by Tony Kevin
I learned later a little of the history of this military base, oddly located in the middle of Spain. Córdoba, guarded by the Sierra Morena and this key army base at Cerro Muriano, had fallen into the hands of the Franco rising at the beginning of the Civil War in July 1936. In ensuing months, Republican forces made a determined but unsuccessful effort to re-occupy this politically significant city. A pitched battle was fought right here at Cerro Muriano, during which a Hungarian Jewish photographer Robert Capa took what became one of the most famous documentary photographs of the Civil War, ‘The Falling Soldier’, of a Republican soldier being shot dead while charging forward gun in hand. This photo had a huge contemporary impact in Europe. The battlefront stabilised just north of Cerro Muriano, and remained that way for the rest of the war. The front line extended north-westward from the mountains just north of Córdoba to just east of Mérida, and thus was very close to my line of walk. The villages of Villaharta and Alcaracejos, which I was soon to walk through, were both just inside a large bulge of territory that Republican forces held onto for most of the war, defending the southwestern approaches to Madrid.
I walked through challenging mountain country that day, playing hide-and-seek with a huge motorway construction project that seemed bent on obliterating every trace of the old walking trail. This is one problem with guidebooks: their truth can be overtaken by events. But adjusting Raju with careful use of the Michelin road map, and keeping an eye on the sun to check my general direction, I did not lose my way. Halfway up to the pass, I lunched in a tiny village called El Vacar, in a village bar–delicatessen called Casa Laura, which had the most wonderful local cheeses, jamón serrano, and homebaked bread. After listening to a spirited conversation between Laura and two customers, of which I understood barely a word, I resumed walking with reluctance. My path lay high above a new motorway tunnel. Coming down steeply into a valley, I found a highway-side motel below the pretty hillside village of Villaharta. Villaharta had two bars but no hostal.
I set off the next day from Villaharta on my longest leg so far — thirty-eight kilometres through high remote countryside, with no villages or roadside bars on the way — in fact with no roads of any size at all — from Villaharta to Alcaracejos. It was a deeply satisfying walk though beautiful semi-wild rangelands. I was very alone: I met two sheep herders in a four-wheel-drive, a Rumanian immigrant repairing boundary fences, lots of sheep and cows and goats and dogs, but no one else all day. Even after I came down out of the range onto a dry meseta (tableland), there were almost no farmhouses. There were a few large cattle properties, ringed with expensive wrought iron and brick-pier boundary fences and huge electronic driveway gates. Whoever lived in these places — if anyone did — clearly would not welcome pilgrim callers. Outside their well-fertilised and watered pastures, it was rough gorse scrubland — awful country. There was no flowing water — whatever water had flowed must have been dammed upstream for the benefit of these rich pastoral estates.
I could not walk any faster than three-and-a-half kilometres per hour, and by 3.00 pm — nine hours after I had started — I had reached the end of my strength, with Alcaracejos still six kilometres ahead. My two litres of water had disappeared down my throat alarmingly quickly during the day, and I had found nowhere to refill my bottles safely. Luckily, I now saw two young builders working on a new house not far from my path, and approached them. ‘Agua, por favor’, I croaked in my best tourist Spanish. They looked at me as if I was from Mars, but kindly passed their large chilled water container to me. I took a litre, thanked them profusely, and limped off towards the village. ‘How far? Six kilometres? It’s nothing’, I said proudly — having already walked thirty-two that day and still standing …
Fortunately, my blisters were by now well anaesthetised while I was moving. They only began to hurt again whenever I stopped. Raw blisters do this — some natural painkiller kicks in when you are walking rhythmically, and it is only when you stop — especially at the end of the day, when you gingerly peel off your stuck-to-the-skin socks and wash your stinging feet — that the injury comes back with a vengeance, in great throbbing waves of pain. That is the time to lie motionless on a bed until two Nurofens have taken effect, allowing you to hobble again — very carefully, after talcuming your dry feet and easing on a pair of open sandals — down the stairs to the bar.
