Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  * * *

  BARCELONA

  Walking down the Carrer Princesa, the mill-owner’s wife saw a house at some distance still, its windows, shutters and doors open, and a pile of furniture in the street. Had it been sacked? So many terrible things had been happening. Only a few days before, walking down the Ramblas where the church of Belén had been burnt, a crowd of people surged into the door of a house, and almost immediately a man appeared on a balcony. Did he jump, was he pushed? – whatever it was, he had fallen on the pavement almost in front of her and been killed. The scene still haunted her as she walked down the street. Approaching the house, Juana ALIER saw a magnificent grand piano on top of the piled-up furniture; smashed into the middle of the lid was an axe, its haft sticking out. She hurried on, overwhelmed with anxiety.

  —Things were being destroyed for the sake of destruction. Why? The burnt churches, those marvellous stained-glass windows in the church of Santa María del Mar which could never be replaced. Every time I passed by I felt my anguish return …

  Memories of an engraving of a French revolutionary tumbril came to Joan ROIG’s mind as he watched the small lorry, decorated with red flags, being brought up to the gates of La Maquinista, the large engineering and locomotive works. In the back the workers had put a single chair on which the managing director was to be seated, ROIG, the only manager to turn up at the works where he had found the workers armour-plating lorries for the Durruti column, had rapidly foreseen the drama of the coming Saturday if there was no money to pay the men’s wages, and after considerable effort had persuaded the managing director to come to the factory. Now he was being taken under armed escort to the bank.

  —‘Don’t leave me,’ he begged. ‘Put another chair in the back,’ I said to the committee, ‘I’m coming, too.’ I had no idea what might happen. We got to the Hispano-Americano bank and withdrew the necessary money. There was no problem about that. Then the armed workers started to surround us; I didn’t know what the problem was when suddenly I found myself, with the managing director and a couple of committee members, bundled into a taxi on our way back to the works. Only later did I learn what our fate had nearly been …

  Some of the committee had taken the position that their lives served no further purpose once the money had been collected. They were saved, he believed, by the fact that, due to the economic depression of the previous years, no new workers had been taken on, which meant that all the committee members knew the managers. ‘Had there been new workers, some of them would undoubtedly have been extremists and taken the matter into their own hands.’ Notwithstanding, a few days later one of the board of directors was found assassinated – the work of railwaymen, it appeared, for the dead man had been a railway company director.

  ROIG, a practising Catholic, a man of the centre and a staunch Catalan nationalist who believed that the military uprising against a popularly elected government was totally unjustifiable, rapidly began to feel that the reaction to the uprising was equally unjustifiable. Particularly the assassinations. At the barber’s one day, he heard a man who was being shaved telling the barber about the ‘canaries’ he and others took out every night and shot, ROIG turned away in disgust at the look of pleasure on his face as he described in detail how the prisoners pleaded for their lives, how he pretended they were going to be set free and then shot them in the back. ‘The worst was when he invited the barber to accompany him that night to witness the spectacle.’

  Church-burnings and assassinations had begun almost immediately. In the city’s largest hospital, Prof. Josep TRUETA was still treating the wounded from the street fighting with an innovatory method he had evolved,15 when he was called to see something. By a wall outside the ward three corpses were lying. ‘It’s the work of the FAI,’ he was told.16

  Soon afterwards the brother of a leading anarchist died in his hospital; eleven of the dead man’s companions turned up and arrested Prof. TRUETA and a nurse, accusing him of ordering the latter to administer an injection which had been the cause of death.

  —‘He must be a fascist,’ they said of me, ‘and she must be working with him.’ Then someone said, ‘But she’s a nun.’ ‘Ah, so you’re protecting nuns as well.’ We were put on trial there and then …

  Extremely frightened, Prof. TRUETA could not help wondering at the fact that the head of the anarchist group was a surgeon who, before the war, had used a number of not so veiled threats, which included showing him a dedicated photograph of Alfonso XIII, to extort employment from him.

