Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  —‘Ala, paisa, run, run,’ the Moroccan shouted. He lifted his rifle and fired. I didn’t see the man fall but later I learnt it was a well-known local anarchist. Moroccans were searching out militiamen and shooting them down like that. From a place called La Hasa on the outskirts, Moroccans and civil guards were firing down on the militiamen as they tried to turn their lorries round only 200 to 300 metres away to escape. It was a massacre.

  I went home. I didn’t feel what had happened as a great personal tragedy. Rather, as I related what I had seen, I felt something of a hero. No one at home dreamt of eating anything, but I was hungry and slipped away to the kitchen. All I could find was a tin of condensed milk which I gulped down …

  The family spent the night in the infantry barracks in case the ‘reds’ returned. His uncles and cousin were the only right-wingers to have been shot; another twenty or so people had been taken to the cemetery, but the Moroccans had arrived in time. From the positions in which his relatives’ bodies were found, it seemed that they had been shot as the militia retreated rather than executed in a planned way.

  In the barracks someone said that half a dozen men had been executed against the wall at the rear. He and some others went to look. There were six bodies of republicans who had been shot. One of the corpses still had his pipe in his mouth.

  The next day he and his cousins went to the cemetery to bury their dead. An infernal scene met their eyes. The cemetery was carpeted with bodies, at least 200 of them. They picked their way through, looking for their relatives. They wrapped them in the sheets they had brought and buried them themselves in the family vault, without coffins. Carlos didn’t recognize any of the other corpses; they were almost certainly the militiamen who had been trying to escape.

  The right-wingers continued their executions that night.

  —An anarchist couple, whose son was a school-mate of mine, was taken to a village 25 km away and shot. From a falangist who was present, I later heard that the woman had been raped by the whole Moorish firing squad before being executed.

  The five wounded carabineros were brought out of the hospital on stretchers and a Moor caught hold of each one by the feet and arms and tossed him into a lorry. The village medical assistant, who had to accompany them with a lantern, told me what happened. When they got out on the road, the wounded men couldn’t stand up to be shot and the Moors bayoneted them to death …

  His family decided to leave, to take refuge in Gibraltar. San Roque was virtually the front line. They set off the next day and made the short trip without difficulty.

  * * *

  Small insurgent columns from Seville and Córdoba were attempting to ‘pacify’ neighbouring townships and villages, with their large numbers of landless labourers. In pueblo after pueblo, the pattern repeated itself: attack; rudimentary defence; the slaughter of some or all right-wing local prisoners before the imminence of defeat; capture of the village and the summary execution (after summary mass court martial) of all who had ‘aided the rebellion’ (that is, defended their village, and thus the legal government). The declaration of martial law by the rebel military affirmed their claim to be the legal authorities. All those denounced by ‘law-abiding citizens’ as assassins, left-wingers, trouble-makers, non-churchgoers were certain to be court-martialled. Queipo de Llano’s threats were not to be taken lightly.24

  Rafael MEDINA, thirty-year-old falangist businessman, was a sometime leader of a flying column which operated in his home region west of Seville. It was essential, he believed, to take villages rapidly in order to prevent assassinations of right-wing locals which ‘the reds, enraged at the thought of losing their villages, carried out at the last moment before our forces approached’. But who could deny that there was also violence on the insurgent side?

  —I was opposed to the repression, did what I could to prevent it. However, martial law had been declared, military discipline was at stake, there was news of the atrocities being committed in the other zone. Our situation was precarious; had there been any weakness we might have found ourselves in a difficult situation. ‘Fear preserves the vineyard,’ as we say. But I would much have preferred that this harshness, this fear, had not existed on our side …

  The Marquess de MARCHELINA, a retired artillery officer who had joined the Carlists in Seville five years earlier and was leading a requeté tercio in the reconquest of Andalusia, was scandalized by the executions. Carlist ideals could not be reconciled with such actions, and he always protested about them. However, his attitude, he recognized, was not the normal one.

