Other attempts were made to persuade the defenders to give in, but to no avail. On 18 September, after weeks of growing tension which had led to a handful of desertions and even some suicides, the long-awaited explosion took place. The government had brought journalists from the world’s media to watch the spectacular defeat of the rebel forces, and the blast was so loud it was heard in the southern suburbs of Madrid, forty kilometres away. The southwest tower flew into the air like a rocket before collapsing. On the ground, teams of Assault Guards were waiting to storm the building and claim victory. Yet even as the journalists watching from afar started to announce the fall of the Alcázar, the efforts to capture the ancient fortress failed. While some Republicans did manage to get inside – a red flag was even placed on the statue of Charles V in the main courtyard – the attackers had little idea of how many men they were actually facing: at one point an assault on a breach in the walls was fought back by only four Civil Guards brandishing pistols, the Republicans assuming in the confusion that they were up against a much larger force. Skirmishes took place all around the building, but the defenders, most of whom were unhurt by the blast after their successful calculations of where it would take place, knew the area far better and were able to use this to their advantage. By nightfall the Alcázar was still in their hands and the government’s embarrassment deepened even further. The explosion did, however, bring forth another life – the second baby born in the Alcázar, who popped out with the force of the blast. Her mother was already in labour at the time, but nonetheless she named her daughter Josefa del Milagro in honour of the ‘miracle’ of her birth.
Time was running out for the Republicans. Franco’s forces were inching closer by the day. Desperate now to take the Alcázar, the Asturian miners started digging another tunnel, while government troops fired an ever greater number of shells at the wreckage of the once proud castle. On one day alone a total of 472 shells were sent crashing into the walls. Still the defenders held out. Then on 21 September Franco’s men captured the nearby town of Maqueda. The general had to make a choice: either continue northeastwards and move swiftly on Madrid, thereby possibly bringing the war to a quick end; or turn round and head southeast and relieve the Alcázar, which would give the government more time to prepare its defence of the capital. Franco took the latter option, explaining to one of his supporters that it was necessary to convince the enemy ‘that we will do what we say we will do’. For the defenders in the Alcázar it was a godsend. For the rest of Spain it meant another two and a half years of misery as the war dragged on.
Within days the defenders could see and hear Franco’s troops pushing towards Toledo. But the fight was not over yet. The Republicans made a last-ditch attempt to take the castle before it was relieved, despite scores of militiamen abandoning their positions and running away. On the morning of 27 September another explosion rocked the castle, but again the follow-up attack failed to dislodge the besieged. It was now just a matter of hours before the Nationalist vanguard would reach the town.
General Varela, in charge of Franco’s forces on the ground, turned the relief of the Alcázar into a competition between the Legión and the Regulares. Both these forces, based in Spanish Morocco, liked to think of themselves as the crack troops of the army. Now they could test themselves against each other. As they pushed through the town they ignored the promise by Moscardó inside the fortress that Republicans caught in the conquest of the town would be spared, and militiamen were shot dead or bayoneted on the spot where they were found. Their brains and guts ‘sizzled like sausages’ on the hot cobblestones, according to one observer. The massacre was horrific, the Regulares even killing a doctor and his wounded patients in the San Juan hospital with grenades. A group of forty anarchists, trapped in a seminary by the advancing troops, locked themselves in, got drunk on anise then set fire to themselves rather than hand themselves over. ‘These men knew how to die,’ was the admiring comment of the legionaries.
In the end the Regulares were the first to reach the Alcázar. The defenders could hear their high-pitched barking war-cry in the streets below before the vanguard got to the ruins, bringing the first decent food and cigarettes to pass their lips for months. General Varela arrived the following morning as the massacre continued in the town, officially declaring the end of the siege at ten a.m.
‘Sin novedad en el Alcázar, mi general,’ Moscardó told him. The rest of the defenders were silent, too weary to say anything.
