Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  MADRID

  A shout went up in the ‘tunnel’ where he was working. ‘The communists are coming!’ Almost all the men in Pedro GOMEZ’S workshop tried to flee; some of them escaped through the cesspit under the prime minister’s office.

  —‘What’s going on here?’ the communists asked those of us who remained. ‘Nothing.’ ‘You keep on working. We’re up above and nothing will happen.’ So while the fighting went on in the streets, we went on working below. We had no difficulty getting to work through the battle …

  After two days, the communist troops attacking Casado’s small forces virtually controlled the city, having besieged their enemy in a number of isolated buildings. General Miaja, once the hero of the communists, and the only senior officer to agree but a fortnight before with Negrín on the need for resistance, switched sides and became president of the defence council. Other officers had already shown that their communist sympathies (and even party membership) had been no more than momentary opportunism. Wherever their opponents were in control, communist militants were rounded up en masse. Under arrest, Julián VAZQUEZ, communist garment workers’ union leader, believed that their blind faith in ultimate victory had prevented party members like himself from seeing reality. Others, like Miguel NUÑEZ, felt that the Casado supporters had a demented idea of the fate that awaited them.

  —They believed that the Popular Army would be combined with the nationalist army; that the republicans would be sent on a short course – those officers who weren’t communists, naturally – and then be incorporated in the new, united army, at one rank below their present one …

  NUÑEZ, the former education militiaman and now a political commissar, told the officers who had ordered his arrest that they were mad. The fascists were not nineteenth-century liberals.13 He was taken off to prison where he was held until the day the nationalists started to move into Madrid …

  The fighting lasted a week. To save the situation for the defence council, the anarchist leader Cipriano Mera, who had supported Casado from the beginning, called in reinforcements from his army corps reserves. The news that the government and communist leaders had left the country became widely known; the communist-led troops began to vacillate, then retreat. Throughout the fighting, which caused several hundred casualties, civilian life continued in a state of suspended animation. Amidst the desolation of two simultaneous civil wars, Alvaro DELGADO stood in the Plaza de Colón, discussing Goethe’s Werther with the girl he had fallen in love with at the school of Fine Arts. A shell exploded, killing a man in front of them, his brains splattering onto a tree. ‘We went on with our discussion. Our lack of concern for the war was total; we fled from reality into German romanticism and painting.’

  None the less, the fighting gave him a daily excuse to prove his love to Margarita. Every evening, he crossed the lines from her house to his after seeing her home. ‘You could tell by the newspapers being sold which zone you were in. The soldiers kneeling in doorways firing down Alcalá at the war ministry in the Plaza de Cibeles gave you an idea of where the shooting began and ended.’ Once safely home, he rang up to tell Margarita of his arrival, offering her his ‘heroism’ as a token of adolescent love.

  By 12 March, the fighting was over and Casado’s defence council was the only authority in the republican zone. The three communist corps commanders on the Madrid front were dismissed, and one of them executed. Possibly the conflict had been entirely unnecessary.

  During the fighting, the communist forces occupied the civil government building and arrested the socialist incumbent, Gómez Ossorio, although he had not supported the defence council. On his release, he returned to his office where his son, Sócrates GOMEZ, watched him rummage in the drawers of his desk. Failing to find what he was looking for, he told his son that two sheets of handwritten notes given him by Negrín had disappeared; they were the notes of the broadcast the prime minister intended to make on 6 March, and which he had given Gómez three days before when, on one of his rapid trips to Madrid, he instructed the civil governor to prepare the radio broadcast from his office. Not finding the sheets, Gómez told his son what they contained. Negrín was going to announce that the war was lost.

  —The speech contained a number of diatribes against foreign governments, particularly the British and French, for being to blame for the defeat; and great praise for the heroism and spirit of sacrifice of the republican combatants. But, the speech went on, there was no way of continuing the war; it was ‘each for himself’ now, so to speak … 14

  * * *

  Militancies 18

  ANTONIO PEREZ

  Socialist youth political commissar

  He was fiddling with the knobs of the artillery group’s radio trying to get some music. Tuning in to an enemy station broadcasting from Andalusia which, for reasons of morale, he normally wouldn’t listen to, he heard the programme interrupted by an announcer giving news of a communist uprising in Madrid. He didn’t believe it. Tuning in to Madrid, he heard the news of the Casado coup. He didn’t need to think twice to know that the latter meant surrender, and that he was totally opposed. Taking out one of the radio’s valves, he hurried to find the head of the SIM, a communist who shared his room. At that moment, he thought, he was probably the only person in the unit who had heard what was going on in Madrid.