  —The repression was a military tactic that, unhappily, has been repeated in all wars – a means by which authority is asserted, a sad law of war. The problem for the military was that their forces were small in number at the beginning, and they had to impose discipline. The outcome of the war didn’t seem that certain at the start, the slightest vacillation might have been fatal; sabotage, bombings, even guerrillas might have started. Inevitably, injustice was done – as it is in every war …

  The repression was not confined to townships and villages where assassinations had been committed. In a railway village between Seville and Córdoba, the church was burnt but no one was killed during the fortnight the workers held it. Then a punitive expedition arrived from Seville. As it advanced, it set fire to the shacks of the poor on the way to the railway station. Juana SANCHEZ’S husband put on his railwayman’s uniform and went to the station where he had been left in charge. He was arrested and brought back to his house where his wife and five children were awakened.

  —As they took him away in the lorry I ran after it shouting ‘¡Por Dios! ¡Por Dios!’ and one of them shouted, ‘If you don’t get back you’ll die before he does’ …

  She tried to think what her husband might have done to be arrested. A member of the UGT but no militant, she recalled only one political action of his: participation in a pre-war May Day demonstration. He had come home and asked her if she had a bit of red cloth. Although her father was an old-style republican, she always kept a red hanging at home to drape over the balcony to celebrate a religious festival; and her husband said he would use it as a flag if she would sew the three letters UHP on it. She hadn’t known what they meant and he had told her: ‘¡Uníos, hermanos proletarios!’ (‘Unite, brother proletarians’). She had worried about his going but it had all passed off quietly.

  Two days after his arrest she went to the village, an hour’s walk from the station, and discovered that he was being held with a great number of other men in the casa del pueblo. Shortly, he was removed to the gaol. Every day she walked to the village to take him his food until her ten-month-old baby fell ill; then a right-wing family in the village offered her shelter. She went to see the, local priest who tried to calm her fears, but when pressed for assurances told her that he could do no more. ‘“They’ve told me not to stick my nose into things. Don Jerónimo, I smell gunpowder about your head,” was what one of them told him.’

  A month later, her husband told her his name was on a list; he asked her to speak to the guardia civil and the Falange chief, both of whom told her they knew nothing.

  —‘They can say what they like,’ my husband told me, ‘we’re all dead men in here. When you hear the cock crow that will be when they take us out.’ He asked me to stay in the village and early next morning to bring him tobacco. ‘But early, very early’ …

  She returned to the right-wing family’s house where she intended staying awake in the doorway all night; but the wife persuaded her to lie down, saying that her husband could not be taken because he hadn’t been tried. Some time during the night, in dream or reality, she heard the sound of a lorry and the singing of Cara al Sol, the falangist anthem. She ran to the gaol; the policeman on duty waved her to stop.

  —‘There’s no point in your coming here. Your husband has been taken to Seville.’ The feet went from under me, I sat down and cried. No one comforted me. Finally, I dragged myself to the landowners’ club and waited for
the Falange chief, who was at mass. ‘Recommend your soul to God,’ was all he had to say.

  That was it. I never heard or received any definite news of my husband again …

  She was convinced that her husband had been shot against the cemetery wall in Seville. The father-in-law of another man shot with her husband tried to bribe the grave-digger to tell him who had been shot there and on what day. The grave-digger said it was impossible because people were simply brought there and executed without names being given. But he recalled a tall man wearing green shoes who had been shot that day; before dying he had cried, ‘Criminals, I am the father of five children!’ She was sure that was her husband.

  —When I went to Seville by train I looked out of the window at the cemetery wall. It was riddled with bullet-holes. I would think, ‘One of those killed my husband,’ and a terrible feeling came over me. But I couldn’t not look …

  * * *

  Let it be known to all the inhabitants of this admirable capital that I shall be the faithful and cold image of Justice; placing myself above all evil and cowardice, I shall work without rest to ensure that in our capital and its villages there remains not a single traitor who can in any way hinder the self-sacrificing tasks which the army and militias are undertaking to … place us amongst the most civilized of nations that, with blind Christian faith, are full of ambitionless hopes.

