*
Without military victories to offset hunger, cold and air raids, the mobilization of the rearguard became increasingly difficult. While morale at the front remained high and defeat seemed impossible, the rear was beginning slowly to crumble. ‘There was virtually no mass political involvement any longer.’ The communist party was losing the close ties it had forged with the people of Madrid in the November days.9 The fervour of the revolution was gone; the linked policy of aligning the bourgeois democracies abroad and the democratic petty bourgeoisie at home in the anti-fascist struggle meant pursuing the alliance with right-wing socialist and liberal republicans. (Amongst the latter, there were many who, like Régulo MARTINEZ, the Madrid left republican leader, felt that communist propaganda was constantly trying to prove that the ‘communists alone existed’, and feared that if the war were won, they would proclaim another ‘Stalin-type soviet regime’.)
It was surely no accident that Mundo Obrero, the communist party’s main Madrid organ, staged a revolt at this moment. The Spanish people, it wrote, would not make the revolution according to the wishes of capitalism. ‘The people will triumph despite capitalism’s opposition. Without pacts or intermediaries. And they will set the popular revolution on the course that the popular will considers opportune.’ More importantly, the paper said it did not believe that the ‘only solution to our war is that Spain should be neither fascist nor communist because France wants it like that’.
From Barcelona, where the government and communist party headquarters were established, José Díaz, the party general secretary, replied. It was, indeed, the party’s position that Spain should be neither fascist nor communist. Mundo Obrero’s statement that the people would triumph despite capitalism corresponded ‘neither to the situation, nor to the policies of our party nor to those of the Comintern. We want the (democratic) states to come to our aid. We believe that in helping us they will be defending their own interests; we try to make them see this and call on them for aid … ’10
No more was heard on the matter. While reaffirming that ‘we shall continue with the men of the petty bourgeoisie until the end’, the communist party reacted when their defeatism became too apparent. Early in April, it organized pressure to oust Prieto who, as defence minister, was notoriously ‘pessimistic’ about ultimate victory. His objectives in the Teruel offensive three months earlier had been too patent: to reinforce the republic’s hand in potential peace negotiations.11
On 1 May 1938, Negrín set out the republic’s war aims, itemized in ‘Thirteen points’. The ‘popular republic’ which would result from victory would safeguard legally acquired private property ‘within the limits of the supreme national interest’; would carry out a profound agrarian reform to create a solid peasant democracy – ‘owner of the land it works’; would affirm both liberty of conscience and regional liberties, as well as the maintenance of Spain’s political and economic independence.
It was an appeal to the bourgeois democracies to consider Spain’s cause their own. It failed, as all such expectations had failed before.
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Militancies 17
TOMAS MORA
Socialist commissar-inspector
Commissar-inspector of the army of the east, he was on the point of resigning when he read Negrín’s ‘Thirteen points’. After what had happened already, who would believe them? Who would believe, for example, that religious freedom was to be permitted in the republican zone? Propaganda! A clergyman rescued from death was worth more than all the propaganda of this sort.
Secretary of the National Federation of Pharmaceutical Assistants and a member, in consequence, of the UGT national committee, he had been one of the first five front-line political commissars appointed in October 1936, when, with the enemy advancing hard on Madrid, the commissariat had been set up. He had set out immediately for the non-existent front to rally the militiamen; then he was sent to Valencia to help sort out the complicated situation that had arisen there. With the creation in 1937 of the army of the east out of two army corps before Teruel, he was named to his present post.
Not that his appointment had been officially ratified by the socialist defence minister, Prieto, who believed – for some reason best known to himself – that he was a supporter of Largo Caballero, the former socialist prime minister. That was how far sectarianism went between the factions of the party. As it was, the defence minister had got it wrong; he was a Prieto supporter, and had been even before the war.
Prieto hated the commissariat – and he was right to do so, he thought. With some honourable exceptions, men who helped build the Popular Army, too many commissars were a liability. They tried to dominate the military commanders which was not a difficult matter if the latter were right-wing career officers. The officers were completely inhibited as a result – and an officer in that state could not effectively command troops. He had been a ‘bit totalitarian’ in this respect on the Teruel front, insisting that his commissars collaborate fully with the military commanders, strengthen and support them. If an officer were suspected of treachery, he must be reported immediately; otherwise he must be left to command his men.
But the major problem lay elsewhere; Prieto was determined to undo the several hundred communist appointments, especially in the army of the centre, which, under the statutes, should have been made only by the Commissar-in-Chief. The defence minister ordered all commissars to hand in their appointments and re-appointed only those he approved of; ordered the members of the Commissariat’s secretariat to active duty as commissars at the front, and issued an order designed especially to replace the communist commissar of the army of the centre, Antón, with a socialist. Appointed a brigade commissar on the Teruel front, Antón did not take up the posting.
