Night Before Battle, Ernest Hemingway

Night Before Battle

AT THIS TIME WE WERE WORKING IN A shell-smashed house that overlooked the Casa del Campo in Madrid. Below us a battle was being fought. You could see it spread out below you and over the hills, could smell it, could taste the dust of it, and the noise of it was one great slithering sheet of rifle and automatic rifle fire rising and dropping, and in it came the crack of the guns and the bubbly rumbling of the outgoing shells fired from the batteries behind us, the thud of their bursts, and then the rolling yellow clouds of dust. But it was just too far to film well. We had tried working closer but they kept sniping at the camera and you could not work.

The big camera was the most expensive thing we had and if it was smashed we were through. We were making the film on almost nothing and all the money was in the cans of film and the cameras. We could not afford to waste film and you had to be awfully careful of the cameras.

The day before we had been sniped out of a good place to film from and I had to crawl back holding the small camera to my belly, trying to keep my head lower than my shoulders, hitching along on my elbows, the bullets whocking into the brick wall over my back and twice spurting dirt over me.

Our heaviest attacks were made in the afternoon, God knows why, as the fascists then had the sun at their backs, and it shone on the camera lenses and made them blink like a helio and the Moors would open up on the flash. They knew all about helios and officers’ glasses from the Riff and if you wanted to be properly sniped, all you had to do was use a pair of glasses without shading them adequately. They could shoot too, and they had kept my mouth dry all day.

In the afternoon we moved up into the house. It was a fine place to work and we made a son of a blind for the camera on a balcony with the broken latticed curtains; but, as I said, it was too far.

It was not too far to get the pine studded hillside, the lake and the outline of the stone farm buildings that disappeared in the sudden smashes of stone dust from the hits by high explosive shells, nor was it too far to get the clouds of smoke and dirt that thundered up on the hill crest as the bombers droned over.

But at eight hundred to a thousand yards the tanks looked like small mud-colored beetles bustling in the trees and spitting tiny flashes and the men behind them were toy men who lay flat, then crouched and ran, and then dropped to run again, or to stay where they lay, spotting the hillside as the tanks moved on.

Still we hoped to get the shape of the battle. We had many close shots and would get others with luck and if we could get the sudden fountainings of earth, the puffs of shrapnel, the rolling louds of smoke and dust lit by the yellow flash and white blossoming of grenades that is the very shape of battle we would have something that we needed.

So when the light failed we carried the big camera down the stairs, took off the tripod, made three loads, and then, one at a time, sprinted across the fire-swept corner of the Paseo Rosales into the lee of the stone wall of the stables of the old Montana Barracks. We knew we had a good place to work and we felt cheerful. But we were kidding ourselves plenty that it was not too far.

“Come on, let’s go to Chicote’s,” I said when we had come up the hill to the Hotel Florida.
But they had to repair a camera, to change film and seal up what we had made so I went alone. You were never alone in Spain and it felt good for a change.

As I started to walk down the Gran Via to Chicote’s in the April twilight I felt happy, cheerful and excited. We had worked hard, and I thought well. But walking down the street alone, all my elation died.

Now that I was alone and there was no excitement, I knew we had been too far away and any fool could see the offensive was a failure. I had known it all day but you are often deceived by hope and optimism. But remembering how it looked now, I knew this was just another blood bath like the Somme. The people’s army was on the offensive finally. But it was attacking in a way that could do only one thing: destroy itself. And as I put together now what I had seen all day and what I had heard, I felt plenty bad.

I knew in the smoke and din of Chicote’s that the offensive was a failure and I knew it even stronger when I took my first drink at the crowded bar. When things are all right and it is you that is feeling low a drink can make you feel better. But when things are really bad and you are all right, a drink just makes it clearer. Now, in Chicote’s it was so crowded that you had to make room with your elbows to get your drink to your mouth. I had one good long swallow and then someone jostled me so that I spilled pan of the glass of whisky and soda. I looked around angrily and the man who had jostled me laughed.

“Hello fish face,” he said.
“Hello you goat.”
“Let’s get a table,” he said. “You certainly looked sore when I bumped you.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked. His leather coat was dirty and greasy, his eyes were hollow and he needed a shave. He had the big Colt automatic that had belonged to three other men that I had known of, and that we were always trying to get shells for, strapped to his leg. He was very tall and his face was smoke-darkened and grease-smudged. He had a leather helment with a heavy leather padded ridge longitudinally over the top and a heavily padded leather rim.

“Where’d you come from?”
“Casa del Campo,” he said, pronouncing it in a sing-song mocking way we had heard a page boy use in calling in the lobby of a hotel in New Orleans one time and still kept as a private joke.
“There’s a table,” I said as two soldiers and two girls got up to go. “Let’s get it.”

We sat at this table in the middle of the room and I watched him raise his glass. His hands were greasy and the forks of both thumbs black as graphite from the back spit of the machine gun. The hand holding the drink was shaking.

“Look at them.” He put out the other hand. It was shaking too. “Both the same,” he said in that same comic lilt. Then, seriously, “You been down there?”

“We’re making a picture of it.”
“Photograph well?”
“Not too.”
“See us?”
“Where?”

“Attack on the farm. Three twenty-five this afternoon.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Like it?”
“Nope.”

“Me either,” he said. “Listen the whole thing is just as crazy as a bedbug. Why do they want to make a frontal attack against positions like those? Who in hell thought it up?”
“An S.O.B. named Largo Caballero,” said a short man with thick glasses who was sitting at the table when we came over to it. “The first time they let him look through a pair of field glasses he became a general. This is his masterpiece.”

We both looked at the man who spoke. Al Wagner, the tank man, looked at me and raised what had been his eyebrows before they were burnt off. The little man smiled at us.
“If anyone around here speaks English you’re liable to get shot, comrade,” Al said to him.
“No,” said the little short man. “Largo Caballero is liable to be shot. He ought to be shot.”

“Listen, comrade,” said Al. “Just speak a little quieter, will you? Somebody might overhear you and think we were with you.”
“I know what I’m talking about,” said the short man with the very thick glasses. I looked at him carefully. He gave you a certain feeling that he did.
“Just the same it isn’t always a good thing to say what you know,” I said. “Have a drink?”

“Certainly,” he said. “It’s all right to talk to you. I know you. You’re all right.”
“I’m not that all right,” I said. “And this is a public bar.”
“A public bar is the only private place there is. Nobody can hear what we say here. What is your unit, comrade?”

“I’ve got some tanks about eight minutes from here on foot,” Al told him. “We are through for the day and I have the early part of this evening off.”
“Why don’t you ever get washed?” I said.

“I plan to,” said Al. “In your room. When we leave here. Have you got any mechanic’s soap?”
“No.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got a little here with me in my pocket that I’ve been saving.”
The little man with the thick-lensed glasses was looking at Al intently.
“Are you a party member, comrade?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Al.

“I know Comrade Henry here is not,” the little man said.
“I wouldn’t trust him then,” Al said. “I never do.”
“You bastid,” I said. “Want to go?”
“No,” Al said. “I need another drink very badly.”

“I know all about Comrade Henry,” the little man said. “Now let me tell you something more