Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  As work places closed, scores of communist and socialist youth, now fused into the unified socialist youth JSU (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas), reported to their local branches. A 25-year-old clerk, Pedro SUAREZ, hadn’t slept at home for many weeks. He and the other members of the workers’ and peasants’ anti-fascist militia, the MAOC (Milicias Anti-fascistas Obreras y Campesinas), were on active duty. ‘Everyone knew the uprising was going to take place.’ They had a few pistols, nothing more. But even unarmed they were ready, night after night, sleeping on benches in their local branches.

  At the socialist casa del pueblo, Tomás MORA, national committee member of the UGT, broke the news to other trade union and socialist party leaders. But they decided not to announce it to the large cultural meeting MORA was about to open so as not to alarm the people.

  Nor did the news appear in the papers the next day; the republican government slapped on total censorship. ‘Our readers will think we’re living in the best of all possible worlds,’ grumbled a journalist. ‘No one will believe that,’ replied another. ‘Lack of official news always means people will believe any rumour.’

  * * *

  Saturday, 18 July

  SEVILLE

  At dawn the heat lifted. A breeze from the east cooled the streets as Rafael MEDINA walked to the Sport café in the Calle Tetuán. His brother-in-law, an air force captain, had been sent home under house arrest a few hours earlier for firing at a plane sent from Madrid to bomb the insurgent military in Morocco; he and Capt. Vara del Rey had knocked it out on the ground. Prepared to die for his ideals, his brother-in-law had just escaped and returned to Tablada airfield.

  The streets were almost deserted: the calm before the storm that must now break, he thought. Things couldn’t go on like this. Calvo Sotelo’s murder at the beginning of the week, ‘in which the Popular Front government had had a hand’, was the final blow.1 The army wouldn’t wait any longer.

  Turning into the street, he remembered what his father had said as they passed a group of day labourers out in the country not long before. Seeing the rancour and contempt with which they looked at the car, his father commented: ‘Rafael, unhappily there is no solution to all this.’

  Nor was there. Those on top, the landowners, had failed to understand; they had refused to follow his father’s example in setting up village industries, in distributing land among the village labourers. Those on the bottom were filled with envy. Understandably. The result was the greatest imaginable hatred among classes, a complete rupture between those who called themselves right- and left-wing. Nowhere were the social differences greater than here, in Andalusia. The left was preparing a revolution, foreign communist leaders were entering the country, he believed; while those with means on the other side were leaving. It was the brink of class war.

  He walked into the café. His friend, the rejoneador Pepe ‘El Algabeño’, was waiting; the rising in Seville was to take place that evening or the next morning. General Queipo de Llano was to lead it.

  —Queipo! A Republican, a man who had conspired against the king, who had fought José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange to which I had belonged since the Popular Front victory at the recent elections. What shape would the coup take under his leadership? I didn’t like the sound of it, nor did Pepe …

  SAN SEBASTIAN

  The civil governor looked up as he walked into the office. ‘What, you again!’ ‘Of course,’ replied the CNT official, ‘you’re supposed to be the arbitrator of the fishermen’s strike, and I’ve come to see what you’re doing about it.’

  Miguel GONZALEZ INESTAL, one of the few full-time paid anarcho-syndicalist union officials, was secretary of the northern regional federation of CNT fishermen’s unions. His members at Pasajes, the large fishing port near San Sebastián, had been on strike since May for higher wages and better work conditions. For a moment he and Governor Artola, a left republican, discussed the strike; from the governor’s expressions, GONZALEZ INESTAL began to realize that he didn’t yet know.

  —‘I think you must be unaware of what has just happened.’ ‘What’s that – what has happened?’ ‘The military have risen in Morocco. A state of emergency has been declared.’ ‘I don’t believe it,’ he cried. ‘Why don’t you get on the phone and find out? … ’

  As the governor reached for the telephone, the military commandant of San Sebastián was announced; the two conferred. A staff major, on holiday in the Basque city, arrived and urged the governor to take immediate measures to prevent the near-by Loyola barracks from rising. ‘I am a right-winger, but I have sworn loyalty to the republic.’

