Guerra

by Jason Webster

  Manolo went on talking, ignoring the scene that was catching everyone’s attention. A lot of people his age, he was saying, didn’t want to talk about any of this, still preferring the culture of silence that had prevailed since the 1970s. He had bumped into one man a few days previously – they had been at school together and his father, like Manolo’s, had been shot in the bullring. ‘Why are you digging all this up?’ the man had said. ‘Why not leave it alone?’

  ‘He can’t cope with it,’ Manolo said. ‘That’s fine. I’m not asking him to talk. But for too long people have been afraid to say that all these things happened. Now it’s time to speak out.’

  It amazed me, after what Manolo had said, that there still seemed to be serious-minded people around – some historians, for example – who claimed that the massacre never took place. There was even a book about Badajoz during the Civil War that didn’t so much as mention the bullring, claiming that in total only twenty people were killed when the city was captured. When I mentioned this, Manolo merely shrugged his shoulders. ‘There’ll always be people like that,’ he said.

  His expression was fatalistic, but not without confidence that the truth of what he was saying would eventually win through. Outside the country there were few doubts that the massacre had taken place. Only in Spain, where the Nationalists had won, did you hear denials.

  Manolo’s world had been destroyed before he was even born; he had been struggling with this all his life. And now finally he was able to say what had happened. But there was no shouting from the rooftops, no triumphalism or pretension in his words or his manner. He was, if anything, humbled by what life had given him, and treated his task now with a sense of responsibility.

  As we finished our drinks, Manolo told me one last story. A man from Valencia had contacted him through the association, ringing him up out of the blue.

  ‘Before the war, his father had been involved in some drama performance in support of a trade union,’ Manolo said. Some time later he was involved in a freak accident at a petrol station and lost both his eyes and his hands. When the Francoists took over that area, anyone who’d been involved in the drama production was sentenced to death. But, because of his injuries, the man’s father had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. So severe were his disabilities that he was useless as a prisoner, so they commuted it again to house arrest. But now, under house arrest, in effect his entire family was subjected to a form of incarceration. ‘If they lit a fire in winter,’ Manolo said, ‘the guards outside would come in, pull their cocks out in front of the women and piss on the flames to put them out.’

  After fifteen years of this, the poor man asked for clemency, which was granted. But he still had to make some money. So father and son got involved in estraperlo – the black market. They’d go out on the train to the villages to sell stuff from the city, then bring goods back to sell from the country. Arriving back in Valencia in the afternoon, they couldn’t get off at the station as they might be caught by the authorities. So they had to jump from the moving carriage a few hundred yards out. The son had to tell his blind, handless father exactly when to leap, otherwise he would fall to his death. For years this was how they lived.

  Manolo leaned in towards me. ‘You know what this man on the phone said to me? “They should have shot him in the beginning. It would have saved us so much pain.”

  ‘But, I said to him, at least you had a father there, a hero figure to look up to. That’s what counts. I never had that. But the man just couldn’t understand.’

  As Manolo spoke, I began to see Spain differently, as a country that had suffered for centuries at the hands of tyrants, but which had emerged somehow intact, yet also subtly transformed, as if given greater strength. In his quiet, unassuming way Manolo was pulling away at the layers of fear which had wrapped around this country, by giving lectures, organizing conferences, simply by talking about what had happened. By breaking the silence that held the past in ice. For people outside the country, the Spanish Civil War was an episode in history; here it was part of people’s own internal narrative. After decades of speaking in whispers, these stories could now be told out loud.

  ‘I have always thought,’ Manolo said as he got up to leave, ‘that the most important thing is not what happens to you in life, but how you deal with what you are given. I have always tried to live by that.’

  I sat sipping my coffee. Across the store the woman in the yellow silk dress was still arguing vociferously with the shop assistant.

  20

  The End

  The Civil War came to a rapid and sudden close in the spring of 1939, the final drama being played out on the docks of Alicante. Thousands of desperate people crammed on to the quay, scanning the horizon for any sign of ships that might rescue them from imprisonment and death at the hands of the advancing Nationalists. They had come from all over the country to this, one of the last ports held by the Republicans. British vessels, it was said, were on their way. One had recently passed by – Billmeir’s the Stanbrook – and had taken over two thousand people away to safety. In the last days before final defeat, the refugees were praying that more like her would come and save them.

  After the collapse on the front lines, the Nationalists were moving in fast as Republicans, hungry and weary after almost three years of war, spontaneously gave up the fight. There was only one thing to do: get out quickly before being caught up in the waves of reprisals that would inevitably come. Most members of the Republican government had already gone into exile. Those who had remained were on their way out, flying from danger in specially arranged aircraft or on foreign ships. They’d had their escape routes planned for weeks, not least those who had been urging the people to ‘fight to the last man’. Republican Spain, a quickly shrinking piece of territory, had become a place of fear and chaos. But with no land borders left to them, there was only one direction in which people could run: towards the sea.

  The hope in Alicante was that the British would finally come to their aid and help them fight against the fascists who were threatening the whole of Europe. The British, on whom everyone’s hopes had rested through all these years of war. But the British didn’t want trouble, and they didn’t want war. Only days before they had recognized Franco as the legitimate ruler of Spain. They were determined not to upset him now.

