—‘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! …
To the family’s surprise, father and brother were released, but threatened with re-arrest if the friars’ whereabouts were not revealed by noon the next day. After a long struggle with the Capuchin provincial, who was in hiding, SERRAHIMA managed to reach agreement that one friar would give himself up, and for the rest they would say they had lost track of them. The next day, realizing that they had taken action, the patrol pursued the matter no further; and the friar was soon released by the police – only to be shot by someone who recognized him later.
After his brush with the patrol, SERRAHIMA found the nervous tension too great to remain at home. All the Catalan ideals for which he stood were at stake. He went to the police to see if they could afford protection against the workers’ patrols. ‘Leave – that is all you can do,’ he was advised. ‘But – we can’t all leave,’ his father said; and so they agreed to remain.
To avoid being cooped up at home, he began walking round the city in the uniform of the times: shirt-sleeves and hemp sandals. The sight of the burnt churches depressed him; but there were other things that impressed him even more.
—In all my walks through the many different types of neighbourhood, I didn’t see a single drunk. And that was a time which lent itself to excesses. Nor were there any sexual crimes; only once was one brought to my attention, and then without any real details. While there was total social disorder, you might say, there was no moral disorder. People were being assassinated – though in far fewer numbers than, propagandistically, has been claimed; in fact, relatively fewer than in other republican cities like Madrid, I believe – but at the same time the total decomposition that one could have expected did not occur …
Nevertheless, there could be no doubt that the struggle to win the Catalan middle classes was lost without thought by the libertarians. The consequences for them, for their revolution, and for the war were grave.
* * *
Let us repeat the phrase so often pronounced by our illustrious general, Queipo de Llano: the words ‘pardon’ and ‘amnesty’ must disappear from the Spanish dictionary.
ABC (Seville, 1 September 1936)
* * *
We are fighting totally for Spain and for civilization. Nor are we fighting alone; 20 centuries of Western Christian Civilization lie behind us. We are fighting for God, for our land and our dead …
It has always been Spain’s providential and historic mission to save the civilized world from all dangers: expelling moors, stopping turks, baptizing indians … Now new turks, red and cruel asiatics, are again threatening Europe. But Spain, today as yesterday, opposes them, saves and redeems civilization. Because this is a holy war, a crusade of civilization …
José Maria Pemán, monarchist poet
(Broadcast over Seville radio, 15 August 1936)
* * *
BLOOD AND GOLD FOR THE SALVATION OF SPAIN
Youth’s generous blood must be prepared to be shed for the sacred cause of Spain. The gold of the wealthy is necessary for the same cause …
Defensor de Córdoba (15 September 1936)
* * *
ANDALUSIA
In the first days of August, as the Catalan columns were being brought to a halt on the Aragon front, a motorized Army of Africa column, made up of legionaries and Moroccan regulares, headed north from Seville. Almost all the 8,000 men had been air-lifted from Morocco; amongst them was Lt BRAVO, of the guardia civil, who was impressed by the reception they were given. People came up to them in the streets and presented them with religious medallions, wine, water-melons, whatever they had to show their gratitude.
—There were still legionary NCOs who had doubts about the uprising – many had deserted at the beginning. But when we saw the welcome, I told them: ‘Now you can’t doubt that this is a popular movement.’ For that is what it was. The Moroccan troops were scandalized when they heard that the reds were desecrating religious images. Girls were pinning scapularies on the Moors and I remember one old regular who said to them: ‘No saint, no Jesus – but God, yes!’ …
Travelling in commandeered lorries and advancing mainly by night, the force advanced 200 km to Mérida, in Estremadura, in a week. Three hundred and fifty kilometres ahead lay their final objective: Madrid.
Behind them they left a rearguard which was by no means secure: Granada and Córdoba were still outposts, the former isolated, the latter connected to Seville by only a narrow corridor along the Guadalquivir river. To the south, on the coast near Gibraltar, danger of attack from the Popular Front forces in Málaga (where the rising had failed) remained very real.
* * *
1. The belief that the ‘army en bloc’ rose against the republican government does not withstand examination. Of the two dozen active divisional generals, four (and only one of these with troop command in the peninsula) rose. Four out of five guardia civil generals and the general commanding the air force remained loyal. Of nearly sixty brigadier generals, less than one third joined the rising. This does not mean that the rest were all loyal; many were dismissed by the republic, no doubt with good reason. However, it was captains, majors and – to a much lesser extent – colonels who provided the bulk of the rebel officer corps. Possibly as many as half the men actually serving in the army at the time remained in the republican zone, and between one third and one half of the active service army officers. However, three factors reduced their effective combat strength: 1. The republican government’s grave error in demobilizing soldiers (who refused to heed subsequent call-up orders and often joined the militia instead). 2. Working-class anti-militarism, particularly strong amongst the anarcho-syndicalists, but also in evidence amongst socialists. Combined with a general distrust of all army officers as a result of the rising – a distrust which was not unfounded as many deserted when the opportunity arose – this meant that the officers were not used. 3. The resulting lack of hierarchical chains of command, bureaucratic coherence and disciplinary coercion meant that while military units might still exist an army had ceased to. Despite these disadvantages, the Popular Front forces rapidly fought the insurgents to a stalemate in the Guadarrama, suggestive of the Spanish peninsular army’s material unpreparedness for war. Mola had two divisional commands, Burgos and Valladolid (the 6th and 7th), to use immediately against the Madrid 1st. He was soon expecting to have to withdraw northwards because of shortage of rifle ammunition. The combat capacity of the peninsular army alone was probably not high enough to make possible a decisive breakthrough on either side; the Army of Africa alone had such capacity.
