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Dan Carrier |
Alone in the Pyrenees
Dan Carrier retraces the perilous route taken by volunteers who risked their all in order to fight for Spanish Republicans 62 years ago
THEY came out of the mist and were as surprised to find me as I was to run into them. I was 1,500 metres above sea level, on the cusp of a rocky outcrop, and, before the guards spoke, I had been accompanied by nothing more than the whistling winds and the occasional clank of a cowbell.
The Spanish border police, decked in snazzy mountaineering outfits – fleece and gore tex with an Iberian coat of arms emblazoned across their chests – and with pistols slung casually on hips, fired rapid questions: I understood little, but my dishevelled state spoke volumes.
After explaining why I was wandering through the Pyrenees, and after they had checked I was in a fit state to reach my destination, they pointed into the fog behind them and told me it would take around six hours’ walking. I was thankful for the brief conversation, and readjusting the straps of my rucksack, and battening down my waterproof poncho against the rising wind, I strode off with renewed vigour.
Earlier this month I set out on a week long journey. My aim was to retrace the steps taken by the English volunteers who joined the Spanish republican army to fight fascism during the country’s civil war of 1936 to 1939.
I had been inspired by my family’s involvement - my great uncle Nat Cohen was one of the first of 40,000 volunteers who saw that the war was a precursor to the larger conflict that would soon engulf Europe.
Laurie Lee, author of Cider with Rosie, had as a 23-year-old travelled through France and then climbed these very paths I found myself on to join in the fight.
The British and the French governments had set up a non-intervention pact in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Fascist Italian and Nazi German governments forces from providing help to their ally, General Franco. Any British subject caught in Spain would be fined and face a two year stretch in prison. It meant volunteers, such as Laurie Lee, had to sneak over the border.
Lee describes his time in Spain in the book A Moment of War: it tells of how he travelled from the French town of Perpignan to Figueres in the north of Spain, over the peaks of the Pyrenees.
Where the Spanish police stopped me was the same area Lee was taken to by French shepherds under the cover of night. I had been walking for three days, a similar length of time it took Lee to do the same stretch.
My route started at St Pancras; I went by Eurostar to Paris, then on to Perpignan. A bus took me in the abbey town of Arles-sur-Tech: in the foothills, it is dominated by the mountains to the south, dark and brooding at night. Lee started from Ceret, around 10 miles from Arles, but, according to his description reached a similar point after a day and night of tough walking.
I was following well marked paths on a route map: Lee had tried, and failed, to find a guide. Instead, he writes: “I knew I simply had to go up, over and south.
“Behind me, as I climbed the gentle slopes of the foothill fell away to Perpignan and the sea, while the steep bulk of the Pyrenees Orientales filled the sky with their sunlit peaks.”
His journey started on December 5, 1936, and was to face some bitter weather. I walked out in June, and my admiration of his achievement increased. Even in the summer, the Pyrenees can be unforgiving to the single traveller. When I was greeted by the border guides out trekking for a day, I had not seen a soul for 48 hours. I was cold, stricken by bouts of vertigo, and worried I had become hopelessly lost in the mists.
My first morning was spent following a path that traversed a mountain stream. I clambered from boulder to boulder, and physically it was the toughest thing I have ever done. I wondered if I had the strength to walk around 15 miles each day, with a rucksack on my back, and with the peaks of the eastern Pyrenees to conquer.
I took one wrong turn. The path petered out but I went on. I found myself clinging to rough scree and boulders: I felt tired, giddy and then angry with myself. I was in danger and I only had myself to blame.
I crouched behind a wind-warped tree and got out my map. I was too scared to take my rucksack off – it was heavy and I wondered if in my precarious spot I would be able to safely put it back on again – and scoured the map for clues as to where I had gone wrong. The map proved to be little help: the paths on the paper did not seem to marry those on the ground in front of me. I decided to turn back, find a spot I knew and go on from there. If I discovered the route I was on was in fact right, well, I'd have to admit defeat – my vertigo, accelerating with each giddy step, was far too much for me to overcome.
I found the spot where I had taken a turning – instead of heading upwards (I had already climbed upwards, upwards, upwards for the best part of the day) my path sent me along the side of a mountain, through a beechwood, and as I came out the other side, I saw the town of Las Illas nestling in a valley, which was my first stop. Las Illas is a tiny hamlet that saw nearly 500,000 refugees pour through it at the end of the war. I stayed in an inn that hosted the Spanish Republican president Luis Companys and his Basque and Catalonia counterparts as they fled. I reached the inn and crashed out, exhausted. Lee's first night was less comfortable. He slept outdoors, and he was caught out in a December blizzard.