I limped into the village, coming down from an ermita chapel on a nearby hill where I had rested for a while on a cool shaded stone bench. There was a choice of accommodation at the main highway crossroads in the village. I chose the grungiest-looking, the Hostal Fonda Nueva, a seemingly rundown hotel with a faded sign, Bar, Comidas, Camas (bar, food, beds). I was badly in need of all three, though the place looked like a set from a Sergio Leóne Western. I got a cheap room with bath, with one unmade slept-in bed and one clean bed. The hot-water tap was not working, and the bath was dirty. It was shaping up to be the Spanish hotel stay from hell — my worst pre-trip fantasy come true. But initial impressions were, as I often found in Spain, deceptive. The hotelkeeper, Juan, apologised handsomely for the state of the room: there had been a big fiesta in town the night before (Friday), the hotel had been full of guests, and the maid had not yet had time to do the rooms (or maybe she was still sleeping it off after the party). He set to, quickly cleaning the bath and reconnecting the hot-water tap himself. His wife, Isabel, thoughtfully offered to put a load of my clothes through the hotel washing machine — what bliss it was to have really clean and fresh clothes again, after a week and a half of my ineffective hand-washing. I had a luxurious bath, dressed my blisters with about five tiritas, and went downstairs to the bar where I spent a happy evening with Juan.
The bullfighting season had started, and it was all over television. I watched it desultorily, with little joy. Most others in the bar did not seem terribly interested either. They were more interested in talking to each other, eating and drinking, looking at newspapers. Let me dispose quickly of bull-fighting, then mention it no more. It does not attract me in any way. I find it cruel, ritualistic killing, involving the taunting and torture of defenceless domestic animals in our human care. I am a moderate meat-eater, so I cannot object to animals being killed for meat. But to take pleasure in killing in unequal contest, to erect a whole ‘sporting’ culture around it, down to television commentators scoring the finer points of the play as if in a football game, and discussing play statistics — that is an unpleasant thing to me. Most of all I was disturbed by the cruelty in the faces of the bullfighters, their evident joy in killing as they worked themselves up for the final sword thrust through the heads of the by now exhausted and tormented bull, looking at them dully with hurt and pain-filled eyes. What kind of men could enjoy doing this for a living? What kind of men and women could enjoy watching it?
I also sensed that most Spanish people nowadays would really far rather be watching football, but feel it is patriotic to show at least a polite interest in bull-fighting because the sport is part of their national tradition. It certainly has the active patronage of the monarchy and upper classes — at every televised bullfight I saw, there were members of the royal family prominently in attendance, along with well-suited Spanish people and a certain kind of well-heeled tourist. People dress up for a bullfight — I did not see many T-shirts and baseball caps, but lots of men in well-cut suits and women in summer dresses and hats. It was unsettling to watch the evident pleasurable excitement on some of the women’s faces as bloodied matadors came up to receive the acclamations of the VIP stand after killing their bull.
Watching these bullfights at close range on television — for the TV crews make liberal use of close-up filming of the matadors and bulls — I could see a direct line of descent from the cruel recreations of ancient Rome. Even the architecture of the bullfighting arenas is much the same: they look exactly like Roman arenas. I could not help but be reminded of the movie Gladiator, another kind of thoroughly uneven contest put on for the perverse en
tertainment of rich and jaded Romans. I also thought of what had happened in Badajoz, not so far from here, after the city fell to Franco’s forces early in the Civil War, on 14 August 1936. One thousand five hundred Republican captives were systematically herded in batches into the Badajoz bullring, there to be slaughtered by machine-gun fire. The bullring was drenched with human blood that day.
In sum, bull-fighting to me is a cruel and anachronistic cultural practice — I can see nothing noble, romantic or beautiful about it — but it is part of Spanish tradition and national pride, and so I suppose some form of it will be around for many years yet.
