eyes. The Spanish I speak with my heart."
Was it that Hall was resigning because he loved the Republic? Yes, I guess you could call it that. (You could also call it a good craftsman's stubborn ideas about how to cover a war, but you didn't.) Did Hall realize that, if he quit, an enemy of the Republic might be sent to take his place? No, Hall didn't think. Come to think of it, though, the office had Cavanaugh and Raney available and those two Jew-haters and Mussolini-lovers would be no friends of the Republic. You are a friend, a compañero, it is right that you know. We have so many problems with the foreign press. McBain from New York, we know he is a spy, he has links with the Falange. If we arrest him, the world hollers Red Terror. So we watch him, keep all his letters, hold up his cables. Thank God he is a drunkard; two SIM men keep him drunk most of the time. Maybe his office will fire him. You are a friend. You write the truth. Even a little truth by a friend whose editor chops up his cables helps the Republic.
Hall tore up his letter of resignation. When the Republic captured thousands of Italians after Guadalajara and Bruejega, Hall filed long stories based on interviews with the Blackshirts. When the Republic captured Nazi Condor officers and men at Belchite, Hall sent photographs of their documents to Paris with his stories.
New York kicked, and Paris warned Hall repeatedly. Finally Paris transferred him to the Franco side. That was at the end of '38, when the Republicans had seen their hopes dashed at Munich and the only thing that kept them going was the feeling that they could hold out until the Nazi Frankenstein finally turned on London and Paris. "Then France will have to rush arms and maybe a few divisions to us and the British fleet will have to patrol the Mediterranean and the Russian planes, unable to get through now, will be able to come in through France and through the Mediterranean." Antin figured it out that way, told it to Hall the week before some nice clean crusaders for Christianity let him have it with a tommy gun in the back in a Barcelona café.
The Falangistas were very glad to have Hall behind their lines. Their friends pulled some wires in New York and Washington and, after two months, Hall was fired, but by then his notebook was growing thicker and he elected to stay as a free lance. He was seeing the face of fascism for the first time, he wrote, and seeing it at close range. He would stay, job or no job. He stayed, and the Gestapo in San Sebastian wrote out an order and a rat-faced little aristocrat with an embroidered gold yoke and arrows on his cape was studying Hall's notes and smirking like a villain in a bad movie.
There were no charges and no explanations. They just slapped Hall into a cell in solitary, and once a day they handed him a bucket for slops and once a day he got a chunk of bread or a thin chick-pea stew. In the beginning he had hollered for the American consul, but the German guard would grin and say, "No entiendo Español, Ich sprech kein Englisch," and finally Hall just settled down to waiting for the end of the war.
Every now and then a smooth German major would have him brought out for questioning; that scar on his head and the scar on his chin were grim mementos of those sessions. The Spaniards were bad but the Germans were worse. The Italians were just hysterical. There was the day the Italian officer made the mistake of getting too close and Hall clipped him with a weak right hook. The Blackshirt screamed like a woman and clung to his eye; that was when they tied him to the wall and let him have it with the steel rods on his back.
And then, in April, the Republic keeled over in its own blood and the fascists decided to be generous to celebrate their victory. The Axis was now openly boasting that it had run the Spanish show; the worst that Hall could do would be to play into their hands by writing about how tough fascism was on any man fool enough to oppose the New Order. They were generous, they were fair. They gave him a practically new suit of clothes, they returned his three hundred odd dollars, they even returned his notebook with nearly all of its original notes.
Hall went to Paris. He spent a week soaking in warm baths and eating and avoiding the WP crowd. During the week he cabled a New York book publisher he had met in Madrid in '36, when he had joined a group of American intellectuals attending an anti-fascist congress. He offered to turn out a book on his experiences as a correspondent and a prisoner in Franco Spain. It was a week before he got an answer, but the answer came with a draft of five hundred dollars.
The swelling had gone down in his nose by then, but he still had to breathe through his mouth. A doctor who'd looked at it wanted a hundred bucks for operating, but it meant two weeks of doing nothing but getting fixed up, and Hall hated to wait. "Later," he said, "later, when I finish my book."
He poured his notes and his guts into the book, and finished it in a month. When he was done he borrowed some money from a friend in the Paramount office and got a Clipper seat to New York.
His publisher, Bird, liked the book and rushed it to press. He also gave Hall another five hundred and sent him to his own doctor to have his nose fixed up.
It was a good book, perhaps good enough to justify Bird's gamble, only it reached the critics three weeks after the Nazi panzer divisions were ravaging Poland and the smart boys in Paris were wearing smarter correspondents' uniforms and filing fulsome stories on the genius of Gamelin and Weygand. "We'll have to face it, Matt," Bird said, "no one but you and I give a damn about Spain right now. I'm taking back copies left and right from the booksellers. No, the hell with the advances. The war's far from over. You'll do another book for me, and we'll make it all up."
Through Bird, Hall got a job as a war correspondent for a Chicago paper. They shipped him to London, where he stewed in his own juices for months, and then to Cairo to join the fleet. Hall was assigned to the Revenger and, when the Nazis sank her, he spent some three days on a raft with a handful of survivors. One of them died of his wounds on the raft, and another went raving mad and slit his own throat with the top of a ration tin.
Hall filed a story on the experience when he was brought back to Cairo, and Bird cabled "That's your new book." It was an easy book to write. He took a room at Shepheard's and pounded it out in three weeks. The British censors liked it as "a tribute to British grit" and arranged for a captain attached to a military mission bound for Washington by plane to deliver the manuscript personally to Bird. The story was still hot when the script reached New York. Bird sold the serial rights to a big national weekly that same day for thirty thousand dollars. A lecture agency cabled offering a guarantee of a fantastic sum for a three-month lecture tour. A book club chose The Revenger, the critics sang its praises, and Bird bought himself a house in the country.
Hall quit his job and made the lecture tour and wound up with a fat bank account and a permanent appreciation of the value of a chance plop in the ocean. For the first time in his life, he found himself with enough money to do exactly what he wanted to do. The Army doctors had shown him to the nearest door, but he had offers from magazines and syndicates to return to the war zones, and the radio wanted him as a commentator.
It was Bird who first learned of Hall's new plans. And Bird understood. "The Spanish War was round one," Hall told him. "South America was one of the stakes. The Falange had an organization in the Latin countries. The Heinies used to brag about it to me in San Sebastian. I'm going to South America to see it for myself. Maybe there's a book in it, maybe there isn't. I can afford to find out."
Cuba had been the first stop on this odyssey. There Hall had had some tough sledding, met some Spanish Republicans who knew him from Madrid, won the aid of a group of young Cuban officials and written two angry and documented magazine pieces.
From Havana, Hall had flown to Puerto Rico.
Hall had stopped thinking. The reverie into which the lieutenant had plunged him passed into a rapt consideration of the imperfect smoke rings he was blowing toward the ceiling.
Dickenson joined him. "Well?" he asked. "Is it San Hermano tomorrow?"
"I'm
