We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  What Jay saw of the explosive social situation in Extremadura in the spring of 1936 convinced him of the need for a government strong enough to implement thoroughgoing agrarian reform. Tens of thousands of land-hungry peasants living below the bread line were faced by intransigent landowners determined to cede nothing. Jay was, of course, a friend of Araquistain – hence Negrín’s assumption that he supported the position of Largo Caballero – but he could see that the combination of weakening the government while spouting empty revolutionary rhetoric was dangerously irresponsible. When Largo Caballero was ousted as prime minister in May 1937, an embittered Araquistain, who had hoped to be made Foreign Minister, forgot his own revolutionary past, assumed a fervent anti-Communism stance and became a ferocious critic of Negrín. It was in reference to this that Jay commented in his letter to Negrín: ‘I would never make a frontal attack on the Pasha despite all the vicious things he has said about some of us, but I still feel strongly and say so, about the irresponsibility of the Caballero crowd that spring.’18

  When the Spanish military rebels rose on 17–18 July 1936, Jay was still living in Torremolinos, where he had established a close friendship with the expatriate English Bloomsbury Group writer, Gerald Brenan, who lived in the nearby village of Churriana. Gerald was so deeply impressed by Jay’s knowledge of Spain and the energy with which he dashed around that he referred to him as ‘a crack reporter’. Jay wrote to Gerald on 13 August from Gibraltar: ‘I admire your guts in staying on. Don’t overdo it. If you hear that the black boys are advancing – they are now reported to be at Antequera; no advance has begun from San Roque – go on a ship.’ After a lengthy, and remarkably well-informed analysis of the violence, he asked Gerald to send him details of what was happening in Málaga. At the bottom of the letter, he scribbled: ‘Leave please if it looks bad.’ At the time of the coup, Jay was alone since, in February, Ruth had gone back to America to be with their son Michael. As soon as Jay heard the news of the coup, he set off for Gibraltar: ‘I simply wanted to get to Gib to find out what was happening and file to the London News Chronicle which had asked me to cover them in the event of the rumoured rebellion taking place.’ A day later, Jay Allen was reported to have been killed by the Republican army at a road block not very far from Gibraltar. He recalled years later: ‘I ran into some fighting in La Línea, damned near got killed (my chauffeur’s shoulder was all but shot off and next day there were 68 bullet holes in the car). Had I anticipated any such trouble, I’d have been more cautious.’ His son remembered his own and his mother’s distress during the hours between reading the ‘news’ in the Seattle paper and then learning before nightfall that he was reported to be in Gibraltar and safe:

  He had borrowed a rich man’s limousine and driver and was going from Torremolinos to Gibraltar. A very nervous squad of Republican soldiers opened fire. They killed the driver, who had rolled out into the street creating a pool of blood. My father rolled out also into the driver’s blood. The soldiers believed he was also dead and moved away. Later my father crawled away and got to safety in Gibraltar. We all thought it deeply ironic that such a supporter of the Republic as Jay would be the first foreign casualty of the Civil War.19

  In the course of the war, among the articles filed by Jay Allen were, along with Mario Neves’ reports on the massacre of Badajoz and George Steer’s report on the bombing of Guernica, three of the most important, and frequently quoted, articles written during the war. These were an exclusive interview with Franco in Tetuán on 27 July 1936, his own account of the aftermath of the Nationalist capture of Badajoz and the last ever interview given by the about-to-be executed José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

  Jay Allen’s interview with Franco was the first granted by the future rebel leader to a foreign correspondent. After being refused a pass to Spanish Morocco from rebel headquarters in Algeciras in the south of the province of Cádiz, he spent the night in a field near neighbouring San Roque. He was then contacted by Franco’s staff and told to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and go to Tetuán. After a hazardous journey, in the High Commissioner’s mansion, he was finally admitted into the presence of Franco, ‘another midget who would rule’. Both Franco’s optimism and his ruthless determination were revealed in this historic interview with Jay Allen. Asked how long the killing would continue now that the coup had failed, Franco replied, ‘There can be no compromise, no truce. I shall go on preparing my advance to Madrid. I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I shall save Spain from marxism at whatever cost...Shortly, very shortly, my troops will have pacified the country and all of this will soon seem like a nightmare.’ When Allen responded, ‘That means that you will have to shoot half Spain?’, a smiling Franco said: ‘I said whatever the cost.’20 In the course of the interview, Jay noticed that, on Franco’s desk, there were several copies of the Bulletin de L’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale, a ferociously anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik publication which praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against Communism. The Entente was an ultra-right-wing organization which had close contacts with Antikomintern, an organization run from Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Information. Franco pointed them out to Jay and commented on just how valuable he found them.21

