Guerra

by Jason Webster

  General Sanjurjo was a hero of Spain’s wars against the Riff tribesmen in northern Morocco. On 10 August 1932 he took part in a pronunciamiento – a coup typical of the nineteenth century, whereby a military officer would make a proclamation against the government, either rousing enough support to take over the country or getting shot down in glory. Although momentarily successful in Seville, where he launched a manifesto, Sanjurjo’s co-conspirators failed in their uprisings in Madrid and other major cities across the country after their plot was betrayed by a prostitute. Sanjurjo was arrested while trying to flee to Portugal and was imprisoned.

  The time was not yet right to bring down the Republic, but conservatives were shortly to gain the upper hand. Frustrated by the slow pace of reform, anarchists were encouraging peasants to occupy villages and plots of land spontaneously and start farming them for themselves. One of the most famous cases occurred in January 1933 in the Andalusian village of Casas Viejas. Unlike earlier disturbances, which had involved church burning, this time the authorities used extreme measures to restore control. Police reinforcements stormed the village and violently imposed order. As they were carrying out house-to-house searches, one of the villagers, known as Seisdedos, locked himself in with a handful of other anarchists and refused to come out. In the gun battle that followed, two policemen were shot. Eventually the police burned the house down, killing all inside, although Seisdedos’s daughter, Libertaria, had managed to escape. Later the police shot dead fourteen anarchists who had surrendered earlier in the operation. The massacre caused an outcry and the socialists decided to withdraw their support for the liberal government. In the following elections in November 1933, conservative parties were duly elected to power.

  There followed two years of rule by right-wing coalitions. Agrarian reform was not just halted but reversed, many peasants ending up worse off than they had been before. The period became, for the Left, the bienio negro, the ‘black biennium’, with its lowest point in October 1934. The Left became alarmed at the entry into government at this time of the Catholic authoritarian CEDA coalition. The group was led by José María Gil Robles, an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini who had been present at one of the Nuremberg rallies. He allowed himself to be addressed as Jefe, or ‘Chief’, in imitation of Führer or Duce, and was keen to introduce Nazi propaganda techniques to Spain.

  Convinced that Gil Robles’s party’s inclusion in the cabinet marked the first step in the creation of a fascist state, left-wing groups organized a general strike and staged a series of revolts across the country, all doomed to failure. Only in the northern mining region of Asturias did the rebellion hold out, thanks to a rare alliance between socialists, anarchists and communists. There, local troops weren’t able to quell the movement, and so the government in Madrid called in the toughest forces that Spain then had – the Army of Africa, based in the Spanish territories in northern Morocco. Led by General Francisco Franco, colonial troops and soldiers from the Spanish Foreign Legion suppressed the left-wing miners using merciless and blood-thirsty methods they had developed in the Riff mountains. In an operation which lasted a fortnight, two thousand people were killed and a number of towns and villages destroyed. General Franco became a pin-up for the Right and a hate figure for the Left. Few then realized it, but a precedent had been set for the coming Civil War.

  The repression and defeats of two years of right-wing governments served to reunite left-wing parties, so that by the time elections came round once again in February 1936 they were able to stand on a united ticket – the Popular Front, a name thought up by the communists. This time the anarchists decided to vote, if only to secure the release of their imprisoned comrades. On the Right, the CEDA leader Gil Robles presented himself as the last hope against the threat of Marxist revolution, leading a coalition of parties known as the National Front. Both sides were already referring to themselves in the language of confrontation. The Popular Front, again promising sweeping social reforms, won the vote by a whisker.

  Gil Robles’s plan had been to gain power through the ballot box, much as Hitler had concentrated his efforts after the failure of the Munich Putsch. After the CEDA’s electoral defeat in Spain, this strategy lay in ruins. Fifteen thousand members of the youth movement of Gil Robles’s party switched en masse to the radical Falange party, the Spanish fascists.

  The Falange had been set up in 1933 by the young aristocrat José Antonio Primo de Rivera. It was a radical, extremist group that called for social reform and authoritarian nationalistic rule, while engaging in a violent conflict with left-wing groups. Inspired by Italian fascism, it had been named after an ancient Macedonian battle formation. Until the elections of February 1936, when the Popular Front came to power, the Falange had been a small fringe organization, but now, with a new influx of members, it became a more important player on the stage. After acts of increasing violence, including murders and bombings, in March its offices were closed down and its dapper young leader was imprisoned. José-Antonio would never know freedom again, although he was later destined to become a mythical figure in Spanish politics.

  For the extreme Left, the victory of the Popular Front at the elections in itself was not enough, and it urged that the pace of social reforms be increased. The leader of the radical wing of the socialist party, a semi-literate former stucco worker called Francisco Largo Caballero, was travelling around the country making increasingly inflammatory remarks about revolution, and was flatteringly dubbed ‘the Spanish Lenin’ by the Soviet press. Meanwhile, on a single day in March that year, over sixty thousand peasants in the western region of Extremadura spontaneously took over almost three thousand farms. Having feared for their property, landowners were now beginning to fear for their lives. Both sides seemed to be hell-bent on confrontation, with frequent gun battles in the streets between left-wingers and Falangists and other far-right groups. And the violence continued. On 16 June 1936 the CEDA leader Gil Robles claimed in parliament that in the four months since the Popular Front had won the general election 160 churches had been destroyed, 269 people assassinated, 10 newspaper offices sacked, 113 general strikes called and 146 bombs set off. Anarchy ruled; the government had lost control.

