Perhaps through tiredness, or a feeling of not really caring what would happen, I did something I might not ordinarily have done – I took a chance; I simply turned and walked away from them without a word, around a corner and down a narrow street in as relaxed a fashion as I could. For a second I could hear feet behind me as they took a few steps to follow me, still undecided as to what or who I was. Would they pounce? I was betting on them assuming I was a lost tourist. I tried to blot them from my mind, all the while looking for corners to turn into and ways of losing them. Eventually I reached a street lined with trees. Crossing into it I started to run, not looking back, but in my mind’s eye watching the two policemen doubling back on themselves as they decided I was not worth the chase and heading off to seek a larger kill. Still I ran, just to make sure: running from everything that had happened that day.
I sprinted through the streets, but my body could only go so far. Breathless and sore, my chest heaving and the clammy taste of physical exertion on my tongue, after a few minutes I came to a stuttering halt, leaning against a lamppost as I tried to catch my breath. Black spots flashed across my eyes, and my veins pulsed like thunder. I already knew the police were not behind me, but checked just in case: the road was empty. I was the only person there. I looked around: the buildings were in better condition here. Geraniums poured over railings on upper balconies, while in a corner of the street a large overhanging tree stood next to a collection of large municipal dustbins. I stumbled towards it. Bits of old wood had been left out, broken wardrobes and chests of drawers, to be picked up by rag-and-bone men. There was also, I saw, up on the pavement and placed under the veiling branches of the tree, an old sofa, dragged out of the way of the street and pedestrians. It had tears down the sides and the cushions had gone, but it was long and wide. I walked towards it, doubting what I was seeing. There was no one around; the sense of danger lessened. The sofa was perfectly placed underneath the tree. If anyone did pass by they would have trouble seeing me anyway. I sat down slowly, testing it for hidden surprises. It smelt dusty and smoky. Its floral pattern would have been at home in some overly decorated flat belonging to an elderly couple, I thought. And I imagined all the thousands of times it had been sat on, the conversations it had witnessed, the lives that had been lived on it.
My head sank down on to the arm rest while my feet moved up at the other end. Curling my legs slightly I could just fit, my rucksack placed under my cheek for comfort and security. For a while I kept my eyes open while my body rested, until at last they closed. It was dawn before I realized I had fallen asleep.
14
Death of an Anarchist
On the afternoon of 19 November 1936, shortly after lunch, a group of leading anarchists left their headquarters in Madrid to drive to the front lines on the outskirts of the city for a tour of inspection. Franco’s troops were in the middle of a concerted but frustrated bid to take the capital by force. With determination and a certain amount of luck, the Republican defenders were holding them back. ¡No pasarán! – They shall not pass – went the defiant cry, and in Madrid, at last, the rebels’ seemingly inexorable advance was encountering its first serious setback. Despite claims by Nationalist generals that they would be drinking coffee in the city’s bars by the following day, Franco wouldn’t take Madrid until the very end of the war, almost two and a half years later.
On that afternoon, the anarchists drove towards the University City, the large campus district to the northwest of the centre, built only a decade before and now the focal point of the war. Among the heavily damaged faculty buildings, General Millán Astray’s battle cry ‘Death to Intelligence’ must have had a particular resonance. It was a sunny autumn day and the large black car sped through the streets until it reached the area near the Hospital Clínico, at that point the scene of fierce fighting against Moroccan Regulares. Near the Dentistry Faculty, the anarchists in the car saw a group of their own militiamen walking in the opposite direction, away from the front line. The vehicle stopped and the occupants got out. One of them, a large man with a barrel chest, powerful neck and delicate, almost deer-like features, with small almond-shaped eyes, started haranguing the men in his typically direct way. They shouldn’t be deserting their positions, but fighting the enemy. The forces of fascism were on the attack. Here in Madrid they would be defeated and buried for good.
His words seemed to have an effect, and the weary men turned round and started trudging back towards the front. But then a shot rang out. The anarchist leader fell, wounded and bleeding. His companions, seeing what had happened, quickly hauled him back into the car and raced off towards the Ritz Hotel, now being used as a hospital for the Catalan militias. There, doctors examined the wounded man and deliberated. After a while, another doctor was called over from the Hotel Palace nearby, at that point an anarchist hospital. After he had performed an examination, the medics decided there was nothing to be done. The man was seriously wounded – a nine-millimetre bullet had entered his body just below the left nipple and passed out through the back. He would almost certainly not survive. He was also an important man. Better he die from the bullet wound than under the knife of a surgeon trying to save his life.
A few hours later, in room twenty-seven, situated on the first floor of the hotel, at around four o’clock in the morning, the anarchist leader breathed his last.17 Two days later, in Barcelona, hundred of thousands of people attended his funeral. One of the most popular and charismatic leaders of the forces lined up against Franco had gone. His name was Buenaventura Durruti.
Spain is the only country in the modern Western world where anarchism has ever had mass appeal and where something approaching an anarchist revolution has ever taken place, leading many to speculate on an inherently ‘anarchist’ aspect to the Spanish psyche. This, combined with a strong and sometimes violent reaction to the strictly authoritarian and hierarchical regimes that have ruled the country for so much of its history, can perhaps explain some of anarchism’s appeal.
