The Spanish fighters again: liberation achieved. And denied.

When we last saw our gutsy Spanish Republican fighters in the French Foreign Legion, they were rather twiddling their thumbs in North Africa waiting for something to change.

Well they did eventually change. And in a big way.

Men of the Nueve with their halftrack Guadalajara

In 1943, the Americans landed in Morocco and, together with British forces, in Algeria. The local French military was still ostensibly supporting the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain and serving under its orders, which meant Nazi orders. They put up a bit of a fight but soon caved, though not before some three thousand men had been killed and a lot more injured.

At that point, the local leadership, specifically the commander of the French forces, Admiral Darlan, suddenly realised they had always been lifelong democrats and switched to the Allied side. They required little in return, except being kept in office, which might have led to some friction with the Free French and in particular with de Gaulle.

Fortuitously, a young royalist decided the best way to secure the return of the rightful King to the French throne was to assassinate Darlan, which he duly did. It turned out he was wrong, as far as getting the King back was concerned, but he certainly removed a major irritation for de Gaulle.

Meanwhile the Allies, advancing from Morocco in the West and Algeria in the East, eventually drove the German army to defeat in Tunisia. The French, having switched sides, fought with the Allies, and that included the French Foreign Legion, who saw some tough battles, in which its Spanish Republican forces played a key role. And lost many men.

Not all the French forces had had to switch sides. Some soldiers had been with the Free French right from the start. In particular, one idealistic young officer had raised a small force in the French colonies south of the Sahara, marched it across the desert and joined the British effort against General Rommel in Libya.

Leclerc with his Armoured Division, during the liberation of France

His name was Leclerc (well, it was Philippe de Hautecloque, really, and Leclerc was just a nom de guerre which he’d adopted in the hope that it would deflect the attention of the authorities from his family back in occupied France). De Gaulle made him a major general and gave him the Second Armoured Division, the iconic Deuxième DB, to command. It was selected to be the only French unit to be included in the Allied landings in Normandy when they eventually came.

Unfortunately, he only had 4000 men and he needed 15,000. He set out to recruit new soldiers. One group from whom he found it easy to recruit were the Spaniards, who transferred in droves out of the Foreign Legion and into his Deuxième DB. Manuel Fernandez, whom I quoted yesterday, summed things up:

“The ideas of de Gaulle corresponded more to ours than those of the others who’d stayed with Pétain. The officers of the Legion considered us as red Spaniards, as revolutionaries… The senior officers would say to us, ‘you’re not in Spain here. You’re not going to make a revolution here.’ We’d keep quiet. The officers with de Gaulle, on the other hand, said ‘oh, did you fight in Spain? Good…’ The men the officers wanted were Spaniards. We had a certain experience, not just in Spain, but in the campaign in Tunisia too.”

Spanish recruits to the Deuxième DB
parading on the beach in Morocco

From the many Spaniards mobilised into Leclerc’s division, one company, the ninth, was almost exclusively Spanish: 146 out of 160 men. Commanded by a Frenchman, Raymond Dronne, and his number 2, the Spaniard Amado Granell, from Valencia, who had commanded a division in the Civil War, it passed into legend as ‘La Nueve’, ‘The Nine’.

The Deuxième DB landed in France in August 1944. The American high command had committed to allowing French troops to lead the Allies into the French capital.

On the 20^th, an insurrection broke out in Paris, with Resistance units taking action against the Nazi occupiers. De Gaulle asked for and obtained authority to press on to their support as quickly as possible. On the 24^th, Leclerc told Dronne and the Nueve “leave and go to Paris”. They left at 7:30 that evening and by 9:30 the company, supported by a squadron of tanks from the French 501^st armoured regiment, arrived at the Paris Town Hall. There, the first ‘French’ soldier to make contact with the Resistance forces that had taken control was Lieutenant Granell, the officer from Valencia who had held general rank in the Spanish Civil War.

The next day, as well as attacking several key points around the City, Spanish soldiers also accepted the surrender of the German Commander and took him into custody, before handing him over to French authorities.

The men who had fought so hard to keep Spain free, at least had the satisfaction of leading the liberation of France’s capital.

One of the halftracks in the parade down the Champs-Elysées
celebrating the liberation of Paris

The action in Paris wasn’t the Nueve’s last. They fought on through the rest of the war, even reaching Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s hilltop eerie, the Eagle’s Nest. By then though, only 16 of the 146 Spaniards of the combat were still fit for combat. They had lost 35 dead and 97 wounded.

Captain Dronne, their commander, said of them:

Some of them are experiencing a clear moral crisis due to the losses we've suffered and above all to the events in Spain.

The Spaniards who fought with the French had hoped that after overthrowing Fascism in Italy and principally in Germany, the Western Powers would turn their attention to Spain and finish it off there too. It wouldn’t happen.

The best slant to put on that decision is that the Western Powers had bled enough in the war and they didn’t want to fight another. That may be partly true. But Franco was no Hitler, the Army he led no Wehrmacht. Overthrowing his regime would not have required anything like the force or the losses that the battle against the Nazis had cost.

