Now slumped in his chair in Norham Gardens, the whisky doing its work, he gazed up at the mantelpiece, at the picture frame that contained no photograph but only a small, singed newspaper clipping. He had preserved it because that little piece of paper had brought Florence back to him.
He had been on guard duty at the Albacete camp, his group having been saddled with the two am shift. The war was in its eighth week, it was late September and the nights were getting cold. A Yugoslavian comrade had passed him a shred of newspaper, urging James to use it to relight a dwindling fire. He had just put a match to it when he noticed it was in English; indeed it was a page from The Times. Hungry for news, he had blown out the flame so that he could scan the items: a ship lost in the Atlantic, troubles for Mr Baldwin’s government. Then a name leapt out at him. ‘Miss Walsingham’s withdrawal from the Games disappointed British organizers, who had believed she was a racing certainty for a gold medal, having secured her place in the final with the fastest qualifying time. But the champion swimmer said that she had never intended to compete in the last stage of the Olympic swimming competition. ‘I wanted to show Herr Hitler that his nasty little Nazis are not the best in the world, whatever they might say. Whoever comes first on Sunday will be second best — and they will know it.’
James reached for it now, reading it again, nearly four years later, as he let a third glass of whisky warm his throat. For months that clipping had stayed in his wallet, second best to having a photograph of her. He had kept it with him until they had made contact again, kept it with him, in fact, until they had set up this house as their marital home (thanks to some help from Papa Walsingham).
Once in its frame, it became quite a conversation piece: Florence used to like telling the story. But for James it was more than just a memento of their romance. It was also a reminder to him of his own naivete. He kept it lest he forget that sometimes — often — she was right and he was wrong.
He had written to Florence immediately, addressing his letters to her Oxford college. He had little confidence in the wartime postal service of a country divided against itself, but whenever he passed a mailbox, even in the remotest Spanish village, he would send another letter. When he ran into Ed Harrison, covering the war for Time magazine, the American journalist had let slip that he was returning to the States via London: James promptly pushed a letter into his hand.
In each version he wrote the same thing, apologizing for his pig-headedness, applauding her bravery for what she had done in Berlin — and then congratulating both of them for taking a stand for what was right. He described the action he was seeing, at first doctoring the actuality just a touch to ensure he gave a good impression of himself. But eventually he simply recorded the unvarnished truth, flattering or otherwise. He faithfully recorded, for example, the midday attempt he and a contingent of mainly British volunteers had made to storm a hilltop monastery deep in the Castilian countryside, now converted into a Nationalist fort. He had been inching forward on his stomach, the earth scratching his face as he advanced. Within moments, he had heard bullets swish through the grass above his ears. Only the sound of gunfire coming from his comrades behind made him realize that he was meant to fire back. He pointed his rifle in the direction of the enemy and squeezed the trigger — only to hear a single, dull click. He suddenly felt utterly exposed, vulnerable to instant death (though, he wrote to Florence, ‘I soon learned that the ability to shoot back is no guarantee of safety’). Still lying prone, the air around him whizzing with gunfire, he had emptied out the failed ammunition and loaded a fresh clip of cartridges. Still nothing. So it wasn’t his fault; his weapon was a dud. Only the presence of Harry Knox, scrabbling up the hillside just behind him with a functioning gun had saved him.
In his letters, he would offer his half of the conversation he imagined they would be having — about the course of the war, the intervention on the Nationalists’ side of the Germans and the Italians, the republic’s desperate need for Britain to get involved. He wrote often, once a week at least, and kept writing even when he had reached Madrid for what he and his fellow volunteers believed would be the decisive battle of the war.
Madrid. By rights his memories of Madrid should have been sources of horror — and plenty of them were. He had spent twelve long days with the XII International Brigade in an event that would be named, in the heroic language of such things, the defence of Madrid. On the ground and in the moment, it felt much less epic. For a man raised on English schoolboy notions of battles — at Agincourt or Hastings — it was a shock to realize quite how messy, confused and appalling was the reality.
The battle was fought in the northwest of the city, where Franco’s forces were attempting to break into the capital, with the action focused on the university district. The result was a crazed, shifting series of skirmishes in and around the academic buildings. It might have been funny if there had not been so much death around — the notion of an armed advance to capture the geography block, followed by a retreat back to the literature department. James was involved in a series of particularly furious counter-attacks to recapture the Hall of Philosophy.
In one operation, James and a dozen others had had to run across an open space of some forty yards. They did it in threes, a frantic dash in which the men at James’s side had simply fallen away as they ran, shot noiselessly it seemed to him. By the time he reached the other side, he came across perhaps a hundred dead bodies, Moroccans mostly, men of the Army of Africa, veterans of Spain’s colonial wars enlisted into Franco’s forces. James had been transfixed by the sight of the corpses. Most had not been killed cleanly, by gunfire. Instead shells had shredded their bodies; Mills bombs had blown off their arms and legs. He could smell burning and turned to see a small fire, no larger than the ones he remembered from the scouting weekends of his boyhood. Except this time, in place of logs, were two dead men burning steadily. He had not vomited, nor wept, as he might have expected of himself. Instead he had simply stared, feeling as if he had failed these men by arriving too late. But perhaps by looking at them, really looking at them, as if they were men rather than corpses, he could give them a small measure of dignity.
He had, to his surprise, become an effective soldier, his willingness to take risks winning the admiration of his superiors. A few called him El Corajudo, the brave one. Eventually, he had been given intelligence duties, including surveillance of those the Republican brass suspected as infiltrators or spies. Until the day whose details he could not remember, the day whose consequences he was never allowed to forget.
And yet, despite everything, the word ‘Madrid’ did not fill him with dread. For he associated Madrid with Florence.
Eventually, after perhaps his dozenth letter, he had got a reply. She explained that, not long after the fuss about her performance in Berlin had faded, she had decided that she too ought to be in Spain, to give what she could to the cause of freedom. Like him, she was reluctant to write down the complete truth: that she wanted to be with him. And he, no less ardently, wanted to be with her.
Florence became a nurse, treating the wounded at the Red Cross Hospital in Avenida Reina Victoria, in northwest Madrid. She had no training to speak of, but that was hardly unusual. She relied instead on the instruction of Marjorie, a stout and seasoned volunteer from Baltimore, who had abandoned her job as a sister on the wards of the city hospital there to treat the besieged people of the republic; she taught Florence and the other women under her the basics. And, Florence being Florence, she had read several books on medicine and anatomy en route to embattled Spain, mugging up on the ship from Marseille to Valencia, leaving James in no doubt that she had rapidly become as expert as any of the doctors.