by Pete Ayrton
ARTHUR KOESTLER
PORTRAIT OF A
REBEL GENERAL
from Spanish Testament
AT THIS TIME GENERAL QUEIPO DE LLANO was one of the most famous broadcasters in the world; every evening millions of adherents and opponents listened in to his talk from Seville, with mixed feelings, but with rapt attention. Never, probably, in the whole history of wars and civil wars has a general made speeches to the world – and such picturesque speeches too; and even if his accounts of the strategic situation are frequently contradicted by the facts on the very next day, they have never been lacking in a certain artistic charm. Here are some samples, taken at random:
July 23rd, 1936. ‘Our brave Legionaries and Regulares have shown the red cowards what it means to be a man. And incidentally the wives of the reds too. These Communist and Anarchist women, after all, have made themselves fair game by their doctrine of free love. And now they have at least made the acquaintance of real men, and not milksops of militiamen. Kicking their legs about and struggling won’t save them.’
August 12th. ‘The Marxists are ravening beasts, but we are gentlemen. Señor Companys deserves to be stuck like a pig.’
August 18th. ‘I have to inform you that I have in my power as hostages a large number of the relatives of the Madrid criminals, who are answerable with their lives for our friends in the capital. I likewise repeat what I have already said, namely, that we have a number of the miners from the Rio Tinto mines in our prisons ... I don’t know why we are called rebels; after all, we have ninetenths of Spain behind us. And since we have nine-tenths of Spain behind us, I fancy that those on the other side are rebels and that we should be treated as the legal government by the rest of the world.’
August 19th. ‘Eighty per cent of the families of Andalusia are already in mourning. And we shall not hesitate, either, to adopt even more rigorous measures to assure our ultimate victory. We shall go on to the bitter end and continue our good work until not a single Marxist is left in Spain.’
September 3rd. ‘If the bombardment of La Linea or one of the other coastal towns is repeated, we shall have three members of the families of each of the red sailors executed. We don’t like doing this, but war is war.’
September 8th. ‘I have given orders for three members of the families of each of the sailors of the loyalist cruiser that bombarded La Linea to be shot... To conclude my talk I should like to tell my daughter in Paris that we are all in excellent health and that we should like to hear from her.’
I had heard a few of these gems before my departure from Paris, and had pictured the speaker as a kind of Spanish Falstaff or Gargantua – coarse, jovial, red-nosed, fat and apoplectic. And now he was actually standing five paces away from me, in front of the microphone; on a lanky, gaunt, almost ascetic frame was poised a head with expressionless, sullen features; a thin-lipped mouth, covered by a short, scanty moustache, and grey cold eyes in which a smile was seldom, a peculiar and disconcerting flicker frequently, visible. The contrast between the extremely grave and restrained, if crabbed personality of the General and his spicy, burlesque way of expressing himself at the microphone was not merely staggering, it was positively uncanny.
His talk had now come to an end; while it was being translated into Portuguese, the General led me across the courtyard to his room. His first question was whether reception of Seville was good in Paris and London, and whether his talks came over well.
On my answering in the affirmative he continued ruminatively:
‘I am told that I can scarcely be heard anywhere in Central Europe. Atmospherics are supposed to be responsible. But I am rather inclined to think there is deliberate interference from other stations... ’
A somewhat painful pause ensued. Then, before I had time to put my first question, Queipo de Llano asked me rather brusquely:
‘How is it that you’ve come to Seville?’
I reminded the General that I had received a ‘Salvo Conducto’ signed by Gil Robles in Lisbon.
‘Don’t talk to me about Gil Robles,’ interrupted His Excellency ill-humouredly. ‘When we are victorious, Spain will be governed by a military cabinet; we shall sweep away all the parties and their representatives. None of these gentlemen will be members of the Government.’
‘Not even Señor Gil Robles?’
‘I can assure you that Señor Gil Robles will not be a member of the new Government.’
I turned the conversation round to foreign affairs. What would happen in the event of a victory of the military party? The answer was short and succinct:
‘Spain will maintain the closest friendly relations with Germany, Italy and Portugal, all of which states support us in our struggle and whose corporate constitution we intend to imitate.’
To my next question, what would be the relations of the new Spain to those countries which adhered strictly to the Non-Intervention Agreement, His Excellency’s answer was no less precise. It consisted of two words:
‘Less friendly.’
Finally I questioned him as to the origin of the German and Italian planes, ‘the activities of which on the Nationalist side had aroused such lively comments abroad’.
‘We bought those machines in Tetuan,’ replied Queipo de Llano with a smile. ‘It’s nobody’s business.’
‘Whom did you buy them from in Tetuan?’
‘From a private trader, who buys and sells aeroplanes off his own bat.’
I failed to discover from His Excellency the name of this curious private individual in Tetuan who apparently was in a position to deal in dozens of the most up-to-date foreign war-planes. I also failed to get in any further questions, for the General broke off abruptly and proceeded immediately to a description of the atrocities committed by the Government troops.