“Looking down, the foothills had disappeared and been replaced by a blanket of swirling vapour,” he writes. “The shining peak of Canigou began to a switch on and off like a light house…then the wind rose to a thin-edged wail, and I felt the first stinging bite of snow.”
Lee stumbled, fortuitously, across a ‘rough little stone built shelter. It was half in ruins, and there was nothing inside it but straw, but I suppose it may have saved my life.”
I felt much better for my night’s rest, and faced the following morning with vigour. The path from Las Illas snakes along the Spanish border and starts gently, the accompanying smell of pine in the early summer morning, the rosemary filling the air after a nights rain, made each step a pleasure. While I knew every mile passed took me closer to a swim in the sea and a large brandy – I had planned to make the French border town of Banyuls my destination before heading to Figueres, for Lee each step would have been heavier. He was walking to face well-trained and heavily armed Fascists trying out their modern war machines on the helpless civilians of Spain.
By evening I was still some way from the mountain shelter I was aiming for, and by dusk I hung my hammock between two pine trees and got out my sleeping bag. I was so exhausted that my fears over monsters in the woods soon passed. The only problem was waking up at five with the sun.
Walking alone was relaxing. I could go at my own place, and moan aloud about the severe pains I was getting in my knees, without having a partner to annoy. I also raised my own spirits with the occasional renditions of solid walking songs - something a companion would not have enjoyed. And I found moments of great peace: bird song, including the call of nightingales, took my breath away. The section I was walking had mixed landscapes – at times I was hidden in large woods, which would then break out into open paths, affording incredible views. walking under tree cover means it was hard to gauge quite how high up I was. For the trees to suddenly drop away and Spain to lie ahead of me was intensely visual, and made me wish for a fellow walker to stop and admire the view.The last day on the mountains was tough. My knees were agony, and the weather, for the morning and much of the afternoon, atrocious. The wind blew stinging rain at me and I could not see more than 10 feet in any direction. It was here I met the Spanish police, and was given the fillip of knowing I was nearly there. Then, as I strode across one open piece of moor land, the wind got up more fiercely than before and the skies cleared. The sea appeared: I was till a good three hours away, with a valley to scramble down, but I could see the sun shining on my destination. After a final struggle down a ravine, much of the time on my bottom, I found myself stumbling through olive groves and vine yards: the earth, red, was steaming after the rain. After walking into Banyuls, I left my rucksack in a tourist office, stripped off my clothes, and swam in the Mediterrean.
After a night in a hotel (bliss!) and stocked up my stomach on spaghetti and a glass of red wine, I put my bag on my back and walked along the coast road in midday heat to Portbou. Its an untidy town: George Orwell mentions it in Homage To Catalonia. He fled there after escaping political intrigues in Barcelona. I flashed my passport at the guards in Portbou's train station, and entered Spain. From there, I took a train to Figueres and laid flowers at a memorial to the Brigaders whostayed there.
Lee eventually made it to the Spanish border, but was greeted with suspicion. He too made it to Figueres, it was not before he had been arrested. No one believed he had walked over the Pyrenees in winter carrying just a violin and a saucepan, as his memoirs suggest. After a 50-odd mile walk of my own, without having to dodge border guards, my respect for Lee and the sacrifice he and his comrades were willing to make for the progressive political philosophy they believed in was greater than ever.
MY GREAT-Uncle Nat Cohen left Stepney on a bicycle in June, 1936, to take part in the Workers Olympiad.
Held in Barcelona, it was an alternative competition for those who did not want to go to the Berlin games. He arrived days before General Franco's coup: instead of turning round and going home, he joined a workers militia and was in a small group who tried to re-take the island of Mallorca from Italian troops.
He then set up an English-speaking unit, called the Tom Mann Centuria, which was to become a precursor to the International Brigades. He was shot in the knee and invalided home, and when he returned, the streets of the East End turned out. He was pictured in the Daily Mirror being greeted by hundreds of people, with his new Spanish wife Ramona and a Great Dane dog they had rescued from the besieged city of Madrid. Later Arnold Wesker wrote about him in his seminal play Chicken Soup with Barley, which contains the line: “That Nat Cohen is a terror.”
His memory, along with other Britons who went to Spain, is honoured this Saturday at an annual service held on the South Bank, underneath the London Eye wheel where a sculpture commemorates their sacrifice. |
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Your comments:
We have lived on the French side of the border with Spain for many years and often wondered about the exact route that Laurie Lee took into Spain. After leaving Ceret and Las Illas we assume that he was arrested in La Vajole and from there taken to imprisonment at Figueras. Mr Carrier presumably went down into La Jonquera, onto the old Roses road, and over the Col de Banyuls pass into France again?
R & C McCutcheon |
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