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

banking family but had been—like so much else since the beginning of the war—taken over by a workers’ committee. Because mercury was an important element for munitions production the mine was good material for reportage; and the brutalist machinery and heroic laborers, the lead amphorae packed with mercury standing like so many soldiers in regimented lines, provided striking, resonant images for their cameras. But it still wasn’t enough, wasn’t combat . So they headed over the mountains, to Andalusia.
    There, shortly after sunrise on the morning of Saturday, September 5, Nationalist Breguet bombers began attacking government troops encamped in the hills near the copper-mining village of Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba. By midmorning the rebel forces, which had launched their attack from Córdoba, had brought in artillery and were shelling both the village and the Loyalist encampment. By midafternoon, when the Nationalist infantry arrived with their machine guns, the place was in pandemonium. Men, women, and children were fleeing the village on foot, on horseback or on mules, in cars or trucks; the women sobbing, cradling their infants or leading mules or cattle; the men clutching forlorn bundles of clothing or household objects or valises. Nor were they the only fugitives: behind them came scores of the Loyalist milicianos —terrified volunteers whose previous experience of firearms probably involved no more than shooting small birds on their farms. Now, crying out that rifles were no use against shells and bombs, they fled on foot or in commandeered automobiles, in some cases threatening to use their weapons on anyone who got in their way. Others, however, remained at their posts, and they and the few regular infantrymen managed to hold position until evening. At that point the rebels—planes, artillery, infantrymen—retired to Córdoba for the night; but they would return the next day to finish what they started and send the remnants of the government detachment back to its base camp at Montoro, twenty-seven miles to the east.
    It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. After spending a month vainly firing at the rebel garrison in Córdoba along a line just east of the city, the Loyalist general, José Miaja, had planned a bold flanking maneuver in which a detachment from his Third Brigade would go to Cerro Muriano and stage a surprise attack, planned for September 5, on the rebels from the north. Miaja must have been very sure of success, because a handful of journalists—the photographers Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner, the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau, Clemente Cimorra from the Madrid daily La Voz , and Robert Capa and Gerda Taro—had been permitted to witness the action. In the event, what they saw was a table-turning rout.
    The journalists were billeted in a 1920s country estate called La Malagueña, on a hill of the same name just south of the village; and Capa and Taro probably didn’t get there until early afternoon, when the two-hour lunch break that combatants on both sides customarily observed would have given them the all-clear. By that time the refugees from the village were in full flight, and Capa, who always remembered that behind his images were actual people with actual emotions, trained his camera on the straggling families on the road—on the barefooted children in their cotton dresses and shorts, and their exhausted, terrified parents. This is what war does . In the late afternoon, the fighting started up again in earnest; but it seems as if the only photographs he and Gerda were able to make of the combat were of government soldiers carrying machine guns on their shoulders, or unspooling telephone wire to hook up field communications devices—all taken behind the lines, on the wooded slopes around La Malagueña.
    That was more than Namuth and Reisner were able to get, despite being in the thick of fighting with Borkenau in Cerro Muriano itself, where the journalists had to hide in