Guerra

by Jason Webster

  The jogger took a step back.

  ‘It was here, right in front of the mine,’ he said quietly. His face was no longer red and was turning grey. ‘Right where you’re standing now.’

  10

  The Siege

  On 28 September 1936, General José Varela clambered over the ruins of the old Alcázar fortress in the central Spanish city of Toledo to claim one of the most important Nationalist victories of the Civil War. Inside, the survivors of a harrowing seventy-day siege were white-faced and frail from weeks living off hard gritty bread and horse fat. Around them the ten-foot-thick walls of the medieval castle that had been their home and refuge since late July lay broken into piles of rock and rubble, smashed yet not defeated by the ten thousand Republican shells fired at it since the outbreak of the war. Dead bodies rotted in cellars and hidden corners, the smell of decaying flesh and human dirt mingling in the crisp autumn morning air. Many of the nearly two thousand people inside were too weak to raise a cheer when Varela and his Moroccan troops arrived to relieve their torment, and the women refused to emerge from their underground bunkers for shame at not having washed or changed their clothes in months. But the man who had led this defiant stance against the besiegers from the beginning, Colonel Moscardó, was able to stand to attention in the presence of his superior and utter the most famous line of his life: ‘Sin novedad en el Alcázar, mi general.’ Nothing to report from the Alcázar, sir. It was untypically phlegmatic for the usually bombastic and excitable colonel, but it touched the hearts of Spaniards all over the country – and not only supporters of Franco – after one of the most dramatic and heroic chapters in the history of the war. While Republican blood flowed down the streets of Toledo in the wake of the Nationalist victory, the Alcázar had been successfully relieved, its inhabitants saved. Franco, retracing Varela’s steps two days later and hearing the same statement from Moscardó for the benefit of the news cameras, was able to say, ‘Now the war is won.’ It took him another two and a half years to make that a reality, but the relief of the Alcázar had a symbolic importance which powered the Nationalist forces to eventual victory.

  The siege of the Alcázar began almost by accident. Moscardó and other conservatives in Toledo had never intended to lock themselves in the fortress and so were unprepared for the ordeal they had to go through. The plan had been to take the entire city for the uprising; only when this failed did the insurgents have to fall back on the castle. That they held out for so long bore testament to their determination as well as the ineffectiveness of the Republican forces trying to force them out.

  Colonel Moscardó was a middle-aged officer known for his nervousness and volatility. People said his mother had died insane. After a career in Spanish Morocco, this keen football fan had been farmed out to Toledo to take charge of the army’s school of physical education. The school was on the outskirts of town, although attached to the military academy which was based in the Alcázar, a vast square fortress that sat on the highest hill in Toledo, dominating a city that had once been the ancient capital of the Visigothic kings of Spain. Rebuilt by Charles V in the sixteenth century, it had been burned down by the British during the War of Spanish Succession, then again by the French during the Napoleonic Wars, finally being remodelled and strengthened at the beginning of the twentieth century, just a year or two before a young cadet called Francisco Franco arrived from Galicia for officer training. It was a dour and ugly building, unremarkable save for its size and imposing towers, one at each of its four corners.

  The plotters of the military rebellion hadn’t even bothered to inform Moscardó of their plans. He was an unimportant figure in the scheme of things, an old football coach to young artillery cadets. But when he discovered that the army was rising against the government, he knew instinctively which side he was on. The rebel leaders didn’t have any plans for the capture of Toledo, being more preoccupied with taking control of the major cities. So it fell to Moscardó and a handful of fellow right-wingers to try to take the town for the uprising of their own accord. The local unions and worker organizations fighting against the military rebellion proved too strong for them, however, and after failing to secure the town, they fell back to the haven of the Alcázar. There they were joined by almost seven hundred Civil Guards from around the province, and a couple of hundred Falangists and other supporters. After a daring raid on the neighbouring arms factory, where they managed to get their hands on over seven hundred thousand rounds of ammunition for their Mauser rifles, Moscardó’s men locked themselves inside the fortress.

