‘The Nabara’ is a long narrative poem by Cecil Day Lewis (see also weeks 240 and 396) which is based on an incident during the Spanish Civil War known as the Battle of Cape Matxitxavo, when four lightly armed trawlers of the Basque Republican Navy engaged a heavy cruiser, the Canarias, belonging to Franco’s fascist Nationalist forces in a desperate attempt to protect a transport ship, the Galdames, carrying passengers and supplies for the Republicans. Numbers may have been on their side, but of course given the disparity in armaments it was like minnows attacking a pike, and three of the trawlers soon retired from the fray; the Nabara fought on and was eventually sunk, with the few surviving members of its crew being taken prisoner.

It is interesting to speculate how far Day Lewis was inspired in the making of the poem by Tennyson’s ‘The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet’, which treats of a similar battle against impossible odds. Certainly those ‘Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico’ could be seen as sharing a kinship across time with Tennyson’s ‘Men of Bideford in Devon’.

It’s a powerful and moving poem, though some may feel that it could have been even better Day Lewis had laboured the point a little less and left the facts of the narrative, to which he seems to have been pretty faithful, to speak for themselves more. That said, it remains an inspirational account of the lengths of self-sacrifice to which ordinary people at that that time, and perhaps even now, will go to defend their freedom.

The poem is rather long so I give only the concluding and in my view strongest section. We pick up the narrative where the Nabara is about to fight on alone.

From ‘The Nabara’

Phase Three

And now the gallant Nabara was left in the ring alone
The sky hollow around her, the fawning sea at her side:
But the ear-ringed crew in their berets stood to the guns, and cried
A fresh defiance down
The ebb of the afternoon, the battle’s darkening tide.
Honour was satisfied long since; they had held and harried
A ship ten times their size; they well could have called it a day.
But they hoped, if a little longer they kept the cruiser in play,
Galdames with the wealth of  life and metal she carried
Might make her getaway.

Canarias, though easily she outpaced and out-gunned her,
Finding this midge could sting
Edged off, and beneath a wedge of smoke steamed in a ring
On the rim of the trawler’s range, a circular storm of thunder.
But always Nabara turned her broadside, manoeuvring
To keep both guns on the target, scorning safety devices.
Slower now battle’s tempo, irregular the beat
Of gunfire in the heart
Of the afternoon, the distempered sky sank to the crisis,
Shell-shocked the sea tossed and hissed in delirious heat.

The battle’s tempo slowed, for the cruiser could take her time,
And the guns of the Nabara grew
Red-hot, and of fifty-two Basque seamen had been her crew
Many were dead already, the rest filthy with grime
And their comrades’ blood, weary with wounds all but a few.
Between two fires they fought, for the sparks that flashing spoke
From the cruiser’s thunder-bulk were answered  on their own craft
By traitor flames that crawled out of every cranny and rift
Blinding them all with smoke.
At half-past four Nabara was burning fore and aft.

What buoyancy of will
Was theirs to keep her afloat, no vessel now but a sieve –
So jarred and scarred, the rivets starting, no inch of her safe
From the guns of the foe that wrapped her in a cyclone of shrieking steel!
Southward the sheltering havens showed clear, the cliffs and the surf
Familiar to them from childhood, the shapes of a life still dear.
But dearer still to see
Those shores insured for life from the shadow of tyranny.
Freedom was not on their lips; it was what made them endure,
A steel spring in the yielding flesh, a thirst to be free.

And now from the little Donostia that lay with her 75’s
Dumb in the offing, they saw Nabara painfully lower
A boat, which crawled like a shattered crab slower and slower
Towards them. They cheered the survivors thankful to save these lives
At least. They saw each rower,
As the boat dragged alongside, was wounded – the oars they held
Dripping with blood, a bloody skein reeled out in their wake:
And they swarmed down the rope-ladders to rescue these men so weak
From wounds they must be hauled
Aboard like babies. And then they saw they had made a mistake.

For, standing up in the boat,
A man of that grimy boat’s crew hailed them. ‘Our officer asks
You give us your bandages and all you water-casks,
Then run for Bermeo. We’re going to finish this game of pelota.’

Donostia’s captain begged them with tears to escape but the Basques
Would play their game to the end.
They took the bandages, and cursing at his delay
They took the casks that might keep the fires on their ship at bay;
And they rowed back to the Nabara, trailing their blood behind
Over the water, the sunset and crimson ebb of their day.

For two hours more they fought, while Nabara beneath their feet
Was turned to a heap of smouldering scrap-iron. Once again
The flames they had checked a while broke out. When the forward gun
Was hit, they turned about
Bringing the after gun to bear. They fought in pain
And the instant knowledge of death but the waters filling their riven
Ship could not quench the love that fired them. As each man fell
To the deck, his body took fire as if death made visible
That burning spirit. For two more hours they fought, and at seven
They fired their last shell.

Of her officers all but one were dead. Of her engineers
All but one were dead. Of the fifty-two that had sailed
In her, all were dead but fourteen – and each of these half-killed
With wounds. And the night-dew fell in a hush of ashen tears,
And Nabara’s tongue was stilled.
Southward the sheltering havens grew dark, the cliffs and the green
Shallows they knew; where their friends had watched them as the evening wore
To a glowing end, who swore
Nabara must show s white flag now, but saw instead the fourteen
Climb into their matchwood boat and fainting pull for the shore.

Canarias lowered a launch that swept in a greyhound’s curve
Pitiless to pursue
And cut them off. But that bloodless and all-but-phantom crew
Still gave no soft concession to fate: they strung their nerve
For one last fling of defiance, they shipped their oars and threw
Hand-grenades at the launch as it circled about to board them.
But the strength of the hands that had carved them a hold on history
Failed them at last: the grenades fell short of the enemy,
Who grappled and overpowered them,
While Nabara sank by the stern in the hushed Cantabrian sea.

                                    *                   *                      *

They bore not a charmed life. They went into battle foreseeing
Probable loss, and they lost. The tides of Biscay flow
Over the obstinate bones of many, the winds are sighing
Round prison walls where the rest are doomed like their ship to rust –
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
Simple men who asked of their life no mythical splendour,
They loved its familiar ways so well that they preferred
In the rudeness if their heart to die rather than to surrender…
Mortal these words and the deed they remember, but cast a seed
Shall flower for an age when freedom is man’s creative word.

Freedom was more than word, more than the base coinage
Of politicians who hiding behind the skirts of peace
They had defiled, gave up that country to rack and carnage.
For whom, indelibly stamped with history’s contempt,
Remains but to haunt the blackened shell of their policies
For these I have told of, freedom was flesh and blood – a mortal
Body, the gun-breech hot to its touch: yet the battle’s height
Raised it to love’s meridian and held it awhile immortal;
And its light through time still flashes like a star’s that has turned to ashes,
Long after Nabara’s passion was quenched in the sea’s heart.

C. Day Lewis