*
Whilst the nationalist troops were still entering Gijón, Paulino RODRIGUEZ tried to locate the battalion commander in Sotrondio who had the orders to blow up the coal mines. Unable to find him, he gave instructions to the sentries at the mine where the dynamite had been stored to allow none of it to be removed; then he returned to the townhall to destroy papers, especially charges laid against people which would be dangerous for those who had signed them. Tortured in the repression after the October 1934 rising, RODRIGUEZ had no illusions about what was in store. The battalion commander did not reappear.
Around Oviedo, still besieged by the Popular Front forces, the front was calm. José MATA, a socialist miner and veteran of October 1934, was in command of a battalion; he had refused to accompany his brigade commander to Gijón to find out whether resistance was to continue. At 8.30 that evening he received a message from him saying he should be in Avilés at that hour to be evacuated. He gave orders for the brigade’s documents and papers to be burnt. Then he made for Sama de Langreo in the Nalón mining valley. He couldn’t leave his men; he would have died of shame to abandon companions who had joined him on the first day in the struggle against the military. ‘They were captains and lieutenants who would be considered by the Franquistas as politically responsible as I.’
In Sama de Langreo he and other commanders met. Some believed they should stage a last-ditch resistance.
—They were going to shoot us anyway, there was no hope. They hadn’t forgotten October 1934 – and then we’d been mere soldiers. Prudence won out. It would have been stupid. We couldn’t have resisted more than twenty-four hours. They had only to shell us from the heights to raze the town. We decided instead to make for the mountains …
* * *
Episodes 8
Fugitives
Paulino RODRIGUEZ and two fellow-councillors left the Sotrondio townhall, having declared the town council dissolved. All the funds were carefully accounted for and left behind; they had run up a white flag on the building. The three men made for the RODRIGUEZ farmstead where there was a chamizo – a very narrow gallery which he had cut to dig his own coal. While his two companions gathered dry grass for bedding, he went to tell his mother they were there, and to fetch blankets.
José MATA and fifteen companions made for the mountains of the Puertos del Aramo south of Oviedo where they hid for a fortnight. But they were in countryside they didn’t know well; the first betrayals took place. They decided to return to the Nalón valley where they were known. A few days after their return new falangist recruits began denouncing villagers. Beatings, assassinations began. ‘We’ll have to go to the sierra,’ they said and they set off. Little did MATA think that eleven years of guerrilla life were opening before him.
*
Hearing the firing squads’ volleys from their hiding place in the gallery, RODRIGUEZ and his companions realized that things were going to be worse than even they had imagined. It was 27 October 1937; fifteen people had been shot, their bodies left unburied, in the near-by village of Blimeo. The three men set about making their hiding place more secure, moving out only by night. One day they heard the stones and earth at the entrance being moved: local lads looking for a place to hide who, when they realized that people were already there, covered up the entrance again and left. But the fugitives feared they had been discovered and decided to leave. His two companions set off for the townships of Barredos and Laviana. RODRIGUEZ believed his only hope lay in taking to the sierra. He made for home first to ask his mother’s advice. There he found his sister had made a hiding place under the hay in the shed next to the cowstall for his brother and his unit commander who were both wounded.
—She said I should join them. She had dug out a sort of tunnel in the floor under the hay and widened it a bit at one end. That’s where we hid …
He set out to make the hiding place safer, laying planks over the tunnel so that if there was a search bayonets prodded through the hay would not reach them. But it was not long before they heard that police forces were burning hay-sheds to force fugitives out. RODRIGUEZ started to dig a tunnel from the shed to the kitchen of the house.
*
No preparations had been made for guerrilla warfare in the sierra while the war lasted; no training, no supplies, no arms caches, no radios. The men who took to the mountains were the remnants of a defeated army. They formed small groups, each independent of the other, of between half a dozen and twenty men each. There was no organization, no overall command.
—It was very difficult to form a real guerrilla from a conquered army. A lot of men were there by force of circumstance, not all were political by any means. Adventurers, people without political ideals, who had fought in the war, been implicated in something or other and now couldn’t return. For a real guerrilla, the men must be trained, not only militarily but politically; must be convinced of what they are fighting for; must volunteer for it. Men of steel, undaunted by despair, prepared to go days without food and sleep, ready to sow terror. There has to be a purpose to make such an existence viable. In the circumstances, we lacked many of these things …
They were on the defensive, in fact. Had they launched a real guerrilla war, sabotaging the enemy rear, it would have all been over quickly, he thought. The enemy would have responded with a yet more ferocious repression against their families and comrades. The people would not have continued to support them. That was what happened after the enemy’s final victory in the war: they sowed fear. For every person the guerrillas killed, they responded by killing twenty or fifty. Happily for MATA, his immediate family had been able to get out, but even then they assassinated his third cousins. ‘If my mother had had to remain behind, I’d have committed suicide rather than let them kill her because of me.’
