Josep CERCOS emerged from the station at Caspe, in lower Aragon. The train had reached there without meeting resistance. In the station square CERCOS saw, to his great surprise, a company of civil guards. Each guard wore a red neckerchief.
—‘What’s going on here?’ I said to the Asturian. One of the guards came up to me. ‘Ah, my friend, when you see a civil guard without one of these round his neck, shoot him. Only those wearing them are on the republic’s side.’ That didn’t impress me much. We didn’t give a damn about the republic, we were concerned only about the revolution. I wouldn’t have gone to the front if not to make the revolution. We had come out to fight in the streets of Barcelona because we had no option; but to go and fight the military in Aragon – no, I wouldn’t have gone simply for that. It was the fever of revolution which carried us forward. We had preached anti-militarism for so long, we were so fundamentally anti-militaristic, that we wouldn’t have gone simply to wage war. That was something we couldn’t envisage. Today, without for a moment regretting it, I can see we wanted to go too fast, wanted to leap from one century to the future in a matter of days …
Not all the columns originated in Barcelona. One, swinging up from Tortosa, close to the mouth of the Ebro, was led by a Saragossa CNT leader, Saturnino CAROD, who had escaped from the city soon after dawn on 19 July. Meeting in a wood on the banks of the Ebro outside the city the night before, members of the CNT local federation and regional committee had agreed that delegates should be sent out to raise the rural masses. CAROD, propaganda secretary of the regional committee for Aragon, Rioja and Navarre, had been delegated to raise lower Aragon, his native area, where he had spent much of the previous month on a speaking tour.
His absence from the city made him feel out of touch. But the other regional committee members seemed ill-informed, uncertain of what was planned to confront the military uprising when he hurriedly returned to Saragossa. Contrary to what was often thought, the libertarian movement in the city, he reflected, was not as strong, did not have the revolutionary consciousness it was credited with. A joint CNT–UGT delegation went to the civil governor to ask for arms: 10,000 rifles were promised, never arrived. Masses of CNT members, building workers in the main, gathered in the Plaza de San Miguel, waiting. When he went to summon the republicans to take action, he found them playing cards in their Ateneo; by the time he returned to insist more forcefully, he saw them being led away under arrest by assault guards who had joined the military. The masses began to break up and disappear. ‘The republicans were more frightened of arming the CNT masses than of the military … ’ As he left the city, he walked past military and civilian patrols which had taken over the streets.
On an improvised stage in front of the CNT branch office in Tortosa, he gave a speech calling for volunteers. Between 3,000 and 4,000 responded, the majority peasants.
—I told them quite plainly what the objectives were: to defeat the enemy in open country, to crush the military uprising, to fight for the republic – not to make the revolution, let me stress that …
* * *
No llores, madre, no llores
Porque a la guerra tus hijos van,
¡Qué importa que el cuerpo muera
Si al fin el alma triunfará
en la Eternidad!
Don’t cry, mother, don’t cry
Because your sons are going to war,
What matter that the body perish
When the soul triumphs at last
in Eternity.
Old Carlist song
* * *
SOMOSIERRA
Four field pieces fired from the lorries on which they had been roped down, the barrels resting on the cabin roofs. Another four had been unloaded and were firing from the ground at Somosierra, the main pass through the Guadarrama between Burgos and Madrid. The column which had left Pamplona six days before for Madrid had turned back to take the pass. Antonio IZU’s spirits had dropped; turning back? All he and his fellow requetés wanted was to go forward, ever forward. What did it matter if Guadalajara on the column’s route had been taken by the reds? They’d storm it! But General Mola thought differently.
