Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  17. See Militancies 10, pp. 313–16.

  18. It was now, also, that women’s role in the new state was defined. See p. 310.

  19. See p. 404 n.

  20. From within, the nationalist army sometimes appeared a less professional fighting force than it was often credited with being. A seventeen-year-old alférez provisional (temporary second-lieutenant) who was wounded seven times in the northern campaigns, the Teruel counter-offensive, the break-through to the sea, the Ebro and Catalan offensives, suggested that at the infantry level there was little to choose between either side. Ignacio HERNANDEZ: ‘If anything, the republicans had better [Czech] machine-guns and machine rifles; we in the nationalist infantry armed ourselves with them whenever possible. Both armies lacked manoeuvrability; the Nationalist Army had relatively few professional officers in it, and the level of training of those I encountered seemed deplorable. I remember a colonel throwing a map on the ground and, without taking compass bearings, ordering us to take a hill which we knew was in the opposite direction to the enemy lines. I, as a seventeen-year-old, commanded a company; I had had only a few weeks’ training; I knew no arms drill at all. The battalion was led by an alférez provisional for a long time. The professional officer nominally in charge of the battalion spent long stretches back at the regimental depot. We lacked mobility. We did the whole Catalan campaign on foot … What won the war for the Nationalist Army was its superior artillery and bombing capacity. You could almost say that the Condor Legion won the war.’ It should be added that the nationalist command was able to move reinforcements to threatened fronts with greater rapidity than the Popular Army; nationalist forces, for example, were transferred in little more than twelve hours from the northern front to Brunete to stem the republican break-through in the summer of 1937.

  21. The organization later moved into espionage and sabotage, helped people escape to France, issued doctors’ certificates exempting sympathizers from military service, organized secret religious services, etc.

  22. Generals Miaja and Matallana refused to support the operation; the republican government had to accept this insubordination. (See H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 868.)

  Winter 1938 to Spring 1939

  BARCELONA

  The Ebro crossing, brilliantly conceived and executed, demonstrated finally the error of a traditional concept of war. In a direct confrontation of military strength, the odds were on the nationalist army ending the day victorious. It was a repeat, on a larger scale, of earlier republican offensives: Brunete, Belchite, Teruel. A breakthrough, exploiting the enemy’s surprise; containment of the offensive by rapidly mobilized nationalist reinforcements; finally, the nationalist counter-offensive. The Ebro offensive gained time and lost vast amounts of war matériel which the republic could not replace. Fighting with their back to a river made matters no easier. The battle started at the height of the international crisis over Czechoslovakia when world war seemed imminent – which almost inevitably would have involved the bourgeois democratic powers directly in the republic’s fate; it was dealt a political death-blow by the Munich pact at the end of September.1 By the time it ended six weeks later, France had again closed her border with Spain.

  Two days before Christmas, with the promise of a large infusion of German aid, Franco launched his offensive on Catalonia.

  Timoteo RUIZ, nineteen-year-old communist peasant from Toledo, had been promoted lieutenant during the Ebro battle; he was now dispatched to Barcelona to raise a company to defend Catalonia. When he saw the men who reported to the Carlos Marx barracks, he was disheartened: they were all men who had been exempted from military service because of specialist skills, most of them married. Their wives and children came to see them off as they set out to hold a line along the Bruch pass. He felt the men hadn’t their hearts in fighting. There was a spirit of defeat; people were war-weary.

  —‘Oh, when this finishes,’ peasants said to me, and what they meant was that they didn’t care which way it finished, as long as it finished. There was no spirit of defence as there had been in November 1936 in Madrid. The political struggles in Barcelona had sapped the people’s spirit, I thought. During the defence of Madrid, ideological differences had played no part …

  But once he got his men to the front, their combativeness rose; it was in the rearguard that the demoralization was greatest.

  Among those in the rearguard called up at this late stage was Tomás ROIG LLOP, the Lliga Catalana member who had remained in Barcelona.2 He was thirty-six. Reporting to the Francesc Macià school, he found 400 men assembled on the third floor – all heads of families, like himself. They waited and waited, wondering what was going to become of them.

  —After three hours of this, one of the men spoke up: ‘Do you want to leave here?’ ‘Of course,’ we all chorused. ‘Well then, form up in a column of fours. I will act as the commander, and you will keep in step, shouting – “one-two”, “one-two” as we march out – ’ We formed up, and with the man giving the orders and us shouting as he had told us, we marched out of the building. We marched past the guard, still shouting ‘one-two, one-two’ until we had gone a short distance around a corner. Then our leader – a man of genius, a man with a real sense of humour – shouted a last ‘one-two’, and with that we scattered and ran. The army never saw us again …

  1939 was not 1936, reflected Josep SOLE BARBERA, the Reus communist lawyer, now serving at the front. In Madrid, unknown heights of heroism had been scaled, expressing a true popular unity. The Catalan forces lacked neither morale nor heroism; but the circumstances had changed. The north had been lost, the Non-Intervention committee had played its part in helping the enemy, the political events since May 1937 had had their effect. ‘The conditions for a resistance to the death no longer existed.’

