Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  Along with labour peace, prices and profits remained fairly stable during the war, in AVILA’s memory. Anyone who rented land from the duke of Medinaceli, Spain’s largest noble landowner with 79,000 hectares, was considered fortunate in Espejo.

  —We used to say that it was better to rent from him than to own the land; other owners charged twice as much. We paid 30 pesetas a fanega per year, the same rent, I remember, as in my youth. The duke of Fernán-Núñez also rented his land cheap, and both allowed their tenants to pass on their leases to their sons. They could do this, I suppose, because they had so much land, so much rent coming in …

  Although income fluctuated depending on the year, he calculated that after all costs, including wages, rent and taxes had been deducted, profits averaged about 20 pesetas a fanega of land on the estate. ‘Rents were a fair barometer of profits at the time.’

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  The small and medium-sized peasantry in the nationalist zone, particularly the wheat-growers of Old Castile, could not count on such profits. Well aware of needing their support for its cause, the Burgos regime took an important step towards remedying one of the great rural ills: the lack of a guaranteed outlet at a guaranteed price for the peasantry’s wheat crop. The creation of a national wheat service to achieve these aims was welcomed by the peasantry. Not for nothing did a nationalist newspaper write that ‘Wheat has been one of the principal arms of combat in our struggle.’

  —Before the national wheat service, a farmer who lacked the financial means to store his wheat crop was forced to sell it immediately. That meant low prices, commented Antonio GINER, the son of a farmer with 120 hectares of wheat land in the Old Castilian village of Castrogeriz, not far from Burgos. At the outbreak of war my father had two crops stored; he was lucky to have the resources. By announcing guaranteed prices in advance each year – prices a little higher than those before – and purchasing the wheat as soon as it was harvested, the wheat service did away with all this … 11

  The national wheat service was an integral aspect of the new regime’s overall control of the economy, and its determination to guarantee production and distribution (the 1937 wheat crop was decreed of ‘national utility’ by Franco, and anyone impeding the harvest would be found guilty of rebellion under martial law). Other measures, especially in the matter of securing loans, were also taken to help the peasantry. What had the pre-war republic offered? Precious little. The new lease laws and an agrarian bank, which would have helped this peasantry, had either been emasculated or not approved. Labour costs had risen, wheat prices had fallen. Only the Catholic agrarian syndicate, modelled on the Belgian example, played any significant role in helping the Old Castilian peasant, providing cheaper artificial fertilizer, seed corn and other supplies than he was able to procure from private dealers. It also established granaries in each village where the peasant members could store their wheat if the price was low; and in Castrogeriz, when the situation became especially bad under the republic, it paid the farmers between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of the market value of their crop in ready cash to keep them going. Given the low level of mechanization, medium-sized peasants were also employers of labour, if only at harvest time. They felt the effects of wage claims and strikes as much as, if not more so than the large owners. Labour peace, law and order, were important issues.

  —Within two days of the start of the war I was happy, recalled a day-labourer in Castrogeriz. Life was quiet and peaceful again. What a stroke of luck that this man Franco came along! …

  José ALFARO was one of the village’s 150 day-labourers, the majority of whom lived in caves under the castle.12 The leaders of the labourers’ union had been arrested in Burgos on the first day of the uprising, court-martialled and shot. Other union members fled to the surrounding hills, but these provided no hiding places and they were forced to return to the village. Summary courts martial did the rest: some twenty villagers were executed. Not all of them deserved their fate, reflected ALFARO; ‘they were workers like the rest of us who had been taken in by the leaders.’ The latter had coerced labourers to join their union; like many others, he hadn’t wanted to join because they attacked religion, attacked everyone who went to church.

  —I was brought up to believe in God by my mother. She was illiterate, but she taught me religion when, as a child, I went with her to the fields where she worked. I went to mass. The union leaders called me a blackleg, the landlords’ scum. They wanted the revolution, wanted to get paid without having to work. I didn’t want that. My mission in life is to work – not to get paid for doing nothing …

  He was not alone in feeling that the war brought peace and tranquillity; Fernando SANCHEZ, a ploughman in the village, shared the opinion that the war was a good thing.

  —Once the left had gone we could all work for a day’s wage peacefully again. There was plenty of work, we all worked as hard as we could. With the youth away at war, we older men had to work even harder – but we were happy …

  —It was before the war that we knew war, explained Antonio GINER; once the war started everything was peaceful. We could get on with farming again. We suffered very little, the fronts were a long way off. Everyone helped each other out; even the señoritos, who had never worked on the land, lent a helping hand. Some land went out of production because farmers lost sons at the front, there was some drop in production, but it wasn’t much …

  —There was a tremendous spirit in the village, everyone put his back into it, recalled a local grocer’s son, Joaquín SUÑER. We all knew that the only alternative to winning was to lose the war; and people were determined to win …

  Aged eighteen, SUÑER was quick to volunteer for the Falange militia. Before the war, to the best of his knowledge, there had been no more than half a dozen falangists in Castrogeriz. But now one had to join something or remain under a cloud. One couldn’t remain neutral. His father was a CEDA member.

