The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

High Mass is going on’, he says, ‘they put food for twelve pilgrims on a table, which is set up at the door of the church. The pilgrims have to go to the door of the kitchen, where the cook hands each one a bowl of broth, not soup, for they do not have it in this country. When the pilgrims receive their bowls of the broth they walk in single file back to the church and sit down in the places reserved for them at the table. Then a man arrives with a great cauldron of cooked meat and serves to each his portion, and another gives each pilgrim a slice of pork and a third pours out a glass of wine for every one. In the afternoon there is Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament with music.’ *
    Such was the reception of pilgrims in the seventeenth century. In the twentieth there are no free hostels and free meals for pilgrims at the cathedral door, but such is the hospitality of the people of Pamplona that no pilgrim goes hungry. After leaving my knapsack and bundles at my lodgings I went off in search of my old friend Tío Marceliano, who is a celebrated character in Pamplona. He is the proprietor of the most popular eating-house and tavern in the city, in the calle Santo Domingo, a little below the central plaza. During the great feria of San Fermín in July every year, after the encierro of the bulls, the aficionados, who have raced in front of the careering bulls, through the streets, go off to Tío Marceliano’s to eat magras, namely fried rashers of bacon and tomatoes, and drink great carafes of red wine. Tío Marceliano’s real name is Matías Anó: he was a staunch Basque mountaineer, a man whom Pío Baroja would acknowledge as a true Arch-European of the Alps and Pyrenees. I found him in his tavern playing Mus with a party of old cronies. When I arrived, I called out: “Olá Don Matías, have you forgotten me and the old days during war?”
    Don Matías jumped to his feet and greeted me warmly. The old cronies gazed at me, summing me up, weighing me in the balance, testing me by all the laws of man and beast.
    “Do I remember you?” cried he. “Do I remember my own name? It is you British and Americans who have forgotten us, your old friends. You were glad to have us in the old days of 1943.”
    Don Matías and his Basque compeers had been staunch friends of the allies in the worst days of the Second World War. They had helped our refugees through the passes of the Pyrenees, risking their lives and in a number of cases falling victims of the German patrols on the frontiers.
    “Don Matías,” said I, “as a British subject I must bow my head in shame. You and Biurrún and our Basque friends belong with many other Spaniards to what I call the ‘Forgotten Legion’. That Legion has numbers in all parts of Spain. Ours has, been ingratitude indeed.” I quoted the Italian historian of the Renaissance, Guicciardini, who said that nothing is in its nature so fleeting, nothing has shorter existence than the remembrance of kind acts; and that he who cannot or will not cancel them by a return of kindness, often seeks to cancel them by forgetting their existence, or by making himself believe that they were after all not so very great.
    “Those are too many words for me,” said Don Matías scratching his head after removing his perpetual boina; “I’m a man of few words. We Basques don’t want gratitude. Friendship, however, does not thrive on forgetfulness. Yet I still believe in Great Britain and North America; I have sons and nephews in both of them and I’ll continue to believe in the democratic countries and in my own Basque race until I die. When we last met was when American propaganda first began to spread through the countryside. I remember when you, Don Gualtiero, came with your friend Señor Gilbert and the Military Attache of the American Embassy and your wives.”
    “I remember well. We were a party of four or five and we were your guests for the San Fermín.”
    “And I remember the surprise of the Guardia Civil in Pamplona when bundles of copies of the Reader’s Digest and P.M. and American propaganda stuff fell out of the attaché’s car in the main street. You said they were toys and comic strips for the children!”
    The festival of San Fermín of 1943 had been the first great gathering at Pamplona since before the Civil War and people from all over Spain attended it. No feria in Spain possesses fiercer gusto than San Fermín. There is excitement in the air, and from early morning the