They had spent a day in Aranda de Duero. Rafael GARCIA SERRANO and his falangist comrades had been sent to a convent for food. ‘Eat all you want, my son,’ a friar had said to him, ‘for you are going to die for religion and us poor friars.’ ‘Yes, father, and for the revolution.’ The friar hadn’t liked that, they’d had a bit of an argument. He wouldn’t deny the falangist revolution. The sight of a group of CNT workers and peasants being brought prisoner to the barracks in Logroño, where the column had met some shooting, had saddened him. Why weren’t these workers on their side, like the Navarrese peasantry, he wondered. The Falange stood for them, not for those bourgeois CEDA supporters who stood on their balconies and cheered the column’s arrival. But the workers hadn’t understood, some of them even had the guts to shout ‘¡Viva la República!’ as they were brought in; the falangists grabbed their rifles then and made sure they shouted ‘¡Arriba España!’
IZU had slept in the coal lorry in which he had left Pamplona. After mass, he and his companions made for a local bar which he saw, as they approached, was being sacked. By now such sights surprised him less than a week before. ‘It’s the blue shirts again,’ he thought, remembering a nasty scene in Alfaro, a socialist stronghold in Logroño, which the column took without loss, on its second day out. Two right-wingers had been killed there the day before. He had been ordered to escort the local guardia civil corporal to bring in a man, and as they took him through the streets under arrest the villagers cried, ‘Kill him, he’s the worst.’ In the plaza, the guardia corporal took a stick from an officer’s hand and hit the man a tremendous blow over the head from behind. The man crumpled up dead. ‘The things that happened there were shameful. The blue shirts were mainly responsible, going from house to house looking for people.’ Twelve villagers had been shot.
The cannon boomed. Forces from Burgos – falangists, requetés and infantry – were sharing the attack with the Pamplona column. Among the requetés were youths of fourteen and grandfathers of sixty. The order came to advance.
Rafael GARCIA SERRANO heard strange whistling sounds.
—‘Rafael, how the goldfinches are singing this morning,’ said a friendly requeté. ‘Goldfinches?’ The noise did sound a bit like that. ‘Are there goldfinches here?’ The requeté began to laugh. I realized then what it was. Almost immediately, a soldier advancing beside me was shot in the stomach. We gathered round as a requeté doctor gave him first aid. Would he be all right, we asked; he was the first casualty and it impressed us. He died. We continued to advance …
Militancies 4
ANTONIO IZU
Carlist peasant
The grey barrier of the Guadarrama loomed before him. Even Napoleon, they said, hadn’t been able to take the pass in a frontal attack. He heard the stray bullets whistle, remembered the Carlist veterans’ tales; he’d been dreaming of nothing else since he was old enough to remember. His grandfather had fought in the last Carlist war, had told him how he’d made the liberals run. That war had been lost, all three Carlist wars had ended in defeat. Now, at last, the chance for revenge had come. They had been waiting a long time.
—Carrying the need in our hearts and souls, waiting for the opportunity. When it came, we grabbed a rifle and shouted, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ …
Carlism was in his blood, he was conceived a Carlist, born one. You could ask most people why they were Carlists and they’d reply, ‘Because I am.’ It was the ordinary people, the lower classes in Navarre, who were Carlists. The rich and the intelligentsia didn’t belong; Carlism was a popular movement.
His father had been a fervent believer in the cause, one of those who thought that everyone above a sergeant in the army, a canon in the church, should be swept out of office as a parasite. A bit of an anarchist at heart, he thought. In his native village of Echauri, 14 km from Pamplona, the fami
ly had 45 hectares of land, a pair of oxen, a couple of horses, a cow; they were comfortably off. The majority of the 540 villagers were smallholders with 6 to 10 hectares. There was only one republican, the local vet, and he soon became disillusioned. The village was almost solidly Carlist …
Ahead of him, on the road, a squadron of insurgent cavalry appeared, galloping along the verge towards Somosierra. At the head of the pass he could hear the artillery pounding; the going was beginning to get rough. It seemed like the Carlist wars all over again.
¡Viva el follón!
¡Viva el follón!
¡Viva el follón!
Bien organizado
Porque con él
Pide justicia todo el requeté.
Long Live the shindy …
That’s well organized
Because that’s the way
All the requetés demand justice.