At the start, living in mountain huts in Peñamayor, a roadless sierra to the north-east of the Nalón valley, and in the mining villages, the guerrillas moved about with relative impunity. In the villages, the miners, who were very often also peasants, could be relied on. The guerrilla groups limited their actions to avenging assassinations to frighten the enemy from committing others. It was more a question of survival than of taking the offensive. Sabotaging the mines, MATA believed, would not have served the republican cause, however useful the coal output now was to the enemy.
—It would only have hurt the people, discredited us in their eyes; and within a year they would have got them working again. Meanwhile, Franco would have been able to buy all the coal he needed, as he was able to buy oil …
Throughout the first winter, with the enemy rearguard manned by new conscripts called up by the Franquista army, civil guards and falangists, there was little attempt to hunt down the guerrillas. But the following spring an entire division was sent in to liquidate them. Cowherds kept the guerrillas informed. While the troops beat the mountains, most of the guerrillas were in the villages and townships; as soon as the troops left, they moved back to the sierra. ‘Until the end of the war we didn’t have any important engagements.’
Later, they had to live by hold-ups. MATA’S first was on the San Vicente coal mine, which the Asturian miners’ union had owned and operated for years and the enemy had expropriated. The guerrillas requisitioned the wages. After such actions, which took time to plan and execute, the groups split up, each man going his own way.
—I’d disappear, no one knew where I went. I needed to rest, recuperate mentally. There was a time when you had to be on constant guard; you never knew whether one of the men with you had gone to see his girlfriend or to talk to the guardia civil. Once a friend of mine, a socialist youth member, tried to assassinate me; he had killed two others already. We got him first.
We became as quick on the draw as cowboys in westerns. A doctor in Mieres whom I went to consult in broad daylight about my rheumatism gave me a piece of advice. On the table in front of him I had placed four hand-grenades and two pistols. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. Eat a lot of meat, it makes one’s r
eactions faster. Look at lions and tigers compared to non-carnivorous elephants.’ He was right. We ate plenty of the fascists’ livestock. One night, on a path, I found myself face to face with a police corporal. He wasn’t looking for us, he was going to see his wife. ‘Good evening, where are you going?’ he asked. Before I could reply, my companion had shot him dead. ‘What did you do that for? I knew him, it was so-and-so,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know who he was. All I saw was a policeman with a gun,’ my companion replied …
*
Once the tunnel reached beneath the kitchen, Paulino RODRIGUEZ felt safe. His sister had been taking the earth out to the fields to bury under manure so as not to arouse suspicion. On either side of the kitchen stove there was a recess or closet, RODRIGUEZ began digging out a room beneath the kitchen in such a way that the closet would make an entrance to it. He made a trapdoor of iron and concrete, which resembled the tiles, to place in the floor of the closet. Then there was the problem of light. The initial solution, a flex from the kitchen, was dangerous: it might be seen. He drilled underground until he reached the mains entry into the farmhouse, and wired up a new light, bypassing the meter. Then the three fugitives spent the day sleeping and the night reading or listening to the radio his sister brought and which they wrapped in blankets. They spent twenty-eight months like that.
His sister cut off all communication with his wife and children. The latter were being harshly persecuted to give away his whereabouts.
—My nineteen-year-old daughter died of the treatment she received at the hands of the police. My sister told me of her death, but not the cause. I didn’t know the punishment they were having to suffer …
*
RODRIGUEZ was still in hiding when, in January 1939, a few days before the fall of Barcelona, José MATA and 800 guerrillas set off in different columns for the coast and possible escape. The guerrillas communicated with France, using rice water to write between the lines of letters which contained eulogies on Franco. Indalecio Prieto, no longer a minister in the central government, had made arrangements for a boat to be waiting in the small port of Tazones on the Villaviciosa estuary.
Some of the older, sick men who were to be got out – men who had been in hiding in houses and other refuges – were sent in advance to the rendezvous. For MATA and the men in Peñamayor it was a matter of a night’s march across the mountains to reach the concentration point in a pine wood two hours from the port. Guerrillas from Mieres, Langreo and all the surrounding areas assembled there at dawn. Twenty-five of the men were wearing Franquista army uniforms. The plan was that they should report to the small garrison in the port as a relief section and take over. The uniforms came from men who had fought in the republican army and had subsequently been called up by the nationalists. When MATA arrived at the pine wood he found the advance party was not there.
—An enemy patrol, which was searching for some deserters, came across them quite by chance; our men opened fire – and the plan was given away. The enemy brought in reinforcements and began to attack. We managed to keep them at bay all that day and, under cover of dark, we began to withdraw in a fighting column. The next day the guerrilleros from Langreo and Mieres fought another battle. Fifty-seven men were killed, most of them because they left the column. In a well-disciplined guerrilla column there’s no danger unless you’re betrayed or the enemy is very strong. We split up again into small groups and returned to the sierra …
*
One of the two companions with whom Paulino RODRIGUEZ had first hidden in the gallery was caught and ‘sang’ before being shot. A search party went to the RODRIGUEZ farmhouse, but so well-constructed was the underground hiding place that they were not discovered. The fugitives had been warned by their contacts of the coming search. When the police and falangists found nothing, they set off for the gallery, taking his sister with them. His mother insisted on accompanying her. It was snowing heavily. When they reached the mouth of the gallery, the falangists’ leader ordered his sister to go in. ‘If they shoot, the bullets will be for you – and mine will be for your mother.’