  Fifteen thousand people pressed against the sea, in fear of the Italian soldiers fighting for Franco who were moving quickly down to capture the city. Time was running out for the refugees. A glimmer of hope appeared in the form of two ships approaching the docks. But the captains took one look at the sheer quantity of expectant people on shore – many of them armed – and quickly turned back.

  There was no means of escape: even the local fishing boats had been sabotaged in the days beforehand. And when an enterprising refugee managed to make the motor on one of them work, scores of people leaped on board and the boat quickly sank. Within minutes it lay at the bottom of the sea, unsalvageable.

  As desperation grew and the Italians moved in closer, the suicides began. A man with a cigarette in his mouth slit his own throat and fell to the ground, bleeding to death. Two men shook each other by the left hand and shot themselves in the temple. Others threw themselves into the sea.26 This was the last betrayal. Many believed they had been deliberately herded into this spot to make their capture and murder at the hands of the Nationalists that much easier. They preferred to take their own lives than hand themselves over to the enemy. Others hung on. They knew everything was lost, but decided to wait it out. Their duty was to escape and keep on fighting. As the suicides continued around them, a small group of men grabbed what they could and tried to make a run for it. They were soon caught outside the town by the Italians.

  Then, from the castle on the hill overlooking the port, came the sound of machine-gun fire. The Nationalists had arrived. Panic set in, and some of the refugees threw suitcases full of saffron into the sea. They had been planning on taking the precious substance abr
oad to sell – something to get by on if they managed to leave the country. Seeping out, it stained the water below them yellow and red. And then, just at the last minute, a ship arrived in the port. Perhaps they were about to be saved after all. But as the vessel approached, it unfurled the Nationalist flag and played the Nationalist anthem to the thousands lining the port. The waiting had ended. There was nowhere left to go.

  After the Nationalists’ failed attempt to capture Madrid in the autumn and winter of 1936–7, the Spanish Civil War turned into a slow conflict of attrition, Franco gradually chiselling away at Republican territory while the Republicans in their turn launched offensives meant to divert Nationalist advances and deliver a decisive blow against the enemy. The mistakes of the First World War were often repeated. On the Republican side, tanks, when they were used, were usually spread out thinly along the front rather than formed into powerful columns. Land was won and lost at the cost of thousands of lives. Franco’s German and Italian allies would often become exasperated at the Generalísimo’s old-fashioned tactics: the Spanish war was costing them time and a lot of money. But Franco refused to change his methods. He wanted to keep the infrastructure intact while pursuing a war meant to ‘cleanse’ Spain of Marxism, Freemasonry and the world born out of the European Enlightenment, which in his mind was responsible for so many of the country’s problems. A swift victory over the enemy would have created more difficulties in the rearguard and required repression on a scale even larger than was already being carried out.

  After failing to break through at Madrid – but still trying to encircle the capital – Nationalist attentions had temporarily turned to the conquest of the southern city of Málaga, where Mussolini’s Italian soldiers claimed an important victory. As well as sending significant military assistance, Hitler and Il Duce had both now officially recognized Franco’s regime as the legitimate government in Spain, an event which Franco had described as ‘the peak of life in the world’. Málaga became another notorious bloodbath, with perhaps as many as twenty thousand Republicans shot in the aftermath of its capture, much to the horror of the Italians. Arthur Koestler, who was in the city when it fell, described how exhausted militiamen would hang around on street corners, rolling cigarettes, waiting for the Nationalists to arrive and shoot them.

  With this important port city in their hands, the Nationalists then turned their attentions to the strip of territory running along the northern coast which was cut off from the rest of the Republic. First the Basque Country, which had achieved virtual independence by this point, then Cantabria and finally Asturias all fell to Franco’s armies. The Condor Legion played a significant role in this campaign, bombing Guernica into oblivion and then developing carpet-bombing techniques in Asturias. Republican offensives at Brunete, west of Madrid, and later on the Aragon front did little eventually to improve the situation, ending either in Nationalist counter-offensives which won back most of the territory lost, or a stalemate.

  After the north fell, the Republic made two more large-scale attempts to turn the course of a war which was steadily going against them. Firstly a move was made to capture the town of Teruel, in southern Aragon, in the winter of 1937–8. It was a particularly harsh winter in a bleak part of the country. Temperatures dropped to twenty degrees below zero and guns and artillery froze. Heavy blizzards cut the Republican lines of supply from Valencia. Forty-six men from one brigade were shot for refusing to attack with empty rifles when their ammunition ran out. Eventually Republican forces captured the town, only to lose it again shortly afterwards in a Nationalist counteroffensive. Exhausted, they were unable to fight back as the Nationalists pushed on and took new ground. Within a few months they had reached the Mediterranean and cut Catalonia off from the rest of the Republic.

