Pyrenees crossing - snow and cognac

Remembered in March 2007, by R. W. Rynerson

WAY BACK WHEN…  March 1971

Spain.

I also remember how interesting it was to see so little population.  Americans have the idea of Europe as being densely settled, but the villages here were tiny, as shown in my previous slides, and there were few of them.

Of course, this trip was only made three decades after the Spanish Civil War, and I could not tell how much poverty and underdevelopment was a legacy of long ago, or a consequence of the drylands, or how much was the result of that bitter struggle.

Continuing into the Pyrenees... to freedom

One of the things that I noticed about this train heading up into the mountains is how many young people were taking it for access to day hikes.  Sometimes it was just two or three students, as in the attached slide, and sometimes it was a larger group of young men and women.

Only the night before, I had experienced some of the many reminders of the tight social control in the arch-conservative Spain of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.  Earlier in the trip, I had run into more police inspections, border guard attention, and hints of secret police activity than in any of the other countries west of the Iron Curtain that I had visited.

The Spanish Civil War had ended 32 years before my March 1971 visit, but during its first three decades, the Fascist government of Spain was able to control its security through the kind of informal means that I had witnessed in several situations.  For example:

Following traditional practice, a night watchman patrolled each street in urban areas.  He had a big key ring with keys to the street gates of each house, hostal (Spanish for a pension or bed & breakfast), etc.  On the night before this train trip, when I arrived back at my hostal after seeing a film, I had to clap my hands loudly.  The watchman appeared out of the shadows and let me in to my hostal.  He had to receive a tip.

The watchman traditionally was a retired military person or civil servant.  This provided him with a supplement to his government pension, but it also meant that someone who was dependent on the government knew everything that was going on in that street, including who came and went at each home.

As urban life became more complex, an informal call by police on the watchman was no longer enough.  In 1968, the Organizacion Contrasubversiva Nacional was formed to give the Fascist government a real secret police department.

How did this relate to the students' desire for fresh air?  Outdoor sports and hiking were among the few socially acceptable outlets in which they could get away from the tight social controls and the political controls.  No wonder these passengers looked so happy!

Passenger count gets thinner.. as does the air

The passenger count on the local train to the French border continued to thin out, while the scenery became more and more dramatic.  An elderly Spanish lady was amused at my picture-taking and told me to wait until we reached the higher elevations.  Fortunately, I took her advice, because things were about to unfold in a different way than I had expected.

The train schedules in the Deutsche Bundesbahn's Ausland Kursbuch (Foreign Timetables) France and Spain sections disagreed with each other slightly, but that was not unusual.  The Spanish tables showed one set of times and the French tables showed a slightly different set of times.  The train was running on a third set of times, but every source was within a few minutes of the other.  (This is not uncommon when paper timetables have to be circulated between companies.)

As the train eased into the Spanish border station of Canfranc, I was prepared for the usual mad scramble to go through Customs while changing from the Broad Gauge Spanish train to the Standard Gauge French train.  Instead, the few remaining passengers wandered off.  No one headed into Customs.

I stopped for a moment to look around, and saw that the railway crew was getting ready to couple a standby car onto the equipment of my train to be ready for the Sunday afternoon return crowd from the mountains.  I snapped photo 11, as I looked at a scene that I would have thought was in old Colorado.  The spare car had a wooden body and the mountains behind closed in on the little town.

Cautiously, I approached a Spanish officer in the tri-cornered hat of the Guardia Civil.  Where should I go for the train to France?  After he understood what I was asking, he laughed.  He made some comment, but I couldn't understand it.  I asked if it was okay to walk into the Customs area, and he waved his arm to indicate that I was welcome.  Cautiously, I walked into the room where baggage would have been opened.  There was no one there.  I walked a bit further and realized that I was headed out the French side.  No one was there.

Stepping out onto the platform, I realized what the guard must have been trying to tell me.  Photo 12 shows what I saw.  The tracks were completely covered by snow.  In some places, there were icicles hanging on the electric catenary.  It was obvious that there would be no train coming.  Was I at a dead-end?

I stumbled through the snow to a hut from which I could see smoke rising.  A lone SNCF (French) railwayman was going through the motions of tending the empty yard.  As best as he could, he tried to explain to me that the line was closed by a storm or a washout, but that a bus would be running.  I walked back through the snow, still half expecting to be yelled at by a policeman or a border guard, but nothing happened.

Back in the station, I looked around until I found the waiting room and an SNCF ticket counter.  Posted there was an emergency timetable, showing a bus connection between Canfranc, Spain and Bedous, France.  Bedous was so small that it did not even show on my German timetable.  Instead of a mad dash to catch the French Marchandise et voyageurs (Mixed freight and passenger train) I was going to have over two hours in Canfranc.

I thought of buying more film, as I only had a few frames left.  But it was Sunday, and in conservative Spain almost everything was closed.  The one store that sold film, I was told, was among the places closed.

