Guerra

by Jason Webster

  By the late spring of 1938 the Spanish Civil War was almost two years old and entering its final phase. General Franco and his supporters, who called themselves the Nationalists, were slowly beating their opponents – the Republicans, defenders of the democratic state Franco was trying to overthrow. The Nationalists were backed by Hitler and Mussolini’s weaponry and soldiers, while the Republicans were relying ever more heavily on their only serious international backer, Stalin. The Republicans were in disarray at this late stage in the war: Franco had reached the Mediterranean and had cut their remaining territory in two. He was now moving his army down the coast towards Valencia.

  As I now learned, it was at this point that the front line had reached where I was standing that morning, surrounded by goats on a dry mountainside, a jittery dog scuttling about my feet and a dead animal hanging over the shoulders of my elderly neighbour.

  I knew only a little about the war. It was not a subject you talked about much in Spain, where people usually wanted to forget and get on with their lives, even now, almost seventy years since it had begun. Friends had often dismissed the subject as unimportant. It was politics, nothing more, just a scrap between some people on the Left and some others on the Right. And anyway, it was all history, finished. Caught up as I had been by other aspects of the country – the colour and passion of Spain, things that usually drew people here – I had side-stepped this part of Spanish history. I had been too busy enjoying everything that fitted in with my romantic dreams of what Spain was all about: the sensuality of flamenco, the exoticism of the country’s Moorish past

  Nonetheless, I was fascinated by what Begoña began to tell me.

  ‘This is where the Republicans had their last defences,’ she said. ‘These lines here’ – she nodded towards the zigzag markings – ‘were the trenches.’

  It wasn’t easy to make them out, with the flat midday light almost obliterating the contours in the landscape. But as she pointed, they began to stand out more clearly: man-made shapes that appeared somehow out of place in their natural surroundings. Mostly filled in now, the trenches were about two metres wide, each stretch some eight or ten metres long before a dogleg bend to another stretch, creating a jagged effect.

  Begoña told me how Republican fighters had made a stand out here in the countryside as Franco’s men marched southwards. It was difficult mountainous territory, and while the Nationalists’ capture of the nearby village had been straightforward, the Republicans hoped to slow the advance by leading the enemy out into the hills. They hadn’t lasted more than a few days.

  ‘Franco’s planes came from over there’ – she pointed towards the northeast – ‘and shot them up.’

  The shape of the defences, it seemed, was supposed to offer some protection against a linear attack from the air. But the planes returned again and again, manoeuvring so that their machine-guns could fire the length of each stretch of the trenches.

  ‘Some managed to escape but most of them were killed.’

  There was nothing but wild flowers and birds today; only a lifetime ago, this place had been a killing field. I looked around at our peaceful, pastoral surroundings and struggled to imagine what must have happened that day.

  ‘And it took place right here?’ I said, as though demanding confirmation from her. Begoña took a swig from her water-bottle and nodded. The dead goat’s head swung limp and senseless on her back, its half-open eyes now mere balls of drying jelly.

  I glanced up in the direction from which the Nationalist fighters had approached. In the distance the Penyagolosa, the highest mountain in this part of Spain, once sacred to the Celtic sun-god Lugus, pushed upwards into a cloudless sky. Further up the valley I could make out the whitewashed walls of my own farmhouse glinting in the sun.

  ‘The bodies,’ I said to Begoña. ‘Are they …?’

  ‘They’re still here,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  I looked again at the trenches and the scarred earth where we were standing. I felt uneasy about walking on people’s graves, thinking about the men who were lying here, about the kind of people they’d been, about their wives and lovers, their children.

  ‘How many Republicans were here?’ I asked.

  About seventy of them were buried there, she told me.

  ‘I was eight at the time,’ she continued. ‘I came with my mother and brother to sow wheat that morning. We saw the Francoists dig a pit, a fosa, and then throw the bodies in from a lorry on top of each other.’

  For the first time I caught the emotion in her voice, a tightening in her throat.

  ‘My mother didn’t stop weeping all day.’

  Only her voice betrayed the depth of her emotion, her face screwed tight as it had been for decades against the sun and the elements. And perhaps, also, against the memories of what she had witnessed here as a little girl. The experience she had had, the event that had occurred here, filled the space around us like lead.

  My mind was filling with questions: why had they dumped the bodies here rather than giving them proper burial? What had happened to their families? Why hadn’t anyone moved them since? Franco had been dead for almost thirty years. The country was a democracy once more. Couldn’t a memorial be erected at least? It was disturbing to think that here in this lost, sun-drenched valley, with its fields of wild flowers, the smell of blossom filling the air, bursts of birdsong set against a blanket buzz of honeybees, something so terrible could have happened.

  The questions and thoughts filled my mind, but it was almost impossible to speak.

  ‘I’m the only one left who saw what happened,’ she said at last. Rosco was curled around her feet, looking up at me with mournful eyes. ‘I’m the only one left.’

  Grief and sorrow now seemed to flow like an electric current from her skin. If I put a hand on her arm, in some inadequate gesture of sympathy, I was sure I would feel a shock. There was one thing, however, that I had to ask. Why had she brought me here?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, turning away. ‘I don’t know.’