  —Then this officer, Major Garmendia, turned to me. ‘Which side is the CNT on?’ ‘On the side of anyone opposed to the rising,’ I replied. ‘And the fishermen’s strike –?’ ‘It will be called off immediately. Señor gobernador civil,’ I said, turning to Artola, ‘the first thing you should do is to keep the military commandant here as a hostage.’ I saw he didn’t like the idea; he was a weak man. I turned away. His wife came up to me. ‘You must encourage him to resist. Do everything you can, my husband is very passive, he doesn’t realize the gravity of the situation.’ She paused. ‘You’re a resolute man, I can see. Use his telephone, do whatever is necessary.’ I went to the phone and rang up my union headquarters. I told the lads there to prepare for the trouble that was about to hit us. At the other end of the line the voices sounded pleased …

  SEVILLE

  The news went round the city in a flash. León MARTIN, a mechanic, heard it in the garage where he was at work. The atmosphere had been tense for weeks; everyone knew something was going to happen. ‘But when it did, it happened so fast it took everyone by surprise.’ He tried to get the ninety members of his local CNT section, of which he was the secretary, together; only a dozen or so turned up. Together they set off for the assault guard barracks in the Alameda.2

  —‘Arms! Arms!’ the people were shouting. There were hundreds of us outside the barracks; but we didn’t get any arms. A few patrols of assault guards were out in the streets, accompanied by a few civilians with pistols – but what could they do? …

  After lunching at a hotel in the centre, General Queipo de Llano donned his uniform and drove to divisional headquarters. Meeting no more than verbal opposition, he arrested General Villa-Abrille and took command. He repeated the procedure at the infantry barracks next door. Ordering the regiment to be paraded, he found he had 130 men at his command; summer leave had depleted the army’s effective strength in Seville as elsewhere. He detailed a captain to march into the city at the head of his men to proclaim a State of War.

  In the Garden City suburb, Juan CAMPOS, a cabinet-maker, heard shooting; he wasn’t sure who was firing or why. He set off for the centre. He had time on his hands, his furniture factory was on a three-day week. ‘Like so many others, my employers were boycotting the republic; they gave work only when they wanted.’ At the civil government building, he found a crowd clamouring for arms; but none were being handed out. A cry went up calling on people to make for the artillery depot in the Paseo de Colón, along the river.

  —We set off, 2,000 of us at least. The divisions which had racked the working-class organizations in Seville no longer counted, recalled Francisco CABRERA, a sharecropper’s son, who belonged to the communist youth. We weren’t being armed because the republican authorities were more frightened of the working class than of the military. We communists didn’t share the government’s confidence that the rising could be put down in twenty-four hours. Party orders were for all militants to come to Seville …

  Queipo had moved fast; an engineer captain with sixty men had been ordered to take the artillery depot where 25,000 rifles were stored. The workers were met by fire; men fell to the ground, wounded and dead. The rest scattered.

  The cabinet-maker, a socialist party member, retreated to the casa del pueblo; he found the socialist headquarters deserted. An assault guard captain came looking for the two socialist parliamen
tary deputies. A general strike had been called, he said, they were needed. But they didn’t show up.

  —They stayed at home – and that’s where the military found them. No party or union leader displayed the slightest sense of leadership when the moment came …

  Returning to the Plaza Nueva in the centre, he found groups shouting: ‘All workers back to their barrios.’ What a mistake, he reflected. The people should stay to defend the city centre. But they took up the cry and started to leave for the working-class neighbourhoods to the west and over the river to the south.

  —The Seville working class wasn’t the organized proletariat of Barcelona, lamented León MARTIN. There was a lack of cohesion, a lack of consciousness. Seville was underdeveloped, the working class included an enormous number of sub-proletarians. If the pigmentation of our skins had been different, we would have been blacks …

  Queipo’s shortage of soldiers was made good with cannon; there was no difficulty in getting a field piece into the centre. A few rounds and the assault guards in the Telephone Exchange in the main square surrendered. Then the cannon was turned on the Hotel Inglaterra behind which stood the civil government building.