The less honourable explanation is that the West was already turning its attention against the Soviet Union. Far from wanting to take on Franco’s rather eccentric brand of Fascism – he was always more of a Franquist than a Fascist – they preferred to concentrate their efforts against Communism. In that fight, Franco could if anything be something of an ally, just as soon as he could be brought out of his pariah state. Which happened in the fifties, when the easing of measures against his regime was the price paid for stationing American forces in Spanish territory.

Ultimately the thousands of Spanish Republicans who fought and died for France and for the freedom of their own country, would be let down. “We weren’t fighting for a flag,” Manuel Fernandez would tell the 2017 documentary makers, “we were fighting for ideas”. They were fighting for freedom, in their country as well as France.

Well, they were cheated of that goal. But at the very least, we owe it to them to remember their sacrifices and their courage.

The lesson for me? Even in Europe, the Second World War didn’t start on 1 September 1939. It began on 17 July 1936, with the nationalist uprising against the Second Spanish Republic.

Nor should it have ended when it did. Once they’d finished off Hitler and Mussolini, the Western Powers should have seen off their ally Franco. Which means the war would not have ended in Europe on 8 May 1945.

But it did. With the work not quite done. Sadly.

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...

Coronavirus: the truth. So far as we know

They say that the first casualty of war is truth. There’s no reason why the war against Coronavirus should be any different.

Generally, the problem is that governments are lying about what’s going on. You know, claiming to have shot down more planes than the enemy ever had, or claiming that a retreat is a strategic withdrawal to more defensible positions. Today, though, the mist over the truth is just the lousiness of the information.

For instance, we’ve been counting total numbers of infected cases. But we know that no country has the means to test every one of its citizens. So how can we know what the true figure is?

The number of infections in Germany is currently at about 70% of the number here in Spain. But the number of deaths stands at about 12%. Is that simply because they’re testing much more widely, and therefore identifying far more cases than don’t lead to death?

I’ve seen conflicting estimates of the true number of Spanish cases. Some authorities say they should be four times higher, others twenty times. Four times or twenty? How do you get anywhere near the truth with that kind of variation?

The same is true of the number of deaths. Some countries don’t count deaths in certain contexts. Maybe someone died outside a hospital and wasn’t tested. So they’re not included in the figures. On the other hand, if someone with CVid dies they may be counted as one of the deaths, even though they had underlying conditions, one of which may have been the real cause of death.

There are certain phenomena that are particular to certain nations. For instance, in the UK death figures can be reported over several days. The number of deaths reported for one day may therefore climb later.

In Spain, too, there’s a problem with weekends, when reporting may be delayed. That means figures may be low for Saturdays and Sundays, but exaggerated on Mondays. And that may or may not happen. 

That’s how exciting this all is.

Still, perhaps one can make a couple of assumptions, just as long as one remembers that they are assumptions and they are open to challenge as any assumption is.

The first is that however bad the figures may be, within a single country, they’re likely to be just as bad any day as they are on any other – or just as good. So if the case figures are a twentyfold underestimate on one day, then they’re likely to be a twentyfold underestimate on another. That means that comparing the figures over time may at least give a view of where we’re heading.

The second assumption is that the figures for a single day can jump about a bit. They may be up or down by chance. So it’s best to look at what happens over several days or a week.

Coronavirus cases (left) and deaths (right), by day, in Spain
Rolling seven-day average as dotted line
The black line marks the lockdown-start date

In the graphs, I’ve shown the daily figures for cases and deaths in Spain. I’ve also included a trend line based on how the average for the previous seven days has been changing. The trend line only starts on day seven, because no seven-day average can be counted before. The black line marks the day on which the Spanish lockdown began in earnest, 16 March.

Both lines show an uptick right at the end, but remember what I said about not putting too much weight on a single day’s figure. In any case, they’re for a Monday, so it’s possible they reflect late reporting at the weekend. Still, it’s possible there’s a real uptick. The lesson is that both figures can start growing again, whatever the prior trend may show.

That trend itself is at least a little encouraging. It does look as though both lines may at last be dipping. The deaths have not dropped as much as the cases, but that’s to be expected: patients dying today were probably first counted as cases a week ago.

It has, however, taken three weeks of strict lockdown to get here. Far stricter, for instance, than in the UK. As strict as Italy, where the figures also seem to be showing a tendency to drop.

This is, however, only the start of the drop. How long will it be until we get to figures so low that we can sensibly think about relaxing restrictions?

The Spanish government has started planning for that moment and one decision has already been taken: work regarded as non-essential, currently suspended, will start again on 11 April. But when will parks reopen? Or schools? Or bars and restaurants? That’s still unclear, but we do know that Wuhan, where the epidemic started, is only just beginning to relax, after eleven weeks of lockdown.

What this says to people in other countries is that lockdowns aren’t quick fixes. This is a long battle; restrictions have to be tough; they have to be in place for a longer period than any of us would like; and they can only be removed gradually.

Still, if we can trust the Spanish figures at all, they do seem to work.

Eventually.

