overlooking the town of Gandesa, a spot etched in the minds of many Americans and Spaniards alike. They call it Hill 666.

This was the scene of one of the most fearsome battles to involve the American volunteers, who fought here as the Abraham Lincoln battalion. Other units of the XV International Brigade were here as well, plus the crack Spanish troops of Gen. Enrique Lister.

To the north, a 300-foot cliff drops off, an artillery position controlling the important valley below. To the east, a few hundred yards distant, were the fascist positions. With Franco’s control of the air, Hill 666 was almost untenable.

Yet the Republicans, first Lister’s troops and then the Lincolns, held. After eight days on that parched ground, a place so rocky the dead could not be buried nor the trenches dug, the remaining Lincolns were relieved. “It was here,” Lister told a group of students recently, “that the Lincolns proved their worth.”

Like Belchite, this lonely rock shows its scars: rusty shells of the grenades both sides threw; a belt buckle partially hidden in a clump of thirsty wildflowers; dented bullets and bomb fragments, almost as common as the rocks.

A decade ago, this landscape was still littered with the skeletons of those who died in August, 1937. Someone has finally cleared away the sun-whitened bones.

The war that littered and split Spain also divided the world. Americans volunteers arrived with passports stamped “Not Valid for Travel to Spain,” against the orders of their government. They fought because, to them, the war was the world’s first battle against fascism.

Behind the volunteers was the support of most Western intellectuals, many of whom came to see the war firsthand, plus some early believers in communism. Those who came to Spain, some to fight, included George Orwell, John Dos Passos, Arthur Koestler, Andre Malraux, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spencer and Paul Robeson. Perhaps best remembered by Americans of this generation, Ernest Hemingway came as a journalist.

During the Republican retreats that followed the loss of Hill 666, Hemingway crossed the River Ebro to assess Lister’s beleaguered troops. On the way back, the rowboat carrying Hemingway was caught in a Republican-Nationalist cross fire.

Ramon Buckley, 44, knows the story. His father, Henry Buckley, was also in the boat--a British journalist and one of the most famous correspondents to cover the war. “The river was pretty swift,” according to Ramon Buckley, “and when the two soldiers who were rowing saw the cross fire they kind of ducked into the hull. The boat was heading for the remains of a bridge shelled by the fascists. Hemingway gets up, takes the oars that the soldiers had dropped--that’s Hemingway--and begins to row with all his might. Finally, he pulled the boat to the safety of the shore.”

Now, A mood of anticipation hangs over Spain. It has been 11 years since the death of Franco, five since a low-ranking military officer held Spain’s Parliament at gunpoint in a failed attempt to regain power for the military. And although the right appears weak and divided here now, outbursts of nostalgia for the old dictator are expected to mark the anniversary.

Those who remember the Civil War complain of a strong new apolitical attitude among Spain’s young. Drugs and a love of night life has replaced the effervescent political talk, “ la movida ,” that bubbled through the cafes of Madrid in the years following Franco’s death.

But Spain’s constitutional monarchy, following last week’s elections, seems strong. Both the far right and far left, despite continuing Basque separatist killings, seem subdued as the center increasingly takes hold.

Perhaps this passionate country is at last learning to live with its past. In Caspe, a mountain village that was for a time the command post of the XV Brigade, a nonpartisan monument went up this spring: “Caspe a Sus Hijos, 1936-39”--Caspe to Its Children.

Entwistle looks ahead: “The realization of any democracy by young people is essential because they’re going to be the ones who continue the good fight. The good fight is a fight for peace.”

Victor Ortin looks back: “This village is a monument,” Ortin says, one hand sweeping across the forlorn silhouette of Belchite, “to a war that should never have been.”