Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  There was nothing in the pact that permitted such a measure, recalled AJURIAGUERRA, although it might have been tacitly understood between them (‘though I don’t now remember that it was’) that no one who had committed a blood crime would be allowed to leave.

  —Once the officers had disembarked, the problem arose of what to do with them. As the Dueso prison was empty – we had released the right-wing prisoners – it was decided they should go there – but not as prisoners; it was to be their living quarters, and for several days the gates weren’t even closed …

  In the prison, EPALZA heard General Roatta say that if Franco continued to oppose the implementation of the pact, the Italians would send a cruiser to take off the Basque officers.

  —They tried to carry out the agreement, but they didn’t have the guts. One day someone shouted, ‘Look out, they’re lowering the flag.’ Until that moment only the Italian flag had flown over the prison. A company of Spanish soldiers marched in, with prison officials, to take over. Ajuriaguerra gave the Italian commandant such a dressing down, told him so many home truths about his country, his regiment and himself that all he could do was salute and leave …

  The prison gates closed; the pretence was at an end. Mass courts martial began. Sentenced to death, expecting to be executed, Juan AJURIAGUERRA wrote a letter of protest about the Italian betrayal to be delivered after his death to General Roatta. (Unknown to him, the letter was smuggled out of the prison and delivered to the Italian consul in San Sebastián, who protested to Burgos at the executions taking place, thereby possibly saving some lives.)19

  Meanwhile, in the rest of the republican zone, the Basque nationalists were accused of betrayal. AJURIAGUERRA disagreed. The Basque army had not surrendered until after the fall of Santander where the enemy offensive had turned into a military walk-over.

  —The central government had told us it could send no aircraft; and after the loss of Bilbao, morale was low. Our people felt very deeply that they should not have to fight outside Euzkadi – as before the war they had not been called on to do military service outside their own territory, which was one of Vizcaya’s foral rights. Morale in the Santander army was low; it was higher in Asturias, but the latter fell not long afterwards. The Asturian propaganda that anyone who looked towards the sea was a coward, served for little: the Council of Asturias and the army’s general staff escaped in the end by ship. We in Santoña remained: the secretary of war in the Basque government, the head of the Basque militias and five other party leaders, including myself …

  No one could doubt their personal integrity and bravery. But other aspects of Basque nationalism, no doubt, helped determine the situation, as Pedro BASABILOTRA saw.

  —If Franco had been clever, he would have told our troops that they had fought bravely, cleanly and surrendered honourably. Having said that, he would then have called for volunteers to join his army to take Madrid. I’m convinced that 80 per cent of our troops would have responded to such a call on the spot. I judged that from conversations I had. They felt betrayed by the republic which had constantly promised and failed to deliver weapons. While in Madrid we heard they had arms and planes … 20

  * * *

  The war is an armed plebiscite … between a people divided: on the one side, the spiritual is revealed by the insurgents who rose to defend law and order, social peace, traditional civilization, the fatherland and, very ostensibly in a large sector of the population, religion. On the other side there is materialism – call it marxist, communist or anarchist – which wants to replace the old civilization of Spain by the new ‘civilization’ of the Russian soviets.

  Spanish bishops’ collective letter (1 July 1937)

  * * *

  My dear Iñaki:

  In a few hours I am to be executed. I die happy because I feel Jesus close to me and I love as never before the only homeland of the Basques … When you think of me, who has loved you like a father, love Christ, be pure and chaste, love Euzkadi as your parents have done.

  Visit my poor mother and kiss her forehead. Farewell until heaven. I bless you a thousand times.