A smile in the pandemic

An implacable disease has broken out. A silent enemy, its stealthy advance appears inexorable, as it leaves a trail of victims behind it. At first, many sicken, and then with terrible finality, they begin to die.

Italy is one of the first places struck. In Florence, where the ravages are just starting, a group of young people decide they will be safer outside the city than inside. They make for a villa at Fiesole, in the hills nearby.

Fiesole. Not a bad place to be locked down

A breach of the lockdown rules? Perhaps there were none at that time. But in any case, they are in that place alone, and they have to find a way to pass the time.

Seven young women and three young men. They decide that each day they will elect one of their number to be King or Queen. The monarch for the day will choose a theme. Then everyone has to tell a story on that topic.

The themes range widely. Some are noble and elevating, like those of the day devoted to acts of great generosity. Some can be fearsome, such as Isabella and the Pot of Basil, one of the fiercest revenge stories written. The majority, however, are funny, concerned with the clever way people get out of scrapes, or trick each other to achieve their aims. Often, at the core is love, in the widest possible sense, from the purest of loves to something, shall we say, far earthier.

And what could be more appropriate? Love and laughter. What better way to tackle the fear and depression that accompany a terrible illness?

Some of you reading this post, especially if you’re Italian, may be saying “I recognise this story”. You’d be right. This isn’t a tale of Coronavirus in 2019. It’s a story set against the background of a far worse affliction, the Black Death, in 1348.

What’s more, the story’s a fiction. The seven women and three men, noble and virtuous even when they’re telling stories bordering on the erotic, emerged from the imagination of one of the world’s greatest storytellers, Giovanni Boccaccio.

Boccaccio's statue in the
Uffizi gallery in Florence

The book, the Decameron, is a monument to his skill. He had never previously published a short story. There was no tradition of writing such pieces anywhere in Europe. And here he produced a hundred of them.

Most of the stories were not invented by him. Indeed, many were old folk tales, or traditional stories from different countries. But he had to collect them and write them up himself.

What’s more, he wrote them in a strange language. In the fourteenth century, there was no such nation as Italy. The name applied only to a geographic entity, the peninsula where people spoke a variety of languages, related though often very different from each other, and none of them called ‘Italian’.

However, half a century earlier, the great poet Dante had written his extraordinary three-volume poem, The Divine Comedy, in his native language, Tuscan. Another great poet, Petrarch, a contemporary and friend of Boccaccio’s, had also written poems in that language.

Boccaccio, as a Florentine, was also a Tuscan speaker. The huge influence of these three writers, using that language, is one of the major influences that led to Tuscan becoming the basis of today’s Italian, when Italy appeared as a nation at last, over five centuries later. That’s why anyone who knows modern Italian reasonably well can still read Boccaccio with no great difficulty.

But writing prose fiction in Tuscan? In his day, this wasn’t viewed as an appropriate activity for a learned man. When his friend Petrarch called on him, he made that point forcefully. Only women read prose fiction in the vernacular language, the poet admonished him. Tuscan was a ‘vulgar’ language. Women were uneducated. Writing in that language for such an audience was simply undignified.

Men like them, when writing prose, wrote the great noble language of all the best thinkers. They wrote Latin.

That’s all very ironic, today. The Decameron is still read widely, and enjoyed by anyone who likes hilarious, serious, sad, noble, raunchy, astonishing stories. Boccaccio’s Latin works are read by a handful of Academics and no one else.

Amusingly, I think Boccaccio knew that might be the case. The best manuscript of the Decameron – and this was still before the start of printing in Europe, so all books were handwritten – is held in a Berlin museum and it’s in Boccaccio’s own hand.

He produced that copy just two years before his death. So clearly, despite Petrarch’s reproaches, Boccaccio loved this peculiar work of his enough to go to the extraordinary length of writing it all out once more, by hand, even as he approached the end of his life.

He loved his work, as his readers today still do. And the work is a wonderful roller coaster ride through love and fun and laughter and astonishment. It amazes and amuses us. Above all, it raises our spirits.

What better antidote to the pain that comes in the wake of an affliction?

Even if we can’t retreat to the hills above Florence to enjoy his stories.



Just for fun, here’s a retelling, rather than simply a translation, of one of my favourite stories in the collection.

Chichibio and the Crane, from the Decameron

Currado Gianfigliazzi was a nobleman of Florence, a man known for his generosity and style. He led the life of a knight, often taking time away from his duties to go hunting with hawk or hound.

One day, he brought down a fat young crane, and sent it to a good cook he had, a Venetian called Chichibio, to dress it and roast it well for dinner that evening.

Chichibio, who looked as naïve as he was, trussed and dressed the crane and started roasting it over ther, with all the skill he had. When it was nearly done and giving out a wonderful odour, Brunetta, a young woman of the neighbourhood who Chichibio longed to make his own, came into the kitchen and when she saw and smelled the crane, begged him to give her one of the thighs.

He replied emphatically, “you won’t be getting any part of that bird from me, Brunetta, not from me you won’t”.

