Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  —I ordered him back to the boiler-making section, re-appointed the former workshop head and told him he was now responsible for seeing that repairs were properly carried out …

  Small things surprised him: the great number of carriage seats which had been ripped out by people to make themselves leather jackets; nothing like that had happened in Asturias. Andalusian refugees billeted in fine country villas tore out doors for firewood in winter. They couldn’t be blamed, the fault lay with those who organized their housing and who had not taken the trouble to tell the refugees where they should go for firewood in the mountains. Of course, the fundamental cause of all this disorder lay with the military who had started the war. ‘None the less, the lack of any sense of property, the lack of culture, astonished me.’

  Among CNT militants the outcome of the May events, the growing strength of the PSUC, and the economic difficulties encountered by the collectives all made for demoralization. Josep COSTA, CNT textile union secretary in Badalona, and Joan MANENT’S companion there, believed that the general mass of workers was less affected.

  —But we came to the conclusion that we didn’t know what we were fighting for any longer. We’d reached a situation in which nothing seemed worthwhile. So most of us went to the front, to fight and be killed …

  At the front, morale was high, especially among the youth, even those who had been called up, in PONS PRADES’S experience. Though not yet seventeen, he had volunteered for the army, falsifying his age, not long after the May events. The effect of the latter on the CNT woodworkers’ union had been ‘catastrophic’. Although work continued, there was a sense of material and moral defeat which permeated everything. Nobody talked about it; ‘It was just like an impending death. We were all waiting for the union to die of a heart attack.’ But at the front things were very different.

  —As long as the war wasn’t lost, everything hadn’t been lost; that was what we all felt. And once the war was won, all the problems could be reconsidered. Even defeats like that of May could perhaps be overcome …

  Hopes to be shattered; but whose tortured shadows were to rise again, a year later, in a second civil war within the civil war which without settling the former, finished the latter, opening the gates of Madrid to the enemy …

  MADRID

  The winter had been very hard; when blizzards struck during the Teruel republican offensive, it had snowed heavily in Madrid. The people, he thought, were beginning to lose heart. Or rather, those people who wanted only to ‘eat and live’, who wanted the war to end, however it ended. Régulo MARTINEZ, president of the Madrid left republican party, still had faith in victory; yet he could not help but see that large sectors of the population no longer shared his faith.

  —They were like sand, these masses, absorbing whatever came their way. Their morale was falling very rapidly. The soldiers at the front never went without food, but they knew that their families in the city were going hungry, and that was bad for morale too …

  There was the problem of the refugees; in the panic evacuation of the countryside as the enemy advanced on the capital in that already distant autumn of 1936, many had come who had been supporters of village caciques, he reflected. At the beginning, when he had found them places to live, they had given of themselves in the defence of the city; but now they were among the first to become demoralized.

  The front line remained where it had been traced in blood during the November offensive. Nationalist artillery continued sporadically to shell the city from Mount Garabitas, in the Casa de Campo, although there were no more direct assaults. In the barrio of Argüelles, facing the University city, few houses remained intact. An area so close to the front was also an area in which it was relatively safe to hide. Standing in the doorway of a house, a man watched three children playing behind a cobble barricade in the sand of the street. Only two families lived in the three still habitable houses; one was a chemist whose children he taught, to earn money because, as a leader of the clandestine Falange, private work was safest. As he watched, spent bullets from the University city splattered against the barricade and the walls of the houses. Three mortar shells suddenly exploded over the roofs. The children’s mother looked up. ‘You had better come in now, it’s getting a bit thick.’ It was as though it had just started to rain. ‘That was the way the people of Madrid lived.’

  Women hung out their washing on the barbed wire entanglements; children went to school in air-raid shelters, and to the Gran Vía to pick up red hot shrapnel. It was a favourite sport of Alvaro DELGADO, the fifteen-year-old son of a clothing store manager. The shelling did not usually start until 6 p.m. The lads would wait in the side streets on the south side of the Gran Vía until they heard the cannon open fire, the whine of a shell in the air, and the boom as it exploded against the Telefónica. Then they rushed into the street for the hot metal.