—Instead, within a short time, he turned up as a civilian attaché to General Rojo, the chief-of-staff. How could you win the war with people behaving in an absolutely undisciplined manner like this – and backed by the communist party? …
Charges of communist proselytism in the army, especially in Madrid, had become so widespread that he had been sent on a special mission to investigate. He had informed Antón of the allegations of undue influence in membership recruiting and communist infiltration in other parties’ military units. There were complaints that the only newspaper reaching the front was the communist Mundo Obrero, and that the distribution of the others, which went through the army’s commissar, was being held up.
—As far as the press was concerned, Antón told me that the complaints were justified – but not the cause. ‘Here are the number of copies of each paper we receive for distribution. Mundo Obrero – 10,000; El Socialista – 500; Castilla Libre (libertarian) – 800; Política (left republican) – 500’ Your comrades who complain should send us more copies.’ I went to the Socialista offices and they said that with the newsprint shortage their regular subscribers had to come first. If that was the case, I replied, they had no cause to complain. Having made inquiries of the other papers, where I ascertained much the same, I wrote an objective report on the newspaper situation. How Mundo Obrero got sufficient paper to print its 10,000 copies, I don’t know. I, who had really been sent to Madrid to find a cause for sacking Antón, was unable to accuse him of anything, for the other charges were extremely difficult to prove. It was well-known that the communists, using the prestige of Soviet aid – very well-paid aid, as Prieto put it – offered military commands in return for party cards. But because of the aid, the government was always under pressure to tolerate such procedures …
Recently Prime Minister Negrín had attended a dinner for the commanders of the armies of the east and manoeuvre, and in a speech afterwards had spoken about the Soviets.
—‘I know there are those amongst you who dislike the presence of Soviet advisers,’ I recall him saying. That was certainly true. Apart from a couple I knew, who were excellent, the rest were little better than master-armourers. I could never understand how the Soviet government sent such p
eople. ‘But,’ continued Negrín, ‘I want to point out what you all know – the Soviet Union is the only country which is sending us aid. The communist party is the party which is putting the most into the war effort. For these reasons alone I beg you to be tolerant of the advisers.’ His speech made me boil with anger. I think he was no more than the tool of the communist party. Whether he was sincerely convinced that the communists were the only real force behind the war effort, I don’t know. But he was certainly under their influence …
Prieto’s measures dealing with the commissars were thus totally justified, he believed. The communists had taken advantage of Caballero when he was premier and war minister. Caballero’s leadership had been disastrous, not only during the war but before. The most conservative of working-class leaders, he had become a ‘real’ revolutionary only with the rise of fascism; in October 1934, and again in the first days of the war, when the Madrid masses prevented the formation of Martínez Barrio’s government of conciliation,12 he had shown how ‘real’ his revolutionary determination was. Demagogy, pure and simple! Instead of seizing the chance on the latter occasion, using the authority he indisputably enjoyed to prove he was the ‘Spanish Lenin’, and take power, he did nothing. By the time he was appointed premier six weeks later, it was too late; the republic was already under the influence of, if not dominated by, Soviet aid.
Indeed, he reflected, if the socialist party had not been divided, the UGT divided, the military uprising might have been little more than another abortive coup, like that of August 1932. As he looked back on events, he had to conclude that the major responsibility for what had happened had to be laid at the doors of his party. Prieto, on the other hand, was a pragmatist, a man of realities. Julián Besteiro was the only socialist leader who had a viable long-term vision, but Prieto was the only leader who understood practical politics. He should have become prime minister in 1936 after the Popular Front electoral victory. ‘He had more political wisdom in his little finger than the whole of the socialist party.’ Not that he was without serious faults.
—His sectarianism, his phobias – as soon as he suspected anyone of supporting Caballero he had him down in his black book – his pessimism. The latter was demoralizing. He believed the war was lost from the moment Germany and Italy intervened. He remained at his post out of personal pride or whatever, but without hope of victory. As he was a man who said what he thought, he demoralized others. It was counter-productive to have a defence minister who thought only of peace …
He had accompanied his army commander, Hernández Saravia, to see Prieto to tell him that the capture of Teruel on their front would be a relatively easy objective for the Popular Army. ‘Hombre, you fill me with optimism,’ Prieto had said.
Militarily, the offensive had turned out well. Executed with speed, it had taken the small enemy force by surprise. But the initial success had not been followed up. Was it again the Popular Army’s lack of manoeuvrability, he wondered. With the exception of General Rojo, the republic lacked good military strategists, as well as good middle-level commanders – so important in a war of fixed positions. You could teach an illiterate to handle a rifle in a short time, but to teach workers the complexities of commanding a body of men over terrain was a totally different matter. Their lack of education told against them, he thought. The nationalists had the advantage on both scores: trained strategists and army commanders on the one hand, students who formed the bulk of their subalterns on the other13 … But it was for none of these reasons that the Teruel offensive had failed to develop and advance deep into enemy terrain, as he believed was necessary. The explanation lay elsewhere.