  Outside, the town was overrun with anarchist militiamen as central authority broke down. Dead priests lay rotting in the streets, desperate women and children vainly pushing bread and cigarettes into their mouths to try to revive them. One priest was even found with a crucifix forced into his rectum.

  The siege began as the situation across the rest of country was still volatile. Things did not look good for the defenders: the Alcázar was cut off from the other parts of Spain held by the Nationalists. As the situation clarified in the first few days of the war, they realized that their only chance of survival would come from rapid advances by either General Mola in the north, or Franco in the south. But Mola got stuck in the Guadarrama mountain chain as he tried to move on Madrid, while Franco was still held up in Spanish Morocco at this point, busy trying to get his troops across the Strait. The Alcázar was surrounded and very far away from any outside help. They had a good supply of ammunition, but food stocks were low as it was the summer holidays and most of the cadets had gone home. They did have a supply of fresh water, though, contained in ancient cisterns in the depths of the castle. Optimistically, Moscardó expected to have to hold out for a few days, perhaps a fortnight at most. No one suspected just how long they would have to stay in there.

  Expectations about the duration of the siege were woefully off the mark on the outside as well, however. The anarchists were the main force among the Republicans now controlling Toledo, but socialists and communists were also in the city. The rivalries between these factions meant coordination during the early days of the siege was pitiful, and in the absence of any coherent strategy men lurked behind barricades, simply emptying their cartridges into the massively thick walls of the fortress in the vain hope that something might get through. But they thought they had time on their side and could take it relatively easy, that the Nationalists would eventually be forced into surrender.

  Shortly into the stand-off, the attackers managed to find what appeared to be a trump card – Moscardó’s family, discovered hiding in the city during a house search. Moscardó’s wife was left alone by the Republicans, but his twenty-four-year-old son Luis was another matter. He was of an age where he could fight – and die. Militiamen took him to the cheka of the forces now controlling the city. These were unauthorized political courts where people were ‘tried’ on suspicion of supporting the enemy. They had been set up across Republican Spain at the start of the war and thousands passed through their hands before being ‘taken for a ride’, in the language of contemporary gangster films – a short drive to a swift execution. The name came from Russian, after similar bodies set up during the revolution there.

  The man in charge of the Toledo cheka was a lawyer named Candido Cabello. Cabello could barely believe his luck when the militiamen brought Luis Moscardó through the door. Only a few streets away Luis’s father was holed up with some two thousand people inside the Alcázar and was quickly becoming a thorn in the side of the government. According to one version of events, Cabello soon had Colonel Moscardó on the phone, and made his position very clear.

  ‘I’m giving you ten minutes to surrender the Alcázar. If you don’t, I’ll shoot your son Luis who is standing here beside me.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Moscardó replied without any emotion.

  ‘So that you can see it’s true,’ Cabello went on, ‘he will speak to you.’ He handed the phone over to Luis.

  ‘Papa!’ the boy cried. />
  ‘What’s happening, son?’ Moscardó asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Luis. ‘They say they are going to shoot me if the Alcázar doesn’t surrender. But don’t worry about me.’

  ‘If it is true,’ Moscardó said, ‘commend your soul to God, shout “¡Viva España!” and die like a hero. Goodbye, my son. A kiss.’

  ‘Goodbye, father. A big kiss.’

  Cabello took back the phone, but Moscardó was the first to speak. ‘You may as well forget the period of grace you gave me,’ he said. ‘The Alcázar will never surrender.’

  Luis wasn’t actually killed on the spot but was taken away to be locked up, although he was shot before the siege eventually came to an end. Cabello’s plan, meanwhile, had totally backfired. The defenders were now more entrenched than ever, led by a man who was prepared to sacrifice his own son. Any doubters there might have been within the Alcázar were now silenced. There was no going back.