***
Meanwhile I was enjoying getting to know my landlord Juan, a delightful character with Monty Feldman-like eyes and more than a hint of Monty Python zaniness about him. He had done a pilgrimage to Santiago along the Vía Frances, and we talked about what it had meant to him, and later he brought out his pilgrim staff to show me. We compared lengths, and had a ceremonial photo taken, in which we both look intensely serious. Juan, a fine fellow, brought out his best Montillo extra dry sherry for me, with Isa’s very good homemade tapas — lamb kidneys, marinated vegetables, smoked fish, potato omelette, smoked chorizo sausage. Then he served up a three-course dinner at a special table in the bar restaurant area. It was a great evening, finishing up with good coffee and Spanish cognac. Juan recommended that I try the ‘Carlos’ range, named after Spanish kings. Carlos I (primero) is hugely expensive; Carlos V (quinto) is the everyday brand and a bit rough; but Carlos III (tercero) is just right, a lovely smooth aromatic cognac at the right price. I was getting to really like these Spanish village bars: Alcaracejos didn’t feel like the Wild West anymore, and Juan was the most hospitable and delightful innkeeper any lonely pilgrim could hope for. Through our clumsy Spanish exchanges, there was real warmth: I felt Juan understood why I had wanted to do this pilgrimage, because he had done it himself and said it had enriched his life. Like me, he was Catholic, but not with excessive fervour. We were kindred spirits. Interestingly, he did not seem to know that his village lay on the Vía Mozárabe pilgrimage route from Granada to Mérida — I was discovering that this route was still a fairly well-kept secret in Spain.
***
I stayed two nights in Alcaracejos, having a rest there on Sunday. The Civil War was still on my mind: the local church where I went to Mass was a modern building, in which all that remained of the original thirteenth-century stone church was an arched stone doorway. I read on a plaque that the church had been destroyed in battle in the Civil War. I do not know which side was defending and which side was shelling the church; the inscription was diplomatically silent on this.
It got me thinking more about the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). One cannot understand modern Spain without knowing this war’s history. I sensed real reluctance to talk about it, certainly in public places like bars. So I read books. The best and most objectively balanced general histories of the Civil War period are by English writers: Hugh Thomas (The Spanish Civil War, 1977), Antony Beevor (The Spanish Civil War, 1982, replaced in 2006 by a substantially rewritten new book with the title, The Battle for Spain), and Gerard Brenan (The Spanish Labyrinth, 1943, an illuminating early account of the social and political background to the Civil War, written soon after it ended). Spaniards on all sides value the work of these English historians because the Civil War is still too close for Spanish historians to confront without painful emotional involvement. While few Civil War veterans are still alive, many of their children are. Memories of terrible atrocities, and of loss of parents on both sides in battle or by political reprisal-killings afterwards, are still disturbingly fresh for people my age. And people whose Civil War family histories are mutually well known still have to live and work alongside one another.
There is consensus now in Spain on two points: the war began with an illegal coup, an act of armed rebellion against the legally elected Republican government by troops based in North Africa and the Canary Islands, who are now commonly called the ‘Nationalists’; and thereafter there were great crimes against humanity committed by both sides. Most but not all Spaniards would now agree that more such crimes were committed by the Nationalists than by the Republicans. It was a brutal, unrelenting war, typified by the exemplary reprisal killings that took place after Nationalist military conquests of Republican-held cities.
The Nationalists thought of the war as a second Reconquista, and saw themselves as crusaders against the forces of evil and atheism. Their duty was to restore Spain to a well-ordered Christian state; their battle cry was ‘Viva España’. As the war proceeded, and even in the early years after it ended, their leaders showed their defeated enemies no more mercy than the Spanish Inquisition had shown Spanish Moors and Jews four centuries earlier.
The Republicans initially believed they were defending Spanish democracy and constitutionality. Their battle cries were ‘Viva la Constitucion’ and ‘Viva la Republica’. The Republicans enjoyed popular support in Western democracies, except in Franco-leaning conservative Catholic circles, but never had the active military support of Western governments. Hitler and Mussolini, on the other hand, sent powerful military aid to the Franco forces from the beginning.