  At the centre, the liberal intellectuals in the Popular Front, once again in charge, proved incapable of holding these forces of mutual destruction in check. Warnings came that right-wing army officers were planning another coup, but almost no counter measures were taken, ministers refusing to arm the people whose votes had given them power, but whose radicalism they feared. As a precaution they removed from Madrid those generals most suspected of plotting against the government and sent them to the outer regions. Franco, famous for his repression of the left-wing rebellion in Asturias eighteen months earlier, was packed off to the Canaries, General Manuel Goded went to the Balearic Islands, while General Emilio Mola was sent to Pamplona in the north. Sanjurjo, now out of prison, was in exile in Portugal.

  Mola’s forced move to Pamplona was a godsend for the plotters. This tall, bespectacled general now became the mastermind of the coming coup from the centre of a highly Catholic, conservative part of the country, and was nicknamed el Director. Secret plans were drawn up for the army to rise simultaneously across Spain and Spanish Morocco, thus delivering a knockout blow against the government and preventing what was seen as an otherwise inevitable Bolshevik revolution. The key was to be the use of extreme violence. ‘We must sow terror,’ Mola insisted to his co-conspirators. ‘We must give the sense of domination by eliminating all those who do not think like us, without scruples or hesitation.’1

  On 7 July the annual San Fermín bull-running fiesta took place in Pamplona. Mola used the holiday to organize a clandestine meeting with the other plotters. They had to move fast or the government would eventually smoke them out. But there were problems: the local conservatives of Pamplona, the Requetés, were demanding more concessions for their pet causes; others were urging caution. Franco sent a telegram from the Canary Islands saying t
he time still wasn’t right. Mola was furious. Franco was an important figure, a well-respected soldier, and would be a key factor in the success of the coup. Mola decided to carry on regardless.

  Two things would work in his favour. In Madrid, Prime Minister Casares Quiroga studiously ignored the barrage of warnings about the coming disaster, like a Cassandra figure in reverse. And then, on 13 July, José Calvo Sotelo was shot dead in a police lorry.

  At once all the doubts and calls for caution were silenced. Policemen had murdered a leading politician on the Right. No further justification was needed for a coup. Franco telegrammed again from the Canaries. This time, he was on board.

  The rebellion was set for 18 July at five o’clock in the afternoon, just after siesta time. The starting point was to be the home of the Army of Africa – the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco.

  3

  Anything Goes

  The hall was dark, the only light coming from the red and orange spotlights shining on the surface of the ring in the centre. I followed Luis down concrete steps into the clashing noise of hundreds of raised voices, unnerved still by the growling Rottweiler at the door, its strange forehead-marking giving a fleeting, disturbing impression in the gloom that it had three eyes. Two boys of no more than eight years old were playing with bright-yellow space-fantasy machine-guns that flickered scarlet sparks and gave off a high-pitched scream every time they pulled the trigger. As the warehouse was built half underground, the late-night summer air seemed stickier and clammier than outside, where the occasional gust of sea breeze might bring momentary relief. Down in the hall the only movement came from the hot breath of the crowd. Most of the people there appeared to be young muscular men dressed in T-shirts and shorts, with stout necks and cropped hair – the kind you saw hanging around outside the entrances of gyms with their arms slung over one another as they looked the girls passing in the street up and down. Slouched on white plastic chairs aligned in rows, there were a few women dotted in among them – girlfriends and wives, perhaps – some with young children cuddled on their laps. One of them was smiling, her broad white teeth seeming to shine in the dark, shoulder-length hair fixed in an artificial wave as though she had just come out of the hairdresser’s.

  Luis led me to our seats – a slow and lengthy process, as he stopped to greet friends and acquaintances along the way. Many of them, I noticed, were wearing baseball caps with an embroidered silhouette of a bull on the front. It was the same bull you often saw dotted around the Spanish countryside – huge black billboards originally put up as adverts for Osbourne sherry, but which had since become something of a national symbol. Years back, when the authorities had talked about taking them down, there had been a public outcry and protection orders had been placed on them. Now you sometimes saw the same image on car stickers, or as an emblem on items of clothing, as here.

  ‘I’m going to a fight,’ Luis had said a couple of nights before when I’d bumped into him in the street. ‘Why don’t you come along?’

  As well as the farm, Salud and I kept a small flat in the coastal city of Valencia, where I had come to spend a few days after Salud had unexpectedly been called away on a flamenco tour abroad. One of the girls in the troupe couldn’t make it and so she had been called in as a last-minute replacement. It looked as if she was going to be away most of the summer. I’d arrived looking for a dose of the city stimulation that was lacking in the mountains, and was slowly getting used to being on my own again for the first time in years. In other circumstances I might have turned down Luis’s invitation, but caught up in the lightness of being temporarily single, and thirsty for excitement, I agreed to go along.

