On the Plain In Spain
Dudley Poore
Editor's note: In August 1919, Dudley Poore and John Dos Passos, both freshly discharged from the U.S. Army, met in Paris and headed south with the intention of crossing into Spain, where they planned to remain for some months—they set no precise limits on their stay. Although Dos Passos had a Spanish visa, Poore had none, so he entered the land illegally by wading across the Bidassoa River, which marked the national border, near the town of Hendaye. During the fall and winter they journeyed widely while living primarily in Madrid, Granada, then Madrid again. Much of the time a third American, Arthur McComb, a friend of theirs from Harvard, resided with them. Frequently they enjoyed the company of Spanish acquaintances, chief among them being Jose Giner y Pantoja, whom Dos Passos had known during the fall of 1916 and the first months of 1917. Dos Passos and McComb departed Madrid early in the spring of 1920; Poore remained some weeks longer to absorb the life of Spain before he too departed to rejoin Dos Passos in Paris.
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece that Poore has written about this stay in a Spain largely untouched by the ravages of World War 1 and as yet unaffected by the industrialization that was overtaking the rest of Western Europe. For him, as for his friends, it was an idyllic moment after the horrors he and Dos Passos had witnessed as ambulance drivers on the Western Front and later in the mountains along the Austrian border in Italy. They were aspiring writers; they admired the Spanish character; and they were free to move about as they pleased.