  Everything for Spain! The homeland demands it, and those who do not feel the love that every good son must feel for the fatherland are not worthy of living in it and must leave or disappear for ever from Spanish soil …

  Major Bruno Ibáñez, of the civil guard, on taking up his appointment

  as head of public order in Córdoba (23 September 1936)

  * * *

  CORDOBA

  The large Andalusian towns, whether they offered resistance to the military or not, felt the full rigours of the repression. Córdoba, with a population of close on 100,000, had fallen to the military in a few hours and almost without resistance on 18 July. An artilleryman had been killed and a prominent CEDA member was reported to have been found assassinated in the streets. These were the only deaths.

  Major Bruno Ibáñez’s efforts did not belie the words of his address to the people of Córdoba when he took up his new post as head of public order. In his first six days in office 109 people were arrested, more than in any equivalent period since 18 July. The repression, however, had started with the uprising.

  Luis MERIDA, a twenty-five-year-old Córdoban lawyer, joined the military as soon as he heard the cannon pounding the civil government building into submission, hoping for a coup d’état to ‘restore order to the republic’. The Popular Front had brought nothing but disorder – the birth-pangs of the social revolution, in his view. What he wanted was a military coup which would suspend the constitution for a couple of months and re-establish authority.

  There was no rapid coup; instead he found himself in an isolated city, ‘an island in a sea of anarchism’, without sufficient weapons to defend itself. He took part in a sortie to Seville to get arms. On the road, the party came across a dozen corpses, patently labourers from their clothes and sandals. They had been shot. He and a friend said the Lord’s Prayer.

  —The others with us in the lorry listened in hostile amazement. ‘Those accursed dogs, they should all be killed,’ they said. They couldn’t believe that anyone would pray for ‘reds’ …

  These were falangist comrades of his, for he had joined the Falange very soon after the uprising, feeling it impossible not to belong to an organization which united all those who were fighting, and feeling also a certain attraction for José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the Falange’s founder.

  On their return from Seville with a lorry-load of arms and ammunition, the men heard that their leader, a member of the prominent Cruz Conde family in Córdoba, had been questioned by General Queipo when he reported on the situation.

  —‘How many of them have you shot in Córdoba?’ Queipo asked. ‘None! Well, until you shoot a couple of hundred there’ll be no more arms for you,’ he said in that raucous voice of his. He needn’t have worried because the city was soon living under a reign of terror …

  Every morning, when they made a sortie from the town along the road to Málaga, they saw the corpses of men and women, face up, face down, in an olive grove – the result of that dawn’s executions.

  —The cellar in the Falange headquarters where they brought the people was like a balloon which filled in the evening and by the next morning was empty again. And that was only part of it. Executions were taking place daily in the cemetery and on the other roads out of the city. They could kill anyone they wanted …

  Seeing a notorious local executioner coming down the street ‘waiting for dawn’ with a whore on each arm, he reflected that the man believed in nothing that he and his comrades were fighting for.

  —There were two sorts of people here, as no doubt in the other zone: those who went to the front to fight, and the criminals who stayed in the rear. I hadn’t joined the movement for this …

  From the start of the war, Córdoba newspapers reported official police arrests daily; ‘unofficial’ arrests went unreported as did, with few exceptions, the executions. Sometimes the reasons for the police arrests were given: a man ‘selling marxist novels’; a woman ‘putting out a white flag during last Monday’s air raid’; the inspector of a children’s home, ‘doing no good, teaching children to give the clenched-fist salute’; a 36-year-old woman, ‘a known extremist going daily to the cemetery to see the corpses and on her return to her barrio making remarks against the movement’; a grave-digger ‘protesting about military orders in the cemetery of Nuestra Señora de la Salud’. From 18 July to 31 December 1936, 1,049 such arrests, fifty-three of them women, were reported. A small proportion of the total, no doubt.