So, I headed into the station restaurant to get some lunch and pass the time.  And that was the beginning of getting to know a bit more about the people of the Pyrenees.

Dining and then a stroll in the Pyrenees...

The railroad station restaurant was huge, with tables set with white tablecloths for perhaps over 100 customers.  There were three or four customers in the place.  A television was running in one corner with live, beginning to end coverage of a Catholic religious procession.  The hostess seated me at a table with an older man who was dressed like a Basque.  By now, I had been in Europe for almost two years, so I was not surprised at being seated with other people, but what followed was not typical.

I didn't order wine with my meal, but my tablemate simply ordered another glass for and poured some of the wine from his bottle for me.  We broke bread together with me saying my few words of thanks in broken Spanish.  Otherwise, we said little, but it broke the ice.  It turned out that he would be on my bus.

When it came time to load the bus, I found that it was the 11-passenger Citreon all-purpose vehicle one saw everywhere in France then.  These were used as police vans, as station shuttles, as delivery trucks, anything that one might imagine cutting into their sheet metal bodies.  Photo 10 was snapped by the bus driver, and I look a little goofy in it, but you need to have an idea of how we were going to assault the summit of the mountain pass.

The Garage del Val d'Aspe bus had been chartered by the SNCF for us.  The company name, a mixture of Spanish and French, was typical of the language spoken there.  The driver had brought a buddy along, which turned out later to be a good thing.  As we pulled out, though, I was concerned to see how both of them smoked and waved their hands while driving the two-lane mountain highway.  Later on, I learned that this was the highway that Hannibal had taken with his elephants on his epic march to attack Rome.  I wondered if his drivers paid better attention to the road.

Just before departure, a well-dressed Spanish man arrived and said kissy farewells to a VERY well-dressed French woman, presenting her with a bottle of Spanish Cognac.  We others gawked: a teen-aged girl, an elderly lady, two downscale Spanish guys, and my "Basque" tablemate, none of us so glamorous.  I looked around at our bunch of passengers and realized that we were from the cast for a disaster movie.

Last  stop in Spain...

Here are the last hours of March 28, 1971, the end of my week in Spain.  No, I don't always remember exact dates from that long ago, but I found the attached movie ticket with some other items from the trip.  The evening before my bus ride over the Pyrenees, I had watched "Paint Your Wagon" in Spanish, with Lee Marvin.  The part of the mayor in an old Western town was played by Tom McCall, who was actually the Governor of Oregon at that time.  The Spanish crowd cheered and shouted "Toro, Toro!" for the scene in which a bull rampaged through the movie town.

All of that, in dry Zaragoza, seemed far away that next afternoon in the midst of the snow and ice at the border crossing.  The Spanish customs post did look like it belonged in a movie, however.  It was perched on the edge of a cliff into which the two-lane roadway was cut.  There was little room for any traffic or inspections, other than in the road.  A red-and-white customs barrier blocked the road as the border guards waved us to a stop.

On the attached 1938 map, the rail line is shown as a black line crossing the border west of Mt. Perdido (10,994 ft).  From breakfast time, I had started on this map in Zaragoza, passed through Huesca, and in mid-afternoon was at the crossing.

The guards and the driver/s had a long discussion about the events of the day and then we presented our papers.  On previous European border crossings, I had tried only presenting the relevant documents, and then they would ask for more.  This time I pulled out everything, and it made quite a pile of paper:
    + Portugese language orders
    + Spanish language orders
    + French language orders
    + Berlin travel documents, in Russian, English and French
    + Army DA31 Leave and Pass Form
    + My Army identity card

You can read more in my webpages on the paperwork that we soldiers generated at: Berlin 1969: Documents/Papiere .

The border guards pounced on the Russian language document.  My travel orders had been stamped by the Soviet Army when I left Berlin via Marienborn.  I was a bit nervous, because the losing side in the Spanish Civil War had been involved with Soviet (Stalinist) "advisors" and "volunteers" and these guards worked for the winning side (that had been involved with their German Nazi and Italian Fascist equivalents).  They studied the document carefully and then I saw them flip it over and on the back was printed a purple reproduction of our Berlin Commanding General's signature and rubber stamp.

I think that they were reading the French text with the signature.  Everyone else on the bus was getting waved through, so they could watch with me as the guards' lips moved as they read the Berlin travel authorization.  The guards were now impressed, and in turn, everyone on the bus was highly impressed.  One of the border officers returned my paperwork with a smart flourish and a salute.  One of them also explained that it was a pleasure to pass through the "first American of Spring."  I breathed a sigh of relief.

The red-and-white barrier was raised and we were rolling downhill.  Around a curve, we saw a French fort cut into the rock walls of the next cliff, facing Spain.  They were ready with a mirror-image of the fort I had just seen on the south side of the pass in case the Spanish invaded them.