As many had predicted, diverting forces to relieve the Alcázar almost certainly turned the war from a relatively quick affair into a long, drawn-out conflict, in which attrition often took the place of the swift campaigns of the early months. Madrid got the time it needed to build up its defences against the coming Nationalist assault. A strong defence was the government’s main priority, as Republican forces – still largely made up of militiamen at this point – were no match in the field for the Nationalists’ professional soldiers. Franco’s forces, while claiming a great victory and securing a massive morale-booster for their cause, lost the momentum of their northward campaign on the capital. Not until the very end of the war would they regain such a pace, and then it would mostly be through the implosion of the Republican forces.
But the relief of the Alcázar was highly important for Franco personally. It was the crowning achievement in his rapid rise through the ranks of the Nationalists, turning him from a fence-sitting vacillator in the weeks before the rebellion into the undisputed head of the movement. Two days before he embraced Moscardó for the benefit of the cameras inside the ruins of the fortress – a great media coup set against the rapidly developing art-form of war propaganda – the ‘saviour of the Alcázar’ had been effectively named head of state on the Nationalist side and generalísimo – the supreme commander of its forces. He was to retain this position of absolute power until his death. Ever a savvy manipulator of people’s emotions, Franco gained the maximum political capital possible from the drama of the siege. His first goal – taking complete control of the Nationalist movement – had been largely achieved. Now he could concentrate on winning the war.
Moscardó was promoted to general, but the former football coach was out of his depth commanding armies in a civil war. Franco made sure he was never placed in positions of crucial importance, although always treating the hero of the Alcázar with the respect he deserved. Eventually he was made a count and died in 1956, having spent much time in his later years taking visitors around Toledo and telling them the story of the most dramatic events of his life.
11
Burgos
They said the food in Burgos was so rich it could ‘wake up a dead man’. The main square, pressing against the Gothic cathedral, was filled with bars to accommodate the visiting crowds – sandal-wearing pilgrims, mostly, making their way towards Santiago with uniform staffs, sun hats and expressions of holiness. It was very picturesque, the needle-sharp towers of the temple rising up into a cloudless sky, quaint postcard views in almost every direction. I headed out and away from the centre down the side streets looking for a place to eat. Crossing the Arlanzón, an uncannily clean river for one that flowed through a city, I found a grimy café down a blind alley and immediately walked in: when in unfamiliar Spanish towns in the past, a general policy of making for the busiest and dirtiest workers’ bar had usually served me well. Beer crates had been left in the entrance and I had to climb over them to get in, but I was quickly greeted by a joyous smell of frying garlic and sour smoke filled my nostrils. The place was packed and the television was yelling from the corner. I found a free chair at the side of a shared table and sat down. A woman with greasy dyed-blond hair who had her back to me turned round and smiled, revealing black stains like caves between each yellowed tooth.
The bar was a dark cramped space with walls painted in odd colours – one blue, another purple, another brown – while miniature imitation street-lamps stood at angles in the corners as though they were about to fall down. Behin
d my back, a chimney stack had been covered in shiny ‘brick-look’ wallpaper. Down some steps at the back, underneath a minstrels’ gallery, was a kitchen, from which steam and fatty odours wafted up and mingled with the nicotine and hot breath of the customers. Behind the bar stood a body builder looking like a model for Action Man, with protruding forehead and tight hips. There was so much bulk on his upper arms and chest it was a wonder how he could even turn round amid all the bottles and trays of food, but somehow he managed to slip through, wiping his hands on the dark-blue cloth sticking out of his front trouser pocket. Down in the kitchen, what looked like his mother and sister were clad in white aprons, their hair wrapped up in nets. I looked over towards the metal bar and the plates of food warming under the glass: boar stew, tigres – stuffed mussels, Burgos-style black pudding packed with rice, and sopa castellano – stomach-lining garlic and chorizo soup with egg. A few tapas and some warming red wine and I would feel like new.