  Two days after his appointment, Major Ibáñez – known locally always as ‘don Bruno’ – announced publicly that he was going to rid Córdoba and the province of ‘every book pernicious to a healthy society’. Anyone who had ‘pornographic, revolutionary or anti-patriotic’ works must hand them in forthwith or run the risk of court martial. Two weeks later, he was able to announce that 5,450 books had been destroyed.

  —My father, who was a maths teacher, lived in terror, recalled Roberto SOLIS, a Catholic law student. He was an educated man, a centrist republican, who spoke English and French and liked to read. I saw him destroy Engels’s The Holy Family, a work by Bakunin, Molotov’s Fifth Plan …

  His father had an assistant, a pleasant and serious young man of twenty-two of whom he was very fond. One day the latter boasted to him that ‘for fun’ he was taking part in the nightly executions.

  —‘Last night we shot eight.’ My father couldn’t get over the shock. If that wasn’t enough, he soon learnt that a university professor was taking his fourteen-year-old son to watch the executions. The son, Pedro, used to tell me about it.

  In the early mornings I remember my mother, who was a Catholic of enormous piety, exclaiming ‘¡Ay, por Dios!’ when she heard the firing squad’s volleys …

  If the town had been living under a reign of terror before don Bruno’s arrival, it became a nightmare during his rule. Luis MERIDA saw him at a benefit bullfight.

  —As he came out of the ring people cringed. He had blue eyes, I’ll always remember. To get out of his way the people would have incrusted themselves in the walls if they could. Everyone was electrified with terror and fear. Don Bruno could have shot all Córdoba, he was sent here with carte blanche. It was said that his whole family had been wiped out by the reds in some town in La Mancha. Whether it was true or not, he was a prejudiced, embittered man …

  He was also exceedingly pious, attending mass regularly. He advised the people that by all the means at his disposal he intended to ‘exile from this holy earth’ the vicious and irrational vice of blasphemy. ‘All great, prosperous and cultivated nations have always been profoundly religious; Spain, in the i
ntimacy of its being, is nothing other than twenty centuries of struggle for Christianity.’ Characteristically, his next target was the cinema. He banned all films of an ‘immoral and anti-militaristic’ nature; all Russian films – ‘even those of ancient times or of the Czars’ – and permitted only films of an elevated, patriotic and religious character. Soon the cinemas were showing Military Manoeuvres in Nuremberg, shot in Hitler’s presence and constituting a ‘formidable demonstration of the German state’s war potential’.

  But he never allowed such matters to distract him from the real purpose of his office: his reprisals were immediate and pitiless. When one night some Popular Front saboteurs blew up a stretch of the Seville-Córdoba railway line, he summarily executed the entire railwayman’s brigade that was on patrol duty that night.

  There were disadvantages to his methods; within a month of taking office, he had to admit to labour shortages in the building, stone-cutting and mining industries. It was still not impossible to flee the city.

  What need was there in a place which had submitted from the start, where there had been no assassinations, to shoot so many people, wondered Alvaro MILLAN, a sales representative, who was arrested twice. Was it because Córdoba was close to the front?

  —No. The same terror existed everywhere. They created a state on the basis of lies and terror. It wasn’t only the working class which suffered. Before the war I was a member of a tertulia which had some forty middle-class members: schoolmasters, lawyers, politicians, sales representatives, etc. Only four or five, including myself, survived the repression …

  A self-made man, who had started life selling bootlaces in the streets of Córdoba, MILLAN only escaped execution by the rapid intervention of two friends. The town’s leading bookseller and a doctor who shared his cell were both shot. When he was released he went to see his friend. ‘My life is no longer mine, it is yours. Please allow me to join the Falange –’ A lifelong moderate socialist, he saw no other means of finding personal protection, and it was a favour his friend could not refuse.