  Some historians have doubted the veracity of this conversation; the story feels almost mythological, having a peculiar resonance, not only for its echoes of Abraham and Isaac, but within a Spanish historical context. During the time of the Reconquest, at the siege of the town of Tarifa on the very southern tip of the Spanish peninsula in 1294, the ruler Alonso Pérez de Guzmán had been given an almost identical ultimatum by the besieging joint Christian and Moorish forces, who threatened to kill his son, whom they’d kidnapped earlier, if he didn’t surrender. Guzmán was from the same school of parenting as Moscardó, and famously replied that if they didn’t have a knife on them to murder his boy they could take his. He was later nicknamed ‘the Good’ for his defence of the town. Moscardó was now a hero in this vein, a character straight out of the tales of the knights of old.

  Meanwhile, time was moving on and people inside the Alcázar were adjusting to their new environment. A homemade newspaper, El Alcázar, was printed with snippets of news, appeals to keep up morale from Moscardó, and bulletins of events. The large inner courtyard began to resemble a town square in these quieter early days, with young girls taking an evening stroll, unmarried officers chatting to them and courting them in the traditional manner. A circus was held, two different magicians gave performances, and the band played as though it were an ordinary Sunday afternoon. But it wasn’t long before the lack of supplies became evident. The day after the first edition of El Alcázar appeared, the flour supplies ran out and it became necessary to slaughter the horses for meat. It was even agreed which was to be the first: a bad-tempered animal called Pistolero, ‘gunman’, who’d managed to throw off anyone who’d tried to ride him. Aside from the meat, horse fat could be used for lamps in the cellars. The electricity was down and the only way to power the all-important radio was to use car batteries, but even then reception was bad and often failed altogether.

  Conditions started to worsen dramatically shortly after this. On 1 August the Republican besiegers, impatient with trying to starve the Nationalists out, began to batter the Alcázar with artillery, hoping to smash their way in. On the same day, dysentery broke out. From the pages of El Alcázar Moscardó ordered people not to defecate outside the latrines, but often this warning was ignored. The place was slowly turning into a hellhole and the question of food had to be resolved quickly. Whenever suggestions were made about scouting for supplies, Moscardó, ever trusting in divine providence, continued to maintain that God would take care of things. Previous raids into the town had proved unsuccessful, fatally so for some of the Falangists, who were always the first to sign up for any daredevil missions. Finally someone in the Alcázar remembered that sacks of wheat had been stored by a bank in some buildings just within reach of the defenders. It seems too crazy to be true, but after a midnight scouting party crept out and discovered there was indeed a large supply of unground wheat in the buildings concerned, sacks of it were brought back inside the Alcázar. A primitive grinder was made using a saw mill powered by a leather strap running round the back wheel of a Harley-Davidson, and eventually a crude gritty form of flour was produced. Baked into dark bullet-shaped loaves, this and the horsemeat was to keep the defenders alive until late September.

  Outside, the attackers were getting more and more frustrated. The thick walls of the fortress were virtually impervious to their bullets and 75mm shells, so now heavier artillery firing 155mm shells was being brought in. In the meantime a strange kind of rapport was building up between the besiegers and the besieged, the two sides so close to one another they could trade insults, while personal rivalries between individuals on either side developed. The Republicans called the defenders moscas, or flies, a play on Moscardó’s name. For the rebels inside, the Republicans were abisinios, Abyssinians, a pejorative reference to Mussolini’s ‘primitive’ enemy during his recent African adventure. Yet despite the hostility, twice a day there was a brief unofficial ceasefire to allow a blind beggar to walk up the calle del Carmen – right in the middle of no-man’s land – once in the morning and then back down again in the evening on his way home.

  Apart from the shelling, the Republicans also tried a crude form of psychological warfare, blasting lectures on Marxism and music at the Alcázar through loudspeakers in the hope that they might wear the defenders down. One of the favourites on Radio Cigarral, as it was called, was Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’. But these tactics were not enough to force a surrender, although there were up to thirty-five Nationalist desertions during the course of the siege and a handful of those who held out went permanently insane as a result of their experiences.