That was the way they were going to make the Carlist revolution. People said Carlism, with its motto Dios, Patria y Rey (God, Fatherland and King), was ultra right wing. What a mistake! Carlism was neither of left nor right, it was simply Carlist, Catholic, and revolutionary. They were going to stir things up, kick up a shindy. Not to make a revolution of left or right, not to make a political revolution, no. But a revolution which, after a century’s oppression, satisfied the innate need all Carlists felt to explode. They’d set off for war with the ideals of a religious crusade. The peasantry expected no other benefit from the cause.2
—What we saw was the harm others would do us if Carlism didn’t exist. Defensive, it was a movement of indignation and displeasure with the way politics were being conducted. A matter of tradition. But not of going back, enthroning an absolute monarch. Far from it! …
The king he would restore would be like a manager; the people would decide the laws. The king would represent a stable executive while the people elected a Cortes which would legislate and demarcate his powers. ‘I want a king who will drink from the wineskin with me,’ the requetés said. None of this protocol and riding round in a carriage. ‘A king must be like one of us villagers … ’
The people had to be free; that was the essence, the popular meaning of the fueros3 of Navarre. They expressed the people’s innate refusal to submit; freedom from Spanish centralism, but not freedom from Spain.
Carlist social policy was a healthy one, IZU thought; the trouble was, hardly anyone knew much about it. In essence, it considered that there were two fundamental factors to production: capital and labour. The capitalist provided the former, the worker the latter. As production was shared, so the profits (after deduction for depreciation and interest on capital) should be equally shared. The shame was that no one attempted to practise the doctrine –
In front of him a cavalry man fell wounded, there were several dead horses. Things were beginning to look tough; the advance continued without pause.
It was curious, the republic he was fighting had been welcomed with widespread joy in Navarre. The Alfonsine monarchy had fallen at last! But within a month the republic had failed; when the churches and convents were burnt in Madrid and the south it was the end as far as they were concerned. The Navarrese were profoundly religious; it was a rare family which hadn’t at least one, if not more, of its members in the church or a religious order. No churches had been fired in Navarre; yet, not infrequently, priests and friars were insulted in the streets. Not so long ago, the parish priest of Alsasua was bearing the viaticum to a dying parishioner when a group started to insult him. He handed the eucharist to the sacristan and said: ‘You look after these, I’m going to look after them.’ He soon put them to flight.
—Not that Carlists defended the clergy because they were clergy. Oh no! Carlists were capable of stoning priests out of their villages if they became friendly with the rich and didn’t carry out their obligations to their parishioners. The Carlist defended religion, not the priest because he wore a cassock …
It wasn’t like that elsewhere, he was soon to learn. The hatred of the church in other regions might be engendered in part by the local intelligentsia, but in greater part the clergy itself was to blame.
—There wasn’t merely a difference between the Basque and Navarrese clergy and the clergy in the rest of Spain; the gulf was so wide it went beyond being a difference. The communists in Navarre were more religious than the priests in Castile. Does that seem a joke? It was the truth. In Navarre, a communist would go to mass, confess and take communion at least once a year which is what the church demands. In Castile, as we saw during the war, the person who didn’t go to mass was the priest …
It became a matter for comment among the requetés stationed in Old and New Castile. When they talked to a local priest, as they often did, they were always struck by one thing: he never boasted about his church, never displayed pride in how well it was kept up. And with reason: the churches were generally run-down, poor, dirty, badly looked after.
—But almost everywhere, the priest had his house and his irrigated garden. It was the latter he boasted about: the crops he was growing and harvesting. Of spiritual matters priests didn’t speak; of their plots they had plenty to say …
In such circumstances, where the priest made no effort to attract people to church, all you could expect was indifference. And that was what he found. The villagers’ lack of education was another cause. In his own village there was only one illiterate youth; in Castile it was a different matter. In education, in farming, in everything, Castile seemed to him fifty to a hundred years behind Navarre. Though the people might be indifferent to the church, they could very well hate the clergy. ‘The priesthood, from what I was to see in Castile during the war, completely failed in its task of providing spiritual leadership.’ But these depressing discoveries still lay in the future.