  Ignacio CAÑAL, a falangist lawyer, advanced across the square towards the hotel. Very few civilians had joined the rising, he noticed; not more than twenty-five or thirty in the first six hours. Of course, most of his falangist comrades were still in gaol, but he had expected more volunteers. A shell whistled over his head, tearing through the screen of the outdoor cinema set up in the square, passed through a hotel window and exploded on the civil government building –

  —Led by an artillery major we ran into the building. The governor and other authorities came down the stairs, their hands over their heads. In an extraordinary way, the events all seemed very ordinary, utterly provincial …

  ‘From time to time I had to rub my eyes to convince myself I wasn’t dreaming,’ Queipo wrote later. Within a few hours, he had taken the centre of Spain’s fourth largest city, ‘red’ Seville, in a coup which had had the prior support of only two majors and a handful of captains he had not even spoken to. Half an hour after the radio station was taken, Queipo was making his first broadcast.

  ‘Sevillanos’: To arms! The fatherland is in danger and, in order to save it, some men of spirit, some generals, have assumed the responsibility of placing themselves at the forefront of a movement of salvation which is triumphant everywhere.

  The Army of Africa is preparing to cross to Spain to take part in the task of crushing this unworthy government which has resolved to destroy Spain in order to convert the country into a colony of Moscow.

  Sevillanos: The die is cast, it is useless for the scum to resist. Legionaries and Moroccan troops are en route for Seville, and when they arrive they will hunt down these trouble-makers like wild animals. ¡Viva España! ¡Viva la República!’

  MADRID

  During the day the government issued two communiqués calling for calm and assuring the nation that ‘nobody, absolutely nobody’ on the mainland had joined the uprising. There were rumours that the government was about to resign. The socialist and communist parties issued a joint statement supporting the liberal republican government, but calling on the working class to prepare to fight in the streets. With what? The government refused to arm the people.

  Capt. Urbano ORAD DE LA TORRE, a retired artillery officer, went down to the artillery depot. There was no point in staying at the war ministry; the place was chaotic, he thought; Casares Quiroga, prime minister and war minister, was in a state of collapse, incapable of taking decisions. At the depot, he was talking to the commandant, Lt Col. Rodrigo Gil, a socialist like himself, when word was brought that the workers were preparing to take it by force in their search for arms.

  —‘What shall I do?’ Rodrigo Gil asked. ‘There are only 500 rifles left and no ammunition.’ ‘Hand out the rifles you’ve got and tell them to wait until the ammunition arrives.’ I went out in a lorry to tell the workers to be patient, arms were coming. Then I fetched the rifles and, on the corner of the Calle Atocha, I handed them out to anyone who showed me a left-wing membership card. I didn’t know who they were – they might have been bandits and assassins – but at that moment the people had to be armed …

  More arms – another 4,500 rifles – had been handed out earlier that evening, mainly to members of the communist-led workers’ and peasants’ anti-fascist militia. There were ten times that number of rifles stored in the depot, all without bolts. For the past two years, due to fears of popular assault on military arsenals, rifles and bolts had been stored separately. Some 45,000 bolts were now stacked in the Montaña barracks close to the former Royal Palace. Only a few hours earlier, the officer commanding the infantry regiment in the barracks had refused to obey an order signed by the prime minister to hand over the bolts. The Montaña in the heart of Madrid was considered in consequence to have joined the uprising; it held the key to the widespread arming of the people.

  NAVARRE

  As the sun went down, four Carlist3 peasant lads in shirt-sleeves lay in the ditch watching the road to Pamplona. It was hot. Three of them had pistols, the other a shotgun. Their leader, Antonio IZU, had been reaping wheat on the family farm that morning and hadn’t heard of the rising until he got home. Turning the radio on, he learnt that the army revolt in Morocco had been crushed. Notwithstanding, Esteban Ezcura, a local landowner and requeté commander of the Echauri valley, had ordered Izu and the others to keep watch and stop any cars.