  In Barcelona, Adolfo BUESO, the POUM printer who had returned from hiding after the May events, saw only a spirit of defeat. No one, he thought, was willing to fight to the death to save the city.

  —Everybody was thinking, ‘How am I going to escape?’ If Barcelona had been besieged in 1936, the people would have reacted as they did in Madrid. But after thirty-two months of war, their spirit had gone. People started leaving a week before the city fell …

  Stubborn resistance at the front for a fortnight held up the advance; then weight of military strength told, and the nationalists advanced on Barcelona as fast as their columns could march. ‘We could have got to the French frontier in a couple of days if anyone had thought of providing us with transport,’ thought Ignacio HERNANDEZ, the seventeen-year-old temporary second lieutenant in the nationalist infantry. ‘Instead, we did our 30 kilometres foot-slogging a day … ’

  On 26 January, just a month after the start of the offensive, the nationalists entered Barcelona. President Companys telephoned Josep ANDREU ABELLO, president of the Barcelona high court, and told him he wanted to leave the city with him. After dining together in Companys’s torre in the Horta quarter, they got into ANDREU’S car and drove into the centre.

  —It was a night I’ll never forget. The silence was total, a terrible silence, the sort you can imagine only at the height of a tragedy. We drove into the Plaça de Sant Jaume, said farewell to the Generalitat and to the city. It was 2 a.m. The vanguard of the nationalist army was already on Mount Tibidabo and close to Montjuich. We didn’t believe we would return. Alone in the car we set off for Sant Hilario de Sacalm, near Gerona, where we were to spend the next three or four days on a marquess’s estate …

  Eulalia de MASRIBERA, student librarian, who had felt her loyalties divided, who had believed that the ‘best day of the week’ would be when ‘these’ left and ‘those’ hadn’t arrived, now watched the mass exodus. The word suddenly went round: ‘The people are leaving … ’

  —A tragic procession of people on foot, trudging past our house, carrying their belongings. People in mule carts, even people in cars. It went on all day and through the night. It was like those pictures of the South Vietnamese flee
ing with all their possessions …

  *

  At the other end of the city, a liberal republican doctor conscripted into the nationalist army drove in with orders to take over the Clinical hospital. As he pushed open the iron gates, a man in a beret began running away.

  —‘They’re here already,’ he shouted. ‘Who?’ ‘The fascists.’ ‘Yes, that’s us,’ I shouted. ‘¡Viva España!’ he cried. ‘Don’t go on, I’m fed up with hearing that shout,’ I replied. Then we went into the hospital. I was amazed to find a ward with all the beds made, everything in order, spotlessly clean …

  In addition, he found a great number of right-wingers sheltering there and in the medical faculty. They appeared to have plenty of food: meat, butifarra and wine. That night, after a good meal, they held a dance. Dr Antonio TORRES settled down to a pleasant time; the girls were pretty and the military had plenty of food.

  Eulalia de MASRIBERA watched the Moorish troops coming in. Suddenly she saw an officer lash one of them with the whip he was carrying. She cringed. ‘What a horrifying, depressing sight!’

  The streets of the city were littered with paper, torn-up party and union membership cards, documents. In the port the masts of bombed ships stuck out above the water. But at least everything was over, at last, thought Juana ALIER, the mill-owner’s wife. The people she knew went mad with joy. ‘The happiness was that the war was finished, not that one side or another had won.’

  *

  Within a fortnight, the nationalist army reached the French border, completing the capture of Catalonia. Nearly half a million civilians and soldiers crossed to exile and confinement in the terrible conditions of French concentration camps.

  Timoteo RUIZ fought all the way to the French frontier with his hastily formed unit of men called up only a few weeks before in Barcelona, holding off the enemy by day, retreating to new positions by night. As he crossed the frontier, he and many other militants hid their small arms instead of surrendering them to the French; they were convinced that shortly they would be returning to Spain to continue the struggle. But as he marched to a concentration camp and saw the train-loads of Russian war matériel – aeroplane spare parts, artillery, ammunition, which the French had held up – he was demoralized. For the first time he realized the extent to which the bourgeois democracies had refused to help the republic. Had it not seemed, for so long, in the gathering crisis brought on by fascism, that in their own interest they must help? But no, they were blind. And in the light of that refusal, it was necessary to rethink the strategy of war, to learn to find means of depending only on the Spanish people’s resources, of fighting to win … 3

  Soviet arms, shipped via France and held up on the border, came too late. Some train-loads were sent through at the last moment. Francisco ABAD, communist organizer pre-war of his Madrid regiment’s clandestine soldiers’ and corporals’ movement, found himself, as acting military commandant of the town of Figueras, having to order trains back into France. Had they remained, they would have served only the enemy. Figueras was the last town of any size before the border. At the last minute he and his father-in-law, Lt Col. Díaz-Tendero, made for the frontier at Port Bou where they found more trains on sidings. Searching them they discovered a wagon full of republican defence ministry documentation concerning the Popular Army. With difficulty they managed to destroy it, believing it had been deliberately left there to fall into enemy hands.

