A hundred years earlier, during the slaughter of priests, a mayor of an Aragonese township had reported to the government: ‘The massacre of priests is continuing here in the midst of the greatest order.’ It had started because the people had believed a rumour that priests had poisoned the wells. If they could believe that, they could believe anything, not least that the church was not concerned about the poor. In killing priests they believed they were doing a very necessary, even God-ordained task in finishing off vermin. They had forgotten Napoleon’s words: ‘He who eats priests dies of the eating.’
He had caught the last train out of Madrid on the eve of the uprising to spend his summer holidays with friends in the seaside town of Luanco, not far from Gijón. His friends had been arrested and imprisoned; he had been confined to house-arrest for seven months, then held in the local church with other prisoners. There he experienced a moment of great danger. Militiamen arrived from Gijón with a list of people to be taken; one of the men was the cousin of a local committee member. The latter protested that his cousin was not to go. ‘Give us another, then, it’s all the same to me. I’ve got orders to take fourteen,’ said the militiaman in charge.
—So they woke up the first man they happened to come across – a practicante who had done absolutely nothing, and that night he and the other thirteen were shot …
Cut off from news of Madrid, he did not know that his brother, a priest at El Pardo, just outside the capital, had been assassinated in August. Only later did he learn from the local grave-digger how he had met his fate.
—He was a mystic, a man completely withdrawn from the world. The reds (to use the terminology of the time) called him an enemy of the people. He had many rich and aristocratic penitents whom I sent him, for I was rector of a small church on the Paseo de Recoletos, an aristocratic quarter of Madrid. That was his death warrant. They came for him one night and took him to the cemetery at the top of the hill where, facing the sierra Guadarrama, he had so often read St John of the Cross.
‘Will you give me five minutes to recommend myself to God?’ They agreed. Then he turned to them. ‘In the dark you are not going to be able to aim properly, are you? But if I stand against the whitewashed wall of the convent you will be able to see me.’ The first shots didn’t kill him. Lying on the ground, he called to them: ‘Chicos, you will have to administer the coup de grâce, you haven’t killed me’ …
In June 1937, the Council of Asturias decided to abolish make-shift prisons and he was transferred to El Coto gaol in Gijón. Neither he nor any of the priests incarcerated with him were physically maltreated, nor were any executed. After the fall of Santander, he and some 200 other prisoners were transferred to the prison ship in the port of El Musel. The move coincided with the start of the nationalist offensive on Asturias: the prisoners aboard the collier were exposed as hostages to the air raids of the important port. (When the offensive gained momentum, the Council of Asturias protested about the air raids to the League of Nations and threatened to kill prisoners in reprisal.)
—Every time they suffered a set-back it was we who suffered. One night, by the light of an acetylene lamp, we were ordered on deck. I realized immediately what was afoot – a saca. I was sure my last hour had come, they knew only too well that I was a priest. They selected thirty prisoners, many of them good friends of mine, and shot them. I still can’t understand why I was not among them …
He had already been denounced by a fellow-prisoner for hearing women prisoners’ whispered confessions through a rivet hole in the bulk-head separating the two holds. (‘One or two love letters also passed through, but they didn’t reach their destination, I made sure of that. It was a good thing our gaolers didn’t mix the men and women, I’ll grant them that. War demoralized people and a civil war doubly so.’) Woken in the middle of the night to explain how he could confess the women, he showed the militiamen the hole. ‘Bah!’ they expostulated when they saw how small it was, and ordered him to desist. ‘But it was I who had to carry the burden of fear.’ Might he not have suffered the fate of the three or four prisoners who had been taken out to sea in a rowing boat not long before and shot?
But if it was not the fate of priests to die, it was their misfortune to be humiliated. When he first saw himself covered in fleas he believed it was the end of the world; but this was nothing compared to his gaolers’ evident delight in tormenting priests. He was made to clean out the bilges with his bare hands when the pumps broke down. The venerable parish priest of Luanco, who had been president of the fishermen’s brotherhoods on the Cantabrian coast, was treated even worse.
—‘They accuse me of being the persecutor of the working class – ’ he would say. ‘That’s quite normal,’ I replied, ‘that’s what they accuse me of, too.’ ‘But in these newspapers’ – he indicated an enormous bundle – ‘there are articles of mine written over the past twenty-five years defending the fishermen’s interests. I am sure that they will serve as evidence in my favour before a Popular Tribunal.’
In one of the searches, a guard asked don Faustino about the newspapers. He explained. The guard said that was interesting. He sat down on a coil of rope and with a pair of scissors carefully cut out, newspaper by newspaper, each article. When he had finished, he crumpled the articles into a ball and threw them overboard. ‘And with what’s left you can wipe your arse … ’
Like don Faustino, the priest, almost all new prisoners maintained their innocence as soon as they were brought aboard. ‘I have done nothing,’ was the endless refrain. He had a standard answer: ‘Ask the others here what they have done.’