  —‘Look. I’m a member of the socialist party and the JSU. I’m in complete disagreement with my party’s position and in agreement with that of the JSU.’ The SIM chief told me to lay my hands on as many spare rifles as possible while he called a communist militants’ meeting. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’d also like to put in my application to join the communist party.’ ‘All right, you’re a member as of now. You can attend the meeting’ …

  At the meeting, it was decided that each should immediately go to different batteries and artillery groups on their sector of the Valencia front to rally the militants. On their return, they began to clean the rifles he had got hold of in preparation for taking over the radio and telephone posts. Suddenly, the door was kicked in and a sergeant, pistol in hand, with soldiers behind him, arrested them. Under protest, he was taken to the commanding officer, who informed him he had just received a teleprinter message to arrest anyone opposed to the government.

  —‘From what I’ve heard,’ I said, ‘it is you rather than I who are opposing the government. I recognize only Dr Negrín.’ ‘I’m not discussing politics with you,’ he replied. He offered me the possibility of remaining in my room on my word of honour not to escape. I refused. So I was held under guard. I was allowed the newspapers, and from these I learnt that my father had been appointed a member of Casado’s defence junta on behalf of the UGT …

  It seemed an eternity since, leaving his father who had to remain in Madrid, he had set off to spend the summer of 1936 in the family house in the mountains. When his father, who was secretary-general of the socialist railwaymen’s union, was not in gaol – the Popular Front elections had released him and thousands of others who had been imprisoned since October 1934 – the family could just afford to leave the capital for the cool of the Guadarrama. They lived modestly at all times, for whatever his political fortune, their father exhibited the absolute, even excessive, working-class honesty characteristic of all the socialist leaders. It was, he thought, a very working-class party, formed in the paternalistic image of its founder, Pablo Iglesias. The majority of its leaders had never read a line of Marx.

  When the news reached them of the uprising from people fleeing Segovia, they decided it was not safe to stay in the hamlet. People had been shot in the nearest large village, they heard. For five days, their mother, aunt, the two maids and three boys walked over the mountains, guided by shepherds. Going in the opposite direction, they heard, were priests and some nuns. One night, he and his brothers mounted guard inside a shepherd’s shack where the women were sleeping; their arms were the catapults they had made during the holiday. He remembered it with a laugh; he had gone from a boy’s world of sho
oting at birds with a catapult to a new world of rifles and killing men.

  Reaching Madrid, he volunteered immediately for the militia. He was just sixteen, a student of commerce; his brother, who was a year younger, joined up also. Within a couple of months of service at the front, he was a sergeant in the artillery, having completed a fortnight’s course.

  He was in the army to fight fascism, to defend the republic, not to make the revolution; though he had no doubt that a victorious republic would be very different to the pre-war regime. Important social conquests had already been won, and the existence of the Popular Army meant that the defence of these conquests was in the hands of the people. The communist party, which from the start had best understood the needs of the war, and had developed a political strategy which corresponded most fully to the reality of the moment, understood very well the importance of controlling the army in as far as it could. Any party with an ounce of political consistency must be thinking not only of the present, but of the future and the links between the two.

  The socialist party had been a disappointment. Its decline from its position as the major working-class party at the start of the war could not be hidden by the fact that it had provided the majority of the government and both prime ministers since September 1936. It was due in part to the contradictions between the party’s three tendencies, he thought.15 In peace time the party could continue despite them, but in war – when its decisions affected not just the party but the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who weren’t even members – it was a different matter. Largo Caballero had made serious mistakes in the conduct of the war. He seemed to be living in the past, his methods were traditional and bureaucratic. He made ill-judged statements, attacked the communists unnecessarily, lost his temper. He was no longer a guide.

  As a Caballero supporter himself, a revolutionary socialist youth close to communist positions, he couldn’t help but see that Caballero was failing to live up to the needs of the moment. These could be summed up in a few words.

  —The need to defend ourselves, the republic; the need to enlist the active support of the bulk of the population in the struggle – only fascists or insurgent supporters should be kept out; the need to strain every effort to winning the war. People were not fighting to make the revolution, not living the war as a projection of the future; they were fighting to defend the republic …

  The communist party had understood this, he thought, had analysed Spanish development and realized that the situation was not ripe for a socialist revolution. The party had not ‘camouflaged’ the revolution, as some liked to say, had not decided to ‘appease’ the bourgeois democracies. No, the party’s strategy responded to a concrete situation, in which support for the socialist revolution would inevitably have jeopardized the alliance with large sectors of the masses who were not prepared for revolution, but were willing to fight the common enemy. Thousands upon thousands of people had joined the communist party without thought of socialism; most of them didn’t know what they wanted politically except to be in an efficient and strong party. The fact that the communist party’s policy corresponded more closely to reality than the socialist party’s in some part explained the latter’s decline.