Irritated, she answered, “Well, too bad for you, if you feel that way. Just remember that if you don’t give me a thigh, you’ll be getting nothing to satisfy your desires from me either.”

They argued heatedly but, in the end, to avoid falling out with her, Chichibio cut off a thigh from the crane and gave it to her.

That evening when the bird was served up to Messer Currado and some guests of his, Currado was astonished to see a leg missing. So he had Chichbio called from the kitchen and asked him what had happened to the missing thigh.

The Venetian, an expert liar, replied without hesitation, “Sir, cranes only have one thigh and one leg.”

“What on earth?” stormed Currado, furious. “Only one thigh and leg? Do you think I’ve never seen a crane before?”

“Sir,” replied Chichibio, “that’s just how it is, and I’ll show you as much whenever you have the time.”

Currado, out of respect for his guests, chose not to pursue the matter just then, but simply said, “If you claim you can show me that they only have one leg, something I’ve never seen or heard before, I want to see it tomorrow. And if it’s like you say, I’ll be fine. But if not, I give you my word that I’ll give you something to remember me by, with regret, till the day you die.”

That was as much as they said to each other that night. But at first light the next day, Currado whose anger had not dissipated at all while he slept, got up and called for horses. Then mounting Chichibio on a nag, he rode off to a river where cranes could often be seen at dawn.

“We’ll soon see whether it was you or I who lied last night.”

Chichibio, seeing that his master was as angry as ever, and that he had to find a way to make good his lie, which he had no idea how to do, rode along behind him. He was terrified and would have made off if he could see any way of getting away with it. But, seeing no way of escaping, all he could do was keep going, haunted by images of cranes on two legs, in front, behind or on either side of him.

But when they reached the river bank, he happened to catch sight, before Currado, of a dozen or more cranes all standing on one leg, as they do when sleeping. Immediately, he pointed them out to Currado.

“Now, sir, look at those cranes standing over there. You can see that I was telling you the truth last night – they each have just one thigh and one leg.”

Currado saw them and replied, “wait. I’ll show you that they have two.”

Moving closer, he shouted “Hey! Hey!” at the cranes. They immediately put their other legs down, took a few steps and flew off.

Currado turned to Chichibio, and said, “so what do you say now, you miserable liar? Do you see that they all have two legs?”

Chichibio, frightened and not knowing where to look, answered, “Yes, sir. But last night you didn’t shout ‘hey, hey’ at the crane. Had you shouted, it would have put down the other thigh and leg, just like these ones did.”

Currado found that answer so funny that his anger simply evaporated and he burst out laughing.

“Chichibio, you’re right. That’s what I should have done.”

So, thanks to his quick and clever answer, Chichibio dodged his bad luck and made his peace with his master.

Tackling the epidemic

My good friend Fabio is Milanese. As a native of the great city of Rome, I tend to think of Milan as South Austrian. You know, things happen on time, the streets are clean, and where there is bustle there is also a sense of purpose. None of these charges can be levelled against Rome.

Rome to me is the essence of Italy. Milan is northern Europe.

Still, I suppose technically Fabio is, nonetheless, Italian. And as a resident of the region of Lombardy, he was already subject to the coronavirus lockdown even before the Italian government extended it to the entire country. The “situation,” he wrote to me, “is surreal. Unimaginable.”

Top left: deserted arcade in Milan. Bottom left: Fallas crowd in Valencia
Right: two women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket

Certainly, if Milan maintains its sense of purpose – as I’m sure it does – the bustle is gone. Places usually thonged by crowds of both locals and tourists are now deserted. The atmosphere must be eerie, to say the least.

Most recently, Fabio has gone still further, calling for the deployment of the army. Why? People have been breaking curfew rules, kids have been getting together out of doors to have drunken parties, the lockdown isn’t being respected.

I have to say that this doesn’t entirely surprise me, and it may strengthen the sense that the Milanese are, after all, truly Italians. One of my college lecturers was Catholic and she told me of a conversation she once had with an Italian bishop.

“Why,” she asked him, “does the Pope issue instructions that are so strict it’s almost impossible for English Catholics to follow them?”

“Ah,” he replied, “The Pope is Italian.”

This was the time before we started to get Popes from other parts of the world.

“The problem with England,” the bishop went on, “is that its culture is Puritan. This even affects the Catholic community. They try to follow Papal instructions to the letter. But the Pope’s Italian, and he knows Italians will ignore 90% of what he says. So he deliberately makes his decrees particularly strict. I can see how this makes for problems in England.”

As with spiritual instructions, so it seems with government ones: total compliance isn’t the first reaction of all Italians.

Still, it seems Fabio’s plea didn’t fall on deaf ears. He tells me the army is indeed being deployed. Maybe, with bad grace, and under the baleful stare of men with guns, more Italians will now begin to take the lockdown seriously.

Meanwhile, where we’re living, near Valencia in Spain, we’re in the runup to the great fiesta of the Fallas. Celebrations are already under way, with thousands of people thronging the streets. Rather like the marches for International Women’s Day at the weekend. It’s hard not to admire such a tenacious attachment to traditions, particularly to joyous ones. On the other hand, we’re now up to 1600 infections across the country, 10% of the total in Europe. That’s still far behind Italy, with over 9000, but we’re catching up…

Some are beginning to question just how responsible our devil-may-care attitude may be.

