Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  Lack of military experience was bound to tell against the militiamen, most of them fighting for the first time in their lives, in open battle.

  —‘Come on – forward!’ we shouted, and tried to advance without cover, in groups, Josep CERCOS remembered of his first major attack on the village of Azaila. Pinned down by a machine-gun in the church tower, I quickly came to realize the need of organization and tactics …

  More than set-backs on the ground, however, it was air raids which demoralized the militiamen, as Narciso JULIAN, the Madrid communist railwayman who had enrolled in a Catalan communist-led column, discovered.

  —We were so naïve that when the planes came over we thought they must be ours and stood up to wave. The bombs started to fall. We were on railway flat cars loaded with dynamite. Everyone, including the anarchist machine-gunner, leapt for cover; I never saw him again. The engine driver was the only one to show any control; he shouted at me to lie on my back and fire at the planes while he held the machine-gun’s tripod. The planes veered away …

  So many militiamen left the column after the raid that they had to remain in the township of Grañén to reorganize. Del Barrio, the column leader, announced that many of the anarchists amongst the militiamen wanted to leave. JULIAN, who had been caught by the uprising in Barcelona where he had gone to attend the Popular Olympiad, was given the invidious task of telling them they could not leave with their arms. He set up two machine-guns in a house facing the townhall.

  —The heart went out of us all when we saw the numbers coming to hand in their names to leave. They weren’t only anarchists by any means, nor did all anarchists leave. Without exception, those who wanted to go refused to surrender their arms, even when told that hundreds upon hundreds of peasants were waiting to use them. Finally, I pointed at the two machine-guns. One of the men threatened to shoot me all the same. ‘Go ahead, not one of you will be left alive.’ Trueba, the political commissar, harangued them and at last they handed in their weapons. Then they were put on two trains and sent back to Barcelona …

  It was an air-raid also that apparently stopped the most direct and closest threat to Saragossa – Durruti’s column, advancing along the main road from Barcelona, the vanguard of which reached to within 20 km of the city.9

  All the columns, organized by the different political organizations, were brought to a halt by the stiffening opposition. In Barcelona, Ricardo SANZ, Durruti’s companion, was in charge of supplying the Aragon front. Every night the column leaders telephoned him.

  —All of them had more men than arms, more wounded than ambulances, more shortages than supplies. Arms, ammunition and supply waggons – everything needed for waging war – was scarce. We started to collect up the arms that remained in the rear. Arms, arms, arms! Those cabrones, the French, with their Non-Intervention that kept the arms from reaching us …

  The POUM and CAROD’S column received a consignment of Russian Crimean war rifles whose barrels, after two or three rounds, split open; armourers sawed off the ends, leaving the rifle 5 or 10 cm shorter. Were important stocks of arms being kept in the rear while men fought and died at the front with these antiquated weapons? The Durruti column dispatched a group to Sabadell, the Manchester of Spain, close to Barcelona, where they took 400 to 500 rifles and two machine-guns,10 from trade union headquarters and political offices. Neither CAROD nor Jordi ARQUER, political commissar of the POUM column in the Sierra de Alcubierre, believed that significant quantities of arms were being held back. There was a general shortage of all weapons.

  —That was the main reason for not being able to launch a major offensive. But it wasn’t the only one. There was no overall plan – I don’t believe there was a military officer in Catalonia capable of drawing one up; there was no proper coordination between the columns, and sometimes there wasn’t even communication between us, ARQUER recalled. Unless Col. Villalba called all the column chiefs to a meeting, no one knew what the other was up to …

  Worse, there were rivalries between the columns. A middle-aged CNT peasant, Fernando ARAGON, in the village of Angüés, only a few kilometres behind the line on the Huesca front, wryly observed them. The anarchist Roja y Negra column was on one side of the village, the POUM militia on the other.

  —When the former went into action, the latter sat back with their hands in their pockets, laughing. When the POUM was in combat the anarchists, I have to admit, did the same. That’s no way to fight a war, let alone win it. They should have got together to fight the common enemy …

  Although they had failed to capture their major objectives – Aragon’s provincial capitals – the columns had taken nearly three quarters of the region and advanced 100 km beyond the borders of Catalonia. This was a greater achievement than any other militia forces managed in a few weeks. But now, as though the momentum were spent, the columns dug in, took root and remained. For nearly a year there was no major offensive on the 600-km front running from the Pyrenees to Teruel. The same could be said of some other fronts; but it was here that the CNT’s greatest weight lay, backed by the resources (such as they were) of Catalan industry. Were the militiamen who rebelled against ‘digging in’ not instinctively right? Would not the ‘people in arms’ lose the initiative by adopting the enemy’s strategy? Would a war of position not inevitably fail to develop an alternative, perforce revolutionary, strategy which would rely on mobility, harassment, erosion – irregular warfare? The example of their Ukrainian hero, Nestor Makhno, whose partisans fought white and red armies separately and sometimes simultaneously for three years, appeared to have been forgotten. Though it was the libertarians’ only hope, they failed to seize it. In practice, the priorities of revolution and war were settled – even before they became the subject of polemic – in favour of ‘war first’ by the Aragon columns. To say this is to say no more than that revolution and war remained, if not two separate concepts, then two separate practices. At the front ‘war’, in the rear ‘revolution’, such was the paradox, as we shall see.