  In the Carlist headquarters in Pamplona, Mario OZCOIDI, requeté captain, waited. That morning, a message had arrived from General Mola and he, the only requeté officer available, had hurried to the general’s HQ. As he waited for Mola, the chief planner of the uprising, to finish talking to the newly appointed guardia civil commanding officer in Pamplona, who was known for his loyalty to the republic, Mola himself came out and said: ‘We’ve got to finish off this bastard.’ OZCOIDI hurried back, planning to arrest, or kill if need be, the civil guard officer, who was about to take his men south to Tafalla on the Ebro river to resist the uprising.

  —Suddenly, I heard shots from the guardia civil barracks. We didn’t know what had happened. But soon the news went round like wildfire: the guards had shot down their commanding officer as he was attempting to get them to leave the barracks …

  Not a single car had come along the road all evening. Before giving up his guard duty, IZU reported to his commander; Ezcura told him to have his men ready first thing in the morning and to make for Pamplona in the local bus.

  —‘We’re at war now,’ he told me. ‘Ah, that’s good,’ I replied. And I went home very happy. I didn’t sleep all that night, thinking of what a hell of a shindy we were going to kick up …

  MADRID

  In the evening the government resigned. A new government, under Martínez Barrio, leader of Unión Republicana, the party the farthest to the right within the Popular Front, was formed. The president of the republic, Manuel Azaña, had wanted the formation of a national government, from communists to right-wing republicans, to crush the military rising. The socialists, under pressure from Largo Caballero, leader of the party’s left wing, refused to take part, calling instead for the people to be armed. The government which emerged in the late evening was composed exclusively of republicans, in general more to the right than those in the outgoing cabinet.

  The Puerta del Sol was filled with people, who had been flooding in all afternoon and evening, shouting for arms. Suddenly, Julián VAZQUEZ, a communist tailor, saw a figure appear on a balcony of the interior ministry. There was silence, everyone waited. He began to read out the list of the new cabinet, and as he did so a cry went up, then a shout repeated from mouth to mouth.

  —‘Treachery! Treachery!’ The atmosphere was explosive. If they’d given us arms at that moment we’d have been capable of conquering the world …

  To a left republican schoolteacher, Régulo MARTINEZ, the new government se
emed a prudent move. The military were rising to the cry of ‘death to communism’; here was a government to show them that there was no such threat. But the people took the news badly.

  —Even members of my own party – Azaña’s party – began tearing up their membership cards. The masses wanted revenge, revolution. They threw caution to the wind; courage and resolution were the order of the day …

  VALLADOLID

  The rising was bound to succeed here, the heartland of Castilian Catholicism, birthplace of the fascistic JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista), scene of its unification with the Falange Española only two years before. The falangists, shut up in the cells that seemed like the pens where bulls are kept before being released into the ring, could hear the shouts of ‘Fascists, assassins’ from beyond the prison walls. Would the mob storm in? Would they be the first, unhappy martyrs of the uprising?

  Tomás BULNES, a lawyer associate of Onésimo Redondo, co-founder of the JONS, had managed to persuade a warder to leave the cell door unlocked. But the precaution was proven unnecessary. The prison warders began to look more cheerful; one of them told the falangists that troops of the Farnesio cavalry regiment and assault guards were taking up positions in the streets. ‘We knew then that the military had risen.’

  Before dawn, the falangist militants were being released by a group of falangist youth, armed by the military. ‘What’s the point of your leaving?’ the prison director asked Alberto PASTOR, a falangist farmer who had been imprisoned after a fight in his native village. ‘Tomorrow, you’ll be back in here anyway.’

  —But I didn’t stop to listen to any more. The moment we had been waiting for had come at last …

  * * *