Interestingly, it was announced only today that the Fallas would, even at this late stage, be cancelled. Or at least postponed. I haven’t asked Fabio, but I suspect I know what his reaction would be… For my own part, I wasn’t going to be going to any of the major events.

It strikes me that we need to take the epidemic seriously. Which isn’t the same as panicking about it. The women fighting over toilet rolls in an Australian supermarket strikes me as at best an over-reaction. At worst, it’s a reversion to the worst instincts of man.

But claiming that nothing much is happening, as Donald Trump has? Or not cancelling major public events? Or simply not keeping contact between people to the minimum absolutely necessary? That doesn’t strike me as healthy either.

The Italian government’s action may, as Fabio says, create a surreal atmosphere. But I really can’t see how else you limit the spread of a virus.

The saddest aspect of all this? It’s the lack of an internationally coordinated response. In a time of nationalism, individual countries seem to have decided that they must simply do their own thing.

That’s a pity. Although I was encouraged to see a suggestion that the virus itself might provide a solution to the problem. Will Hutton, in the Observer, the sister paper of the British Guardian, argued that the infection might drive us to improve what globalisation means.

Meanwhile, Fabio, hang on in there! This won’t go on for ever. And, unimaginable though the short term results are, the actions of the Italian government may well turn out to be the most effective response to the problem.

I certainly hope so.

Fiesta in the time of coronavirus

Here in Valencia, we’re taking the Coronavirus threat seriously.

It may not be a lot of use, but maybe a mask says you're taking it seriously

OK, so we weren’t too pleased when the ruling came down from Madrid that the much-anticipated Champions League match between Valencia and Atalanta had to be played behind closed doors.

Bad news. Valencia has a 4-1 deficit to make up from the first leg and needs its fans to support the team at the home game. But, hey, we understand the precautionary principle. Atalanta’s stadium isn’t far from Milan, and it was a journalist attending the away match there that brought Coronavirus back to us in the first place.

Valencia-Atalanta will be behind closed doors

Can’t be too careful.

In the same way, we’ve no objection to the cancellation of major medical events and conferences. Well, we’re terribly sorry for the people involved, since doctors are pretty smart about where they organise their conferences. I mean, they don’t tend to be in Birmingham or Düsseldorf, do they? More like Sicily or the Canaries.

Seems a pity to deprive them of their trips, but I guess we do need them around. Again, being careful. Just in case.

Besides, not many of us are medics, so we’re only moderately bothered about the measures. I mean, the rest of us wouldn’t have been going to that major cardiology conference in Lisbon or that research meeting in Dubrovnik, would we, so how much are we really supposed to care?

All in all, then, we’ve no real complaints. So far. Good to see the government taking an interest. Putting appropriate measures in place and all that.

Just as long as they don’t go over the top. There are limits, aren’t there? There has to be moderation in all things, including public health precautions.

So – don’t touch our fiesta.

Our fiesta? You don’t know what our fiesta is? The Fallas? Why, it’s only the biggest in Spain.

Honestly, you should get up to speed.

Four days – and nights – of firecrackers in the streets. Some of them capable of making the noise of heavy artillery pieces. The mascletas – when we let off hundreds of these damn things in various designated spots around the city (or sometimes outside them) – can make the bombing of Baghdad sound like a kid’s birthday party.

Really, if you want to know what it sounds like to live in a war zone, there’s nothing better than to be near a mascleta when it goes off.

Then we parade around the streets in traditional costumes and take a look at the hundreds of fantastic sculptures set up at street corners all over the city.

What am I saying? All over the city? All over the all the little towns around the city too. Thousands of people. Getting their costumes ready and then parading in them. Collecting their crackers and their fireworks, and then letting them off. Building their sculptures, and then burning them on the last night (all but one which gets a prize).

Men and women in the traditional costume
And this group had travelled up from Murcia (over 200 km away)

No one’s going to cancel that. I realise that Venice cancelled its carnival, but that’s small beer compared to the Fallas. I mean, think of all those people. Think of the dozens of hours they’ve put in to preparing for this grand party. And you want to cancel it? Think again, pal.

OK. I get it. It means huge crowds surging through the streets. Cheek by jowl. Cough by face. Not perhaps the most sanitary conditions. Maybe not exactly the precautionary principle sagaciously applied.

But, hey. Surviving’s important, I know. But isn’t living even more important? And a fiesta’s all about living, which is what surviving is for.

Besides, if things are so miserable, don’t we need a party all the more, just to console ourselves?

So a Valencian might reason. These thoughts were going through my mind as I walked across the Town Hall Square (or Plaza del Ayuntamiento) the other day, and saw the crowds gathering for a pre-mascleta of the Fallas. The Fallas proper don’t start until the 15th, which you might think apt: it’s the Ides of March. But some events happen beforehand.