For some ten minutes he described in a steady flood of words, which now and then became extremely racy, how the Marxists slit open the stomachs of pregnant women and speared the foetuses; how they had tied two eight-year-old girls on to their father’s knees, violated them, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. This went on and on, unceasingly, one story following another – a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology.
Spittle oozed from the corners of the General’s mouth, and there was the same flickering glow in his eyes which I had remarked in them during some passages of his broadcast. I interrupted again and again to ask him where these things had happened, and was given the names of two places: ‘Puente Genil’ and ‘Lora del Río’. When I asked whether His Excellency had in his possession documentary evidence with regard to these excesses, he replied in the negative; he had special couriers, he said, who brought him verbal information with regard to incidents of this kind from all sectors of the front.
Unexpectedly the flood ceased, and I was given my congé.
Some days later the Spanish Consul in Gibraltar told me that on the occasion of an officers’ banquet in Tetuan in the year 1926 he had seen Queipo de Llano in an epileptic fit.
Although Seville swarms with soldiers, it is not the army that chiefly impresses its character on the town. The dominant element is the Phalanx.
The headquarters of the Phalanx in Seville is in the Calle Trajano; on the afternoon of August 28th I myself saw a lorryload of prisoners from the Río Tinto mines being taken there. The scene was terrible; about half the prisoners were wearing bandages soaked through with fresh blood; and they were bundled out of the lorry like sacks. The street was cordoned off by a double file of Civil Guards; behind them the crowd stood looking on in silence. Speechless, grim, it lingered outside the building for another half hour, staring at the walls and the pale sentries; then it dispersed. It had been waiting for the sound of shots from within. But it had waited in vain; executions are carried out at night.
In the cafés in Seville two notices hang side by side; the first forbids anyone to talk politics, the other makes an appeal for volunteers for the National Militia, the pay offered being three pesetas a day. (In Portugal
volunteers for Spain are promised twelve to fifteen pesetas.) I had an opportunity of watching a recruiting commission at work for about an hour. About thirty candidates had queued up, no more. The first question that was put to each of them was whether he could read and write. The illiterates, of whom there were about ten, were lined up in a special file, and about half of them were accepted. (They were nearly all labourers and agricultural workers.) Of the literates only one, a peasant lad, was accepted, all the rest being rejected. The recruiting commission had orders to turn down any suspicious character; by ‘suspicious characters’ are understood industrial workers, unemployed, anyone wearing spectacles, and agricultural labourers with that indefinable something in their appearance that betrays contact with revolutionary ideas. The recruiting officers, and still more so the sergeant-majors, knew how to detect ‘this something’. I saw how this procedure worked out in practice during the hour I spent there; out of what was in itself, for a whole morning, a ridiculously small number of thirty candidates, only five were accepted. Andalusia is a poverty-stricken province with social contrasts of medieval intensity, and every second person has that ‘something’ in his gaze. And here we touch upon the chief problem of the rebels: their chronic lack of man power.
Franco and his generals were unable to introduce conscription on any considerable scale. They knew that they had the masses against them; they knew that every bayonet that they forced into the hands of the peasants of Andalusia and Estremadura might be turned against them at a suitable moment. The Spanish Army never has been a people’s army; as we shall see in a later chapter there has always been a disproportionately large number of officers in it, a characteristic which has been still further intensified during the course of the Civil War. At the end of a year’s fighting the Moors (estimated at about eighty thousand), the Italians (estimated at about a hundred thousand) and the picked troops of the Foreign Legion constitute the backbone of the infantry in Franco’s army. Then come, in the order of their numerical strength, the political formations: the Falange Española and the Requetes. The actual Spanish regular infantry counts last in Franco’s army.
This chronic lack of man power has been more than compensated for from a strategic point of view by supplies of the most up-to-date war material from abroad. On July 15th, 1937, almost exactly a year after the outbreak of the Civil War, the ‘Daily Telegraph’ wrote:
General Franco continues to rely principally on relatively small forces supported by very heavy armaments. In some quarters it has been estimated that there was one machine-gun to every four men. This is probably an exaggeration. Nevertheless, the Insurgents used very large numbers of machine-guns in proportion to their effectives.
The situation on the Government side was exactly the opposite. Madrid had at its command an infinite supply of men and for a time was numerically twice to three times as strong as the rebels. But these forces were without training, without discipline, without officers and without arms.
On the rebel side there were companies with one machine-gun to every four men. On the Republican side there were companies where four men shared a single rifle.
My stay in Seville was very instructive and very brief.
My private hobby was tracking down the German airmen; that is to say, the secret imports of planes and pilots, which at that time was in full swing, but was not so generally known as it is to-day It was the time when European diplomacy was just celebrating its honeymoon with the Non-Intervention Pact. Hitler was denying having despatched aircraft to Spain, and Franco was denying having received them, while there before my very eyes fat, blond German pilots, living proof to the contrary, were consuming vast quantities of Spanish fish, and, monocles clamped into their eyes, reading the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’.