—Knowing we weren’t in there, my sister wasn’t afraid. She had taken the precaution of putting some tins and bottles in the shaft to show that we had been there recently. She even ‘found’ a bit of the lining of my beret. She was able to convince the falangists that we had left the gallery not long before but without saying where we were going. They searched the mountains until dawn and then gave up …
*
Eighty per cent of the guerrillas in the mountains were UGT and socialist youth members, MATA estimated. There were communists, anarcho-syndicalists and non-party men also. In those first years there were few political differences.
—We ate from the same dish, took part in the same actions; we were all in the same situation – when men’s lives are at stake there can’t be very deep differences. I often went on actions with communists. Fundamentally, I think the base is always united – it’s at the top that disagreements occur. My divisional commander during the war was a communist and we got on very well. He was the sort of man who would have disobeyed his party had it ordered him to take measures against me. We socialists in any case are different–if the party ordered me to do something I was opposed to I’d tell them to go to hell …
When the Asturian socialist party reorganized in clandestinity, it formed a mountain resistance committee made up of Arístides Llaneza, son of the former mineworkers’ union leader, Antonio Florez and MATA. The latter went under the nom de guerre of ‘Tamayo’, an anagram of Yo Mata (I Mata). While the war lasted, the guerrillas had no contact with the republican government; their only contact – via intermediaries – was Prieto.28
Episodes 9
Silences
When the boy saw the corpses of the fugitives they had hunted being brought down in garbage carts, his sympathy for the nationalist cause began to change.
Juan NARCEA was twelve. His father was a mining engineer in Pola de Lena, Asturias, and a supporter of Melquíades Alvarez’s reformist party. At the start of the war a socialist miner warned the engineer that his life might be in danger. He pooh-poohed the idea. In October 1934, the miners had guarded his home and life. Things were different now, the miner insisted: the engineer’s three brothers had been imprisoned and so had two of his sons, Juan’s older brothers. Finally, his father agreed to leave for a village near Teverga where the family had a country house; the rest of the war in Asturias he spent pursuing his favourite sport, fishing
Juan accompanied him. Life in the country house was pleasant enough – more pleasant than in his native Pola de Lena where, in the first weeks of the war, two older boys had descended on him as he was making a birdcage and beaten him with a compressor pump hose. As they beat him they called him the son of a bourgeois.
—They did a fairly good job on me. Children were then clearly divided between right and left. Before the war there were two kids’ football teams in the town, one for the right- and the other for the left-wing. As long as it remained at the level of sport there wasn’t much trouble, but now the differences were becoming much sharper …
The divisions existed within his own family; the war was being fought among his own brothers. The eldest, José, was a doctor, a man of liberal beliefs who never took an active part in politics and probably voted left republican. The next brother, Francisco, a lawyer by training and clerk of the townhall, was an ‘extreme conservative’. The third, Timoteo, was a dentist and a member of the communist party. The fourth, Leopoldo, was a chemist and a member of the Falange. A sister and two more brothers, of whom Juan was the youngest, and who were too small to have clearly formed political views, completed the family.
—At home, before the war, we all got on very well as brothers, but there were violent political discussions in which my father acted as moderator, for he was a very moderate man …
At the beginning of the war, militiamen came to the house and arrested Francisco and Leopoldo. Nine people, including a
former mayor, were shot in the township; but the family did not fear for the lives of its two members.
Soon the brothers were suffering different fates.
—The eldest, José, the liberal, was persuaded that it was his duty to join a militia column as a doctor, and he served in a CNT battalion – which was where, it seemed, most right-wingers served. Francisco, the conservative, was released from prison and forced to join a battalion (but not one belonging to the CNT) as a sort of punishment. As he was a lot better educated than anyone else, he soon found himself in an important administrative job in his unit, and seemed to me to be one of its commanders. Leopoldo, the falangist, was taken to Gijón prison and then sent to a disciplinary battalion to build fortifications; he had a pretty bad time of it.
Timoteo, the communist, had left Asturias before the war, partly for political reasons, because life was difficult for him since my mother was an ardent Catholic and president of Acción Católica until her death. He went to Algeciras, opposite Gibraltar, where he was active in local politics and – as we later learnt – attempted to organize resistance to the military uprising. He was executed there on 3 August 1936.29 My older brothers knew of his death via the International Red Cross, but they didn’t tell my father …
As the war progressed, Juan felt himself on the nationalist side and waited for Asturias to be ‘liberated’. Militiamen came to search the house one day. His relatives, thinking that a sick-bed was a useful hiding place, stuffed religious objects under the sheets beside him. The militiamen’s leader, a schoolmaster, asked what was wrong. A cold. He looked at Juan’s throat, gave him some pills and sat down on the bed. Immediately he leapt up. ‘What have you got there?’ Thinking no doubt that he had discovered weapons, he put his hand under the sheet and pulled out a crucifix. Looking surprised, he put it back. ‘Keep quiet about all that,’ he warned the boy, and went to tell his relatives how to treat his cold.
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