Crowd gathering for an early mascleta
In the background, the cage where the pyrotechnics would happen

I looked at the crowd. I looked at the cage where the colossal firecrackers were hanging, ready to be set off. And I thought, “congratulations, Valencians, on your courage in the face of adversity, and on your determination to have a good time whatever the threat bearing down on you”.

Courageous they certainly seem to be. But only time will show whether that was wise or not.

For my part, I hurried on home. Partly because I really don’t think hanging around in crowds is all that wise these days. But mostly because, while I wouldn’t question anybody else’s taste, the experience of being in a war zone certainly isn’t mine.

But, if Madrid doesn’t step in to cancel them at the last moment, I wish Valencia a happy and virus-free Fallas, all the same.

A Mascleta going off
Creating the true party feeling. At least, if your idea of a party is a civil war

Thoughts of the victims of war in a Valencia air raid shelter

If you’re sightseeing around our local city, Valencia, the saddest sight you can see is an air raid shelter. I’ve visited two and there are many others.

Inside the air raid shelter under the Valencia town hall

They date from “the war”. However, I believe when most of us say “the war” we probably still mean the Second World War, if we’re from countries that took part in it. In Spain, “the war” means the Civil War the raged from 1936 to 1939, led to the overthrow of the Spanish Republic and ushered in 36 years of dictatorship under Francisco Franco, ending only in his death.

On the other hand, there are many people, inside and outside Spain, who would reckon that the Spanish Civil War was a part of the Second World War. That makes some sense. After all, despite signing the same non-intervention treaties as the democracies, Germany and Italy, then under Nazi and Fascist control respectively, sent not just weapons but military forces to support the Franco rebellion. Only the Soviet Union supplied the Republic, and then only with toxic strings attached.

So major players in the Europe-wide conflict that was about to break out were involved in the Spanish war. The air raid shelters in Valencia were built to withstand attack by Italian forces, chiefly in the form of bombing raids from bases they had set up on the island of Mallorca.

One of the striking aspects of our visit was a video they played us. At several points, I realised that I wasn’t listening to Spanish any more, but to Italian. What was being played was Fascist propaganda about how ‘heroes’ from the Italian air force were taking part in raids on Valencia to make civilisation safe from ‘Soviet communism’, in a fight many saw as a Christian crusade.

Down in that air raid shelter, that irony was particularly bitter. These were shelters for civilians, and they were the main victims of the raids. The propaganda claimed the bombers were targeting armament factories and military concentrations. In reality, they were dropping their bombs on civilian dwellings.

No one puts that better than the great New Zealand cartoonist David Low, who has Franco being told that his Arab troops are concerned by the ‘unchristian’ behaviour of his army.

David Low has an officer reporting to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler
“Excellency, the Moorish troops are disturbed.
They say our conduct of the war is unchristian.”

The assault on civilians would become the hallmark of the long struggle that the Spanish Civil War announced: heavy bombing of civilian centres, often described as a means of ‘weakening enemy morale’. Killing civilians to undermine morale? There’s a word for that. It’s terrorism.

And I was particularly struck by one of the photos in the air raid shelter. A mother with her child. Both faces are paralysed with fear. And it’s perfectly obvious that neither has been guilty of an act that merits the punishment they’re undergoing.

Part of the display in the air raid shelter
Left, a bombed home. Right, a terrified mother and child

Sadly, this kind of terror bombing was by no means limited only to the enemies of the democracies in those years of war. In fact the worst bombing was carried out by the Western powers themselves, something they should perhaps bear in mind when they denounce terrorism today. Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg all but destroyed, with tens of thousands of dead.

And, to top it all and inflict still greater destruction, there were the atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mentioning those Japanese cities reminds me of the only reason I disagree with those Spaniards who say the Second World War started with the conflict in Spain. That same David Low I mentioned before had a different view, which I share. After all, there was a Pacific Theatre to World War II as well as a European one. Fighting started there in 1931, when Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, five years before the uprising in Spain and eight before the Nazi invasion of Poland.

In the background, the “Japan-China mixup” as a mugging
In the foreground, the USA, France, Britain,
Germany and Italy are walking away
One is saying, “Don’t you think, after all, there
may be something in the idea of having a police force?”
Another replies, “Tut Tut! Too risky! Much wiser and cheaper
to wait until we’re all murdered in our beds

Just as in Spain, the democracies stood back and did nothing. And, just as Low warned, they paid the price. All the enemies they would face in the official Second World War – Japan in the Pacific, German and Italy in Europe – were using the earlier conflicts to get into shape to fight the big one.

A tragedy. Which makes visiting the Valencia air raid shelters such a sad moment. Though perhaps a necessary one.

Preparing for the pandemic

A crisis! A crisis! It’s a time to rise to a challenge, to show your mettle, to confront and overcome whatever life throws at you.

Of course, the first thing is admitting that there’s a crisis at all. I’ve always preferred what might be called the Jim Callaghan approach, after the Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain, who in 1979 is said – wrongly as it happens – to have declared, “Crisis? What Crisis?”