  —But like most of the youth of my age I joined the Falange. For a simple reason: the Falange came round the villages telling the people they had to volunteer for the war. It wasn’t a matter of choosing really, the essential thing was to defend the cause …

  And the cause was being defended essentially by the peasantry of Old Castile, León, Galicia and Navarre; it was they (and in particular the latter two regions) which provided the shock forces of the nationalist army.13

  The contradictions inherent in this situation did not escape some on the nationalist side.

  —The peasantry was fighting in fact to defend the rights of the large landowners, the big wheat farmers, the owners of the sugar beet factories who exploited them. How could this impoverished peasantry defend interests that were totally opposed to theirs? Only through the mechanism of religious ideology which made them identify the nationalist cause with their own, thought Dionisio RIDRUEJO, the Falange chief. Ideology, spiritual and mental structures, were more important than material interests in this case. These smallholders were anti-socialist, anti-communist, and the idea of the marxist revolution taking place in the other zone was repugnant to them …

  Called up to serve in the nationalist army early in 1937, Paulino AGUIRRE, the philosophy student caught in the limbo of a hotel on the Ebro at the start of the war, found himself serving with poor peasants from the Rioja region. After a month in barracks, his infantry company was sent to the Basque front. As the troops entrained there was a call for all students to step forward; the two or three to do so were made corporals on the spot. When they reached the front, a further selection was made and AGUIRRE found himself a sergeant. Throughout the brief training, and now in action, he wondered about the soldiers under his orders. Did they have any clear idea of what the war was about?

  —It didn’t seem like it. Perhaps deep down they had, although I fear not even there. Their only awareness seemed to be that of obedience – obeying the orders given, not thinking. And the same was true of a great number of officers, especially those who had risen from the ranks and who had never though
t they would have to fight a war …

  But if, as he felt, there was no real awareness of the issues at stake, there was always a strong feeling on the nationalist side that victory was assured. It stemmed from the conviction that military coups in Spain were usually successful, and from the fact that victory seemed normal to the right, since the latter was accustomed to being in power. By the end of the war, two years later, it was no longer the case that soldiers didn’t know what the aims of the struggle were. ‘They had had to hear and read enough propaganda by then to make up their minds.’

  Obedience to orders was no light matter: the nationalist zone was under martial law. And no one could forget the repression that was taking place.

  A republican sympathizer answered his call-up by the nationalist forces knowing he was going to have to fight for the ‘wrong’ side, but fearing further reprisals on his father, a republican doctor in Salamanca who had already been arrested, tried and fined. César LOZAS, an engineering student, had a valid pretext for refusing to serve: dual French-Spanish nationality, but he decided against using it; the new regime might not consider it sufficient. There was no way out but to serve. And that, he believed, was what the majority of the peasant recruits in his infantry company – he was the only student – felt. They were not politically motivated to fight.

  —They were swept along by events, they lacked the ideological awareness that would have motivated a serious attempt to desert. Moreover, any such attempt could cost you your life – and even if you succeeded, reprisals could be taken on your family. There was considerable terror in the rearguard …

  Another republican from Salamanca who served in the nationalist army as a doctor found the peasants making good soldiers, tough, used to a harsh life.

  —Cannon fodder, sheep to be led. They were no one and knew nothing. Those who were politically active had been imprisoned or liquidated. Everything in the rearguard was ‘cleaned up’. The proof can be seen in the fact that there were no acts of violence or sabotage in the nationalist rear – that was how effective the purge was …

  But, despite republican propaganda to the contrary, no amount of terror could weld together a successful army. Military discipline was rigorous; but the nationalist peasant soldier did not, in the last resort, go to the front under any greater coercion than did the republican conscript. Rafael GONZALEZ, a student who served on the Andalusian front, found that the majority of the peasants in his battalion were pleased to be in the army. Most of them had lived a very hard life on the land; in the army they found they were being fed for nothing and for doing nothing. This was particularly true of soldiers on fronts where there was little action.

  —They would remember that they would be a lot worse off at home. The only ideological indoctrination – if one can call it that – they received was the military one which asserted that Spain was in danger, the patria had to be saved. Since resistance was impossible, they joined up with resignation – the sort of attitude that the great mass of people always shows in these situations …

  One thing, in his view, alleviated the resignation. The peasants thought of themselves as part of a victorious army. As a result, their objective became the personal one of taking part in the capture of a capital city, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia. ‘For many of them, who had never left their hamlets before, this offered a bright hope for the future.’