  —‘I’m in charge here,’ he said to me now. ‘You’re going to be tried. Fairly. If it’s proven that the injection you gave was tampered with, you’ll be executed … ’

  The ‘trial’ was beginning when eleven UGT men, armed with rifles, burst into the clinic. A socialist orderly had managed to slip out of the hospital and explain at his union branch what was happening. The head of the socialist group, also an orderly, launched into a speech saying that if the charge were proven TRUETA must be executed as an example; if not, it would be a heinous crime to lay a hand on him – ‘a surgeon whose hands have contributed to saving the lives of so many people.’ The ‘anarchist’ surgeon began to look fearful. A sample injection was taken from a box to a municipal laboratory for testing. No one could be sure the injection had come from that particular box; but someone took the precaution of ringing TRUETA’s friend at the laboratories to tell him what was at stake. ‘We were kept under arrest until at last the report came back: the injections were uncontaminated.’

  Many of Prof. TRUETA’s fears appeared to him to be coming true. The growth of anarcho-syndicalism in Barcelona had long been a source of anxiety for liberal Catalans like him. It contained an explosive mixture, in his view: the ex-rural ‘serf’ who could see the myth of liberty now apparently realizable before him, and the Catalan individualist anarchist.

  —The rural migrants’ situation was rather similar to that of the Irish in England, as I was to see later; both had the worst jobs, the lowest pay and formed the most depressed sector of society. Individually splendid people – but imagine a situation in which Irish immigrants were in power in London. That was the situation which faced us here …

  The Catalan petty bourgeoisie, which for the past five republican years had held political power in its country, was suffering the loss not only of its political dominance but of its economic livelihood – as well, in some cases, as loss of life. More than any other part of the Spanish state, Catalonia was the land of the small family business, passed on from father to son or newly created by skilled workmen and artisans, where upward mobility had some meaning. The joint-stock company was a comparative rarity. The urban petty bourgeoisie was politically supported by a relatively prosperous peasantry farming fairly equitably distributed land. It was these middle classes which formed the backbone of Catalan nationalist sentiment. Although not revolutionary, the bulk of this class was ‘anti-fascist’. Clearly not because it was petty bourgeois, for that very class elsewhere formed the base of fascism, but because it was Catalan and nationalist. The triumph of military reaction in the name of the indivisible unity of Spain could only threaten it by threatening Catalan autonomy, within which it had established its political dominance.

  But rapidly, the revolution became an even greater threat. The petty bourgeoisie’s businesses and enterprises, its retail outlets, its textile, wood and metal-working shops, its taxis and its barbers’ shops were taken over by the workers. As an employer of labour, if only of a handful of men, this petty bourgeoisie was identified as the capitalist class, and its representatives, whether hated personally or not as exploiters, had to be expropriated, harassed, even assassinated.17 Little did it matter that leading CNT militants, like Joan Peiró, fulminated openly against such actions; nor that both the CNT and FAI issued statements categorically condemning assassinations. ‘We must put an end to these excesses,’ the latter declared. Anyone proven to have infringed people’s rights would be shot – a threat which was car
ried out when some anarcho-syndicalist militants were executed.

  Revolutions inevitably breed ‘excesses’; revolution by definition is an ‘excess’ for those who yesterday held power. To ensure the rearguard from the class enemy’s return to power was an urgent revolutionary task. But the excesses of repression and expropriation were spilling over randomly, arbitrarily, without thought of the revolutionary consequences. Who was the class enemy? The petty bourgeoisie? Evidently not, for its representatives, Jaume MIRAVITLLES among them, were sitting on the militia committee by the libertarians’ choice.

  —Their leaders on the committee said the libertarian movement was not responsible for the assassinations. ‘It’s the armed workers’ patrols.18 Some of the members are assassins.’ But in my view, they couldn’t confront this type of people who represented for them their own ideology. With the notable exception of Durruti at the front, the CNT was always plagued with indiscipline within its own ranks and didn’t know how to deal with it …

  Eduardo PONS PRADES, of the libertarian youth, was in the CNT woodworkers’ union when an employer’s family came to see if the union leaders knew where he was. He and another man owned the firm. The latter, a merciless employer, had managed to flee to France immediately; but the former, well known for his kindness, and having nothing to fear, had remained. The union leader, Hernández, set inquiries in motion; three workers were soon arrested. It turned out that they had assassinated the man, mistaking him for his hated partner. Hernández questioned one of them, a young Cordoban.