2. The Carlist revolution was outlined by Jaime del Burgo, president of the Carlist student association AET (Agrupación Escolar Tradicionalista) in Pamplona: ‘Reaction is to return to the situation immediately anterior to the present. Revolution tends to restore a situation much more ancient, which we mean to be the traditional regime … the 16th century … For nothing in the world do we wish to return to what existed before 14 April (1931). Neither its principles nor its men; neither constitutional monarchy nor anti-foral centralism; neither dictatorial tyranny nor irresponsible governments which make pacts with the enemy. Thus, we are not reactionaries. We seek other, more Spanish, more Christian principles which accord better with the class spirit … These principles are old ones: a corporative, guild organization, which is Spanish … ’ (from an article of 16 February 1934 in a.e.t., cited in the same author’s Requetés en Navarra antes del alzamiento, San Sebastian, 1939).
3. The self-governing rights which Navarre retai
ned when its kingdom joined the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century, and which, in modified form, were recognized by treaty at the end of the first Carlist war in 1841 when Navarre lost its status of kingdom.
4. See J. I. Escobar, Asi empezó (Madrid, 1974), pp. 56–7.
5. See A. Viñas, La Alemania nazi y el 18 de julio (Madrid, 1974).
6. See Militancies 3, pp. 94–7.
7. Lt F. Rivas Gómez, ‘La defensa de Baena’, Revista de Estudios históricos de la guardia civil, no. 9, 1972. The author, a native of the town and a guardia civil officer, drew his researches from both sides. ‘There can be no doubt that injustices were committed (in the summary executions), for the slightest accusation on the part of a defender was sufficient for a man to be shot.’ Many inhabitants continue to believe that the repression was even costlier in lives.
8. In October, he was able to arrange their escape across the lines. The discontinuous front made it relatively easy to cross, and the CNT organized the escape of considerable numbers of left-wing militants from the city.
9. The raids, minor affairs by later standards, were the work of a few insurgent planes from Logroño; some of the first bombs on both sides were dropped by hand. Although the republic retained the best part of the antiquated air force, insurgent use of their few planes was effective against militiamen who crowded on roads at the beginning. On 20 August the insurgents on the Córdoba front stopped the republic’s first major offensive by bombing and machine-gunning one of the attacking columns on the road not far from Castro del Río. Italian Savoias took part in the raid (see J. M. Martínez Bande, La campaña de Andalucía, p. 62).
10. According to a libertarian youth member who was in the group, the choice of Sabadell was not accidental: the treintista union was the only one in Catalonia not to return to the CNT fold at the start of the war, joining the UGT. The estimate by Abad de Santillán, the libertarian writer and member of the anti-fascist militia committee, that 60,000 rifles were kept in the rear, seems exaggerated. It is doubtful whether that many rifles had been seized in the first place; the anarchists, moreover, preferred pistols and hand-grenades for street-fighting as was demonstrated in Barcelona in May 1937.
11. See below, pp. 143–5.
12. Both had lost the use of their coercive instruments (the security forces) and the credibility of their institutions (parliament, the legal system, etc.) on which state power, as the expression of class rule, rests. But neither had lost the actual institutions or the coercive instruments – for they had not been destroyed – only the effective deployment of them.
13. As it was to decree a whole series of measures, including the appointment of a defence commissioner, the reduction of the work week to forty hours, a general 15 per cent increase in wages, the reduction of most rents by 25 per cent, the control of the banks, etc.
14. As viewed by the libertarians: one representative of the newly formed PSUC, one of the POUM and three of the UGT. It is worth noting that the libertarians, who determined the representation, allowed the largest working-class party in Catalonia at that moment, the POUM, only one seat, the same as the then diminutive PSUC, effectively the new communist party of Catalonia. The libertarians, while technically representing the CNT and FAI, were all FAI members, with the Nosotros group providing three of them. Numerical equality between the political forces was seen by the libertarians as ensuring them the same rights in regions where they were in a minority.
15. See p. 442, n. 1.
16. The CNT–FAI bulletin in Barcelona reported on 25 July 1936 that a priest in the hospital had a heated argument with a doctor, pulled out a revolver and fired a magazine not at the doctor but at the wounded. ‘Bystanders were so infuriated that they picked out four of the most priestly and fascist of the brethren and shot them out of hand.’ (Cited in Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, p. 269.) It should also be noted that in Barcelona and elsewhere the FAI was automatically blamed for assassinations and crimes.
17. The fact that the petty bourgeoisie in town and country was, everywhere, a frequent employer of small amounts of labour, explains in part the violence of both the industrial and rural proletariat’s response to this class, which was automatically identified with the big bourgeoisie.