  After the interview appeared, one of Franco’s staff told the American consul in Tangier that, if he were ever captured, Jay Allen would be shot. Back in Gibraltar, the British authorities informed Jay that they could not guarantee his safety and recommended that he leave. There was a price put on his head by the rebels. In late October 1936, when Dennis Weaver was arrested, along with Hank Gorrell and James Minifie, after straying behind rebel lines, news was sent to Franco’s headquarters that a News Chronicle correspondent had been captured. Franco ordered that he immediately be brought to Salamanca. When the Generalísimo saw him, he is reported to have said: ‘No, that’s not the one. The one I want is taller.’22

  Jay Allen’s report from Badajoz was secured with even greater courage than that which had taken him into the beast’s lair that was Franco’s headquarters. He had been in Lisbon gathering, at some risk, information on the delivery of eight hundred tons of war materiel for Franco, which was being loaded directly from the German ship Kamerun on to Spanish railway trucks under the supervision of Spanish officers.23 Hearing about the massacres in Badajoz, he had set off to find out for himself. In a town in which the occupying force of legionnaires and Moorish mercenaries were killing and torturing at will, he went around incognito courageously collecting information for a lengthy article that has more than stood the test of time. What he wrote about Badajoz would cause Jay to be vilified for years after. More importantly, what he saw was to haunt him for the rest of his life. Twenty-five years later, he recalled in a letter to Louis Fischer that, when he got back across the border to the neighbouring Portuguese town of Elvas, ‘I hated even thinking about what I had heard and seen at the very end of the mopping-up. As I recall I spent a couple of days on the town before I got up the courage to sit me down and write it.’24 It was an account too that was typical of the humanity and ethical commitment of the man, elements that were apparent from the opening paragraphs written in the sweltering heat of the patio of the Pensão Central, in the Rua dos Chilloes in Elvas. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

  Elvas, Portugal, August 25, 1936

  This is the most painful story it has ever been my lot to handle: I write it at four o’clock in the morning, sick at heart and in body, in the stinking patio of the Pension Central, in one of the tortuous white streets of this steep fortress town. I could never find the Pension Central again, and I shall never want to.

  I have come from Badajoz, several miles away in Spain. I have been up on the roof to look back. There was a fire. They are burning bodies. Four thousand men and women have died at Badajoz since General Francisco Franco’s Rebel Foreign Legionnaires and Moors climbed over the bodies of their own dead through its many times blood-drenched walls.

  I tri
ed to sleep. But you can’t sleep on a soiled lumpy bed in a room at the temperature of a Turkish bath, with mosquitoes and bed bugs tormenting you, and with memories of what you have seen tormenting you, with the smell of blood in your very hair, and with a woman sobbing in the room next door.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked the sleeping yokel who prowls around the place at night as a guard.

  ‘She’s Spanish. She came thinking her husband had escaped from Badajoz.’

  ‘Well, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he looked at me, not sure whether to go on.

  ‘Yes, and they sent him back. He was shot this morning.’

  ‘But who sent him back?’ I knew, but asked nevertheless.

  ‘Our international police.’

  I have seen shame and indignation in human eyes before, but not like this. And suddenly this sleepy, sweaty being, whose very presence had been an added misery, took on the dignity and nobility that a fine dog has and human beings most often have not.

  I gave it up. I came down into the filthy patio, with its chickens, rabbits, and pigs, to write this and get it over with.

