Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [196]
The phrase c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre should have been invented for such a situation. It was marvellous, but the main effect of this experience on me was, that it took me twenty years before I was prepared to see Spanish anarchism as anything but a tragic farce. 2
In fact, Puigcerda did not give the impression of a community geared for war, nor do I recall it as a place full of armed young men in militia outfits, in the manner of later revolutions. (No sign in the Spanish provinces of 1936, for example, of uniformed young women.) If anything, it seemed a town full of politics, talk and arguments, of people standing in groups or sitting at café śtables with newspapers.
Unfortunately, the day ended badly. The young anarchist frontier-guard who had turned me back at my first crossing-point came off duty that evening, saw me eating and chatting on the plaza, and immediately reported me to his commissar. I was interrogated, politely enough but firmly, by an unsmiling man in something like military gear. I am sure that he did not know what to make of my presence there – I did not know what to make of it myself – but clearly, the power of the workers could not be treated so lightly, even if the young Englishman who crossed the frontier not only irregularly, but in flat defiance of the decision to keep him out, had shown no signs of wanting to be a danger to the revolution. To be grilled by trigger-happy amateurs on the lookout for counter-revolutionaries is never relaxing. I confess that I was nervous, late that evening, when I was told to walk along the dark road back to the French frontier, the gun-barrel of an armed militiaman aimed at my back. So my fleeting contact with the Spanish Civil War ended with expulsion from the Spanish Republic.
What was I doing that day in Puigcerda? This is where the historian throws up his hands, faced with the autobiographer. It is not simply that my memory of that day has almost certainly been corrupted by sixty-odd years of mental redrafting, but that even on the day itself my purpose, if that is the right word, in crossing the frontier, cannot have been clear. What would I have done, if my stay there had not been cut short so suddenly? Given the common memory of the Spanish Civil War I should have been considering joining the forces of the Republic in the war against fascism, as several other young English people did in the first weeks of the Civil War. Almost certainly nothing like this was in my mind as I went to have a look at what a revolution was like, in spite of the passionate identification I, like others of my generation on the left, immediately felt with the fight of the Spanish Popular Front government. Did it enter my mind during that day? I cannot say, or if I could reconstruct my feelings perhaps I would want to take refuge behind the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution, because in the light of the subsequent establishment of International Brigades13 any answer might be discreditable. If I did not consider it, then why not? And if I did, why did I nevertheless not join up? Supposing there were any sources other