28
PARTISAN REVIEW
pIe's front in power; after the completion of the first Five Year Plan
and before the Moscow' Trials.
If
Days of Wrath
was a work of the transition,
L' Espoir
is "the
novel of democratic defense" in its ripest form. Although it embraces
only the first phase of the war, ending with the battle of Guadalajara,
L' Espoir
IS
a long book, its structure is complicated if not complex,
and its characters are almost as numerous as the facets of war itself.
In the first chapter, laid in Madrid in the early days of the uprising,
the railway workers union has taken charge of the telephone exchange
at the North Station; and Manuel, a young Communist, is calling
one after another the chief cities of Spain. In this way, Manuel
ascertains which cities ate loyal to the government and which have
succumbed to the fascists; and the reader learns in a flash the military
situation in Spain ....
Leaving the station Manuel goes out into the
streets of Madrid. The night is full of crowds and clenched fists.
Everywhere there are cries of
salud
and snatches of the Internationale.
And trucks loaded with militiamen are travelling towards the Sierra
at 70 miles an hour. The government has ignored for so many weeks
the imminent military revolt, and the masses have grown so tense
waiting for it, that this night of open war comes as "an immense
liberation." Workers and shopkeepers are united in the "strange
fraternity" of the people's front. ... And the political situation? "The
workers' organizations controlled the city (Malraux tells us) while
waiting for instructions from the government." But the government
is pictured as being too paralyzed to act for itself, and seems rather
to be "waiting for instructions" from the workers.
In Barcelona, unlike Madrid, there is fighting in the streets.
The churches which sheltered fascists are burning. The Hotel Colon,
headquarters of the uprising, is beseiged by impromptu militiamen
from the Anarchist federation. Factory sirens are screaming in alarm
and the pigeons are wheeling in clouds above the barricades. Malraux
describes with much precision and lyrical power the peculiar terrors
of street fighting, the exaltation of an armed proletariat. But exalta-
tion, he tells us, is not enough. We meet the Anarchist Puig, who, like
all Malraux's spokesmen, is a leader, a
responsable.
Watching the
extravagant beroism of his comrades before the Hotel Colon, he
decides that they are dying needlessly; their sacrificial gestures are
vestiges of an age of despair, when "all political problems resolved
themselves into questions of audacity and character." But today there
is hope, and "it is no longer a question of setting examples but of
being victorious." What his comrades need, he feels, is to be "co-
ordinated."
