Suddenly a voice broke into my headphones. In Spanish, I was being asked to investigate a low line of hills a little to my left where intelligence thought a division of the International Brigade was holding out. Obediently I gunned my engine. Turning my beautiful ship in a long slow dive, I felt like a huge shark making my predatory way through clear water. The little airscrew roaring behind me, my feet operating the stirrups which gave me extra lift, my hands directing me over the hills. I did not even hear the shots which struck my controls, puncturing the gasbag. How on earth had a few men with rifles managed to hit me? I cast around and saw some battlements. An old castle. A marksman hidden behind the stone walls?
The semi-rigid hull was compartmentalised. Only one section was leaking gas. I could easily get back to the aerodrome. I turned on my radio but failed to make contact. I was being jammed.
A real fear began to overcome me when I made to cut my engine off again and drift away from the enemy positions. The bar controlling the motor refused to respond. I tried everything I could to switch it off, but it still failed to answer my commands. The engine continued to roar, pushing me dangerously close to the line of hills. I was using far too much of my fuel. If I did not cut the engine quickly, I would be unable to make it back to my base under power. The best I could do was to try to gain height. Cautiously I crept up a few thousand feet where it was bitterly cold. The gas continued to escape from the hole the bullet had made, making the machine practically impossible to control.
I tried again to cut power, but the engine pounded on relentlessly. The airscrew at full throttle, I had soon overshot the hills, seeing no troops, but heading rapidly towards the coast. I was now far too deep into Republican territory, heading roughly in the direction of Tarragona and the sea, though I would run out of fuel long before I reached the Mediterranean. Any hope I might have of finding Majorca, say, and her friendly Italian-dominated skies, was baseless.
For an hour, keeping my height to avoid being shot at from below, I tried to stop the engine, but the whole thing remained jammed. Eventually the motor began to sputter and groan. My petrol was almost gone. Another few minutes and the propeller stopped. I was still airborne, but without any means of steering what had effectively become a small lopsided balloon. I was losing height as the left-hand wing, leaking hydrogen, continued to collapse.
I had no parachute, no means of unbuckling my harness without sending myself pitching straight towards the distant ground. Towns and villages sailed by below me. From my map and my compass I saw how prevailing winds would take me eventually to the sea. If I crashed into the Mediterranean at night I would have little chance of surviving but would sink with the remains of my ship. I could only hope that the wind changed again and took me back towards Zaragoza, but there seemed little chance of that.
Evening came. As it grew cooler, I began to drop slowly towards the ground. The sea was closer. The possibility of drowning was increasingly likely. I struggled in my suit, trying to discover a safe way of unhooking and unbuckling myself from the frame, but I could do nothing.
I remember a sense not so much of despair as of fatalism. I hardly saw any point in praying for survival. With my death Mrs Cornelius was free to marry again. My career as an airman was once again cut short by unfriendly Fate. God had no use for me as a flyer. I had cultivated the hubris of Icarus. I promised God that if He should save me now I would never try this experiment again. How many times now had I attempted solo flight only to be sent hurtling groundwards? Now there was even more chance of my dying. God had the common good in mind, not my personal glory! My cities would carry our children to a new security. My cities would fly. As I reconciled myself to my destiny, the fluttering wing collapsed, and I began rapidly to descend.
I was lucky. I came down at night unseen in a rocky field only a short distance from the water. Anticipating my descent, I grabbed tree limbs to slow my progress, using my flailing legs to fling my body backwards, employing the partially deflated gasbag to cushion my fall. I was badly bruised and scratched, but no bones were broken. I began hastily to unstrap myself until I was clear of the apparatus. Exhausted and demoralised, I had no idea of my bearings but knew I had to get away from the little airship as soon as possible. Its Nationalist markings identified me as one of Franco’s men. Aragon was notoriously communistic. The local peasants would tear me to pieces if they knew I had been involved in the attack on their defeated forces.
Luckily I still wore a civilian shirt and trousers, stout boots and a scarf around my neck. The rest of my suit had been built into the harness. I had no money, of course. No papers. I was cold and hungry. My water was used up. I could salvage nothing.
In spite of the pain I walked all that night, following country lanes, seeing no one, making out the occasional lights of a village or farmhouse but avoiding them. Judging myself to be safe, I finally risked sleeping in a ramshackle old stone barn.
I awoke to find myself being shaken by a small grinning boy asking me if I was separated from my brigade. The Twentieth had passed through in the night. He took me for a Republican soldier. Like me, others had lost their weapons fleeing before the Nationalists. Since he seemed sympathetic, I told him I was an American volunteer trying to rejoin my unit. Before I quite realised it, he had taken me by the hand and I was suddenly in a farmhouse full of desperate Reds. I knew panic only briefly before I had control of myself. This was, after all, familiar company. Not for the first time did I find myself in a civil war having to pretend to be a communist in order to survive.
That was how I came under the command of Major Johnny Banks, the Yorkshire trade unionist, and joined the march to Barcelona. For an enemy Banks had considerable wit and charm. His chief boast was that he brewed the best cup of tea on the entire Iberian Peninsula. He infused his men with exceptionally high morale, considering the fact that the brigade had only a few rounds of ammunition left and had been persistently strafed by Italian or German planes pushing home the advantages of the past few days. These battles had left the defenders in a pretty hopeless position. Luckily for me they had no notion of my politics. Major Banks assumed I was a Polish-American separated from his company who would rejoin it as soon as we made it back to Barcelona. The Bolshevist vocabulary was familiar to me, and I fell back into its use with an ease based on necessity.
Thus I had no trouble convincing these Reds of my credentials. I was dressed pretty much as they were. Having left all my German documents in Zaragoza and the others having been confiscated in Dachau, I had no papers, incriminating or otherwise, and I told them I had lost my rifle when I ran out of ammunition. To them I was a comrade and a hero. Indeed, I have rarely felt so thoroughly accepted in my life. Were it not for their politics, I would have had no ambiguity about joining them. My main concern was the same as theirs, to stay out of sight of the screaming German fighters and roaring German tanks.
Barcelona showed few signs of the recent Italian bombardments. The Germans were right to believe they had been quixotic and ineffectual. Billeted at various homes, I elected to remain with the Twentieth Kropotkin Brigade, originally an anarchist unit now commanded by a communist, with numbers made up from members of the International Labour Party and several Americans who belonged to the International Workers of the World, all English speakers. None of the other Americans were from California. I told them it was my home state. We would rest and rearm in Barcelona before returning to the front. Meanwhile we had some leave. At least I had time to think of some way to escape. My only hope was that Mrs Cornelius was not paying for my freedom. The Germans no doubt believed me killed when the plane went down.