18. These acted as a revolutionary police force and were made up of 700 men – 325 of the CNT, 185 of the Esquerra, 145 of the UGT and 45 of the POUM (see C. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas españoles y el poder, Paris, 1972, p. 92).
19. The following story was indicative. The house of a very wealthy, conservative, religious Barcelona family was being searched by an anarchist patrol, one of whose members went out into the garden and began poking about. When he came in empty-handed the family believed a miracle had happened. The rosaries they had buried had not been discovered. A few minutes after the patrol left the anarchist who had been in the garden returned. ‘Idiots,’ he said in Catalan, ‘if they had found these they would have killed the lot of you.’ He threw the rosaries on the table and walked out. ‘He was a Catalan, that was the difference; not that Catalans are better people, simply that they have been Catalans for generations and produced authentic anarchists’ (Prof. Josep TRUETA).
20. ‘When intransigent, intolerant, intractable commissions or elements came to see me, I had no other recourse than to invite them to show me their trade union card, with the unvarying outcome; their cards were dated never earlier than the 1st, 10th or 15th of August [1936]’ (J. P. Fàbregas, CNT economics councillor, Buttletí trimestral de la conselleria d’economia, no. 2, cited in A. Pérez-Baró, Trenta mesos de col·lectivisme a Catalunya, Barcelona, 1970, p. 47). A case in point was rent-collectors. Much hated, many were killed at the start of the revolution. The remainder joined the CNT for their own protection where they became ‘ultra revolutionary’, decided to collect all Barcelona rents and ‘set about it as though they owned all accommodation. They frightened great numbers of the petty bourgeoisie whose interests – and even lives – were at stake … ’ (evidence of PEREZ-BARO).
21. A. Balcells, Cataluña contemporánea, II (1900–1936) (Madrid, 1974), p. 40.
22. In Catalonia the church was somewhat ‘more open’, republican anti-clerical sentiment less marked and the emergence of christian-democratic attitudes more developed than in central and southern Spain. See Points of Rupture, B.
Episodes 1: Attack
The summer somnolence of school holidays continued for thirteen-year-old Carlos CASTILLA DEL PINO. After the Moroccan troops had taken his native San Roque,23 near Gibraltar, life appeared to return to normal and shortly he was expecting to resume lessons with his tutor.
On the night of 26 July 1936, the illusion was shattered: lorry-loads of Popular Front militiamen from Málaga arrived in the village vicinity. At seven o’clock the next morning, shooting was heard. The boy’s uncles and others began to display signs of nervousness and placed mattresses against the windows of their house. Very soon a group of militiamen reached the door.
—Nine gunshots – I counted them – was the way they knocked. My uncle opened the door. Three men came in, two with shotguns and wearing white shirts with their sleeves rolled up, red neckerchiefs, red armbands. The other man wore a steel helmet, the first I’d ever seen, and sergeant’s insignia; in his left hand a sabre and in his right a large pistol …
The men searched the house and the boy followed them. The two civilians – anarchists, for that was what he imagined them to be – appeared very nervous, more at finding themselves in a well-to-do house and in front of señoras than for any other reason, he thought. In one of the cupboards, under some clothes, one of them found something and gave a shout. It was a large crucifix, not the weapon he thought he had discovered, and he put it back. They stayed half an hour and then took his three uncles and a cousin away as hostages. His family were all monarchists; his father, now dead, had been mayor of the township under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship.
Outside shooting continued. Though he didn’t know it, his uncles and cousin had be
en taken to the barracks where they were made to call on the army detachment and the guardia civil to surrender. Neither did. At noon there was another knock on the door. The boy opened it to see a Moroccan regulares lieutenant standing there; he informed him that his uncles and cousin had been shot.
—The women in the house, my mother and aunts, started to scream and wail. Under cover of their crying I slipped out. The lieutenant had said that my uncle Pepe, though badly wounded, was still alive in the hospital. I loved him very much …
Carlos ran through the streets. In the Calle de la Plata, he saw three bodies close by the pavement. Two men and a child. Later he learnt that one of the men had come out of his house to see what was happening and a Moroccan had shot him; his brother came out and he, too, was shot. Crying with grief, his son came out – and the Moroccan shot him.
There was still firing and, without being told to, he put his hands up. As he ran, he saw his uncle Juan’s body, wrapped in a republican flag, being carried on an improvised stretcher. At the hospital, the doctor, whom he often accompanied on his rounds (for the boy already wanted to be a doctor), told him he could see his uncle Pepe. ‘But he’s badly wounded. Don’t cry –’ He found him lying in a corridor. The small local hospital had only a few beds and they were taken by wounded carabineros. His uncle had been shot in the street and had managed to crawl to the doorway of a republican’s house where he was shot again. His body showed twenty-one bullet wounds, one of them in the toes.
—When I saw him, the blood-stained bandages in which he was wrapped, I started to cry. I think he recognized me. Soon he died …
He came out. His other uncle and cousin were lying dead in the street. Uncle Miguel’s face had crashed on the pavement with such force that the bloodmarks could not be removed and the paving stone had to be replaced. Then he saw a Moor across the street.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 21
