Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill

there as well, with a newsroom for correspondents on the fourth floor (along with camp beds for those who had long waits for transmitting their stories) and censorship offices on the fifth.
    After handing his credentials to the guard at the security desk in the entrance hall, Barea went up in one of the building’s five clanking elevators to the fifth floor, where he found the censors’ office at the end of a maze of passages. It was a narrow room, lit only by the purplish glow of a single desk lamp around which a sheet of carbon paper had been taped to form an improvised blackout shade. The wax on the paper, heated by the bare bulb, made the room smell like a church.
    Barea introduced himself to the other censor on duty, a man named Perea, and they started dividing up their workload. In the first days of the war there had been no foreign-language censors—journalists had to translate their dispatches into Spanish before they could be approved; and the censors themselves were ITT employees with little idea of, and no direction about, what details constituted permissible news and what were breaches of security. Their standards varied wildly and randomly: sometimes a correspondent would send a story to his newspaper with no interference and a colleague, transmitting the same information a few minutes later, would find his report struck through with red pencil; no one was happy. But with the arrival of Rubio Hidalgo, a former journalist himself, things were going to be different: the censors would now be able to read the stories in the language they were written in, and there would be consistent standards for what to approve.
    That, at any rate, was the way it was supposed to work. In practice, problems persisted. The big agencies—United Press International, Associated Press, Reuters, Havas—had teams of reporters filing almost around the clock; the major foreign newspapers all had their special correspondents; material poured out of them all. And the word from on high, to Barea and Perea, was that nothing, nothing should be passed that hinted at anything other than success for the Republican forces. Given what was going on from day to day, this seemed a near-impossibility: the rebels took San Sebastián, the country’s summer capital on the Bay of Biscay, extending their hold over the north; in the south they rolled, seemingly inexorably, toward Málaga; at Madrid’s threshold, they continued to press south from the Guadarrama and east from Talavera de la Reina. And the journalists, who often made daily trips to the front, knew what was happening and wanted to report it.
    But when Barea went to the Foreign Ministry for his daily meetings with Rubio, his chief would complain about correspondents sneaking negative stories out in the diplomatic pouches of their embassies, or extremists who threatened him for letting through too much bad news. Not that he was frightened, of course. Opening his desk drawer, he showed Barea the pistol he kept inside it. “Before they get me, I’ll get one of them!” he said. He didn’t seem to be joking. “Take care, and don’t let anything pass!”

September 1936: Córdoba Front
    In the first days of September, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro worked their way south from Toledo across the tawny plain of La Mancha, passing white stucco windmills Don Quixote might have battled against, toward the mountains of the Sierra Morena. Sometimes they stopped to stretch their legs and refill their canteens, and Capa snapped pictures of Gerda, in her worker’s coveralls, bending over a mountain stream and grinning flirtatiously back at him, or curled up like a sleepy child with her head resting on a stone boundary marker engraved with the letters P.C. —which meant partido communal , but which could just as easily stand for “Partido Comunista.” On the Sierra’s northern slopes, in the village of Almadén, they paused to photograph a mercury mine that had once been the property of the Rothschild