  Religion, resignation, fear of reprisal. But there were certainly other reasons which determined that a peasantry, whose standard of living was often little higher than the landless day-labourers’, should fight for the counter-revolution. ‘Patently, their own class interests,’ observed a student who volunteered for the nationalist forces at the age of seventeen with the ambition of making a career of the army. Ignacio HERNANDEZ, an alférez provisional, led peasant troops in the north, at Teruel, on the Ebro, was wounded seven times and decorated as many. The peasantry, he recalled, knew only too well that in the republican zone smallholders were being ‘driven at gun-point’ into collectives, despite the communist party’s efforts to prevent it.

  —The ‘nationalist’ peasantry was fighting for the defence of its property, its land. If this meant identifying itself in the first instance with the cause of the landed obligarchy, big finance, the military – well, that was better than the alternative of being deprived of its smallholding, its plot …

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  As long as any woman is kept as an object and is prevented from developing her personality, prostitution, in fact, continues to exist.

  Mercedes Comaposada, editor, Mujeres Libres (December 1936)

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  Prostitution presents a problem of moral, economic and social character which cannot be resolved juridically. Prostitution will be abolished when sexual relations are liberalized; when Christian and bourgeois morality is transformed; when women have professions and social opportunities to secure their livelihood and that of their children; when society is established in such a way that no one remains excluded; when society can be organized to secure life and rights for all human beings.

  Federica Montseny,

  former CNT minister of health and social welfare (1937)

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  * * *

  In Catalonia, the woman has always been the centre of the family … The man, here, at the end of the week, gives his whole wage to his wife … Women have won not only equality in public life and in work but have possessed it for a long time within the family.

  Federica Montseny (Interview with H. E. Kaminski, 1937)

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  MADRID and BARCELONA

  Women were playing a large and important part in the Popular Front war effort, working in factories, farms, hospitals, in industrial and rural collectives. The depths of the revolution were, at one level, nowhere better revealed than in the change of attitude towards women in a traditionally male chauvinist society. Rosa VEGA, a schoolmistress who remained in Madrid, found the change remarkable. In the blackout, during the siege, she walked home after spending long hours preparing medical supplies.

  —It was so dark that I often bumped into people in the streets. But never once was I molested or in any way made aware that I was a woman. Before the war there would have been remarks of one sort or another – now that was entirely gone. Women were no longer objects, they were human beings, persons on the same level as men. There were many bad things, without doubt, in the Popular Front zone, but the fact that both sexes were humanly equal was one of the most remarkable social advances of the time …

  —The war bred a new spirit in people, it was amazing, remembered María SOLANA, a unified socialist youth member. I was often sent round villages on propaganda missions with other party youth and there wouldn’t be enough beds. I, the only woman, would sleep in the same bed with two or three youths and nothing would happen – absolutely nothing. There was a new sense of human relationships …

  At the start of the war many women donned overalls and pistols and went to the front. ‘They included a large number of prostitutes who caused more casualties due to venereal disease than did enemy bullets,’ recalled a nurse, Justina PALMA, another JSU member. After the battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, a call was put out for women to leave the front.

  —Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, came to the front to tell the women that their place was in the rearguard where they would be of more use to the war effort. Lorries were drawn up to take the women back. But a childhood friend of mine, and a number of others, didn’t leave. I never found out what happened to my friend, but I believe she was killed fighting …

  In Barcelona, similar new freedoms were being experienced by women. Margarita BALAGUER, an eighteen-year-old seamstress in a haute couture fashion house which she had attempted unsuccessfully to collectivize, found the liberation of women the most rewarding of all the revolutionary conquests. For as long as she could remember, she had fought the accepted notion that ‘men and women could never be friends’. Now she found she had better friends among men
than among women. A new comradeship had arisen.

  —It was like being brothers and sisters. It had always annoyed me that men in this country didn’t consider women as beings with full human rights. But now there was this big change. I believe it arose spontaneously out of the revolutionary movement …

  The daughter of a cabinet-maker and former CNT member, she used to go to an anarchist centre after work in the invoice department of the plumbers’ and electricians’ collective.14 At the centre plays were staged for the benefit of war widows, women knitted soldiers’ sweaters and wrote letters to soldier pen-friends; there, too, sex education classes were given. An anarchist in his mid-twenties explained the male and female reproductive functions, ‘talked about physical contact between men and women’. Nothing like this had existed before the war.

  —I found it excellent. The classes were mixed and I think they helped us, men and women, to develop a new way of understanding, just as much as in gaining information. It was a way of getting rid of all the old taboos. A real liberation …

  Abortion was legalized under controlled conditions, centres opened for women, including prostitutes and unmarried mothers, birth control information disseminated and ‘marriage by usage’ instituted whereby cohabitation for ten months, or less if pregnancy occurred, was considered marriage.15 Despite these considerable gains, the revolution did not fundamentally alter the traditional roles or – but rarely – the customary inequalities of pay. Women continued to launder clothes, cook, keep house and look after children; they continued to get paid less than men.