Unplanned pleasure

Fail to plan, they say, and plan to fail.

I’m sure there’s some truth in that. As there is in most aphorisms. Not all of them of course. I have no idea who came up with that bright little drop of optimism that ‘good things come to those who wait’, but he must have been living in a different universe from mine.

Still, even if planning is generally a good thing, it’s often the unplanned that gives the greatest pleasure. 

While we were in southwestern France last weekend, we decided to pop down to the beach at Argelès-sur-Mer. That was less of a visit than a pilgrimage. The beach is spectacular, but we live near the Spanish Mediterranean coast and probably wouldn’t travel to France just for sand and sea. No, this beach isn’t just golden and sunlit, it’s associated with something much darker and shameful.

The beach at Argelès, showing no sign of its shameful past

When Francisco Franco succeeded in overthrowing the Spanish republic in 1939, ushering in 36 years of dictatorship ended only by his death, some 500,000 people who’d served the legitimate government fled, mostly into France. There they were interned by the French authorities. Something like 100,000 of them were simply dumped on the beach at Argelès with, initially, practically no amenities apart from the wire fencing to prevent their escape. 

When I say ‘nothing’, I really mean nothing. There were no latrines. There was no shelter. There was no reliable supply of fresh water. Every now and then someone would turn up and toss some food at the internees. It was pretty vile. Hunger and disease-ridden, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Deaths were nothing like as horrific as they might have been had the internment lasted longer, but fortunately with the outbreak of the next war, the world war, within months of the Spanish defeat, many were recruited into the French armed forces, while others were able to move on to friends or family ready to take them in, or into charitable accommodation, above all that provided by Quakers. Even so, several hundred died.

So, we visited the beach to see what the place looked like. There’s no trace of the camp anymore but still, it felt like a small act of deserved respect to visit the place where this shameful act took place.

But then we had the whole of the afternoon ahead of us. What to do next?

We saw signposts to a coastal path that zigzagged along the top of the sea cliffs, towards the lovely fishing village of Collioure, a few kilometres further on. I say ‘fishing village’ though what it really is now is a major tourist destination with some pretty wonderful accommodation for the pretty wonderfully rich. We went there once before, but by car, and found it was impossible to park anywhere inside the town, it was so seething with visitors. In the end, we had to park outside the town and walk half an hour to get to the seafront. 

To be fair, though, it’s such a fine place that it was worth it. Indeed, walking in was probably an enhancement to the visit, since it gave us time to see the place from various angles as we approached it, which is a much better way to get to know somewhere than shooting in by car.

Anyway, this time we had no intention of walking all the way to Collioure. It was only a little over four kilometres away, but it was hot, the terrain was rough, and there was a lot of climbing. We decided we wouldn’t go the whole way. 

So, naturally, we did.

Approaching Collioure the hard way, by the cliff path

It was good to see Collioure again. It was, I suppose unsurprisingly, just as attractive the second time as it had been the first. But we were pretty tired. Our main concern was getting back to Argelès, where we’d left the car. A bus, we decided, would be just the thing and, failing that, a taxi.

There were signs to the tourist office. But at 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon? No chance it was open.

And yet it was. 

“Is there a bus to take us back to Argelès?” we asked.

“Ah, I’m afraid,” the friendly woman behind the counter told us, glancing at her watch, “that by now the last bus will have gone.”

“Oh,” we said, trying not to sound too disappointed.

“But there is a boat,” she went on, “and the next one leaves in twenty minutes, from the pier just outside this office.”

Joy. Elation. Relief, too.

Collioure Castle in the background, with our boat in front
It may not seem much, but it felt like luxury

We waited the twenty minutes and then travelled back to Argelès in what felt like luxury, even though it was just a crowded tourist boat. But it was a pleasure. We saw from below the cliffs we’d struggle past above just an hour or so earlier. We enjoyed watching the surf crashing on the rocks, and the sinking sun casting a glow on the deep blue sea around us. And we got back to Argelès in twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half, and in comfort instead of in footsore exhaustion.

Leaving Collioure, the easy way, by boat

It was a delightful, and entirely unplanned pleasure. It can be the best kind, I reckon. Certainly, that’s how we felt.

Of course, the good thing didn’t come to us as we waited for it. On the contrary, we had struggle to it along difficult paths through oppressive heat.

Further convincing me that whoever said that about good things coming to those who wait, certainly didn’t belong to the universe I inhabit.

The Spanish fighters who changed my views

After four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was finally liberated by Allied armies on 24 August 1944. Units of the mythic French force, the ‘Deuxième DB’, the Second Armoured Division, led the way into the city. They had raced there to support the population that had risen against the occupying forces.