  *

  I watched her walk away with the herd down the dirt track, the dead goat still on her shoulders, the dog scampering about making sure the rest of the animals moved forwards. From behind, the blue scarf holding down her straw hat looked like a dark gash across the top of her head. The weather seemed to be changing, and from the west a hot suffocating wind was beginning to blow, bringing with it the dust and sand of the plains. It passed over the cliff face and down into the hollow of the valley, circling and tightening before whipping round and surging up into my face in concentrated, melting bursts. My eyes stayed fixed on the old woman’s compact form, her skirts flapping around her ankles as she gradually disappeared into the distance. So much strength and energy seemed to be held within her, it was strange to think that one day, like the men dumped in the field she had shown me, it would be extinguished. It was as though she had given a small part of herself to me by taking me to that place.

  I walked back up the slope towards home, but the house, the farm, was different. The change was subtle, but immediate, and the cracks in my vision of what I thought I had were already starting to show. Violence and blood had stained my perfect world.

  2

  Prelude

  Two murders in Madrid acted as a catalyst for the Spanish Civil War: the assassinations within hours of each other of a policeman by political activists, and of a political activist by policemen.

  On the night of 12 July 1936, a young police officer, Lieutenant José Castillo, left his new bride to walk to work from their home on Augusto Figueroa Street, in the old working-class district in the centre of the capital. Castillo was part of a special force of shock troops known as the Assault Guards, a body set up five years previously to defend Spain’s nascent and fragile republic. An active left-winger, Castillo had been involved in the killing of a leading member of Spain’s fascist party, the Falange, during a riot in April earlier that year. They were violent times: political murders were taki
ng place almost every day, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were on strike, churches were being burned down. There were whisperings of a military coup against the newly elected government – a left-wing coalition – now in charge in Madrid. Falangists had sworn revenge against Castillo for the death of their colleague, the Marquis of Heredia, and had sent the policeman’s wife, Consuelo, a note the day before her wedding advising her not to marry a man ‘soon to be a corpse’.

  It was normally only a ten-minute walk to work, but that night Castillo didn’t make it. On Fuencarral Street four gunmen were waiting for him; they shot him down and disappeared. A passing journalist tried to help the wounded man, but arrived only to hear his last words: ‘Take me to my wife.’ He was dead by the time they got him to a nearby medical centre.

  News of the killing quickly reached the police station. Castillo was the second officer in the local force to be killed that year – Captain Carlos Faraudo had been gunned down in the centre of Madrid as he was taking a walk with his wife. Angry and determined to exact revenge, the officers drew up a list of suspects and then, as night fell, began leaving the police station in small groups to make arrests. Suspicion fell on right-wingers, particularly the fascists of the Falange party and their associates. It was late by the time the last group of policemen headed out into the streets, taking a police lorry, number seventeen, out into the wealthy Salamanca district of Madrid. They were led by Captain Fernando Condés of the Civil Guard, Castillo’s best friend. Not all in the vehicle were police officers, however: two were members of the communist-socialist youth movement; another was a young Galician socialist called Luis Cuenca.

  Police lorry number seventeen headed first to the home of a leading politician named José María Gil Robles. A heavy-jowled, trilby-wearing man, Gil Robles was a prominent figure on the Right, leader of the Catholic CEDA coalition party, who had tried but failed to win power and establish an authoritarian Catholic regime through the ballot box earlier that year. Fortunately for him, that night he wasn’t at home, having left to spend the weekend in Biarritz with his family. The policemen would have to look elsewhere.

  One of the men in the lorry mentioned that another leading right-winger lived close by. José Calvo Sotelo, an economist, had been a finance minister before the establishment of the Republic, and was a brilliant orator who was quickly eclipsing Gil Robles as the leading light on the opposition benches. With his clean good looks and more radical policies, he was gaining many followers, moving ever closer to the Falange against the backdrop of a country rapidly falling apart.

  By now it was around three o’clock in the morning on 13 July. Calvo Sotelo was at his home on Velázquez Street that night, having spent weeks moving from place to place for fear of assassination. The policemen drove to his house, roused him and ordered him to get dressed and accompany them to the police station. As a member of parliament, Calvo Sotelo was granted freedom from arrest. Still, he decided to go along with them, promising his family he would call them as soon as he arrived at the station. ‘Unless,’ he added as he was being led through the door, ‘these gentlemen are going to blow my brains out.’

  With the politician inside, the police lorry set off at top speed through the streets of Madrid, Calvo Sotelo wedged in the front between a couple of policemen. After several minutes, Luis Cuenca, sitting in the back, fired two bullets into his head. The body stayed upright until they reached the East Cemetery, where they left it with the night guard.

  ‘As they were in uniform, I didn’t object,’ the guard later told an inquest.

  The body wasn’t identified until the following morning.

  Condés later said he had only meant to arrest Calvo Sotelo, and that Cuenca had shot him without his orders.