Burgos was a surprisingly small place for somewhere that called itself a city. It had barely spread out from the constraints of its medieval limits and felt very much like a provincial town. Which is all it would have been had it not been home to one of Spain’s most important Gothic cathedrals, a major stop-over point on the route to Compostela, and the capital of old Castile – the county, later a kingdom, which had so dominated the Iberian peninsula over the past thousand years. During the Civil War Burgos had also been a centre of the Nationalist campaign and, during the latter part of the conflict, Franco’s headquarters. Few places symbolized better the tenets of the reactionary movement of which the Generalísimo was the head, being both devoutly Catholic and strongly centralist – insisting on all power in Spain being concentrated in Madrid to the detriment of the regions. It had been the polar opposite of anarchist-controlled Barcelona, which during the war followed a pattern well established throughout Spanish history of trying to break away or gain greater autonomy, only to be forced back into uneasy matrimony with the rest of the country. Spain had always been a patchwork of a place, divided by the Romans and later by the Moors, and seemed to swing every so often between breaking apart completely and being held together by force, as though two opposing laws of nature were battling it out over the centuries for the identity of the country. Whenever anything less than an authoritarian regime was in power in Madrid, the regions, particularly Catalonia and the Basque Country, began pushing for independence. This had been the case in the years of the Republic leading up to the Civil War and was a major factor in the start of the conflict, and today similar moves were being made under Spain’s new democracy. Whereas in the past these tendencies had been stamped out mercilessly, it looked as though this time they might get somewhere. The age-old tension at the heart of Spain, which served to give the country a certain dynamism, was flaring up again.
But the threat of violence was still alive, too. The president of the northwestern region of Galicia, Manuel Fraga, a former propaganda minister under Franco who was still going strong in his eighties, had reminded the armed forces only months before that they had a duty to defend the unity of Spain under the modern democratic constitution. It seemed very old-fashioned language in the early twenty-first century, but it struck a strong chord with some. The newspapers had recently reported how a colonel in the army had been arrested for circulating ‘coupist’ literature on the Ministry of Defence intranet, calling on the military in the name of God not to stand idly by while the country was broken up in front of their eyes. The danger of Spain splitting into several smaller states still, today, had the potential to cause certain sectors of society to turn to violent preventative measures. Occasionally the spirit of Franco seemed alive and well.
All eyes were turned towards the television set, so I looked over to see what people were watching. A football match was under way and not a soul was aware of anything else. Even the barman had his eyes fixed on the match, filling the glasses on the counter in front of him by intuition. The blonde woman by my side was jumping up and down in her seat as events unfolded on the screen, while a man on the other side of our tiny table breathed out smoke through flared nostrils. He had the air of an actor: lean, with well-defined features, a large Adam’s apple, short-cropped grey hair and a straight back. He seemed to be the intellectual of the group, making studied, informed comments on what was happening on the pitch in a heavy, slow voice. The others murmured in agreement when he spoke.
‘Who’s playing?’ I asked.
The woman turned and smiled again. ‘It’s Barcelona– Madrid,’ she said, before turning back to watch.
I squinted up at the screen, making out the familiar blue-and-red and white strips of the famous football rivals. A noise like a building collapsing was coming from the speakers. I tried to make out if there was any indication of the score.
‘It’s a draw at the moment,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Paula, by the way.’ And she leaned over briefly to kiss me on the cheeks before taking her place once again. I was used to Spaniards being friendly and affectionate at unexpected moments, but this was exceptional. I put it down to the excitement of the game. From the other side of the table the football expert signalled to the barman and pointed in my direction: I was without food or drink and needed attending to.
I appreciated the gesture and began wondering what I would order. The morcilla looked good, as did the soup. I was starving and needed a good meal to lift my spirits. I had spent weeks on my own now. Salud was still touring around Europe, and on the few occasions when she’d managed to call me I’d either not had coverage for my phone or else the batteries had run out. Our inability to talk in this age of communications was almost comical. Now I wanted to feed off the energy and warmth of the atmosphere I’d unexpectedly found in the bar. Until I felt Paula’s face pressed against mine, and picked up the smell of her day-old perfume, I’d forgotten how good it was to have some company.