—Prieto wanted a military success to show foreign nations that the republic had created an army strong enough to mount major offensives in order to gather support abroad for a negotiated peace. In terms of bringing the war to an end, that was not a mistaken strategy, in my view. It was time, from a humanitarian point of view, that the conflict ended. War – and civil war above all – is the most monstrous experience imaginable. After the fall of the north the previous autumn, I believed there was no hope of our winning; and when the enemy reconquered Teruel and pushed us back to the sea, cutting the republic in two, I knew we were definitely beaten. But as a commissar, I couldn’t say what I felt. It would have been ridiculous to have remained at my post only to spread defeatism and gloom …
In the midst of the battle, when the nationalist defenders, who had held out in isolated buildings in the town for a fortnight, surrendered, he was ordered to bring the bishop of Teruel, who had been sharing the defenders’ fate, out alive. As he drove him away in his car, he asked the prelate if he had not considered advising the military to accept an earlier republican offer of surrender to spare further suffering among the civilian defenders, especially the women and children.
—‘Yes, you may be right,’ the bishop replied, ‘but you must realize that no one resigns himself easily to defeat.’ It didn’t seem to me a particularly appropriate answer from a man of the church. When we got to the train which had been prepared to receive him and the other prominent prisoners, he was asked at General Rojo’s initiative whether he would be prepared to write a statement about the way he had been treated in republican hands. He agreed, and began: ‘At the request of his Excellency, General Vicente Rojo, chief-of-staff, I declare that during my transfer from Teruel to – where are we? Mora de Rubielos – I have been treated with every consideration and respect by those responsible for my safe passage – ’ When we informed Rojo, the latter was furious, for it made the statement appear to have been written under coercion. The bishop was asked to change it, which he did, eliminating the incriminating first words …
Such a statement, MORA believed, was worth any number of Negrín’s points, for world opinion could see that the republic had been at pains to save a bishop’s life.14 The propaganda of action was superior to the rhetoric of wishful thinking any day. What was needed was more actions like this, he thought.
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Episodes 12
Crossing the lines
On a cold winter’s afternoon, five legionaries made their way to the nationalist front line. Their unit, the 16th bandera of the Foreign Legion,15 had just taken up positions a couple of kilometres in the rear in preparation for the nationalist counter-offensive on Teruel.
The men had bought two bottles of anís. In front of them, they knew, a Canaries regiment was manning the line, and when they reached it they told the soldiers that they wanted to buy tobacco. They chatted with the lieutenant and sergeant, telling them that they had taken part in the liberation of the north – Bilbao, Santander, Gijón. From their accents it was clear that two were Basques and one Asturian.
One of the Basques, Eugenio CALVO, asked the sergeant where the ‘sons of a whore’ had their positions. The sergeant indicated the enemy lines. The legionaries stayed on chatting with the soldiers in their dug-outs, waiting for dark to fall. All of them knew the risk they were running.
CALVO was a twenty-three-year-old communist miner from Ortuella, in Vizcaya. From the first day he had fought the uprising, first in the militias, later in a communist battalion in the Basque army. Encircled in Santander, he had managed to crawl through the Italian lines before the surrender of the city and, in civilian clothes, hitch a lift on an Italian army lorry back to Bilbao. In hiding, he had undergone an interior struggle: should he try to get to the French frontier? ‘I thought of my comrades, I thought: one must be consistent with one’s political ideals, must fight to the end.’ Hungry, exhausted by the ordeal of hiding, he one day came across a Foreign Legion recruiting office in Bilbao. Rather than risk the frontier crossing, he would join the Legion with the express idea of crossing the lines. Having just reached the front after three months’ intensive training in Talavera de la Reina and Saragossa, the moment had come.
During the training, he and the four others with him had, little by little, sounded each other out, small things revealing their thoughts. One was
a communist comrade from Santander, another a CNT member from Logroño, the Basque was a schoolteacher. All of them from the north were under suspicion as potential deserters. ‘When we get to the front,’ CALVO remembered a sergeant saying with venom, ‘we’ll have to watch this lot more than the reds.’
Only a few days before, the bandera had paraded to witness the execution of five legionaries from the north for trying to cross the lines. Three of them died bravely, shouting ¡Viva la República! ¡Viva el Partido Comunista!
—We had to march past the corpses. A lot of the old legionaries and falangists spat on the bodies. The schoolteacher reproached me later for not doing the same, for not showing enough caution. But I couldn’t – they had been men like me …
The bulk of the recruits were peasants from Galicia and Navarre, attracted to the Legion by the higher pay and the excellent food: fish and meat every day. They were men, he observed, without an ounce of political awareness.
—Men who had had it drummed into them by their priests that the reds were the devil incarnate who attacked the church and would rob them of their plots of land and their livestock. That made a big impact on them. I remember more than one saying that if he caught a red he’d cut his ears off as a trophy. They had the mentality of the small peasant – individualistic, egotistical, tied to their land and the church …
Night fell. The legionaries told the soldiers they were returning to their unit. Having carefully noted a zone in the barbed wire between sentry posts, they crawled towards it, managed to lift it and get through. The sentries spotted the schoolteacher and shot him in the buttock, but his companion, the Asturian miner, hoisted him on his shoulders and, at the risk of his life, carried him into no-man’s-land.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 71