The nice thing about that kind of denial is that it allows you to show your mettle by returning to the sofa and having another glass of wine.

The problem with denial, unfortunately, is that while comfortable, it doesn’t actually solve any problems. Jim Callaghan discovered that to his cost a few months later when Maggie Thatcher gave him a drubbing in the 1979 General Election.

Danielle and I decided that it was time at last to treat the Coronavirus threat with a little respect. I have to admit that a part of me still says that it’s what an Italian Minister called an ‘infodemic’ rather than an epidemic. That’s a spreading pool of anxiety, if not panic, caused by the sheer volume of information, and mostly rather shrill information, swilling around all the conceivable media today.

Still. It’s certainly true that many communities are already facing the tedious inconvenience of quarantine. So it struck us that, while we can’t do much about the disease itself except cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t get us, we could at least take some steps towards preparing ourselves for isolation, just in case it happens to us too.

We are, therefore, beginning to build up some stocks. We’ve got quite a lot of water, though I do feel we ought to add some beer, preferably Corona, if only out of a sense of appropriateness. We’ve also bought a lot of flour, so Danielle can make bread, and a lot of pasta and rice, plus various tins, so we can cook some basic meals if the need arises.

Flour, rice, pasta, tins: our Coronavirus quarantine survival kit

It seems to me that we’ve probably assured our survival. Surviving isn’t quite the same as living, though, is it? I suppose I can still pop out to buy some more wine. Or I might just have to reconcile myself to the idea that the idea isn’t to have a good time, it’s just get through it.

We can live on pasta with tomato sauce, alternating with rice with tomato sauce, with a tin of something thrown in from time to time for variety. And bread for breakfast, since we have enormous stocks left of Danielle’s excellent marmalade, made just a few weeks ago.

Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied that we’ve made some adequate preparations.

It’s true, though, that we’ve only got enough for about three weeks. That may not seem long. On the other hand, on such a diet, I can’t help feeling that it might seem more than long enough.

Beyond three weeks, I’m not sure whether Coronavirus infection might not start to seem the lesser evil.

How Italian sardines kept the left's wall solid

A triumph for the left it maybe wasn’t. But a colossal setback for the hard, populist right it certainly was. And that’s the next best thing.

Demonstration in Rome by the Sardines movement
Mobilising against Salvini and showing him the door in Emilia-Romagna

Matteo Salvini is the leader of the populist, right-wing Italian party, the League. Until last year, he was deputy Prime Minister in a coalition, but then he pushed his luck too far. He brought down the government in the hope of precipitating an election he looked set to win, but his coalition partners switched to working with Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD), roughly equivalent to British Labour, though substantially more centrist.

Salvini is on record committing that he would “defend the natural family founded on the union between a man and a woman”. He also declared that he was “sick of seeing immigrants in the hotels and Italians sleeping in cars”. Or again, “The problem with Islam is that it's a law, not a religion, and it's incompatible with our values, our rights, and our freedoms.

On Sunday, elections were held in Emilia-Romagna, the region around Bologna, in north-central Italy, a longtime bastion of the left. It is rather like the “red wall” on which Labour counted for decades in the North of England, and which suffered such heavy losses at the election in December: seats fell to the Tories that had been Labour since they were first created.

Curiously, the PD uses rather similar language. But it’s in a position to apply it in very different circumstances: after the results came in, they could declare that “the wall held”.

The governor of the region was re-elected, and with a small but absolute majority. Stefano Bonaccini took 51.4% of the vote, his nearest rival 43.6%.

Salvini had spent much of his time in recent months campaigning around Emilia-Romagna. He claimed he was about to ‘liberate’ the region. But after the elections, Bonaccini could reply that the region had already had its liberation, 75 years ago, at the end of the Second World War – since when, in one form or another, the left has been in unbroken power there.

To what does he owe his success?

To start with, the PD is no party of the hard left, and Bonaccini is certainly no Corbyn. He’s a moderate leftist who can attract voters from the centre, rather than frightening them into the arms of the right. That’s important when you’re trying to protect you wall from a determined onslaught by the hard right.

But something special came out of the campaign in Emilia-Romagna. It led to the emergence of the kind of mass, popular movement that Corbynism inspired. Known as the ‘sardines’, from their ability to fill public squares to capacity at their rallies, they generated a huge momentum for the left – or at least against the right – that had been the exclusive preserve of right-wing populism in the past.

That combination, a moderate leader who could draw votes from the centre, with a groundswell of popular support from below, proved unstoppable in Emilia-Romagna. Even more encouraging, in December the sardines brought together a rally of 100,000, in Rome, a long way from the region where the movement was born. It may begin to make itself felt at national level now.

It’s far too early to be thinking of victory over a vicious, far-right movement in Italy. The national government, where the PD is in an unstable coalition with the bizarre and declining 5-star movement, could fall and let Salvini in. But the result on Sunday does at least give a glimmer of hope that he can be kept out.

And there’s a lesson for other countries too. Combine electability in the leader with a dynamic, mass movement and you can get the far right on the run. That’s the elusive formula we need to find in the US, in the EU, in the UK.

