Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  Unplacated, CAROD stormed out. He ordered his men to make for another army corps HQ on the same front. From there he spoke by telephone with the general commanding the army of the Levante. The latter sounded angry and ordered the brigade to remain where it was. But this did not solve the problem of arms. The lieutenant-colonel in command of the army corps assured him that there was a dump near by sufficient to re-equip the entire division. He had not even finished speaking when a signal arrived from the front. Pounding the table, the colonel exclaimed: ‘The entire dump has just been captured by the enemy.’

  *

  Using the recapture of Teruel as a springboard, the nationalist army rolled forward and by April 1938 had reached the Mediterranean at Vinaroz. Taking all of republican Aragon and a part of Lerida province, it stood poised to advance into the heart of Catalonia. Prieto’s self-fulfilling forecast had been proven more than true. After the loss of the north the previous autumn, the remainder of the republican zone was now cut in two. Hitler, meanwhile, marched into Austria.

  BARCELONA

  In their advance the nationalists captured the hydro-electric plants at Tremp, in Lerida province, which supplied Barcelona. Old steam-generating plants in the Catalan capital had to be pressed into service. Production dropped again. Air raids aggravated the disruption, although some factories – like the new Maquinista Terrestre y Maritima workshops – were noticeably being spared, no doubt on their owners’ pleas. But more than 750 houses had already been destroyed in the city when the worst of the raids began. Every two to three hours, day and night, Italian Savoias bombed the city for forty-eight hours, beginning on the evening of 16 March. People fled the capital.

  Hearing the crash of bombs in the Carrer Carmen just off the Ramblas, and the Red Cross man’s shouts for help, Eduardo PONS PRADES, the young libertarian of the CNT woodworkers’ union, jumped into a car. He was on leave from a machine-gunners’ training camp, and it was the first time in his life that he had driven. Outside a baker’s, a dozen women’s bodies were lying; three wounded women were put in the car and he set off for the Clinical hospital. From there he was sent to fetch two surgeons from their homes. ‘I could see from the fright on their faces that they realized I hadn’t driven before, that they might die in the car as easily as in the raid.’ The novice driver, who at the front was convinced he would not be harmed, was now himself certain that he was going to be killed by a bomb.

  The weather was cold and rainy, and many of the people fleeing the city had to sleep in the hills. Soon the centre was almost deserted, the streets deep in broken glass.

  Filling the car with petrol at one of the few garages still open close by the Plaça de la Universidat, PONS PRADES heard the bombs falling closer and closer. He and the attendant looked at one another; the next moment he felt himself lifted up in a whirlwind of hot air and dust and tossed across the street. He fell stunned. The blast from the bomb, which had fallen on the Coliseum cinema, struck the neighbouring buildings with such force that they collapsed like a pack of cards. Rushed to a first-aid centre, PONS PRADES heard – as did many others – that the bomb had fallen on a lorry carrying high explosives which happened to be driving down the Gran Vía at that moment.

  Almost all the casualties from the big explosion passed through Professor Josep TRUETA’S hands. Head surgeon of Barcelona’s largest hospital, his method of treating war wounds had already made history – one of the great innovatory processes to result from the war.1 For some time he had been observing the evidently experimental types of air raids the Italians had been carrying out on the city and its solid stone houses: the combination of explosive, high-explosive and penetrating explosive bombs, followed by incendiaries. Anti-personnel bombs had also been used. But the March air raids were different in scale. The only comparison, in his view, was Guernica.

  —The raids were meant to test the population’s capacity of resistance. By the time they ended, there were 2,200 casualties in my hospital …

  On seeing the casualties from the ‘big explosion’, Professor TRUETA immediately denied the story that the bomb had fallen on a lorry carrying high-explosives. Casualties reaching the hospital in the following forty-eight hours confirmed to him that another two explosions of similar magnitude had occurred in the city, although they were less noticed because they caused fewer victims. They were, he was convinced, some sort of super-bomb which the Italians were trying out.

  The raids took their toll in casualties and demoralization. But people reacted in protest, even right-wing acquaintances of Professor TRUETA who complained at the barbarity of the air raids. ‘How can the Caudillo allow this sort of thing – ’2

  A liberal, who had not espoused Catalan nationalism, who admired England – ‘I always thought Catalonia could have been like England, despite its different history’ – Professor TRUETA remained at his post though he had long been convinced that the war was lost. Lack of organization, failure to create an army rapidly, the anarchist mentality alien to the Catalan middle classes, had ensured defeat. Never neutral, he felt hostile to everything.

  It was a widely shared feeling. A joke went the rounds of the Catalan nationalist petty bourgeoisie. ‘Which is the best day of the week? Answer: The day this lot leave and the others haven’t arrived yet.’