—And then I would add: ‘Examine your conscience and ask yourself if that is not why we’re all here: for not having done anything. If we had done what we ought to have done many years ago, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are now’ …
Surprising as it might seem, he reflected, the republic had come in with ecclesiastical support, particularly in the Basque country and Catalonia. Barely a month had passed when the convents were fired.25 People started to shout, ‘They’re coming, they’re carrying petrol cans’, and he left the seminary and went to a near-by friend’s home from where he rang up and ascertained that his church was not under attack. He was about to have lunch with his friends, when the nephew of the lady of the house arrived and had words with her. What this apparently fervent, devout man said to her he didn’t know.
—But she turned to me and said: ‘Don Alejandro, you will have to leave immediately; my nephew tells me your presence compromises me very gravely.’ Recommending myself to God, I left the house and walked home through the crowded streets without trouble. But I now knew what to expect of the republic – as did all believers. The republic committed suicide that day …
Indisputably, in his view, the church burnings (which he maintained the new regime had tolerated if not actually instigated) had divided the country. Thereafter the republic had continued its absurd, impetuous religious persecution, incarnated in anti-clerical laws, the dissolution once more of the Jesuits, the offensive against religious education. Nothing could be achieved by legal means. The Popular Front electoral victory, following on Gil Robles’s terrible mistake of believing he could collaborate with the republic, had done no more than confirm this.
—Not that I took part in anything. If someone asked me whether I was on the left or the right, I answered simply: ‘I am a priest.’ But most of us believers saw the civil war as a liberation from that absurd persecution of the church. We Spanish clergy loved Spain and didn’t want to see the country dismembered by separatism. Those were the reasons which justified our supporting the uprising. And if, once in a while, things didn’t turn out as we might have wished, if Franco’s army was not the band of archangels we imagined while in prison, that was not exactly our fault …
* * *
ARMY IS IN SITUATION MORAL DEFEAT, WE LACKING MEANS MAKE IT FIGHT. STRENUOUS EFFORTS RAISE MORALE … STRICT RATIONING EFFECTED DUE FORCED SHORTAGES. WE SEEN NO SUPPLIES YOU SAY
SENT … LACK RIFLE ROUNDS, RAW MATERIALS. URGENTLY NEED CHICK-PEAS, RICE, BEANS, OIL, POTATOES, FLOUR AND HAM SUFFICIENT FOR 1,200,000 INHABITANTS …
Telegram from Belarmino Tomás,
president of the Sovereign Council of Asturias,
to the central government (September 1937)
* * *
ASTURIAS
Father MARTINEZ’S sufferings were not to last long. After six weeks of bitter resistance in the mountainous terrain,26 the Asturian forces began to crumble before the nationalist offensive. Isolated in the last Popular Front territory in the north, the Council of Asturias had declared itself a sovereign government and dismissed General Gámir Ulíbarri, supreme commander of the army of the north. The communist party opposed the declaration of independence, but the socialists, backed by the libertarians and republicans, stood firm. Asturias prepared to emulate Madrid; no one was to ‘look towards the sea’ – the only means of escape.
In one week in mid-October the tables turned. The front started to collapse, panic swept the rearguard whose morale had been severely tested by shortage of food and air raids. The military command advised the council that resistance was impossible. The communist councillors called for all-out resistance, in accord with instructions cabled by Prime Minister Negrín. The majority decided otherwise.
The night before – travel by road was possible only at night because of the air raids – Paulino RODRIGUEZ, miner and socialist mayor of Sotrondio in the Nalón mining valley, had his last talk with Belarmino Tomás. The president of the council assured him that the evacuation of all those with political responsibilities was about to begin. RODRIGUEZ returned to his village on 17 October to find that a battalion had arrived with orders signed by the commander-in-chief of the army of the north to destroy all industries and strategic sites: mines, electricity generating plants, bridges, etc.
—‘I agree that everything must be blown up,’ I told the battalion commander. ‘But first the population’s evacuation must be assured. We cannot blow up the mines on which the population depends for its livelihood; if we do, the people will only heap curses on the few who have been able to leave’ …
RODRIGUEZ secured the officer’s agreement to wait three days before carrying out his orders. He spent the time gathering evidence to present to the general staff to support his plea to evacuate the population or leave the mines intact. On the night of 20 October, he travelled to Gijón with two comrades, one of them a CNT member. When he got there he found people running wildly through the streets. He forced his way into Belarmino Tomás’s office only to find him gone; people were desperately packing papers in boxes and sacks. He saw that people were hurrying towards the port. He thought he should join them. ‘But the battalion commander was waiting for me in Sotrondio. What would happen in the village? I decided to return –’
Throughout the night the fishing boats set sail from El Musel. The day before a bomb had fallen beside the collier prison ship in the port where Father MARTINEZ was confined, killing eleven of the prisoners and wounding a further fifty. No reprisals were taken for the raid; instead, the prisoners were taken off the ship and returned to their original prisons under orders of Col. Franco, commander of the Trubia arms factory, who remained to surrender Gijón to the nationalists.