  * * *

  ONLY BY MAKING THE SOCIAL

  REVOLUTION WILL FASCISM BE CRUSHED

  Solidaridad Obrera, CNT, headline

  (Barcelona, 17 July 1936)

  * * *

  The Revolution, companions, is triumphing. We must be on the alert, however, not to be tricked out of the conquests won with our blood and sacrifice …

  This is not the time to respect classic law, classic justice. The law, justice and history must be structured by the ongoing revolution. Almost nothing of what exists today is worthy of respect … That is why [the working class] must administer the triumphant revolution, a right it will not renounce, that it is prepared to defend arms in hand …

  Statement of the newly formed PSUC,

  unified socialist party of Catalonia – affiliated to the Comintern

  (28 July 1936)

  * * *

  BARCELONA

  In the streets, the revolutionary ferment was ceaseless, ‘dreamlike, hallucinating’, in the memory of a socialist youth treasury official, Alejandro VITORIA.

  —All of us, whatever organization we belonged to, had a tremendous urge to participate. Somehow – I can’t remember how – I found myself in an office in the Vía Layetana redeeming pawn tickets. The working-class women were streaming in, and we stamped their tickets and they went out to get back their goods – sewing-machines, mainly. It was a great moment in my life, I was very happy. We were overthrowing bourgeois capitalist values …

  At the CNT woodworkers’ union headquarters they were saying that the people were masters of the situation, the proletarian cause was certain to win now. To sixteen-year-old Eduardo PONS PRADES, listening to his elders, it seemed easy all of a sudden to reach that new world, that terrestrial paradise his libertarian father had so often told him about. It would be enough to change the flags, sing new revolutionary songs, abolish money, hierarchy, egoism, pride – the pillars on which the empire of money was built. ‘It wasn’t just I, a raw youth, who
felt like that; it was the men, the CNT militants who had fought so long and hard in their lives.’

  Nor was it only the anarcho-syndicalists who experienced the sense of revolutionary upheaval. Narciso JULIAN, the Madrid communist railwayman, was swept up by the tidal wave.

  —It was incredible, the proof in practice of what one knows in theory: the power and strength of the masses when they take to the streets. All one’s doubts are suddenly stripped away, doubts about how the working class and the masses are to be organized, how they can make the revolution until they are organized. Suddenly you feel their creative power; you can’t imagine how rapidly the masses are capable of organizing themselves. The forms they invent go far beyond anything you’ve dreamt of, read in books. What was needed now was to seize this initiative, channel it, give it shape …

  The city blossomed red and black flags, red and black neckerchiefs, banners and slogans. Almost no one wore hats or ties, the bourgeoisie went out in old clothes; overalls were the dress of the day. To move from one working-class barrio to another, different passes were needed; the anarcho-syndicalist militants who had taken over their districts accepted none but their own. In the woodworkers’ union headquarters just off the Paralelo, with its music-halls, nightclubs and bars, PONS PRADES heard the men discussing what had to be done.

  —‘Listen, what about all the people who work in these dens of iniquity?’ ‘We’ve got to redeem them, educate them so they can have the chance of doing something more worthy.’ ‘Have you asked them if they want to be redeemed?’ ‘How can you be so stupid? Would you like to be exploited in that sort of den?’ ‘No, of course not. But after years at the same thing, it’s hard to change.’ ‘Well, they’ll have to. The revolution’s first duty is to clean up the place, clean up the people’s consciousness –’ ‘And what about the customers?’ ‘Listen, do you think I’m the prophet Isaiah? Or are you trying to take issue with me?’ …

  *

  The Catalan libertarian leaders (the CNT local federation, the regional committee) had decided, after President Companys’s offer of power, that the libertarian revolution must stand aside for collaboration with the Popular Front forces to defeat the enemy. The dilemma confronting them (as García Oliver later wrote, justifying an outcome which he had forcefully argued against) was of ‘collaboration and democracy’ on the one hand, or ‘totalitarian revolution, a CNT dictatorship’ on the other. The former had been elected. Their own newspaper’s injunction on the eve of the uprising – that only social revolution could crush fascism – was forgotten or passed off as journalistic rhetoric. Though it was not immediately apparent, the Catalan libertarian leadership had, in effect, taken the same course as the communist party: collaboration, victory in the war first, then ‘revolution’. The real – revolutionary – dilemma, as was soon to be revealed, was the libertarians’ misconception of the ‘dilemma’ confronting them.

  Outside, in the streets, workplaces and factories, the revolution was being made. Fresh from the local federation meeting which had determined the libertarian choice, Félix CARRASQUER, newly appointed member of the FAI peninsular committee, returned to his barrio of Las Corts to find the CNT in control.