  —It expressed our situation as Catalans exactly, reflected Eulalia de MASRIBERA, whose father, a liberal Esquerra businessman, had had to go into hiding after a threat on his life. A staunch Catalan nationalist, she found herself torn between values that had not previously been contradictory: between defending a legally constituted republic and a republic of disorder, chaos, assassinations; between being a Catalan and a Spaniard; between religion and church-burnings; even between members of the same family taking opposite sides. Liberal Catalanists like us were caught in the middle. We couldn’t identify with one side or the other. There was I, with my father’s life threatened by this side, and yet knowing that the other side, the Franquistas, were determined to put an end to Catalan autonomy. It was all this that made the war so sickening for us …

  * * *

  Militancies 16

  TOMAS ROIG LLOP

  Lliga Catalana lawyer

  —We middle classes simply withdrew to our homes and hoped the whole thing would be over as soon as possible, and the situation prior to 18 July restored …

  To begin with, he had hoped that the republic would restore order and win the war. Although his party, the Lliga Catalana, had lined up with the counter-revolutionary bloc in the 1936 general elections, nothing justified the military uprising. It could only threaten what had cost so much to win – Catalan autonomy. By the same token, what could justify the wave of violence that swept the city after the uprising was crushed? The violence of the popular reaction shocked him. Churches and convents were burned, people assassinated before anyone even realized that the uprising had become a civil war.

  Had it not been for this violence against the church, Catalonia would have been a solid bloc against the Franco forces, he thought. Admittedly, the church had not been all that it should, had been insufficiently concerned with ordinary people; but if anywhere, it was here and in the Basque country where this had been least true. The attack on the church had been what most angered the profoundly religious Catalan middle classes.3

  It was these classes which formed the base of Catalan nationalism; in the towns, the liberal professions, the shopkeepers and artisans; on the land, the peasantry. The people who lived their Catalan culture, their language and traditions, in a deep and meaningful way. This middle class abhorred violence, which clashed with the Catalan tradition of conciliation, of seeking means of dialogue rather than confrontation – the English model, the ‘political ideal’. The nationalist middle class was not separatist; separatism, he observed, had been supported by only a small minority which had never played a dominant role in Catalonia’s political destinies. For all that, as soon as Catalans of different tendencies got together in support of their historic perso
nality, the people of Spain began to view the matter with considerable hostility. There had been very few exceptions to that rule. It was explicable by the fear that Catalonia would separate from Spain – ‘something that in fact was inconceivable: geographically, economically – even mentally – it was an impossibility.’

  The middle classes had an important role to play in the war effort. Their hopes for the restoration of law and order had been disappointed. Only one way existed, he believed – and that was used too late. Against the disorder, violence and indiscipline of the FAI which, in the last – if not the first – analysis had been responsible for the republic’s collapse, the communists’ disciplined violence had to be used. Only a well-organized party could control an extreme situation which otherwise led automatically either to worse chaos or to a right-wing backlash. But it had not been until Negrín came to power and sent SIM4 agents to the city that an end had finally been put to the indiscipline and violence. By then it was too late; the middle classes had withdrawn.

  —When we saw that the attacks – not only on religion but on middle-class businesses and workshops through collectivization – were not going to be ended, we pulled out of the struggle. Became neutral, you could say. Didn’t give ourselves up to the war effort. This, I believe, was decisive to the outcome of the war. We withdrew, we could see no purpose to a war we had been dragged into and which we had never wanted …

  As a Catalan nationalist, there were dangers, however, in an attitude of neutrality which could, in the last resort, only favour an enemy resolutely opposed to the Catalan cause. Contrary to the proverb, the devil known appeared worse than the devil unknown.

  —We never believed that Franco would impose a regime which increased the divisions between Spaniards. We thought that after a short period following his victory, he would allow former political parties to re-establish a political order, since he had the army behind him. We imagined he would allow exiles to return. We never thought that his forces would crush Catalonia …

  One of the very few Lliga members to remain in Barcelona, he was deprived of his living as a lawyer. His life threatened more than once, he turned down the chance of escape abroad which Cambó, his party leader, offered, because it meant leaving his wife and three children behind. He found a job in the townhall which did not pay enough to keep them alive, and eked out a living by going round the countryside filling out official forms for illiterate peasants. When they asked what they owed, he looked around: ‘that rabbit,’ ‘that chicken,’ and returned home full of triumph.

  A post office worker he knew told him he had packets of Canary tobacco stored away which he didn’t dare sell. ‘You’re frightened? Well, I’m not,’ and he bundled the tobacco into a large suitcase and set off for the butcher’s, the baker’s, the grocer’s.

  —People were crazy for tobacco – and this post office worker was being sent regular supplies which, by some fantastic stroke of luck, were never intercepted …

  His work sometimes took him to a FAI office. At first he went without tie or cap.

  —‘What have you taken your cap off for?’ the FAI man would say. ‘You’re a rotten bourgeois, rotten through and through, what’s the point of trying to hide it?’ So I’d put my cap back on. Then I’d go to the Esquerra party office to try to get some condensed milk for my children. ‘Why don’t you stop wearing a cap?’ the man would say, looking at me. ‘It’s very impolite these days to wear a hat or cap. Especially when you’re not in your own home.’ A cap or beret – no one in the first months dared wear a hat – became a symbol of the contradictions of life in Barcelona.

