- [Man] In the morning,
before your call comes from the desk,
the roaring burst of a high explosive shell wakes you,
(bomb explodes)
and you go to the window and look out
to see a man, his head down, his coat collar up,
sprinting desperately across the paved square.
There is the acrid smell of high explosive
you hoped you'd never smell again,
(crowd murmuring) (fire burning)
and in a bathrobe and bedroom slippers,
you hurry down the marble stairs
and almost into a middle-aged woman wounded in the abdomen,
who is being helped into the hotel entrance
by two men in blue workmen's smocks.
(typewriter clacking)
She has her two hands crossed below her big,
old style Spanish bosom,
and from between her fingers,
the blood is spurting in a thin stream.
(munitions exploding)
On the corner, twenty yards away,
is a heap of rubble, smashed cement, and thrown-up dirt,
a single dead man, his torn clothes dusty,
and a great hole in the sidewalk
from which the gas from a broken main is rising,
looking like a heat mirage in the cold morning air.
- [Narrator] The new lovers occupied a suite
on the third floor of the Hotel Florida.
(bomb exploding)
The hotel was sometimes hit by enemy shells
intended for a nearby loyalist communication center,
(air raid sirens echoing) but it remained headquarters
for a host of correspondents and celebrities
eager for a firsthand look at the fighting.
André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Herbert L Matthews of the New York times,
the photographer Robert Capa,
the writers Langston Hughes and John Dos Passos,
and the movie star Errol Flynn.
"Hemingway, crackling with generosity,"
one reporter remembered, "and bursting with vigor,
"was at the center of things.
"A high-spirited crowd gathered around him each evening,
"often wearing winter coats since the hotel had no heat,
"to dine on beer and whiskey, canned ham,
"and pâté he imported from France,
"sometimes supplemented with partridges
"he had shot in the fields beyond the city that morning
"and had cooked up on a hot plate
"for himself and his guests."
(guns firing) - He did identify most utterly
with extreme situations.
It's like in King Lear - it's wanting to know the worst
and to know if one can bear it.
It's a test and it's also a terror,
and they come together in one.
- [Narrator] Martha Gellhorn,
reporting on the war for Colliers,
was introduced by Ernest to everyone as his girlfriend.
"She wore short skirts and often sat on the table,"
one woman recalled,
"swinging her long slim legs in a provocative manner,
"but she covered the fighting every bit as fearlessly
"as Hemingway did."
- We'd either hear with our ears
that something was going on,
or we'd hear by rumor
that there was a push or a battle or something,
and then we'd just go off to it.
It was a very small, very much do-it-yourself war.
It was the side of the poor, and...
and that was how it worked.
And those of us who cared about it
cared about it, I suppose,
more than anything before or since.