There were four of these gentlemen in the Hotel Cristina in Seville at about lunch time on August 28th, 1936. The Cristina is the hotel of which the porter had told me that it was full of German officers and that it was not advisable to go there, because every foreigner was liable to be taken for a spy.
I went there, nevertheless. It was, as I have said, about two o’clock in the afternoon. As I entered the lounge, the four pilots were sitting at a table, drinking sherry. The fish came later.
Their uniforms consisted of the white overall worn by Spanish airmen; on their breasts were two embroidered wings with a small swastika in a circle (a swastika in a circle with wings is the so-called ‘Emblem of Distinction’ of the German National-Socialist Party).
In addition to the four men in uniform one other gentleman was sitting at the table. He was sitting with his back to me; I could not see his face.
I took my place some tables further on. A new face in the lounge of a hotel occupied by officers always creates a stir in times of civil war. I could tell that the five men were discussing me. After some time the fifth man, the one with his back to me, got up and strolled past my table with an air of affected indifference. He had obviously been sent out to reconnoitre.
As he passed my table, I looked up quickly from my paper and hid my face even more quickly behind it again. But it was of no use; the man had recognized me, just as I had recognized him. It was Herr Strindberg, the undistinguished son of the great August Strindberg; he was a Nazi journalist, and war correspondent in Spain for the Ullstein group.
This was the most disagreeable surprise imaginable. I had known the man years previously in Germany at a time when Hitler had been still knocking at the door, and he himself had been a passionate democrat. At that time I had been on the editorial staff of the Ullstein group, and his room had been only three doors from mine. Then Hitler came to power and Strindberg became a Nazi.
We had no further truck with one another but he was perfectly aware of my views and political convictions. He knew me to be an incorrigible Left-wing liberal, and this was quite enough to incriminate me. My appearance in this haunt of Nazi airmen must have appeared all the more suspect inasmuch as he could not have known that I was in Seville for an English newspaper.
He behaved as though he had not recognized me, and I did the same. He returned to his table,
He began to report to his friends in an excited whisper. The five gentlemen put their heads together.
There followed a strategic manoeuvre: two of the airmen strolled towards the door – obviously to cut off my retreat; the third went to the porter’s lodge and telephoned – obviously to the police; the fourth pilot and Strindberg paced up and down the room.
I felt more and more uncomfortable and every moment expected the Guardia Civil to turn up and arrest me. I thought the most sensible thing would be to put an innocent face on the whole thing, and getting up, I shouted across the two intervening tables with (badly) simulated astonishment:
‘Hallo, aren’t you Strindberg?’
He turned pale and became very embarrassed, for he had not expected such a piece of impudence.
‘I beg your pardon, I am talking to this gentleman,’ he said.
Had I still had any doubts, this behaviour on his part would in itself have made it patent to me that the fellow had denounced me. Well, I thought, the only thing that’s going to get me out of this is a little more impudence. I asked him in a very loud voice, and as arrogantly as possible, what reason he had for not shaking hands with me.
He was completely bowled over at this, and literally gasped. At this point his friend, airman number four, joined in the fray. With a stiff little bow he told me his name, von Bernhardt, and demanded to see my papers.
The little scene was carried on entirely in German.
I asked by what right Herr von Bernhardt, as a foreigner, demanded to see my papers.
Herr von Bernhardt said that as an officer in the Spanish Army he had a right to ask ‘every suspicious character’ for his papers.
Had I not been so agitated, I should have pounced upon this statement as a toothsome morsel. That a man with a swastika on his breast should acknowledge himself in German to be an officer in Franco’s army
, would have been a positive tit-bit for the Non-Intervention Committee.
I merely said, however, that I was not a ‘suspicious character’, but an accredited correspondent of the London ‘News Chronicle’, that Captain Bolin would confirm this, and that I refused to show my papers.
When Strindberg heard me mention the ‘News Chronicle’ he did something that was quite out of place: he began to scratch his head. Herr von Bernhardt too grew uncomfortable at the turn of events and sounded a retreat. We went on arguing for a while, until Captain Bolin entered the hotel. I hastened up to him and demanded that the others should apologize to me, thinking to myself that attack was the best defence and that I must manage at all costs to prevent Strindberg from having his say. Bolín was astonished at the scene and indignantly declared that he refused to have anything to do with the whole stupid business, and that in time of civil war he didn’t give a damn whether two people shook hands or not.
In the meantime the Civil Guards had actually arrived on the scene, with fixed bayonets and pugnacious expressions, to arrest the ‘suspicious character’. Bolín angrily told them to go to the devil. And to the devil they went.
I decamped there and then from the confounded Cristina. Arrived at the hotel, I began hurriedly to pack. I had hardly finished when a French colleague of mine came up to my room and privately advised me to leave for Gibraltar as quickly as possible. He was obviously acting as the mouthpiece of some higher authority; but he refused to say whom. He merely said that he had heard of the shindy and that the whole affair might turn out very seriously for me.
Eight hours later I was in Gibraltar.
Twenty-four hours later I learned from private sources that a warrant for my arrest had been issued in Seville.
So Strindberg junior had had his say after all.
