Days of wine and shrapnel

Virginia Cowles was a 27-year-old American journalist working for the Hearst newspapers when she went to Spain for the first time. It was March 1937; the battle of Guadalajara had just brought a victory to the Republicans and besieged Madrid was an exciting place to be. Up till then, Cowles had reported mainly on events of a ‘peaceful nature’. Spain would turn her into a war reporter.

Arriving at the Hotel Florida with her suitcase and typewriter, an elegant, resourceful young woman with a high forehead and dark brown hair, she was soon part of the gang of foreigners cheering the Republicans on. There was the bulky Tom Delmer from the Daily Express, in whose room she ate sardines and crackers and listened to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

With Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Matthews and Josephine Herbst, all of whom would leave descriptions of these months in Madrid, she filed her stories from the Telephone Building in Gran Via and went to drink in fashionable Chicote’s. Bright yellow trams rattled down the cobbled streets, Sciaparelli scent was on sale in the shops and Greta Garbo was starring in Anna Karenina. A soldier offered her his rifle to take a pot shot at ‘los facciosas’. Professor Haldane wandered around absent-mindedly in a tin hat and breeches left over from the first world war, and a chicken was found to feed the ‘red’ Duchess of Atholl. When Cowles went with Hemingway to interview Madrid’s chief executioner, Hemingway said to her ‘He’s mine’, and put him in his play about fifth columnists.

What made Cowles different, however, was that she intended to cover the war from both sides. Sympathetic to the Republican cause, she was not blind to its atrocities, and unlike Martha Gellhorn, whose phrase ‘all that objectivity shit’ came to immortalise the partisan nature of reporting, she spent as many weeks with the Nationalists, attending their trials and writing about the German and Italian soldiers serving with them.