  A day later, on 14 July, two funerals were held. At one the coffin of Lieutenant Castillo was draped in a red flag, socialists, Republicans and communists raising clenched fists in revolutionary salute. Several hours later Calvo Sotelo’s body was buried at the same cemetery, his coffin marked with a cross, mourners stretching their right arms out in the fascist salute.

  The murders had split the country in two. Three days later the Spanish Civil War began.

  The murders of Castillo and Calvo Sotelo were the spark that set the Civil War in motion, but came after a long period in which Spain had become increasingly polarized and fractured, hatred and violence taking root as the country was torn apart by extremist forces. By the time the policeman and the politician were killed, there was no way of avoiding war, so intense was the loathing between conservatives and progressives, right-wingers and the Left, and so fragile was the state meant to hold them together.

  Spain in 1936 was a republic, officially the country’s second after an unsuccessful and short-lived experiment with republicanism in 1873. The second fall of the monarchy had come in 1931, when King Alfonso XIII abdicated after elections for town halls across the country showed a collapse in his popularity. Preferring self-imposed exile to a possible civil war, he departed for France, and in a bloodless transition to a republican regime, power fell into the hands of liberals and left-wingers who had been pushing for years for modernization and an end to the monarchy. The new prime minister was the Andalusian barrister Niceto Alcalá Zamora, who formed a government made up of socialists and Republicans. The industrial revolutions that had taken place elsewhere in Europe were still in their infancy in Spain in the 1930s – new industries were concentrated principally in the northern areas of Catalonia and the Basque Country – and the main foreign export earner was still agriculture. Illiteracy rates were as high as 50 per cent, while millions lived in semi-slavery on vast feudal estates in the south – latifundios – where hunger was the norm and work scarce. Life there was primitive. Landowners were often absent, preferring the life of the city, while a surplus of labourers paid a daily rate meant farm managers had complete control over the lives of the workers, employing them or sending them away each morning as they saw fit. Much of the soil was poor and the climate was dry, and many landlords left swathes of their farms uncultivated, preferring the land to stay as an arid wasteland under their own control than be farmed by hungry peasants. And so the aristocrats and gentry and their moneyed offspring – señoritos – would spend their time in luxury in the capital and other big cities, while country folk starved – some even having to eat grass to survive – stuck in a pit of poverty and ignorance. What had been the point of abolishing black slavery, the socialist politician Indalecio Prieto asked, if white slavery still existed in Spain?

  The country, then with a population of around twenty-four million people, was sharply divided in two, and there was immense pressure on the new Republic to produce much-needed reform, with hopes that after centuries of stagnation Spain would finally catch up with its neighbours. But while liberals and left-wingers dreamed of a better future, there was also fierce resistance to any change, principally from three powerful groups with a strong interest in maintaining things as they were: the old ruling class, the Church and the army.

  The early thirties was a bad time to be building a new state. The world economy was still suffering from the crash of 1929, while political extremism was on the rise from the Soviet Union to Italy and Germany. But external pressures on the young Republic were almost nothing to the problems at home. The liberal intellectuals leading the new Spain made great moves to create the country they had always dreamed of, setting up almost ten thousand new schools in their first year, freeing the press and passing reformist agrarian laws. They also tried to modernize the country’s top-heavy army, where there were some seventeen thousand officers for a force of around a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers: a ratio of one to nine. Attempts to improve this, and obliging officers to swear allegiance to the new Republic, won the liberals many enemies in the armed forces.

  But while conservatives dug in their heels over any change, the Republic’s own supporters complained things weren’t moving fast enough. And one of the biggest groups on the Left, the anarc
hists, whose support for the liberal government would ebb and flow over the coming years, was against the idea of a state altogether. More and more, the men in the centre felt attacked from all sides.

  What made matters worse was the impression the liberal rulers gave of being unable to maintain law and order. Less than a month after the Republic came into being, six churches were burned down in Madrid after disturbances between supporters of the Republic and monarchists. The police did nothing to stop the attacks, the then war minister Manuel Azaña exclaiming that he would prefer all the churches of Spain to burn than that harm should come to a single Republican.

  Likewise, conservatives, who were slowly organizing themselves into political parties and formations, felt increasingly alarmed at the growth in regionalism in the country. The idea of ‘Spain’ had always been a problematic concept, the country being more a collection of nations than a single entity. What were now called regions had almost all been, at some time in the distant past, independent kingdoms, principalities or counties, tiny fiefdoms which had been born at the time of the Reconquest and which had grown as Christian territory expanded southwards at the expense of the Moors during the Middle Ages. Through a succession of wars, treaties and marriages these had eventually been united under a single crown some five hundred years earlier. Now that the king had gone, however, Catalonia in particular started to test its strength, drafting a ‘statute of autonomy’ in 1932 which gave the region its own government – the Generalitat – with powers over local administration, civil law and health. For the army, ever the defender of the patria, the fatherland, nothing was more sacred than the unity of the country. The Catalan move was seen as a dangerous threat and prompted the first attempt to bring the young Republic down, a rebellion that became known as the Sanjurjada.