The movement’s beginnings in Spain had not been particularly auspicious. Anarchism was introduced by the Italian Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868, on a trip organized by Mikhail Bakunin to recruit Spanish members to the First International. Fanelli was a deputy in the Italian parliament who was officially domiciled on the state railway system, taking advantage of the free train pass that came with his job. After he had failed to meet anyone in Barcelona, a group of radicals in Madrid eventually arranged for him to give a lecture to some members of a printing organization. Fanelli spoke in French, not having any Spanish. Only one member of the audience understood anything he was saying.
Nonetheless anarchism subsequently spread rapidly across the country, finding a natural constituency among Andalusian peasants living in oppressed, semi-feudal conditions who were attracted to the ideas of a stateless society and redistribution of wealth. Intellectual anarchists would spend time with them to propagate their ideas, teaching them to read and write, and, reflecting a common puritanical streak in the early days of the movement, converting them to vegetarianism, weaning them off alcohol and tobacco, and preaching the virtues of being faithful to their wives.
Anarchism in Spain never lost a certain quasi-religious romanticism, but by the outbreak of the Civil War it had moved on. The movement had its own trade union – the CNT – with about a million members, and had become particularly strong in Catalonia and Aragon. The CNT was the largest single workers’ group at the time, larger in number than the socialists or the communists. The communists were still a tiny minority, but were soon to grow rapidly in number and importance. General strikes had been the anarchists’ main weapon in their struggle for better working conditions, and, more importantly, in trying to bring down the apparatus of the state. But faced with the prospect of a fascist government being set up, they had chosen the lesser evil of supporting the more mainstream left-wing parties involved in the Popular Front coalition that won the February 1936 elections.
There were problems, though
. By definition the anarchists were not a centralized, well-organized body, which goes some way to explaining their eventual eclipse by the communists and socialists. The Republic needed them to help defend itself against the military revolt, but at the same time was frightened of them. Much of the prevarication about handing weapons out to the masses at the start of the war – a move which might have stopped the rebellion in its tracks – came from the fear of what would happen once these radical groups took control. In the end the anarchists did take to the streets, and in Barcelona brought about a revolution once they’d put down the military coup there. But loath to have anything to do with governments and state organizations, they failed to ‘consolidate’ their power as other groups might have done. The anarchists were idealists and libertarians who believed that revolutions and change came from below, not from above, and that it was not their place to impose their will. More ruthless parties, particularly the communists, quickly took advantage of this political gap.
The romanticism of the anarchists was the cause of some of their greatest weaknesses. In battle they tended to rely heavily on passion and belief in the cause, with the result that many of their members were needlessly killed in ‘heroic’ charges against the enemy. This method had worked quite spectacularly in Barcelona, where the anarchists had played a major part in thwarting the military coup and keeping the city out of Nationalist hands. Afterwards, though, particularly during the siege of Madrid, it failed as an effective mode of attack. It is not entirely clear how much the anarchists’ image as a disorganized fighting force is due to subsequent communist propaganda aimed at discrediting them. Even before Durruti died in Madrid, the talk among Republicans had turned to ‘discipline’. The communists and socialists were all in favour. For the anarchists it was anathema. Durruti had led a group of some three thousand anarchist militiamen, the ‘Durruti column’, out of Barcelona in the early days of the war to help capture the rebelheld Saragossa, almost two hundred miles away. Flushed with success and flying their red and black flags, they had marched for over two hours before they realized they had forgotten to pick up even basic supplies. The anarchists had no formal officials or salutes, orders were often discussed by soldier councils before being acted upon, and men were theoretically free to leave and head back home at any time. Belief in their cause was what held them together. To have behaved in any other way would have been to lose their very identity. On what other basis could an anarchist fighting force be formed?
Another problem was the apparent cruelty of many in the anarchist ranks. One of their members, for example, murdered the postman in the coastal town of Altea with a hatchet for overcharging on stamps. Believing that the ‘crimes of society’ were responsible for people ending up in jail, on occasion anarchists released scores of murderers and thieves who then affiliated themselves with their liberators and carried on as they had before. Priests and nuns in particular bore the brunt of their rage. Although, in a strangely typical anecdote of the times, the French writer Saint-Exupéry told how he once saved the life of a monk who was about to be shot by the anarchists, by telling them it was a bad idea. The militiamen were convinced by his arguments and instead of shooting the monk went and shook him by the hand, congratulating him on his escape.
If everyone in Spain at that time had friends elsewhere, the anarchists had none. The socialists could look to similar parties in France and Britain, the communists to Moscow, Franco to Germany and Italy. Almost nobody, though, liked the anarchists, this uncontrollable rabble blamed for many of the atrocities carried out on the Republican side during the early months of the war. They were one of the reasons why assistance was not forthcoming from the other democracies around the world. Travellers to Barcelona at this time found a city where everyone wore workers’ overalls (el mono azul), tipping had been abolished and it was forbidden to utter the overtly religious Adiós when saying goodbye (the standard greeting became Salud). Abortions, divorce and ‘free love’ were all the norm. Meanwhile, in the countryside controlled by the anarchists, whole villages had been collectivized and private property and money abolished. The notion that the conservative-led governments of Baldwin or Chamberlain in Britain would support anything like this was absurd. The anarchists were well aware of this. The Republican government, though, was constantly hoping for London and Paris to help them in their struggle against Franco. One of the things that stood in their way, in their eyes, was the spread of anarchism.