The roar of artillery was closer, louder. He gripped his rifle, they were nearly at the top. He had not fired a shot. Exhausted, thirsty, he looked for water, digging his hempsoled sandal into the rushes to drink the muddy water that oozed out. The reds had made a big mistake in defending only the road through the pass and a couple of heights instead of the whole range. They reached the top.
Quickly realizing their error, the enemy began to attack. Taking cover behind outcrops of rock, the requetés held them off. Their captain waved; leaping up, they ran forward, chasing the dozen enemy militiamen for a couple of kilometres towards the pass. Dark stopped further advance, and they settled down to sleep on the open ground. His company had suffered not a single casualty in the attack.
* * *
The pass was captured; the following day the insurgents consolidated their victory by an advance on the Madrid flank of the mountain range, in which several villages were captured. In one, La Acebeda, Antonio IZU was depressed by the poverty he saw when he was ordered to search the houses. Beds without sheets, covered only with old blankets, doorways so low he had to stoop to get inside; the relative prosperity of Navarre seemed a painfully long way away. As though scourged by the poverty, the requetés came down with diarrhoea and a doctor diagnosed incipient scurvy. For nearly ten days since leaving Pamplona they had lived on cold rations, sardines and bread. Now hot food and supplies of lemon juice were brought up to the front.
The insurgents pushed to within 300 metres of the reservoir supplying Madrid’s water before being held; any further approach drew heavy fire from the opposite side.
—A year later, on warm nights, I used to go down to the reservoir and swim. As far as I could see it would have been possible to cut off the water supplies or to have poisoned them, but nothing of the sort was ever attempted …
*
The insurgents held two of the three major passes in the Guadarrama; but they could not move their line forward towards Madrid. The lightning strike had failed; now it was necessary to envisage a longer offensive. Three days after the uprising, General Mola warned monarchists in Burgos that there was sufficient rifle ammunition for only a few weeks’ fighting. The smallest aid from France
to the republic would be sufficient to swing the balance, he said.4 Mola needed 10 million rounds urgently. Monarchist emissaries were dispatched to Germany and Italy; meanwhile, he ordered his staff to draw up plans for a possible withdrawal north.
Franco, who had flown from the Canaries to Morocco to take command of the Army of Africa, had moved faster and higher. Within a few hours of his reaching Morocco on 19 July, an emissary had left for Italy; and on 23 July, while Mola’s emissaries set off by road from Burgos, Franco’s mission departed by air for Germany in a requisitioned Lufthansa airliner. Mola’s men, after a stop-over in Paris, reached Berlin on 28 July and got stuck in the unhelpful bureaucracy of the German Foreign Office; Franco’s mission went through the Nazi party and by the night of 25 July, barely a day and a half after leaving Morocco, was talking to Hitler. A little known German businessman and the chief of the diminutive Nazi party in Spanish Morocco – no Spaniard was present – presented Franco’s petition to the Führer. After short reflection Hitler agreed; aid – more than Franco’s limited requests – would be dispatched secretly to Franco alone, in the probable belief that he would be the final leader. By 28 July, Franco knew he was assured of German aid; two days later the first Italian assistance arrived.5
In Rome, Franco’s emissary had been less successful; it required the arrival of Mola’s two representatives, the monarchists Antonio Goicoechea and Pedro SAINZ RODRIGUEZ, to clinch matters. It was they who, with Carlist representatives, had secured promises of arms and cash from Mussolini for an uprising two years earlier. The promises were now to be made good.
The only problem which SAINZ RODRIGUEZ, who was left in Rome to negotiate, encountered was that of finding a legal method for the Italians to provide military aid. While perfectly prepared to supply arms and planes, they were concerned lest this appear to contravene the Non-intervention pact which had just been agreed on between the major European nations and the Soviet Union.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 16