  Esteban

  Letter from the Basque poet, Esteban de Urquiaga,

  to his friend Iñaki Garmendia,

  shortly before being shot on 25 June 1937

  * * *

  Militancies 14

  ERNESTO CASTAÑO

  CEDA lawyer

  The column of prisoners from Bilbao’s Larrínaga gaol walked through the night to reach the nationalist lines, unaware of the threat which Juan Manuel Epalza was dealing with in their rear. In the moonlight, Ernesto CASTAÑO tried to make out his side’s lines. He felt like a man who had spent his last night on earth and was prepared no longer for this world. Arrested in the Basque country where he had been helping to prepare the uprising, the ex-CEDA deputy had not allowed his morale to drop during his confinement or because of the harrowing experience of the mob’s assault on the prison. His suffering, he felt, was more than rewarded by the renovatory idealism being shown in Franco’s Spain. The Belgian consul, on his visits to the prison, had told them that the same crimes and assassinations were being committed in both zones; the prisoners refused to believe him, hated him for trying to turn them against Franco. ‘We were totally convinced that a better Spain was going to be created out of sacrifices like ours.’

  Ever since the prison massacre of the previous January, the Basque nationalists had protected them with almost paternalistic attention. They had thanked the prison director and chief warder, told them they would be considered members of their families when they were released, would do whatever was necessary for them. The two were among the prisoners now, having chosen to escape with them. Their fears that the Franco regime would punish them had been laid to rest by the prisoners themselves.

  —‘Rest assured, we are creating a new Spain,’ we told them. ‘The authorities – civil and military – will thank you for your conduct and all you have done’ …

  The uprising had been the only way forward, he thought. The republicans’ refusal to tolerate the right’s access to power, the regime’s need for class war, especially in the countryside, had doomed it to failure. He had fought the republican-socialist coalition, becoming one of the main organizers of the Salamanca Agrarian Bloc which, while affirming its allegiance to the republic, had expressed landowning and farming reaction to the coalition’s legislation and agrarian reform.21 He had gone to gaol for urging farmers not to sow wheat where yields were not high enough to make the crop profitable, and had been sentenced to exile. In the bitter struggle against the new regime, he reflected, the defence of material and religious interests became imbricated. Every possible force had had to be recruited against the republic’s class war, its agrarian policies, its sectarian, anti-religious legislation. Everything had combined, each of them had been in the front line.

  Bringing up the rear, he saw the head of the column stop. They had arrived. Safety! A requeté colonel received them, their political affiliations were noted, food was handed out.

  —But we could hardly eat, hungry as we were, we were so happy to breathe this new air, be where we had longed to be for so long. We informed the authorities that the two prison officers were under our protection. Then Falange leaders from Bilbao arrived and struck the two men in the face. We were horrified, we attacked the falangists, tore their clothes. But the two prison officers were taken off and thrown into gaol. This was our first sign of what was going on. We were deeply disillusioned. One of my prison comrades said he would rather go back to prison. We thought, to begin with, that it was a matter of personal falangist brutality; soon we realized that it was a general state of affairs – something that had been planned and prepared from before the uprising …

  The prisoners, he among them, testified to the prison officers’ conduct, and eventually they were freed and allowed to return to Bilbao. But not before they had been given a rough time. Meanwhile, longing only to be in the bosom of his family, he returned
to his native Salamanca. Little by little, as he heard what had been happening, he could see that there was little shared sentiment between those like himself who had been imprisoned in the red zone and those who had been free from the first day in the nationalist zone. The latter, living in the throes of euphoria, had taken advantage of the triumph to wreak vengeance on their personal enemies, on those against whom they held a grievance. Vendettas were being pursued at every level of the social scale, including the church. His dismay was increased when, less than a fortnight after his release from prison and the end of Basque resistance, with its vexatious demonstration that defence of Catholicism was not synonymous with the nationalist Cruzada, the bishops of Spain published a collective letter addressed to the bishops of the world. In it the Spanish hierarchy justified its support of the military uprising; the church had been the victim of attacks under the republic; but it had always sought to respect the established authorities. It had not desired the war, and now thousands of monks, nuns and priests were being martyred in the republican zone.