Although a charismatic leader of the anarchists, Durruti was less an ideologue and thinker than a man of action and, for many, a terrorist. Born in León in 1896, he had trained as a metal-worker before being thrown out of the socialist UGT trade union for being too radical. He then embarked on a life as an anarchist agitator that saw him spend a great deal of his adult life behind bars. While free men, he and his best friend Francisco Ascaso had, among other things, managed to rob the Bank of Spain at Gijón – to give money to the workers; made an attempt on the life of King Alfonso XIII during a royal visit to France; and murdered the corrupt casino-owning Cardinal Soldevila of Saragossa. (Shortly before his death, Soldevila had made a promising young student in Saragossa, José María Escrivá, a prefect at the San Carlos Seminary. Escrivá would go on to form the secretive and controversial Opus Dei movement, which much later, in the 1960s, would play a significant role in Franco’s government.)
For several years Durruti travelled through Latin America and Europe, fomenting revolution where he could, often struggling to survive, and condemned to death in four separate countries. At one point he ended up in Paris, where he scraped a living as a musician and ran a bookshop.
When the military launched their rebellion and the Spanish Civil War started, Durruti was in Barcelona, at the heart of what turned into an anarchist revolution. The city was a major stronghold of anarchism, thanks in part to the immigration there over the years of Andalusian workers seeking employment in textile factories. The zeal of the anarchists along with the decision of the Civil Guard to remain loyal to the Republic were the main reasons for the Nationalist coup failing in the city. General Goded, who had flown in from the Balearics to lead the revolt, was arrested and later shot. Durruti at this time was a leading member of a secret organization within Spanish anarchism, the FAI – the Iberian Anarchist Federation – which campaigned to keep the movement ‘pure’ and truly revolutionary.
People who knew Durruti described him as a ‘primitive’ kind of man, passionate and a natural leader, but not one for complex or subtle thought.
‘From his elemental way of passing judgement on things,’ one former cellmate of his said, ‘what was good was good, and what wasn’t, wasn’t. There was no middle ground, no reasoning, no subtleties which might lead him to see things in another way. In his view, the world belonged to the workers and to no one else, although a minority had taken possession of what really belonged to others.’18
This prisoner, who shared a cell with Durruti for eight months, described him as ‘a man made out of a single piece of cast iron, with no air bubbles or fault lines in him: solid’. He was intelligent but had little ‘culture’.
‘There was no possibility of sexual relations with women in jail. Whenever his body demanded it, Durruti would suddenly walk up to the sink and, right in front of me, would simply turn on the tap and place his testicles under the cold water.’
This earthy man, with his steel will, proved to be one of the few great characters fighting Franco. While many Republican politicians were overweight intellectuals, Durruti had the combination of single-mindedness, violence, charisma and physical energy that was characteristic of some of the leaders on the Nationalist side.
The Durruti column grew in numbers as it marched across Aragon in the summer and autumn towards Saragossa, but the city stayed stubbornly in Nationalist hands. By November 1936, however, a more pressing situation had emerged in the Civil War. Having marched up the western flank of the country and relieved the Alcázar in Toledo, Franco’s Army of Africa wa
s poised to take Madrid. All attention was focused on the capital. For the Nationalists, victory was in their grasp. For the Republicans, the enemy had to be kept back at all costs. The government of socialist prime minister Francisco Largo Caballero, in an act of bare-faced cowardice, abandoned Madrid and set up a new capital in Valencia. They almost didn’t make it, being stopped en route at the town of Tarancón by anarchist militiamen who wanted to shoot the lot of them for ‘desertion’. Manuel Azaña, meanwhile, now president of the Republic, had simply disappeared to Barcelona. Foreign dignitaries followed suit, reducing their staff in the capital or decamping altogether. The British ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, left the country for the French border town of Hendaye, where he set up a new embassy in a grocer’s shop.
The defence of Madrid was left in the hands of General José Miaja and his brilliant chief of staff, the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Vicente Rojo – the man who had previously tried to negotiate on behalf of the Republic with the defenders of the Alcázar in Toledo. Miaja and Rojo were left with a few soldiers who had stayed loyal to the Republic, along with thousands of militiamen belonging to various trade unions and political factions who until a few months previously had been trying to kill each other in a political turf war. They were facing the best troops in the entire Spanish Army. The odds were not looking good. A number of factors, though, were in their favour. First, Franco’s soldiers, despite their run of success, were beginning to tire after being on the go non-stop since July. Second, the Regulares were particularly good over open ground, but were weak in urban warfare. Third, most of the militiamen had nowhere to run to if they decided to abandon the front line – their wives and children were waiting at home only a short distance behind them. Their backs, as it were, were against the wall, and the Nationalist troops were already notorious for carrying out gang rapes and massacres of civilians.
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