It is nearly impossible for British or American people to conceive of the depth of political and social breakdown in Spain in the early 1930s that precipitated such a dreadful war. Their national civil wars are now respectively 350 or 160 years ago — long enough to look back on them with emotional distance.
The British historians I read agree that the pre-war Spanish Republic’s parliamentary democracy had extremely weak support. Spain had only recently, in 1931, set up a Republic. Popular enthusiasm for the Republic was strong in the lower-middle and working classes, and in major cities like Madrid and Barcelona. But powerful interests at both ends of the political spectrum had no loyalty to the Republic’s new and untested institutions. It was under bitter attack from the Right: the large landowners and very rich, the highly conservative Spanish church, most of the military officer class, the Spanish fascist party the Falange, and die-hard monarchist supporters of the former King Alfonso XIII, who had abdicated under popular pressure in 1931. It was also mistrusted by the radical Left: the then very popular anarchists, the still small Communist Party, radical anti-clericalists, and various groups of regional separatists. The highly factionalised democratic government was under many pressures from parties of the Left: to distribute land to the poor, to more effectively tax the rich, to nationalise factories, to constrain the power of the church, to set up a secular school system, to grant more autonomy to independence-minded regions like Catalonia and the Basque region.
The government’s agenda was overloaded. It was trying to do far too much far too soon, and civil society was rapidly breaking down, polarising towards the extremes. There was absolutely no social consensus on where Spain was going, or how quickly it should try to get there. The impatient Left, as well as the desperately frightened Right, were both readying to take matters into their own hands by armed force.
The great poet W. B. Yeats was no doubt reflecting on the looming civil war in his own country, Ireland, but these immortal lines in his 1921 poem ‘The Second Coming’ seem to me to eerily foreshadow the onset and course of the war in Spain fifteen years later:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Initially, there were idealists on both sides of the war, people fighting for a better Spain. The military rebels were hoping for a quick and relatively bloodless victory. Their leader General Franco, a coldly calculating Galician from the coastal city of Ferrol, sensed that most military commanders would fall his way, once the coup’s credi
bility had been proven. And so it almost happened. Over the first few days, Nationalists quickly gained control over the western third of the country: the western parts of Andalucia including Cádiz and Seville and extending up the River Guadalquivir valley as far as Córdoba, and a huge swathe of territory in the north, across Galicia, Castile, and Navarre — Spain’s most conservative regions. But Madrid and eastern Spain, the northern Atlantic coastal zone, and Catalonia, together containing most of Spain’s population and industry, stayed loyally Republican for most of the war. The government kept its nerve, retaining the all-important national gold reserves in Madrid, and held the loyalty of national army units in areas still under Republican control. It appealed for international aid.
A military front line quickly consolidated, with many untrained Spanish and international volunteers coming forward to supplement what was left of the Army’s manpower on the Republican side. The war dragged on for three terrible years, with the Nationalists steadily gaining territory, population, and resources — their iron rule was never to lose ground that they had won. The Republican forces continued to muster enough resources and courage to go on fighting, even as the tide turned inexorably against them. There was enormous courage and enormous brutality on both sides.
There are many reasons why the initially economically stronger (on the face of it) Republican side did not win, and why the war dragged on for so long. From the start the rebels were better led. Franco was a superb political and military tactician. He knew better than anyone else how to balance off the disparate factions on the Nationalist side, and also how to neutralise potential military or political leadership rivals within the Nationalist camp (more than a few of whom mysteriously died in air crashes). He was a master manipulator of words and symbols, an artful consensus builder. He was utterly ruthless in the war, giving no quarter and using deliberate terror as a military weapon. He was interested in nothing less than total victory. By the end of the war, he had achieved total personal control over Spain. The Falange fascist movement, the Church, the officer corps, the rich, the monarchists, were all now under his thumb. Spain had become a totally centralised authoritarian state, becalmed under the iron rule of this one deceptively ordinary little man. And so it continued until Franco’s death from natural causes in 1975.