  The republic’s last foreign ministry was set up in a village schoolhouse near the border. José LOPEZ REY, art historian and wartime head of the ministry’s political and diplomatic office, and Quero, the sub-secretary, were the last civil servants left. LOPEZ REY had never believed that resistance could be continued – as Negrín publicly maintained – until a Second World War broke out. Hitler and Mussolini would not begin a world war until the Spanish civil war was liquidated; and Britain and France would not move until they were attacked. No, Negrín’s other card – negotiations – was the only, if difficult, one to be played. Negotiations, he knew, had begun with the Spanish monarchy in exile sometime the previous May after Negrín announced his Thirteen Points.4 The monarchy’s restoration would go hand-in-hand with attempting to save as much of the republic’s progressive legislation as possible. Without knowing the details, he wondered whether Negrín did not have in mind that, once the inevitable Second World War had broken out, it would be possible to restore a republic.

  On 1 February, five days after the fall of Barcelona, the prime minister named three conditions for peace: a guarantee of Spanish independence; a guarantee of the Spanish people’s right to determine their own government; and freedom from persecution. All who heard his speech to a rump meeting of the Cortes in Figueras knew that the conditions would not be accepted by Franco; thus Negrín was recommending the continuation of the war.

  LOPEZ REY put the schoolhouse key in his pocket and, with his companion, walked to the frontier. He was suffering from scurvy; for the last six months in Barcelona he had eaten nothing but rice. A lettuce cost as much as 75 pesetas. It was one of the few times in his life when he had money to spare. Crossing the border without problem on his official pass, he reflected that as soon as Franco’s victory looked certain, France and England would recognize the Burgos regime. Non-Intervention had been a farce. The French and English governments were cowardly; so, too, was Hitler, but everything depended on his bluff.

  In the Perpignan restaurant he ordered for two. When the meals came, to the waiter’s astonishment, he settled down to eat them both.

  *

  The tens of thousands of civilian refugees streaming for a fortnight over the 160 km separating Barcelona from the frontier were not so fortunate; their only concern was to reach safety. Rosa VEGA, the schoolteacher who had returned from the Soviet Union, was among them. With her was a young pregnant woman who, after some days on the road, gave birth in a masía without light or water; two days later, holding her baby in her arms, the woman was again struggling towards the border.

  At the frontier post she watched the soldiers throw down their arms. They appeared passive, defeated.

  —The French had set up big pots in which they were heating milk, and as we filed past we were each given a drink and a bit of bread. It was the saddest day of my life. Everything seemed at an end. We were defeated, we counted for nothing now …

  The women and children were separated from the men and sent to different concentration camps. For Dr Carlos MARTINEZ, who had escaped from Asturias in a fishing smack, it was the second time in sixteen months that he was fleeing Spain. He had been fortunate to escape an air raid in Figueras which had destroyed the hospital where he was working. At the border, he watched the old men, women and children crossing into exile in the rain, the weight of defeat heavy on their shoulders. There were terrible scenes as families were separated, as they left for unknown fates in concentration camps.

  —There was a general feeling that defeat, exile, would last only three or four years. The full dimension of the war seemed to have escaped these optimists. I was sure the enemy was not going to let his triumph be wrested from him that easily, that soon …

  *

  In Barcelona, Dionisio RIDRUEJO, Falange propaganda chief, prepared to put into practice an ambitious programme. Foreseeing Catalonia’s fall, he had decided on the need to give the Catalans and syndicalists the impression that they had not been defeated – at least not as Catalans or as syndicalists. His project, which had the approval of the Falange’s secretary-general, Fernández Cuesta, included distributing quantities of Catalan language books and manifestos. Having seen the joy on the faces of so many of the Barcelona petty bourgeois who had cheered the entry of the nationalist forces, he felt his decision was justified. Their relief that the war was over, that the hunger which lined their faces was at last to be satisfied, could – he thought – be put to good use.

  The Falange was anti-separatist and fought for the unity of Spain. But for him the defeat of separatism did not mean the
defeat of Catalonia’s cultural autonomy. As for the anarcho-syndicalist working class, he had teams prepared to hold meetings in proletarian barrios to explain that the new form of syndicalism was not aimed at burying their syndicalism but of replacing it.

  He went to explain his plan to the military commandant, General Alvarez Arenas. The latter barely heard him out.

  —‘This is a city that has sinned greatly, and it must now be sanctified. Altars should be set up in every street of the city to say masses continually,’ he told me. He ordered all my material confiscated, prohibited the speaking of Catalan and forbade the meetings in working-class barrios. Soon posters began to appear: ‘Speak Castilian, the language of the Empire.’ Shopkeepers’ signs were changed to Castilian; all foreign names were ‘nationalized’ …

  RIDRUEJO remained in the city only a fortnight. Totally disheartened, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized.

  Barcelona was a conquered city; the Catalan nationalist middle classes would now feel the weight of Franquista Spain’s cultural repression.

  * * *

  Article 1. All those persons who, from 1 October 1934, to before 18 July 1936, contributed to creating or aggravating the subversion suffered by Spain; and all those who, from the second above-mentioned date, opposed the National Movement actively or passively, shall be considered answerable for their political activities …