  To begin at the beginning, I had heard dark rumors in Lisbon. Everybody there spies on everybody else. When I left my hotel at 4:00 P.M. August 23, I said I was going to Estoril to try my luck at roulette. Several people noted that down, and I hope they enjoyed their evening at Estoril.

  I went to the Plaza de Rocio instead. I took the first taxi. I drove around and around and finally picked up a Portuguese friend who knows his business.

  We went to the ferry that crosses the Tagus. Once on the other side we told the chauffeur, ‘Elvas.’ He looked mildly surprised. Elvas was 250 kilometres (about 150 miles) away. We streaked through an engaging country of sandy hills, cork oaks, peasants with side-burns, and women with little bowler hats. It was 8:30 o’clock when we pulled up the hill into Elvas, ‘the lock nobody ever opened.’ But Elvas knows humiliation now.

  We entered a white narrow gate. That seems years ago. I have since been to Badajoz. I believe I was the first newspaperman to set foot there without a pass and the inevitable shepherding by the rebels, certainly the first newspaperman who went knowing what he was looking for.

  I know Badajoz. I had been there four times in the last year to do research on a book I am working on and to try to study the operations of the agrarian reform that might have saved the Spanish Republic – a republic that, whatever it is, gave Spain schools and hope, neither of which it had known for centuries.

  It had been nine days since Badajoz fell on August 14th. The Rebel armies had gone on – to a nasty defeat at Medellin, if my information was correct, as it sometimes is – and newspapermen, hand-fed and closely watched, had gone on in their wake.

  Nine days is a long time in newspaper work; Badajoz is practically ancient history, but Badajoz is one of those damned spots the truth about which will not be out so soon. And so I did not mind being nine days late, if my newspaper didn’t.

  We began to hear the truth before we were out of the car. Two Portuguese drummers standing at the door of the hotel knew my friend. Portugal, as usual, is on the eve of a revolution. The people seemed to know who ‘the others’ are. That is why I took my friend along.

  They whispered. This was the upshot – thousands of Republican, Socialist, and Communist militiamen and militiawomen were butchered after the fall of Badajoz for the crime of defending their Republic against the onslaught of the Generals and the landowners.

  Between fifty and one hundred have been shot every day since. The Moors and Foreign Legionnaires are looting. But blackest of all: The Portuguese ‘International Police,’ in defiance of international usage, are turning back scores and hundreds of Republican refugees to certain death by Rebel firing squads.

  This very day (August 23) a car flying the red and yellow banner of the Rebels arrived here. In it were three Phalanxists (Fascists). They were accompanied by a Portuguese lieutenant. They tore through the narrow streets to the hospital where Senor Granado, Republican Civil Governor of Badajoz, was lying. Senor Granado, with his military commander, Col. Puigdengola, ran out on the Loyalist militia two days before the fall of Badajoz.

  The Fascists ran up the stairs, strode down a corridor with guns drawn, and into the governor’s room. The governor was out of his mind with the horror of the thing. The director of the hospital, Dr. Pabgeno, threw himself over his helpless patient and howled for help. So he saved a life.

  The day before, the mayor of Badajoz, Madroñero, and the Socialist deputy Nicolás de Pablo, were handed over to the rebels. On Tuesday, 40 republican refugees were escorted to the Spanish frontier. Thirty-two were shot the next morning. Four hundred men, women and children were taken by cavalry escorts through the frontier post of Caia to the Spanish lines. Of these, close to 300 were executed.

  Getting back in the car, we drove to Campo Maior, which is only seven kilometres (about four miles) from Badajoz on the Portuguese side. A talkative frontier policeman said: ‘Of course, we are handing them back. They are dangerous for us. We can’t have Reds in Portugal at such a moment.’

  ‘What about the right of asylum?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Badajoz asks extradition.’

  ‘There is no such thing as extradition for a political offense.’

  ‘It’s being done all up and down the frontier on orders of Lisbon,’ he said belligerently.

  We cleared out. We drove back to Elvas. I met friends who are as much Portuguese and vice versa.

  ‘Do you want to go to Badajoz?’ they asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘because the Portuguese say their frontier is closed and I would be hung up.’