  —Although we were anti-authoritarian, we were suddenly the only authority there. The local CNT committee had to take over the administration, transport, food supplies, health – in short we were running the barrio …

  Rapidly he found himself involved. The city’s main maternity hospital was in his barrio, and the Generalitat sent assault guards to remove the nursing nuns to safety. CARRASQUER rushed to the hospital; he had called out all the local armed CNT militants and told them to get the nuns off the buses at gunpoint and back into the hospital.

  —I wasn’t going to allow 2,000 newborn babies to be left without care. ‘These nuns will only leave here when there are nurses to replace them.’ They might be falangists for all I knew, but they had to continue working …

  He took over the hospital administration, not unhappy to leave the FAI peninsular committee where ‘everybody seemed to be doing whatever came into their heads, without direction – the same fault as always’. Teacher at a libertarian school in his barrio, he now found himself sleeping in what had been the priest’s room in the hospital from which, at night, he could hear the nuns praying. He laughed. A libertarian of a different temperament might have ordered them shot, he reflected, but he knew they were just unhappy women.

  With every day, the city moved deeper into working-class control. Public transport was running, factories were working, shops were open, food supplies arriving, the telephone operating, gas and water supplies functioning – all to one extent or another organized and run by their respective workers. How had this happened? The leading CNT committees had put out no such order.

  Luis SANTACANA, a CNT militant, worked at España Industrial, which, with 2,500 workers, was one of the largest textile factories in Catalonia. The day after the fighting was over, his union told him and a few other militants to return to the factory. When they arrived they found the management and directors were not there; only a few clerks and book-keepers had turned up.

  —We were confronted with the problem of getting the factory working again. We put out a call to the work force – the majority women – to return and, within four or five days, production had started up. Soon we had to take more drastic measures …

  The same day, Manuel Hernández, of the CNT woodworkers’ union, sent young Eduardo PONS PRADES off on his bicycle to reconnoitre the offices of the Wood Manufacturers’ Association – the employers’ organization – and report back immediately.

  —‘You’re sure there’s no one there, peque?’ ‘Not a fly.’ ‘All right then, let’s go up and take it over officially.’ And so we did. That was the beginning of the CNT Socialized Wood Industry which, though it wasn’t yet called that, was soon to be reorganizing and controlling the industry from felling the timber to the finished product …

  By that Tuesday Joan ROIG, the sole manager to turn up at the largest locomotive and engineering factory in Spain, La Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima, found workers already there assembling steel sheeting around lorries as a form of crude armour-plating for the Durruti column which was setting out for Aragon.

  Even the large department stores were open – under CNT control. Joan FERRER, a book-keeper who was shortly to become secretary of the CNT commercial employees’ union, knew that the CNT sent armed men to guard them, especially El Siglo and El Aguila, the two largest, for in the first revolutionary moments there had been attempts to loot them. When the CNT called for a return to work, the staff found that the owners had fled. ‘The commercial employees’ union, which included everyone from shop assistants to book-keepers, took over the stores and appointed a manager to run them … ’

  The revolutionary initiative had sprung not from the CNT’s leading committees – how could it when the libertarian revolution had been officially ‘postponed’? – but from individual CNT unions impelled by the most advanced syndicalist militants. Even then it might have gone no further than the workers controlling management’s activities; the large-scale defection of owners, directors and managers in fear of their fate led in many factories to the next step.

  —Shortly we received union instructions to take charge of our respective factories in the textile industry, recalled SANTACANA of España Industrial. We called a general assembly of the 2,500 company workers in a local cinema. The couple of dozen CNT militants among us met beforehand to draw up a plan of what we were going to propose …

  The factory, he told the assembly, must be taken over because the directors and managers had fled. None of the many speakers opposed the proposal. About 80 per cent of the workers belonged to the CNT, 20 per cent to the UGT. The company accountant, who was not part of management, informed the assembly that there was no more than 300,000 pesetas in the company’s bank accounts – barely enough to cover two weeks’ wages. It was a derisory amount, the assembly agreed, for a
company of that size to hold in cash reserves; but there was nothing that could be done about it.

  The assembly, by a show of hands, elected twelve members to a committee to run the factory; they represented the workers, technicians and administrative staff and included two women from the spinning and weaving sections where the majority of the women worked. All the committee members belonged to the CNT; later the UGT approached them to ask for representation, to which they agreed.

  —‘Union brings strength,’ I said. They were workers like us. ‘The most important task is to face the common enemy together.’ So they received a proportional representation of two members …

  At the CNT glassworkers’ union, Joan DOMENECH, the union secretary, was taking part in a discussion among the militants.

  —‘We should put in for a wage rise and a shorter working week. Now’s the time,’ one of them said. ‘Don’t you know we’ve made the revolution?’ I asked. ‘Yes, that’s why we want to make these demands.’ ‘No, hombre, no. What we’ve got to do is to get rid of the employers and keep the workshops for the workers,’ I replied. ‘Ah – and how are we going to do that?’ ‘Wait a minute and I’ll tell you’ …