  —It seemed a very precious thing for us kids to collect. One evening, when things got a bit hotter than usual, I took shelter in a shoemaker’s shop; when the smoke cleared, I saw a man in the street whose head had been blown off …

  The Gran Vía was known as Shell Avenue. A current joke was to ask whether the 17 tram had arrived. ‘No, the only thing that comes by here is the 15½’ was the stock answer. The latter referred to the calibre of the enemy shells.

  It was the only city where you could go to the front by tram. Girlfriends and novias, knowing that their boyfriends had an hour or two off duty at the front, would take the tram to see them.

  —And there, behind barricades and parapets, you could see them making love with firing going on all round them. Now and again a couple would be killed and their bodies found still clasping each other in a last embrace, Régulo MARTINEZ remembered …

  People got used to anything, he thought. He was taking a short cut through the Plaza de Bilbao behind the Telefónica building – the highest edifice in the city, the enemy’s main target – when he saw two kids of about eight and six playing marbles. An old woman was sitting in the entrance to a cinema taking the winter sun. Suddenly, a couple of shells, missing their target, fell in the square. One exploded, the other buried itself in the ground. One of the kids looked up. ‘Abuela, they’re firing. Go home, coño, only men can be outside now.’ Turning to his companion, he said: ‘OK, it’s your go –’

  —I could hardly believe my ears. I went up and said: ‘And you too, get home quickly, it’s dangerous here.’ They looked up at me and said: ‘Go home? What for?’ …

  People ‘vaccinated’ themselves with shrapnel fragments, and went to the cinema to forget. The Marx brothers; Soviet films. Enemy shelling seemed to many Madrileños to coincide with the time when the cinemas came out. ‘Soldiers who had gone through the worst of the fighting at the front were killed leaving a cinema in the Gran Vía at night.’ For youths like Alvaro DELGADO, half the excitement was the fear of whether they could get to safety when the shelling started. ‘If you could reach the Plaza del Callao and the corner of the Calle Preciados, you knew you were OK.’ One evening he was watching an American film, something to do with Mexico, when the noise of the shooting on the screen seemed somehow to get a lot closer and, all of a sudden, the lights went out: a shell had hit the cinema.

  The centre of the city was always full of people; but the closer you got to the Plaza de España, the fewer people you saw. From there on, the cobble barricades began and sentries stopped people from approaching the front.

  Pushing his father’s handcart through the streets on delivery errands, he liked to stop at all the political party offices and read their wall newspapers. Often they included poetry by Miguel Hernández, Lorca, Alberti, Machado, and he wanted to read them all. In the main squares, enormous posters portrayed the faces of communist heroes – of Stalin, Lenin, La Pasionaria, Lister – as well as anarchists like Durruti. ‘But never a poster of the prime minister, Negrín, and hardly ever one of Azaña.’

  Most children, by now, had been evacuated; some, like Jesús de POLANCO and his
family, had even succeeded in reaching the nationalist zone. His father, manager of a Santander dairy company in Madrid, had been caught by the uprising in Santander; his mother, right-wing and religious, had been left to look after the six children without any means since her husband’s bank account was frozen. The children began to go hungry. Relief came from the waiters of La Granja el Henar, the famous café which her husband’s company owned in Madrid, who brought them food and even gave her money.

  —Our one remaining maid had a militiaman novio, a very nice man who, when he came on leave, would draw his rations and bring them to us. In the midst of everything, there was a tremendous sense of humanity …

  In fact, he reflected, the left helped the right a great deal during the war. Not a single charge was laid against anyone in his house by the left republicans living there. ‘In that sense, the civil war only began after the war, when the right-wingers began denouncing people as reds – ’ Not that they had escaped without trouble by any means. Police and militiamen had come seeking his father. One of the policemen had been so moved by his mother’s shattered nerves and the sight of the six children that he had calmed her down and given her a piece of paper which stated that the flat had been searched and nothing found. If anyone tried to search the flat again, they were to be, shown the paper; if they persisted, she was to call the police.