Up on the television something had happened to stir up passions in the bar. One man near the front was on his feet and shaking his fist at the screen, while his companions jeered and swore.
‘It’s the same problem as always,’ the expert said. ‘Weakness on the left.’
The energy that a Real Madrid–Barcelona football match produced in Spain was extraordinary. Most fans across the country would support a local team, but would then always take sides when the great clash of the season came up between these two most important clubs. Betis or Deportivo might ordinarily be the object of their devotion, but on that day almost every Spaniard was either del Madrid or del Barça. Whereas in the past the Spanish had fought battles over whether the country was a single nation or a collection of nations, now the ancient conflict was played out by twenty-two men manipulating a leather sphere with their feet. It wasn’t just a football match – the very tectonic plates that had moved under Spain throughout its history were at the heart of it. Real Madrid represented centralism, Barcelona the aspirations of the regions.
Franco had recognized this and had cannily poured huge amounts of money into the Madrid side during his dictatorship. A victory for the men in white was a victory for the regime, and the Madrid team was used for propaganda purposes as a symbol of all that was good about a centralized, unified country. A Barcelona win, on the other hand, was a poke in the eye – the only non-lethal form of opposition to Franco under his brutal rule. Needless to say, all attempts were made to prevent Madrid from losing. In 1943, during the semi-finals for the King’s Cup, the major tournament in Spanish football, Barcelona went on to lose the second leg against Madrid 11–1, having won the first round 3–0. The only apparent explanation for the Barça players’ sudden drop in form was a visit to their dressing room before the second match by Franco’s head of state security. Threats were made, and the azulgranos – the ‘red and blues’ – duly handed the match over to their rivals by a score line that has never been matched since.15 Some say it was Franco himself who paid a visit to the dressing room.
I looked around the bar and quic
kly realized that this was solid Real Madrid territory. I hardly expected anything less. Burgos, the birthplace of Castile, was centralist to the core. The Basque Country was only a few miles away to the north. A couple of days earlier, a woman kidnapped by the Basque terror group ETA had been found tied up in a car in an abandoned village not far from the city. Drunken revellers, looking for a late-night party venue, had stumbled upon her in the dark and been able to set her free, but the event was still all over the papers, serving as a reminder of the violence which still marred the division at the heart of the Spanish state. Hatred ran deep.
Back home in Valencia, the Basque problem seemed distant and only ever touched us when the gunmen brought their violence to the coasts to damage the tourism industry, bring attention to their ‘cause’ and leave broken bodies and lives in their wake. Here we were close to the front line: Burgos was the symbol of old Castile, the dominating centre of the country; Vitoria, the Basque capital with its ancient traditions and culture and language, was only an hour’s drive away to the northeast. Attempts had been made to place Euskera – the Basque tongue – on pretty much every branch of the world’s linguistic family tree, but without success. It was a thing apart, an icon of Basque otherness. Not all Basques wanted to break with Spain, but a committed, violent minority certainly did.
The problem was that for the last years of Franco’s life, ETA had been the only real effective military group fighting against the dictatorship. The communists and other organizations from the Civil War had tried to continue the struggle in one form or another after defeat in 1939, but by the early 1950s had disappeared. The emergence of the armed Basque separatists in the 1960s was a new challenge for Franco, and one which managed to cause him much damage. Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco was the Generalísimo’s right-hand man and prime minister during the latter years, and his appointed successor. In the early 1970s it was clear that Franco wouldn’t be around for much longer; Carrero Blanco was due to step into his shoes to ensure his legacy and continued authoritarian rule. It was ETA that put a stop to this plan, blowing the admiral up in the centre of Madrid in 1973 with a bomb so powerful his car flew a hundred feet into the air and over the roof of the building it was parked next to. Opponents of Franco were so jubilant they even composed a song about the historic event.
Guerra Page 13