In Britain, in particular, it means that we too have a historic chance. If we replace Corbyn by an electable leader of the Labour Party, and Keith Starmer, the front runner for the moment, seems to be just that; if that leader can then retain and sustain the movement that Corbynism built; then we too can in time drive out the hard-right government Corbyn let in last December.

The movement doesn’t have to chant “Oh, Keir Starmer”, like it used to chant “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”. There was something repellent about that cultish behaviour. Instead, it just needs to be as effective as the Sardines have been in Italy.

And working for a leader who can command real electoral support

There are immigrants and immigrants

It’s curious being an immigrant again.

Queuing to get into Valencia

I mean, it’s not the first time. That’s not counting my childhood in Rome, where I wasn’t an immigrant but an expat. If you don’t think that’s an important distinction, think again. Expats are people who never really belong. They’re usually in the country for a relatively short time, maybe on a limited contract, often with an embassy or a research institution or some kind of international organisation.

They tend to congregate with others of their kind, talking their own language, and have the sense that they’ll be gone within a while anyway, once their tour of duty is up. They tend to talk about the local people with a definite article, as in “the Italians do such-and-such”, where such-and-such is usually something that the person talking about it doesn’t like much.

The first time I was a real immigrant was when I moved to France in the late nineties. I was on a French contract with a company incorporated in French law. In fact, when it all fell through, it was great to have French law to fall back on with its generous approach to unemployment benefit. A lot more generous than, say, Britain’s. You can actually live on French unemployment pay.

Still. France was a bit special. As the husband of a Frenchwoman, I had a right to French nationality. Once I’d started work again, I set about securing it as quickly as I could. When it came through, I wasn’t an immigrant any more, but in my home country. My second home country, indeed, but a home country nonetheless.

But then we moved just across the border – a short car drive from the superb eastern French city of Strasbourg – into Germany. There we were truly immigrants once more, and it was fun. Discovering how things were done. Struggling, in my case (Danielle is a fluent German speaker), with a different language. Learning to enjoy different foods and pastimes. A great experience.

And now we’ve started all over again. Immigrants to Spain. Without Spanish citizenship or any right to claim it. Truly foreigners making a new home for ourselves in a different country.

It’s proving just as enjoyable as Germany. It helps, I suspect, that though our Spanish is execrable, we let ourselves go and speak it anyway. Far from reacting with horror at the way we’re massacring their language, they seem pleased, relieved even at not having to struggle with English to communicate with us.

So they just talk Spanish at us and, if we only understand two words in three, it doesn’t matter because they’re more than happy to explain what they meant. Making friends has proved surprisingly easy and, even among those who haven’t become friends, we’ve found people gratifyingly friendly.

There have naturally been a few problems. Civil servants tend to be a pain. Some of them take a perverse delight in telling you that you haven’t got the right document and need to come back in six weeks’ time when you’ve got it. However, in some cases we’ve found that even those can become quite pleasant if we persevere, trying to talk Spanish, until smiles eventually replace the frowns and rudeness.

We’ve also discovered that there’s no point thinking you can do anything in a single meeting. It will always take two or even three. The first may be where they tell you’ve gone to the wrong place. But even if that isn’t the case, it’s where they tell you that you don’t have the right documents. Generally, though, when you get there for the final meeting, having booked the appointment correctly, with the right papers, it all goes smoothly and even cordially

Nor is it only in the public sector that it all takes so long. Any big institution seems hopelessly sclerotic with bureaucracy. The banks, for instance, as well as ministries or local councils. Most organisations here have websites these days, and online procedures for doing administrative jobs. But again and again, you get to the final stage, when you’ve filled in page after page of information and uploaded half a dozen scanned documents, and you press the ‘Submit’ button, only to get an error message that tells you helpfully that ‘there is an error with your application’.

The only solution seems to be to go to the place in person, because they certainly don’t answer emails or return calls in response to voicemail. That’s what I generally do these days, without even attempting the online route. It may take a little longer but, in the end, you get smiles and your case dealt with – even the people in the bank are charming if you go and see them yourself – and that was the aim of the exercise, wasn’t it?

So we’re enjoying our status as immigrants.

Still, I know we’re immigrants who get an easy ride. We’re not Muslim or dark in skin colour. We’re not the ones who get told to go back home. I can’t begin to compare my achievements with those of Ilhan Omar, who has risen from refugee roots to become a US Congresswoman. That only makes it all the more shocking that she has been the target of racist attacks from her president.

And think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps one of the most impressive performers in the US House of Representatives, agree with her or not, also called on to go back home – though she isn’t an immigrant at all, but US born and bred.

The 'squad' of awkward women of colour in Congress, attacked by Trump
Ilhan Omar is speaking. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is next to her in black

No. There are immigrants and immigrants. Some are treated gently. Others are the butts of aggression from people who draw encouragement from such as Trump. They face attack even if they are merely descended from immigrants (and how many of us aren’t?) and only distinguished by the colour of their skin or their faith.

We’ve seen that there can be joy in being an immigrant. Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where that was true for all of us.