  —Which, on one later occasion, she did when militiamen appeared. As soon as they heard what she was doing, they gave up their search. My poor mother, what she went through! I gave her no peace. I was only six; I wore a pair of overalls on which I had had UHP embroidered. ‘You’re all fascists and I shall denounce you,’ I used to say to them. They didn’t think it was much of a joke at the time …

  Through the offices of the British embassy – his father was a friend of the British consul – the family was evacuated a year after the start of the war. Five hundred women and children set off in a convoy of buses by night for Valencia where they were taken aboard a British hospital ship which disembarked them at Marseilles. From there they went by train to Hendaye to cross into nationalist Spain. Never in his life would he forget the scene as they walked across the international bridge.

  —The whole expedition burst out singing El corazón santo tu reinarás. People threw themselves on the ground to kiss Spanish soil. Others started singing Cara al Sol, the Falange anthem, and I remembered that a few days before the start of the war my aunt had given me the first five duros [25 pesetas] I’d ever had for singing it for her on her saint’s day …

  The change was tremendous, overwhelming, he remembered. From hunger to abundance, from poverty to relative affluence. There were no air raids, no cause to worry. Public enthusiasm for the nationalist cause in Burgos where he stayed with an aunt and uncle was tremendous. On the Espolón, he met a neighbour who had lived in the flat above his in Madrid who gave him a kiss: a naval captain called Luis Carrero Blanco who had escaped via an embassy.

  Shortly, Santander would fall. One day, a man came to the door and asked if it was his uncle’s house. Suddenly the stranger threw his arms round the boy and embraced him. ‘“¡Hijo mío!,” he cried. ‘I hadn’t the faintest idea who it was … ’ His father had driven to Burgos immediately on his release from the sanatorium in Santander where he had been confined after the prison director and doctor had shown him how to fake the symptoms of TB.

  *

  Despite the defeats, despite all the difficulties, the militiamen who came to Alvaro DELGADO’S father’s shop in Madrid always seemed in great spirits, were never in doubt that the war would be won in the end.

  —Next door to the shop in the Plaza Antón Martín was the Bar Zaragoza which was locally known as the syphilis bar; the army men who went there for the whores often brought them next door to buy something. There was no shortage of clothes and suits for a long time, and the soldiers had plenty of money. While they were serving them, the shop assistants always asked for news of the front. It didn’t matter what setback had just occurred, the men were always optimistic; and their faith was shared right to the end by the Madrid working class …

  The lack of food was debilitating. Queues for bread and milk had started early on in the war. One had to join the queue by 7 a.m. in order to make sure of getting something later in the day; family members took turns spending a couple of hours each in the queue. It was where people talked, it was where he had experienced a new type of revolutionary fraternity. Everyone was addressed as ‘tu’, there were no ties, no hats to be seen, everyone appeared to be wearing sandals.

  But those days were over; the food shortages had only got worse. Everyone was suffering from vitamin deficiencies, great boils came out on his neck and under his arms. His hands were broken with chilblains. A bowl of lentils, a bit of rice occasionally, livened up with some chirlas, a mush of flour – that was all he ate. He never saw meat, never tasted coffee.

  —I’ve often thought that from 1936 I didn’t eat properly again for another ten years. People went home early because of the hunger and cold; and on those dark nights the only light would be the sky lit up with the reflections of shooting …

  Vitamin deficiency was sending Pablo MOYA’S sister-in-law to her grave. The UGT turner made a special trip to his native village to collect a ham his sister had managed to get. He left it to his sister-in-law and his children to eat. There was a generalized spirit of self-sacrifice, even though they were all nearly dying of hunger. Not that a whole day ever went by without something to eat.