  —‘How many times had you seen this man?’ he asked harshly. ‘Only once –’ ‘You mean – you dared kill a man you’d only seen once. Like a dog! He was one of our best employers. Everybody knew he was a good man.’

  ‘He couldn’t have been good, I tell you,’ the Cordoban replied. ‘That’s the end. How do you know?’ The Cordoban hesitated, as though looking for words. At last, he said: ‘Because he looked like the señor of our village – the scoundrel who ruined my father’s health, led him to his grave, forced us to emigrate to Catalonia –’

  The world suddenly shattered for me. What could have happened in that Cordoban pueblo? He was only twenty, had been living in Barcelona ten years. What could have happened that, from the age of ten, he had kept alive such hatred, such rancour for a man, that he could kill, kill another merely for looking like him?

  In the end Hernández offered him only one possibility: to join the militia on the Aragon front where in all probability he would be shot – by an enemy bullet …

  Too many of the anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary solutions appeared primitive, nave, thought Manuel CRUELLS, the Catalan nationalist student who had set out to ‘make the revolution’ himself after the military were crushed. But the revolution that was being made, due to the anarchist as opposed to syndicalist influence, was more rural than industrial, more suited to an Andalusian pueblo than to an industrial city with a large middle class that had been influenced by European culture. At the university, where he was a leading member of the revolutionary committee which the Catalan students’ federation had set up, they had recently had an unexpected visit. A commission of anarchist intellectuals and students, whom they had never seen before, arrived with an enormous package which they laid on the table; then they drew their pistols and laid them next to the package.

  —‘We’ve come here to raise the anarchist flag over the university of Barcelona,’ they announced. At that time, of course, the university was a bourgeois and petty bourgeois preserve: the majority of students belonged to Catalan nationalist parties or groups. I pulled out my pistol – as a rule none of us went armed – and laid it on the table. ‘All right, when we can fly our university flag on your buildings’ …

  The scene started to become violent, but the students succeeded in calming things down, and it ended in embraces and glasses of vermouth. But it had a certain effect. A few days later, the Catalan students’ federation decided to affiliate to the UGT. Later again it dis-affiliated, ‘but the point is that ours was not an isolated reaction. Confronted by the irresponsibility and apparent violence of so many anarcho-syndicalists, it was the way most of the middle class in Barcelona reacted.’

  The middle classes usually feared the non-Catalan anarchist – Murcian, Aragonese, Andalusian – more than the indigenous libertarian. Providing the labour force necessary to create the bourgeoisie’s prosperity, the rural migrant to the city became also the spectre of an agrarian violence that would overthrow the bourgeois order.19 But the CNT policy of admitting all and sundry to membership, the freeing of many common criminals along with political prisoners from gaol, the ‘danger of giving a man a pistol in one hand and a certificate of impunity in the other’, in the words of Jacinto BORRAS, a CNT journalist, made it difficult, if not impossible, to ensure the revolutionary order which the anarcho-syndicalist leadership called for.20

  —There was a deep, very deep wave of popular fury as a result of the military uprising which followed on so many years of oppression and provocation. In order to save lives, as I and so many others did, you had to be prepared to stake your own. But it must be said that many people who, had they been arrested six or nine months later, would have been sentenced to a year or two in gaol, were shot in those first days …

  Of the depth of hatred for the church, especially of the regular clergy, which dedicated much of its efforts to maintaining schools for the bourgeoisie’s children while workers’ children were deprived of secondary education, there could be little doubt. Two hundred and seventy-seven priests and 425 regular clergy were estimated to have been assassinated in Barcelona.21 A great number of churches and convents were burnt, although some were saved thanks to the Generalitat’s intervention. More than anything, it was the primitiveness of the anti-clerical persecution which most shocked the middle classes at the beginning.22