—Divine providence saved us. Had the reds found us aboard the ship as they started to flee that evening, they would surely have slaughtered us, thought Father MARTINEZ, aware, moreover, that the collier’s steering gear had been immobilized a few days earlier to forestall the unlikely threat that the prisoners might seize the ship and sail it out of the port. Now it would not serve those hastening to flee …
*
Aboard the fishing smack Toñin, making at most eight knots, Dr Carlos MARTINEZ, former parliamentary deputy, was trying to get some sleep. He had returned four months earlier from Paris where he had been serving on an arms purchasing commission; after the fall of Bilbao he had been in little doubt that Asturias would be conquered, but while people were fighting and dying to defend his country he could not remain abroad.
He had been one of the first of the sixty passengers to board the now crammed smack. The captain had failed to appear. Happily, a young Basque with some experience of the sea had turned up and they had set off.
Suddenly he was wakened by a beam of light; the Toñin’s engine slowed, then stopped. He knew what had happened; they had been caught by the nationalist cruiser Almirante Cervera.
Passengers began tearing up party membership cards; revolvers and other arms were thrown overboard. On the deck all the passengers were lined up and searched; wallets, papers, arms there had not been time to dispose of, passed behind backs down the line and splashed into the sea. In fear, a passenger leapt overboard, but the cruiser’s crew took it to be an accident and fished him out. Their major concern appeared to be that the smack was proceeding without navigation lights.
—To our surprise, we heard one of the passengers demanding to be allowed aboard the cruiser. At first he was refused, but in the face of his insistence they finally agreed. When he returned, he told us what had happened …
The man had managed to see the ship’s captain, explaining that the passengers aboard the smack were people of modest means fleeing the air raids on Gijón. To prove his point that the escapees were not Popular Front supporters, he pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket showing that a consignment of cocoa worth a considerable sum of money had been expropriated from him. In the course of the conversation, it became apparent to the man that the cruiser’s captain was unaware of the mass exodus from Gijón that night, or else he would not have spent so much time with the smack. The Basque youth had also been ordered on board the cruiser where he was given instructions to set a certain course which would take the Toñin to a ‘bou’ – an armed nationalist fishing ship.
—As we set off some of the passengers panicked, believing the cruiser was going to fire on us. It was an impressive moment for sure, that huge warship towering above us, the immensity of the sea and sky. But when it became apparent that we weren’t going to be sunk, an argument broke out among the passengers about whether to try to escape. The Basque seaman paid no attention. I decided to go back to sleep. I was woken by a cry. ‘We’re saved!’ The Basque had set a course which, far from taking us to the ‘bou’, was heading so far north we might have reached Greenland had we not eventually turned east once out of danger …
Many who set sail later were not so lucky; caught by nationalist warships they were forced to sail to Galicia where the passengers were confined to concentration camps.
On 21 October – four days after the first anniversary of the relief of Oviedo – the nationalist army entered Gijón. Father MARTINEZ saw the prison ship he had so recently left filling with his warders, and felt that a certain justice was being done. But he was surprised when Col. Franco, the republican army officer who had stayed to surrender the town, was arrested, court-martialled and shot within the week.27 The repression that started seemed to him of an ‘inopportune rigour’, it was as though a ‘certain species’ of human being had to be liquidated. Things were being done that should not have been done. The military prosecutor demanded so many death sentences and with such speed that he was nicknamed ‘machine-gun’. Many of those being executed had carried out others’ orders; the real criminals were getting off. Not all were even being tried, for there were paseos. Among those to die without trial was the prisoner who had denounced him aboard the prison ship for hearing the women’s confessions. The police, who had arrested him on some other matter, asked Father MARTINEZ if he wished to see him ‘before they took him a bit further’.
—‘I know what you’re going to do with him,’ I replied. ‘No, I don’t want to see him.’ They laughed. I knew they would take him for a ride, and that was a bad thing, of course. But at a court martial, he would certainly have been meat for the gallows, given the circumstances of the time …
The church, correctly, he thought, did not prot
est officially and openly about the repression. Had it done so it could only have helped the enemy.
—Obvious atrocities are one thing – they must be protested about. But this was another matter – it could only provide the enemy with propaganda and deprive the uprising of its authority; that would have been risky for everyone. On the other hand, individual priests, and the church privately, did a great deal, I’m convinced, to mitigate the repression. The ‘machine-gun’ prosecutor in Gijón was soon replaced by another who was so lenient that he became known as ‘catapult’. Justice is a serious matter and must be carried out seriously, without going to extremes like this …
No, Franco’s army was not the crusading band of archangels he had imagined in prison. The troops sacked and looted Gijón as though it were a foreign city. These were things that should not have happened. On the other hand, a ‘half-mad’ priest who had given the clenched-fist salute when the ‘red’ Dean of Canterbury visited Asturias, maintaining before the English cleric that he was the ‘only free priest in Asturias’, was given the choice of prison or lunatic asylum by his bishop. In prison, the bishop said, ‘Something might happen to him’; the lunatic asylum would be safer. The priest chose the latter, and in due course died there.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 64