  —A tiny bit of bread, lentils – the famous Dr Negrín pills, as we called them – rice, that was about it. And the cold – I’ve never seen rain and snow like that second winter of the war. There was nothing to heat ourselves with. People tore out doors and windows for firewood. And yet I never lost faith in our victory. I had a workmate whose brother-in-law was a political commissar in El Campesino’s division. Every morning I used to call him across and say, ‘Tell me the latest, even if it’s a bunch of lies.’ It sounds ridiculous, but I wanted to hear him say that so many new tanks, so many planes, so much more ammunition had arrived – even if it was untrue. I had a blind, mad faith in our winning the war …

  It seemed impossible to be neutral and remain on any part of Spanish territory. However much there was to criticize about one side, a choice seemed inevitable when faced with the prospect of the other winning. But it was not out of the question. José VERGARA, former agrarian reform chief in Toledo,8 felt that the impossibility resided not in siding but in choosing: both seemed equally repugnant to him. He sent his Mexican-born wife and children, via the British embassy, to the nationalist zone where he knew they would be safe and fed, while he remained with his parents in Madrid. He wanted to have nothing to do with the nationalists – ‘in any case they’d have shot me for having worked on agrarian reform’ – or the republicans. The former seemed bent simply on restoring the old Spain; the latter were a disaster, had proven it in their conduct of the war which patently they were going to lose. For a liberal, neither represented a viable future. He turned down the offer of a high-ranking post in the commerce ministry which was made to him on Negrín’s suggestion. He explained that he was disillusioned with the republic.

  —‘And what will you do when the war is over, then?’ asked the politician on the other end of the line from Valencia. ‘What will you do?’ I replied …

  He found work in the scientific investigation institute in which, among others, Julián Besteiro, the moderate socialist leader, played a leading role. Called up, he procured a piece of paper from someone he knew to say that he was unfit for military service. He dressed in a suit, tie and hat and was never stopped in the street for an identity check.

  —They must have thought I was someone important to dress like that. One day I was in the tube when I became aware that two men were saying something critical about the war. ‘Shut up, we’re being overheard,’ one said. The other looked at me and turned back to his companion. ‘It’s all right, he can’t understan
d, he’s a Russian’ …

  VERGARA lost 30 kilos. One of Encarnación PLAZA’S friends wore four skirts simply to look a little fatter – the fashion then not tending to the skinny. Her father was a medical colonel in the republican army; they lived in the upper-class Salamanca barrio which the nationalist artillery spared. When she went out into the street, the other children made underhand, malicious comments about her father, a staunch republican.

  —Though we all came from the same class, those children were hostile to us for ‘being on the other side’. It was the first time I heard anti-republican remarks …

  Such an experience was no novelty to Alvaro DELGADO, whose family, as so many, was divided; his mother’s side was ‘exceedingly right wing’, while his father’s brother was ‘practically a founding member of the communist party.’ At the start of the war, his mother’s family had had a hard time and she had tried to get his communist uncle to help. Whether he had or not, young Alvaro did not know; what was certain was that very soon his mother’s side became a lot better off than the rest of the family. They moved to a large flat out of danger of the shelling which they shared with two other families; the husband of one of them held an important post in the townhall and seemed able to procure all the meat he wanted.

  —One of my cousins was a draft-dodger who got himself a job as a clerk in the SIM, the counter-espionage service; he belonged to the clandestine Falange. We, who were on the left, had virtually to beg food from my right-wing family who always seemed to have enough bread, soap, milk. In fact, I used to go to the SIM headquarters where my cousin would give me green soap for washing clothes, and condensed milk …

  The right, he reflected, as he pushed his father’s handcart through the streets, might not be very intelligent – ‘in Spain it has always been characterized by its cultural philistinism’ – but when it came down to the practical realities of life right-wingers organized themselves better than the left. Which was not surprising really, when one considered that they had much more experience of administering property and wealth, since they owned almost all of it.