  ‘Because God provides the most profound bonds holding together a well-ordered society – as was the Spanish nation – the communist revolution had to be, above all, anti-God.’ The ‘civic-military’ uprising had attracted the healthiest elements of society in defence of the ‘fundamental principles of every civilized society’. The war was an ‘armed plebiscite’ between the spiritual and materialism. The bishops pointed to a political future which bore the ideological hallmark of a corporative nationalist state: ‘The fatherland implies fatherhood; it is a moral ambience, like that of a vast family, in which the citizen fulfils his total development; the national movement has created a current of love which has concentrated on the name and historic substance of Spain, averse to those foreign elements which have brought us to ruin … ’

  The letter enhanced the new state by officially identifying its cause with that of the church. Order – the order of the property-owning class – and religion were one. The Vatican (which had been careful not to condemn or admonish the Basques publicly) shortly recognized the Burgos regime.

  The church’s support of the right, CASTAÑO felt, was deplorable; it stirred his religious consciousness in a way that even the heavy attacks on the church under the republic had not done. His view of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which throughout the republic he had defended, changed.

  —And I believe that was true of the majority of real Catholics. Half out of fear, half out of ambition, the church failed its duty to speak out against the crimes being committed. Its passivity tacitly countenanced the repression, while at the same time accepting generous benefits from the state. Even if it meant going to the wall, the church should have spoken out …

  The church, he now saw, had not played a Christian, educative role in Spain. It had laid more importance on outward show. As a result, Catholics had drunk not at the well of Christ but of the water of a church that revealed an unworthy egoism. ‘We were brought up not in the love of God but in the misery and chains of Purgatory. We had to discover God for ourselves.’

  It had been impossible to understand this before; he, too, had been brought up in the outward show, the ‘tricks and swindles’. Now, in his daily dealings with the church hierarchy, he saw that the bishops had betrayed him. There was an emptiness which he alone would have to fill with God.

  Still no voice rose to say clearly what the majority of real Catholics like himself felt; they kept quiet for fear that they might be wrong, might harm the public good. It had been a grave error, he thought, one of incalculable consequence for the future.

  But if it was impossible to speak out, it was possible to withdraw all active support from the new regime, even while continuing to hope for its military victory so as to avoid a return to the anguished pre-war situation. He turned down an offer by Serrano Suñer, the Caudillo’s brother-in-law and a major political figure in the new regime, to run its vertical trade union organization. To have accepted would have been to admit that those – the majority now – in the nationalist regime who blamed the CEDA for all the pre-war failures were right; he was not prepared to make any such admission, was proud to have belonged to the party. Nor, he told Serrano Suñer, could he accept the principle of vertical trade unions. The nationalist movement, which he had travelled the country to help bring about, for which he had spent nine months in gaol, was not the one he had hoped for; his active participation was at an end.

  * * *

  The bishops’ collective letter was not the church’s first intervention in the war. Less than three weeks after the uprising, Bishops Múgica and Olaechea of Vitoria and Pamplona respectively – both of which cities were in insurgent hands – addressed a joint pastoral to the Basques of their dioceses stating that it was ‘absolutely illicit’ for them to join forces with the enemy – ‘this modern monstrosity, marxism or communism, seven-headed Hydra, synthesis of every heresy.’

  A long Basque Catholic tradition of wariness of the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy did not lend to ready acceptance of the pastoral which theologians and politicians in the Basque country agreed lacked validity because their bishops were in insurgent hands.22 News was not long in reaching Vizcaya that the insurgents had shot fourteen Basque priests in neighbouring Guipúzcoa after its conquest. At much the same time Bishop Plá y Deniel of Salamanca put forward the concept of the ‘religious crusade’ in a pastoral. The relationship of the two events did not escape the majority of Basque priests. Chaplain in a gudari company, Father José María BASABILOTRA’S conviction of the meaninglessness of the slogan ‘For God and For Spain’ was reinforced. A crusade?

  —Ludicrous. Who could believe that generals, whom we knew were not believers when the war started, were now fighting a religious crusade? We tried to raise ourselves above this sort of thing. Our only thought was the hurt being done to the faithful by a war we had neither started nor provoked …

  Another priest, Father Luis ECHEBARRIA, religious director of the federation of Basque schools, was emphatic.