In the evening, the first half tracks pulled into the square outside the Paris town hall. As in all such units, the vehicles had all been given names by their crews, names that were painted on their sides:

Gudalajara

Brunete

Ebro

Santander

Teruel

If you’re thinking “those don’t sound like French names”, you’d be right. They were great battles of the Spanish Civil War. And the language the crews were talking was Spanish.

These were the men of the ‘Nueve’ (‘nine’ in Spanish), the ninth company of the Deuxième DB, almost exclusively Spanish. Their commander, the French Captain Raymond Dronne, wrote of them later:

The Spaniards fought remarkably. Commanding them is a delicate matter but they have enormous courage and experience of combat.

That ‘delicate’ is a glorious piece of French understatement. It chimes with what Dronne was told when he was first given command:

Everyone’s afraid of them. They’re good soldiers. They won’t give you any problems.

The halftrack Guernica of the Nueve in Paris in 1944

Moving to a new country certainly gives you a new perspective on many things you thought you knew.

For instance, I’ve had to rethink some of the most elementary facts I felt I knew about the Second World War. I’ve long accepted that it didn’t start on 1 September 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland, as is generally taught in schools. The first shots were fired on 19 September 1931, when Imperial Japanese forces invaded the Chinese territory of Manchuria.

OK, you might think, but that was the Pacific Theatre. In the European theatre, the war started in September 1939, surely? Well, that too is an idea I’ve had to revise, under the gentle guidance of Marisa, a friend we’ve met out here in Spain, who’s frighteningly well-informed on history.

My view was always that the Spanish Civil War, which started in July 1936, was a sort of preamble to the World War. In reality, however, with the Soviet Union supporting the Spanish Republic, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the military uprising that brought Franco to power, it offered a first opportunity for three of the major powers of the coming World War to test each other’s strengths and weaknesses and, indeed, to expose some of their forces to combat.

That feels more like the first Act of the wider war rather than merely a preamble to it.

In any case, it wasn’t just the Germans and Italians, or to a smaller extent the Russians, who emerged from the Spanish Civil War with trained and battle-hardened veterans ready for the next stage of the conflict. There was also quite a lot of the Spanish Republican army. The Republic itself had been defeated and overthrown, but many of the soldiers survived.

Large numbers joined the flood of over 450,000 refugees fleeing across the Pyrenees into France. They rightly feared the retaliation that Franco’s victorious regime would exact from them if they were caught. The regime proved they were right by what it did to those it did in fact catch.

In France conditions were, however, not particularly better. They were held in what the French called “internment camps”, but the Spanish, especially the ones who were there, unequivocally referred to as “concentration camps”. Lack of food, poor sanitation and inadequate housing led to huge numbers of deaths. This was 1939, after all, when France and Britain still hoped that their policy of appeasing Hitler might avoid war. That desire, combined with the xenophobia and right-wing beliefs of a significant current amongst Frenchmen, conspired to ensure the refugees were shockingly badly treated.

Offered the option of returning home, about 100,000 chose to go, mostly women and children. Few of the combatants, understandably, took up that offer, however. Some paraded in front of French officers hoping to be taken into the army, but the generals, who were to be humiliatingly defeated the following year, decided they didn’t need these experienced troops whose political loyalties they weren’t sure of (they were generally left wing, some extremely).

Some 10,000, however, were recruited into the Foreign Legion. And, once war with Germany broke out, others were taken into ‘Foreign Labour Companies’ who were set to work on the Maginot line, the great string of bunkers and fortresses along the border with Germany. Life there was certainly preferable to the camps, though in the end it worked out little better. After defeating France, the Nazi authorities captured many of the Spanish workers. Refusing to treat them as prisoners of war, and working with the Franco government’s agreement, they transferred them to concentration camps. Over 7000 were sent to the Mauthausen camp and fewer than 2500 were released at the end of the war.

Chillingly, some of the survivors later said that their experience in the French camps helped them to prepare for the Nazi ones.

Those who were able to avoid capture, joined the resistance. And among those who had taken part in the fighting, many decided to carry on the battle. One Spaniard in the Foreign Legion, Manuel Fernandez, described his feelings on the defeat of France to a 2017 television documentary:

“It was the greatest disappointment of my life. There were moments when I cried like a child. I’d fled Spain and here I was going to fall into the hands of the Germans.”

One answer was to join General de Gaulle who was setting up Free French forces in London. Of his initial 2000 men, 300 were Spanish.

Alternatively, those who were in the Foreign Legion could cross the Mediterranean with their units. In North Africa, however, they were under the orders of the government in Vichy, a puppet regime of the Nazis, set up after the defeat of France. There they were left to wonder how they’d managed to escape Franco, only to find themselves in a military unit whose orders were dictated by a government collaborating with Franco’s most powerful ally, Hitler.