  I had another reason. The rebels do not like newspapermen who see both sides. But they offered to take me through and back again without complications. So we started. Suddenly we drove out of the lane on to a bridge that leads across the Guadiana River into the town where Wellington’s troops ran amok in the Peninsular wars, where now is just another tragedy.

  Now we were in Spain. My friends were known. The extra person in the car (myself) passed unnoticed. We were not stopped.

  We drove straight to the Plaza. Here are my notes: Cathedral is intact. No it isn’t. Driving around the side I see half a great square tower shot away.

  ‘The Reds had machine-guns there and our artillery was obliged to fire,’ my friends said.

  Here yesterday there was a ceremonial, symbolical shooting. Seven leading Republicans of the Popular Front (Loyalists), shot with a band and everything before three thousand people. To prove that Rebel generals didn’t shoot only workers and peasants. There is no favouritism to be shown between the Popular Fronters.

  We stopped at the corner of the narrow Calle de San Juan, too narrow for traffic. Through here fled the loyalist militiamen to take refuge in a Moorish fortress on a hill when the descendants of those who built it broke through the Trinidad gate. They were caught by Legionnaires coming up from the gate by the river and shot in batches on the street corners. Every other shop seemed to have been wrecked. The conquerors looted as they went. All this week in Badajoz, Portuguese have been buying watches and jewelry for practically nothing. Most shops belong to the Rightists. It is the war tax they pay for salvation, a Rebel officer told me grimly. The massive outlines of the Alcázar fortress showed at the end of the Calle de San Juan. There the town’s defenders, who sought refuge in the tower of ‘Espantaperros’ were smoked out and shot down.

  We passed a big dry goods shop that seems to have been through an earthquake. ‘La Campana,’ my friends said. ‘It belonged to Don Mariano, a leading Azañista (follower of Manuel Azaña, President of Spain). It was sacked yesterday after Mariano was shot.’

  We drove by the office of the Agrarian Reform, where in June I saw the Chief Agronomist, Jorge Montojo, distributing land, incurring naturally the hatred of the landowners and, because he was a technician following strictly bourgeois canons of law, the enmity of the Socialists, too.
He had taken arms in defense of the Republic, and so –

  Suddenly we saw two Phalanxists halt a strapping fellow in a workman’s blouse and hold him while a third pulled back his shirt, baring his right shoulder. The black and blue marks of a rifle butt could be seen. Even after a week they showed. The report was unfavourable. To the bull ring with him.

  We drove out along the walls to the ring in question. Its sandstone walls looked over the fertile valley of Guadiana. It is a fine ring of white plaster and red brick. I saw Juan Belmonte (bullfight idol) here once on the eve of the fight, on a night like this, when he came down to watch the bulls brought in. This night the fodder for tomorrow’s show was being brought in, too. Files of men, arms in the air.

  They were young, mostly peasants in blue blouses, mechanics in jumpers. ‘The Reds.’ They are still being rounded up. At four o’clock in the morning they are turned out into the ring through the gate by which the initial parade of the bullfight enters. There machine guns awaited them.

  After the first night the blood was supposed to be palm deep on the far side of the lane. I don’t doubt it. Eighteen hundred men – there were women, too – were mowed down there in some twelve hours. There is more blood than you would think in eighteen hundred bodies.

  In a bullfight when the beast or some unlucky horse bleeds copiously, ‘wise monkeys’ come along and scatter fresh sand. Yet on hot afternoons you smell blood. It is all very invigorating. We were stopped at the main gate of the plaza, my friends talking to Phalanxists. It was a hot night. There was a smell. I can’t describe and won’t describe it. The ‘wise monkeys’ will have a lot of work to do to make this ring presentable for a ceremonial slaughter bullfight. As for me, no more bullfights – ever.

  We came to the Trinidad gate through these once invulnerable fortifications. The moon shone through. A week ago a battalion of 280 legionnaires stormed in. Twenty-two live to tell the tale of how they strode over their dead, and, with hand grenades and knives, silenced those two murderous machine guns. Where were the government planes? That is one of the mysteries. It makes one quake for Madrid.