  —From the start the capitalists were on Franco’s side. Religion doesn’t reject capitalists; but when it is they who rush to the defence of religion, then all I can say is that Jesus Christ knew what to make of it. The Basque people, who are probably more Catholic than any other in the peninsula, were totally opposed to the concept of a crusade. To maintain that defence of religion was the cause of the war is an untruth … 23

  Outside the Basque country, clerical support for the uprising, while virtually inevitable, was not always a linear process, even in Old Castile. Father José FERNANDEZ, a parish priest in Valladolid, believed he was typical of most of the clergy in his initial support of the uprising which he hoped would restore law and order and respect for religion which had been so severely persecuted under the republic, in his view. In the first days of the rising he did what he could to help the military.

  —But very soon the majority of us clergy withdrew. The reason was the assassinations. They were totally unjustifiable. Even worse, they were being ordered and condoned, if not actually carried out, by people who declared the uprising a crusade, who came out wearing religious insignia, scapularies and detentes. On the other side it may have been worse, but there the assassinations weren’t being carried out in the name of religion …

  With the exception of four or five bishops, he believed, the majority of the clergy now reserved its positions; but it did not speak out in protest about the killings.

  —We couldn’t. For a start, who was there to accuse? The assassinations were carried out anonymously – you couldn’t point a finger at the killers. And to have protested openly – this was another reason – would in those impassioned times have been to declare oneself on the enemy’s side …

  There was silence instead. But as the new regime repealed all controversial republican religious legislation, particularly in respect of education, and gave the church new privileges – in effect uniting church and state in a national Catholicism – so the cl
ergy came to demonstrate its open support for the regime. ‘Things were settling down, the assassinations were less frequent, the church became used to its new, privileged situation.’

  This did not necessarily mean that the bishops’ collective action was seen as much more than war propaganda – ‘simplistic as propaganda must be, non-sensical in fact’, in Father FERNANDEZ’S view. On the one side all was white, everyone was good, religious.

  —On the other, only black anti-religion. Equally simplistic was to speak, as the bishops did, of the new religious fervour everywhere apparent in the nationalist zone. An effervescence, nothing more, an exterior show which served the nationalists’ cause. There was no real change; the indifferents remained indifferent, the religious what they had always been …

  GIJON (Asturias)

  Such reflections were unsustainable in the hold of the collier turned prison ship where Father Alejandro MARTINEZ was being held in the Asturian port of El Musel, near Gijón. The ‘purity of feeling’, which Ernesto Castaño had known throughout his confinement in Bilbao, the sense that the sacrifice was necessary to create a better Spain, was almost the sole consolation available to prisoners. But Father MARTINEZ had long been convinced that to save themselves it would be necessary to rise.24 Most Catholics, he was convinced, saw the civil war as a crusade of liberation; almost all approved the bishops’ collective letter.

  —The republic had shown its hatred of the church from the start; in consequence, we supported Franco’s rising as soon as it took place …

  Militancies 15

  FATHER ALEJANDRO MARTINEZ

  Madrid priest

  Had not the Spanish people always followed their clergy with either a candle or a club in their hands? His students at the Madrid seminary where he had taught since his ordination in 1923 asked: ‘Father, why has the church always been on the side of the right?’ And he answered: ‘Because the left has always kicked and beaten the church to the right.’ Popular hatred dated from the middle of the previous century when the church, deprived of its landed wealth, had to seek support from the rich in order to be able to continue its work, he explained, ‘to found the many colleges, sanatoria, hospitals and other institutions it had created’. Socialism had deliberately fostered an anti-religious feeling in the working classes and amongst the intelligentsia. The ignorance and passion of the masses had proven fertile ground. (If anything, the women were the most extreme. More religious than men, but more passionate when they lost control. Schopenhauer was right, he thought: the longer the hair, the smaller the intelligence.)