  Luis was an old acquaintance from fencing school in Valencia. Small and wiry, his face always wore an apologetic expression, and his hair was rapidly greying as he fought an ill-tempered custody battle over his children with his ex-wife. Caught up with other things, I’d stopped attending the fencing classes, but in the village atmosphere of our part of the city we’d see each other out and about and sometimes get together for a drink. It was the usual way in this Mediterranean environment, where socializing always happens outside, often spontaneously, sometimes with people with whom you have only the most casual of connections. Luis had been the first one to recommend looking for a place in the Maestrat, where his family had had a summer house when he was a child.

  ‘Come along. Just a few beers and a laugh.’ I thought he meant a wrestling match, or perhaps boxing, which I knew was another interest of his. It would be fun, I thought. I remembered the comical wrestling performances I’d seen on television as a child: huge men in leotards bouncing off the ropes and pretending to hurt one other, each bout a kind of primitive struggle between good and evil, light and dark.

  After more talk and handshakes we finally made it to our seats. We were seven rows up from the ring. At a glance I reckoned some three, perhaps four hundred people were there. Next to me was a man in his early twenties wearing a white vest, his brown flesh carved into hard bulges around his shoulders and arms. He turned and leaned to shake hands with Luis, pushing into me roughly with his bulk. Spots bulged on the back of his neck where he’d shaved.

  ‘Just a friend,’ Luis said in reference to me. The man sat back in his chair, giving me a quick hard look. I held out my hand to him but he pretended not to notice.

  ‘They’re just a bit nervous,’ Luis whispered in my ear. ‘They’ve had a few problems with these events. Red-tape stuff. It’s all good fun, though. People just want to control things and they got the wrong impression.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but alarm bells were already beginning to ring inside me. I’d always liked Luis, though. He was the kind of man who made friends with anyone immediately. There was something unthreatening about him and, with his dimpled smile and high-speed chat, you could easily spend an entertaining evening with him.

  I looked again at the musclemen taking up most of the seats around us. At the side of the ring there seemed to be an area set aside for VIPs; more children were playing there, running in and out of the adults and scrambling over them as if they were living climbing frames. I’d always loved this side of Spain – the way children were included in everything, even late-night events and parties. A great contrast to the ‘seen but not heard’ mentality that had still prevailed in the England of my childhood.

  ‘Luis,’ I said, turning towards my friend, ‘what type of a fight is this?’

  At that moment a roar went up and the lights, which had been focused on the centre of the ring, started dancing around the hall like fire-flies. Everyone rose to their feet, cheering and clapping. After several minutes of whistling and shouting, I caught sight of a half-naked man moving through the crowd towards the centre. He was young and wore tight shorts and padded fingerless gloves. His body was powerful and well built, but not in the sculptured way of so many dumb-bell pushers. The muscles under his skin were smooth and taut. No overdeveloped pectorals, no washboard stomach, no skinny ankles. Everything about him spoke of strength. The man raised his two fists above his head as the audience cheered him on, but the atmosphere lacked something of the theatricality I had expected. There wasn’t even the overdone seriousness and intensity of boxers when they are led to the ring draped in hooded capes. He smiled and waved, but as though he really didn’t care about the audience. You got the impression he had simply come to fight, and win. Pleasing the crowd came a very low second. As he climbed into the ring I couldn’t help but notice how different he was from other fighters preparing for a bout. He didn’t jump up and down to warm up, or jerk his head from one side to the other to loosen the muscles – all signs of nerves. Standing straight and tall in one corner, he remained still and calm, sometimes looking at the crowd around him, occasionally pushing his right fist into the palm of his left hand as though testing the knuckle padding on his gloves. His skin shone under the lights. He was ready for combat.

  ‘He’s a local boy,’ Luis shouted in my ear. ‘Our ch
ampion.’

  The cheers continued for a few moments as his opponent seemed to slip unnoticed towards the ring, but once the crowd saw the dark shape of the new man swaggering towards the centre the shouts quickly turned to whistles and screams.

  ‘Hijo de puta,’ came a cry from behind us. Son of a bitch!

  The opponent was darker skinned than the local fighter – a mulatto, perhaps. He looked Brazilian. The alarm bells began to ring slightly louder. I struggled to remember what someone had told me once about a Brazilian style of martial arts.

  The whistling continued as the darker man climbed into the ring. He tried to give off an air of confidence, flicking his legs out in a kind of strut while raising a fist up in salute to the baying crowd, but his head was just a fraction too high, his eyes seeming to look inwards, towards himself, rather than out to the audience. The local boy stood in the corner, motionless.

  A man dressed in black who appeared to be the referee came to the centre of the ring. He went up to the fighters and directed a few words to them individually in their corners, spending considerably more time with the white man, then clapped his hands. A bell was struck at the side and the combat began.