I kept wondering where the French border post would be.  In the meantime, we suddenly began making good time.  Unlike the lone Spanish blade plow, the French were using an elaborate snow and ice clearing vehicle that scraped the road bare.  Our driver continued his conversation with his buddy, waving his cigarette with one hand, while steering down the mountain pass with the other.  I tried not to think of those little news stories in the back of the papers, headlined "Bus Plunges Off Cliff."

The French border post finally appeared in a pleasant mountain valley setting, far inside their country.  Our driver used their phone to call the railway dispatcher and then reassured us that they would hold our train.  I couldn't believe that, but hoped he was right.  There was no excitement about my paperwork here-- the French barely paid any attention to it and waved us all through.

Further down the valley, one question was answered as I looked down and saw what looked like a washed out bridge on the railway.  This apparently was where it was shut down.

Picturesque village... and a realization

And then we were in tiny Bedous, not shown on many maps, and there was the SNCF station, with snow-free rails, and-- our train was gone.  The teenage girl of our bus group left to visit her friend in town-- this was the end of the line for her.  For the rest of us, it was cold, and an icy stream bubbled nearby.  Picturesque, but we were getting tired of picturesque.

Instead of being a disaster, this turned into one more surprise.  The Chef de Gare (Stationmaster) took pity on us and invited us to join him in his heated office (the waiting room was unheated).  He was a jovial host and we all conversed in the local mixture of Spanish and French, with me being able to make out that the stationmaster had held the same rank in the French Army that I had in the U.S. Army.  This immediately made us comrades in arms, although of different generations.  Someone suggested that we should toast that, if we had something to drink.

At that point, the well-dressed woman who had attracted everyone's attention in Canfranc reminded us that she had the bottle of Spanish Cognac that she had been given.  She went to her bag to pull it out, and while she did that, to my American amazement, the stationmaster pulled out enough shot glasses from his desk drawer for all of us.  Americans would not be surprised to find extra coffee cups in a stationmaster's desk, but shot glasses caught me off guard.  The last photo in this series shows us celebrating our adventures of the day, the French and U.S. Armies, the SNCF (even the dispatcher who had decided to send the train out without us), and whatever other excuse we had for finishing off the bottle.

The Cognac was powerful.  I went outside into the cold for a while and walked along the banks of the creek to stop my head from spinning.  That photo was the last frame on my Instamatic film and it was getting dark.  I supposed that we would sit around in the station till the last train of the evening departed.

Instead, this day would not quit surprising me.  The Spanish guy on the right in the group photo had been trying to get the attention of Our Lady of the Cognac.  He suggested that they go into town and get a bite of supper.  She responded by agreeing, but added that they should take "the American soldier" with them.  Another one of the Spanish men volunteered to join us.  And so, as the sunlight turned off behind the mountains, we walked down to the little village center with its crooked streets that looked like a Hollywood film set and found an inn that was serving dinner.

It was a simple, but good meal, but what I recall best, besides being amused at being the chaperone for this meal, was the television news.

On French television, I found myself watching film of a column of GI's passing through a swamp in South Vietnam, water up to their necks, holding their rifles over their heads.  My new companions carried on their conversation, but I sat there with my head spinning.  It was no longer the Cognac, but rather the weight of the realization that I was not only not going to Vietnam -- something that everyone assumed when I went into the service in 1968 -- but that I had learned so many things and was only five to six months away from finally getting out of the Army.

(I had left home after my leave in January 1969 and was not to return home again until September 1971.  I had used all of my leave for travel in Europe, sure that I would soon be ordered to Vietnam, with a leave at home on my way from Berlin to Southeast Asia.  Those anticipated orders never came.)

We finished our meal and met the others back at the train station.  The train was an "emu" (electric multiple unit) set that had open seating, very much like a North American commuter train.  We sat together and continued our conversation, while other passengers gawked openly at us, trying to figure out who we were.

The Chef de Gare stood on the platform and blew his whistle to signal the engineer to proceed, and then as our windows rolled past him and we waved, he saluted us, military-style.  There was an elderly lady watching us whose mouth dropped open when she saw that.

In busy Pau where the Bas-Pyrenees rail main line cuts across from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, our group split up.  Some were destined there, some were transferring east toward Lourdes, and some-- as I -- were transferring west toward Bordeaux and on to Paris.

The Cognac lady smiled at us and headed for a comfortable sleeping car.  The two Spanish guys who had been trying to get her attention headed somewhere back in the long string of 2nd Class cars.  I found a 2nd Class car marked for Paris-Austerlitz and wedged myself in the corner of a compartment so I would be able to sleep.  For a time, I was alone in the compartment, reflecting on the experiences of this amazing day and on the changes that I had experienced in myself during my two years in Europe.  Then a group of French sailors stormed into the compartment at Bordeaux.  Sea air blew into the open window as we rolled out toward the Loire and Paris and I thought of home and the Oregon Coast.  The crowded Pyrenees Express seemed to be part of a different world as it hustled us into that night.

--rwr--

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