  The thirteen-year-old daughter of a CNT tailor watched men dragging pews and religious objects from the church opposite her house in Gràcia, a Barcelona barrio, and setting fire to them. She and her mother were churchgoers, and her father didn’t oppose them. The burning seemed unnecessary. When the men set about a near-by convent and María OCHOA saw, amongst the beds and furniture being thrown out and burnt, an embroidery frame which seemed too good to burn, she took it. Her father was angry; he said it was theft and ordered her to return the frame to be burnt.

  —He was a very dogmatic man, a man who believed in his anarchist principles, a man who believed that everyone should think like him. I protested but it was no good. I had to take it back and put it on the fire.

  They dug up the nuns’ corpses, too, and displayed the skeletons and mummies. I found that quite amusing; so did all the kids. When we got bored looking at the same ones in my neighbourhood, we’d go to another barrio to see the ones they’d dug up there. In the Passeig de Sant Joan, they were exhibited in the street. Not for very long, but long enough for us to go and look. We kids would make comments about the different corpses – how this one was well-preserved, and that one decomposed, this one older; we got a lot of amusement out of it all …

  There was a festive enthusiasm in the streets; the war, she thought, seemed a good thing. At home her father talked more about local politics than about the war; not that the latter was forgotten, but what happened in Barcelona seemed more important. He was particularly hostile to the masses of people flocking to join the UGT – ‘opportunists without any political background’, he called them. Soon, however, a black cloud appeared over the festival. A workers’ patrol set up in a house on the corner of the street. It was guarded by two militiawomen. Each night a car drew up and sounded its horn.

  —We soon discovered what it meant. People were being taken to be shot on the other side of Mount Tibidabo. It was horrifying, oppressive. The car would begin to grind up the hill and we knew the fate that awaited its occupants. My father didn’t like it. He thought it quite normal that half a dozen big bourgeois exploiters should be liquidated. But not tha
t all these others were being taken to their deaths …

  The persecution of the clergy, the church burnings had made a deep impression on Maurici SERRAHIMA, a lawyer and leading member of Unió Democrática, the small Catalan Christian-democratic party, because of the long tradition in Spain of such events. He recalled an old street ballad which went: ‘There were six bad bulls at the bullfight and so the people came out of the ring and burnt the churches.’

  —I always maintained that, deep down, these burnings were an act of faith. That’s to say, an act of protest because the church was not, in the people’s eyes, what it should be. The disappointment of someone who believes and loves and is betrayed. It springs from the idea that the church should be on the side of the poor – and isn’t; as, indeed, it hadn’t been for a great number of years, excepting certain individual churchmen. A protest against the church’s submission to the propertied classes. Not that this described the situation in Catalonia totally; with the growth of Catalanism, a movement within the church to open it to the world had started in the past twenty years …

  SERRAHIMA gave shelter to eleven Capuchin monks from a near-by convent in the barrio of Sarrià. Fearing that his house would be searched, he managed to get them hidden elsewhere, and was then involved in getting Cardinal Vidal i Barraquer of Tarragona, who had been rescued in extremis by the Generalitat, out of the country. Returning from this mission – the British consulate regretted that as both the consul and vice-consul were on holiday it was unable to help – he found his home occupied by an ‘FAI patrol’. His father had been accused of having hidden the Capuchins’ money and had been taken off with one of his brothers who had volunteered to share his fate. SERRAHIMA saw that the armed workers had smashed a number of religious pictures and statues.

  —‘We are smashing this,’ their leader had said to my father, picking up a San Francisco, copy of a famous statue, ‘because we know it’s a plaster reproduction. Were it the original in wood we would certainly not break it, for it is a work of art.’ Meanwhile my mother, who had been blind for many years, was overcome by this sudden eruption in the house. The leader sent one of his men, armed with a pistol, to the local chemist to get rose water to calm her nerves. What a typical libertarian gesture, what a mixture they were! …