It would take over two years. Though then things would change dramatically.

But more of that in another post. Just click here...

Backing Brexit, because I know it makes sense. Or ought to, apparently

Ah, the pride and joy of Britain as a great power
Putting down the Kenya Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s

Normally I don’t get into debates on Twitter – or what passes as debate – but I’m on leave so I felt I could put in half an hour or so yesterday and today.

What was the issue? Well, the one that’s going to dominate British politics for years. As our local MP points out, if he’s lucky enough to be re-elected for the next ten years, his professional life is going to be dominated by Brexit.

So, as you can imagine, it was Brexiters who were – how shall I put this? – a little exasperated with me.

“What an infantile perspective he has.” That was one of the politer comments. Still, note that referring to me in the third person is delightfully dismissive. Seen as witty, too, I expect. In certain quarters.

Slightly less courteous were references such as “…hundreds of people … ripping the piss out of your preposterous assertion... Pompous ass!”

It’s never easy to come up with an effective response to an argument as well constructed and closely reasoned as that.

Some people decided to focus on another major shortcoming of mine.

“…well you are a fiction writer – a bad one at that.”

It had never struck me that my skill as a writer, or lack of it, was going to be an issue in the Brexit process. But, hey, that process has already amazed me repeatedly, so perhaps I should contain my capacity for surprise.

At the crux of the argument, aside from the gentle remarks on my personality, was the proposition that Britain would be better off out of the EU. I suggested that this view was based on the belief that Britain remains a global power which, I pointed out, struck me as illusory. At work, I felt, was nostalgia, a backward-looking sense of greatness, which has little or no contact with current reality.

“We are a global power,” I was told indignantly. “Despite the best attempts of some. Recognising that doesn't involve 'going backwards'.”

Another commentator put up a pair of tables, showing that Britain still accounts for 3.9% of global GDP, and that the country is fifth in spending on defence, making it a major military force too.

On the face of it, this sounds compelling. At least, if you see military might as an essential component of global importance, a proposition I might question if it weren’t a digression from the main point here. 

In any case, this writer failed to set his claims in historical perspective.

Comparative GDP

As far as GDP is concerned, Britain’s 3.9%, according to my correspondent’s own figures, represents US$2.9 trillion. That compares with the US’s GDP of $18 trillion – over six times more. When Britain was a genuine world power, its GDP was close behind the US’s: in 1890, British GDP was moving towards $250 billion dollars, when in the US it was nearly $350 billion.

Comparative military strength

It’s also telling that, according to my critic’s other table, Britain, still the fifth most powerful military nation, has a total of 205,330 serving in the three branches of the forces – army, navy and air force. Now, when Britain was still clinging on to its status as a leading power, in 1914, it was criticised for the weakness of its army. On the brink of World War 1, the army’s strength was only 733,514.

A weak force and it made for a difficult start in the fighting that engulfed Europe. And yet – it was slightly more than the three and half times more than the total in all three branches today.

Hence my suggestion that aspiring to be a global power is a backward-looking, vain aspiration for Britain. We simply don’t have the economic muscle or, if military strength really is a key factor, the firepower to play that role. Once, maybe, but not now. “We are a global power”? Wake up and smell the cordite.

And that is my quarrel with these people. They’re refusing to wake up to the reality of our real status. We remain a power, but an intermediate one. In the same league as Germany, France or Italy. To be taken seriously, but in no position to dictate terms to great powers.

Not that I regard the situations as anything to regret. I don’t want to go back to Britain as a world power. When it was, it chalked up a string of horrors: genocide of the aboriginal population of Australia, the cruel putting down of the Indian ‘mutiny’ (in reality, an uprising against a colonial presence that had no right to be installed there), the Amritsar massacre, the hunting of insurgents in Malaya or Kenya or Cameroon – the list goes on and on. Indeed, the British Empire provided the first trial of an innovation that marked the twentieth century: concentration camps used against its Boer adversaries – civilians and not just fighters – in South Africa. Torture, of course, was commonplace across the Empire.

No, I want those things behind us. I’d like us to recognise that they already are. I’d like us to come to the realisation, as Germany, France and Italy have, that we are now intermediate powers. Alone, we’ll be pushed around by the US, China, Russia, Japan and others who may well grant us free trade deals, but on terms we’re not going to like. Together, on the other hand, in the European Union, we, Germany, France, Italy and 24 other countries can truly influence the way the world travels.

That’s why I feel the Brexiters are missing the point. They’re grasping at a mirage. And missing the real opportunity in front of us.

But, hey, who am I to have a view? It seems that “the arrogance of [my] position is breathtaking. And hilariously stupid”. The hilariously stupid should, presumably, just shut up and let others do the talking.

Which is what I’m going to do now.