  The last serious Republican attempt to turn the war came at the Battle of the Ebro, the river that gives the Iberian peninsula its name and which runs across the northeast of the country. A decisive blow there could have rejoined Catalonia with the remainder of Republican territory. It was the biggest battle of the war. By now the Republican army was a professional fighting unit rather than the previous collection of militias and a handful of officers who had refused to join the coup. But after rapid gains, the offensive stalled and was slowly pushed back. It was a disaster for the Republic, which essentially lost its army in the north as a result. When, shortly after in the late autumn of 1938, Hitler gave Franco yet more military supplies in exchange for iron-ore concessions, the balance tipped significantly in the Nationalists’ favour. Taking advantage of the enemy’s disarray, they launched an offensive against Catalonia at the end of December. Republican Spain was now hungry and desperate. Within a month the Nationalists had reached the Pyrenees and the French border. The Republican government, its capital now in Barcelona, fled, the rump of the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, holding its last meeting at the border town of Figueres. Franco rejected all offers of a deal. There could only be unconditional surrender.

  Barcelona, once the most revolutionary city in Spain, was now in Franco’s hands. In a strange irony of history, the first Nationalist tank to enter the centre carried a celebrating German–Jewish woman on the front giving the fascist salute. She had just been released from a Republican jail where she was being held for ‘Trotskyism’. Nationalist sympathizers came out on to the streets to welcome the conquerors, and masses were held in the open air by triumphant priests. Catalan was immediately banned as an official language.

  Not everyone had stayed in the city, though. Hundreds of thousands of people were trudging slowly northward to the border in the hope of safety. Government cars carried officials along the packed roads at a snail’s pace, while civilians with children and wounded soldiers had to walk to escape the advancing enemy. It was another cold winter, and the refugees had no shelter. Arriving at the border at the end of January 1939, at first the French refused to let them in. More and more arrived, though, many of them armed, and the French realized that if they didn’t let them through they might fight their way over. At first civilians were allowed to cross the border, then a few days later the combatants, dumping their weapons in piles as they passed into France. They were herded like animals into makeshift concentration camps. Meanwhile they watched as lorries carrying the artworks from the Prado Museum in Madrid were driven through and on to Geneva for safe-keeping at the League of Nations. There had been fears for their security during the Nationalist assault on Madrid in 1936, so they had been taken first to Valencia and then on to Barcelona. Within a few months, once Franco’s victory was complete, they would be back in Madrid. Not one piece from the famous collection was lost during these tortuous times.

  Despite the loss of Catalonia, the Republic still possessed a third of Spanish territory – including Madrid and Valencia – and had half a million men at its disposal. Most of the government was in exile, though, and supplies of all kinds, particularly food, were pitifully low. The Army of the Centre had only 95,000 rifles and 1,400 machine-guns. The war could not be won as things stood, but there were two reasons to continue: the hope that a European war would soon start and that Britain and France would finally come to the Republic’s aid; and the fear of reprisals if and when they were caught by Franco’s men – better to die fighting than at the hands of a firing squad. Still, there were plenty who thought there was a chance of negotiating a better deal with Franco – if they could get rid of the communists.

  The Republican prime minister at that point, Juan Negrín, despite his attempts to maintain a distance from the Communist Party, was a pragmatist who realized he had little choice but to work with Moscow and its agents in Spain. After the May Days the anarchists had lost power, and many army officers were attracted by the communists’ discipline. Now, though, with the Republic falling apart around them, the thoughts of many turned to survival. And so in the last gasp before the end, the second ‘civil war within a civil war’ broke out. In early March 1939, a collection of anti-communist politicians and officers in Ma
drid overthrew the authorities, and when army units around the country declared in their favour, Negrín, who had returned from France with communist leaders and was holed up near Alicante, was forced back into exile. Soviet advisers realized which way things were going and got out as fast as they could. Many would later die back home in Stalin’s purges.

  This late coup got the Republic no further, though. Franco still insisted on unconditional surrender, communists or no communists. By late March there was nothing more they could do. Along the front lines Republican troops ‘self-demobilized’ en masse, dropping their weapons and heading for home rather than waiting for the order to surrender. With only pockets of resistance to deal with, the Nationalist armies again experienced the rapid conquest of territory they had enjoyed at the very start of the war. The last third of the country was taken in only three or four days. Refugees fled to the coast, hoping to find passage to safety. Valencia and Alicante fell on 30 March, Murcia and Cartagena the following day. From his headquarters, Franco, suffering from the flu – his first illness throughout the whole campaign – issued a statement: ‘Today, with the Red Army captured and disarmed, Nationalist troops have achieved their final military objectives. The war has ended.’ On 1 April the message was repeated throughout the day on Nationalist radio.

  The European war that Republicans had so hoped for to save them from Franco didn’t start until September of that year. Just days beforehand, Hitler and Stalin, until so recently at each other’s throats on the fields of Spain, agreed the Nazi–Soviet Pact, promising not to fight each other while secretly dividing Poland between them. Franco, despite his debt to the Italians and Germans, managed to keep Spain out of the Second World War, although a few thousand hard-line fascist soldiers – the Blue Division – were sent as a token gesture to help on the Eastern Front. Spanish films were later made praising their ‘heroism’, using the blondest actors they could find.