  Not that the communist party and the JSU had been immune from mistakes. One of the biggest of these, undoubtedly – its effects were being experienced in the Casado coup – was the lack of mass political work in the rear. It had made them very vulnerable at the front; they had been much too involved in their localized concerns while, behind them, the rearguard had been allowed to disintegrate. Communist and JSU militants had devoted all their efforts to the problems of the military war. In the rear, the average citizen’s problems – of which there were plenty – had been dealt with only in global terms by a few political leaders who expressed their party’s line. They would have to suffer the consequences of that mistake in the coming weeks.16

  One error which, happily, had not been made was to split up the JSU into its two constituent parts. He had resisted considerable pressure early in the war to support such a move. A sector of the socialist party argued that the party needed its own youth movement again. Unified socialist youth members, they claimed, tended now to join the communists and not the socialist party.

  These arguments, he thought, lacked validity. If the JSU considered the communist party’s policy the correct one, then its members – and there were over 1 million by now – should support it. If they thought the communists represented their interests better than the socialists, it was right that they joined the communist party. The party with the correct positions should gain members.

  —What would have happened to the masses of youth who had joined without previously belonging to the communist or socialist youth movements if the JSU had split up? Where would they have gone? They had joined the JSU because it was a well-run organization which demanded no previous adherence to any political position other than that of being anti-fascist …

  After the enemy cut the republic in two the previous spring, he had been made a commissar. As such you did everything: tried to keep up the soldiers’ morale, looked after their physical needs, their comfort and security. A sort of personal counsellor, an intermediary between the soldier with his human problems, and the commander with his military requirements and orders.

  —You could incur serious tension with the military commander, if he was a man who concerned himself only with military matters or belonged to a different political organization. But, despite that, it was a fascinating and worthwhile job. The level of commissars varied greatly. Some were bureaucrats, others turned themselves into the military commander’s personal secretary; others lived entirely without contact with their men, and others again lived so totally with their men that they barely ever appeared at staff HQ, and when they did, turned up dirty and unshaven …

  As defence minister, Prieto made sweeping new appointments of commissars to eliminate those appointed by the communists. Replacing men much loved by the soldiers, the new commissars tended to be bureaucrats, he observed. In fact, it would have been better if the commissars had been elected by the men themselves. That would have prevented the corps ending up as a fairly mediocre body of men …

  He read in a paper that his father, labour councillor in the Casado defence council, was shortly to make a trip to Valencia, and he asked his commanding officer to be allowed to see him. The former agreed, taking him in his car to Valencia where he had official business. As they pulled up in front of the hotel, he saw his father emerging. He jumped out and ran towards him; his father’s two bodyguards nearly gunned him down.

  —‘We can’t stand here talking,’ my father said. ‘Get into my car.’ As we drove off, I said: ‘You’ve all gone mad; this is monstrous. You’ve lost everything – dignity, political judgement, rationality. All you’re offering is complete surrender of everything we’ve been fighting for. I’m utterly opposed. I’ve been under arrest because of it –’

  ‘I’ll have Casado send an order immediately to have you released. That’s the first thing. Next: have you got any photographs of yourself? No? Get me some quickly so I can get you a passport.’

  ‘A passport? What for?’ ‘To leave the country, of course.’ ‘I’m not leaving. What right have you to dispose of my life as a militant and revolutionary?’ ‘It’s not a question of that. One of the things we’re attempting to negotiate with the Burgos government is that everyone who wants to leave shall be free to do so. Lists are being drawn up. I don’t imagine you will want to stay in Spain once the army has surrendered.’

  ‘That is correct. But I refuse to accept the way this is being settled. We have the capacity to resist another four to six months; by that time, the international situation may have changed. A world war may have broken out.’

  ‘You young people don’t understand the first thing about these matters … ’

  ‘In that case, I think I’m getting sick of adults. You have the wisdom, the experience, the professional
qualifications – but it seems to me you are completely blind. Though we lack experience and all the rest, it is the youth who understand the real situation … ’

  My father refused to discuss it further, saying only that the war was lost and that it was preferable to come to an honourable agreement with the enemy.

  ‘How can you expect an honourable agreement with fascists? It’s impossible. That’s where your theory breaks down.’

  ‘No, we’ve already established contacts with them –’ and he went on to talk about the English, the world and I don’t know what else. Finally, he told me to introduce him to my military commander, and he asked the latter to free me, saying a teleprinter order would come that afternoon from Madrid. I accepted the release, but told him I would give no promise as to my conduct.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I have done what I could.’ We embraced and said farewell … 17

  * * *

  I distrust any bargain. Everything will be decided by arms … The reds will never accept the conditions which I shall impose. The state I want to erect is the complete antithesis of what they want …

  General Franco to Roberto Cantalupo,

  Italian ambassador (Spring 1937)