  If only all the republican forces had lined up solidly against Franco and bent all their energies towards winning the war, none of this need have happened. Franco could not have won, however much aid he received. All the large cities were on the republican side! But now it was too late …

  * * *

  The shadow of things to come had not yet lengthened over the Catalan bourgeoisie. The visible, hostile presence of the revolution, threatening their socio-political interests, their vision of Catalan autonomy, outweighed the enemy spectre on their borders which threatened autonomy but not – it still seemed – their fundamental class interests.

  A confirmed Catalan nationalist, Juana ALIER none the less supported the Franco forces throughout the war, well aware that they were irreconcilably opposed to Catalan autonomy. The wife of one of the city’s largest millers, she wanted the military’s victory to ‘put an end to the sort of life we were being forced to live, to bring in a new life’. She felt everything was disintegrating around her; it couldn’t continue like this.

  Not that, in some ways, she had been unfortunate. Although she had voted for the Lliga in 1936, she had always been able to count on the protection of the FAI militants in her husband’s mill. In the past, her husband had looked after the families of FAI workers in the mill when they were in prison. On one occasion, when she had been denounced for removing papers and valuables from the family torre which the unified socialist youth had taken over, these FAI workers prevented the socialists from arresting her, and sent a couple of armed men to guard their flat. During the May events, she and her husband stayed in the mill, knowing that under FAI protection they would be safer there than at home. Her husband, who had voted for the Esquerra in 1936, had joined the CNT and had been appointed to the city’s flour-milling committee. He and his brother – who, to all intents and purposes, as a member of the mill committee, continued to run the family enterprise – received wages which were higher than the ordinary workers, and quite sufficient to live on. The mill committee always saw to it that the former ‘bosses’ received not only their fair share but a little more of the food obtained by the committee’s ‘sale’ to farmers of mill residues for cattle fodder. Until the very end, she could not complain about food.

  Her husband wasn’t frightened. Not a single mill-owner who had remained in the city had been killed. As long as there was work one would always be able to live, her husband said.

  —If ‘all this’ lasted a short time, he would get his mill back; and if it lasted a long time – then what did it matter? He was more philosophical about things than I. I was more bourgeois, I needed security. I’d always been frightened of not having enough to live on. If one had some capital, one had security. That’s what I missed …

  Her 100-hectare estate in Tarragona province had been taken over by the workers once the wheat harvest was brought in. Until then, they had sent the foreman and an armed worker each week to Barcelona to collect their wages. Her brother’s paper factory in Lerida was also taken over. But thats he had managed to handle, setting up a committee in the head office in Barcelona to run the business side. Everything had to be run by committee these days! Hers consisted of an office boy and a clerk, who both unreservedly supported her, and herself. The important thing was to prevent anyone else taking over.

  —And to ensure that the factory workers got their wages each week. As long as they were paid there was no friction. The committee was just running out of money when Lerida fell to the advancing nationalist forces, putting an end to the matter …

  Despite her energy, her will to resist, she felt herself falling apart, as though without bearings in a life that was totally impermanent, transient. One of the most important bearings of her former life had gone: religion. She desperately missed not being able to go to church. She managed to have her first child baptized clandestinely in 1937 by a priest who came to the house – but only with water. By the following year, when things were slightly easier, the priest returned with the sacramental objects, they took communion and the child was baptized again.

  —Were we to go on for ever like this? Was worship to be abolished for the duration of the war or for ever? I didn’t know. It was part of a world that had been lost. I prayed for the ‘whites’ to win, so that we could start a new life. Not the way they won in the end – but who was to know that then? …

  Though ‘law and order
’ appeared to have triumphed in Barcelona after the May events, this did not reconcile large numbers of the Catalan middle class to the new course of events. Juana ALIER’S husband felt threatened by the growing strength of the communists; he returned from talks with Joan Comorera, the PSUC leader and Generalitat economics councillor, dispirited.

  —‘I don’t know what will happen to the FAI,’ he said. He didn’t feel entirely safe any more …

  But this was an exceptional view. More common was the opinion that the anarcho-syndicalist revolution was ‘like being in a plane which you know is going to crash’, in the expression of Marcel CANET, the son of a small textile manufacturer in Badalona who had been taken over.

  From the moment that he had answered the government’s call to reservists two days after the start of the war, but was ordered out of the Barcelona barracks by FAI militants on the pretext that no army was going to be formed, he had felt (as an Esquerra member) that the libertarians’ response to the needs of the war was tragically chaotic.

  Returning to his father’s mill, where, in the manner typical of much of the Catalan bourgeoisie of the time, he had begun work at fifteen sweeping the floor, he found that on trade union orders the workers had taken over. The man appointed president of the factory committee was a stoker.

  —He decided that my father was going to have to do his job instead. Become a stoker. My father was a republican, a lifelong Catalan nationalist. After working hard and saving all his life, he had managed to start the mill ten years before. What folly to make an enemy of someone like him! The great majority of middle-class Catalans were hostile to the military rising – but an even greater majority came to hate the revolution the CNT was trying to make …