  Inside the Alcázar, people had to be inventive to deal with the harsh conditions. Apart from using a motorbike to grind flour, they found that the heavy leather-bound books from the fortress libraries could be quite effective at stopping bullets, especially if they were over four hundred pages long, and many were placed in windows for protection.13 The men would scavenge around for dried leaves to smoke in lieu of tobacco. Acacia, eucalyptus, elm and mulberry were all used, although eucalyptus had a habit of making them ill. In the sickroom, the Alcázar ‘surgeon’was Dr Pelayo Lozano, an expert on athlete’s foot and acne, the usual complaints of the young cadets at the academy. Now he had to read up on how to amputate limbs injured by bullet wounds. Men who lost a leg were usually given a pair of broomsticks as makeshift crutches to hobble around on.14 On one occasion the doctor’s surgical saw broke down and he had to borrow the chef’s cleaver from the kitchen instead. The chef was becoming used to this kind of thing, often having to prepare meals while bullets flew around him, one of them even knocking the spatula out of his hand as he was preparing another horse-meat special, seasoned with saltpetre off the walls instead of salt. He was lucky if he ever got to see what he was cooking, as he often had to crouch down behind the stove to stir whatever was on the hob for fear of being hit by something.

  The atmosphere inside the fortress changed dramatically one morning in the middle of August when one of the defenders started screaming hysterically about hearing strange noises coming from underground. At first Moscardó dismissed the soldier as mad, but a team was sent off to investigate and came back with the harrowing news that the attackers were almost certainly digging a tunnel underneath them in order to blow up the Alcázar. Hence the muffled bangs as explosives were used to bore into the hard rocky foundations. The Republicans were in fact digging two tunnels, having brought in miners from the Asturias region for the job. Starting from a couple of houses on nearby Juan Labrador Street, they were working round the clock in four-hour shifts, burrowing their way towards the southwest tower and the west wall. Tired of trying to shell the defenders into submission, the Republican government had decided to take stronger measures as the stand of the Alcázar became an ever greater embarrassment for them. The siege had become something of a sport for Madrileños, who would motor down to Toledo on a Sunday to have a picnic in the shadow of the rebel-held castle before taking a couple of pot shots of their own and then heading back home by nightfall. Impressive as t
he Alcázar was, and stuck in the middle of Republican-held territory, it was starting to take on a symbolic significance – evidence of the tenacity of the rebels and the ineffectiveness of the government forces. Something had to be done.

  But building the tunnels, both about seventy yards long, would take about a month, and as they progressed the shelling continued. On 4 September, after a concentrated effort, the northeast tower fell – the first breach in the massive walls had been made. Four days later the northwest tower was also toppled. Still the defenders held out. Odd bits of news were coming in, which kept their hopes alive that the longed-for relief was perhaps on its way. A Nationalist plane had dropped a few scanty supplies of food and a message of support from Franco. Then, on the day the first tower fell, Franco’s troops, now well inside mainland Spain and pushing up the west side of the country towards Madrid, captured the town of Talavera, only seventy kilometres away from Toledo.

  But the tunnels were getting closer, and the inevitable day of the explosion was growing nearer. On 9 September the government sent an envoy, Major Vicente Rojo, to talk to the defenders. Rojo was a former member of the academy who knew many of those inside. During a brief truce he crossed over to the Alcázar and was blindfolded before being taken up to see Moscardó. Despite Rojo’s warnings of what was coming, the colonel rejected his appeal for a peaceful surrender, refusing even to let the women and children go safely. Instead he asked for a priest to be sent over as none of the town priests had joined them. Rojo agreed, and as he left repeatedly implored his former colleagues to keep looking for where the explosives were being laid. Deeply moved and with tears in his eyes, he crossed back to the Republican side empty-handed, the appeals from the rebel officers that he remain with them inside the besieged castle still ringing in his ears. That evening the first of the two babies born in the Alcázar during the siege came into the world. He was given the name Restituto Alcázar Valero.