Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (64 page)

The process was accelerated by the gathering crisis on the land, hit by the end of emigration (100,000 were forced to return in 1933), falling prices, and controversy over the land-reform, which the landowners thought revolutionary, the anarchists a fraud, and which could not be enforced. In the countryside, ‘the poor were maddened by hunger, the rich were maddened by fear’.
⁴⁵
The landowners’ slogan for the hungry was
Corned Republica! –
Let the Republic feed you! The civil guards used what was termed ‘preventive brutality’ to put down peasant risings led by anarchists. In November 1933 the Socialists lost the election, moved out of government and embarked on direct action.

This change of tactics could not succeed and was certain to destroy the republican system. It represented a denial of everything that Caballero had once represented. In May 1934 he encouraged the agricultural workers to strike. It failed: the Interior Ministry deported thousands of peasants at gunpoint and dropped them from lorries hundreds of miles from their homes. In October Caballero pulled out all the stops. In Madrid there was a half-hearted general strike. In Barcelona an independent Catalan Republic’ lasted precisely ten hours. In the Asturias, a Workers’ Commune; with Socialist backing, survived a fortnight, the miners resisting fiercely with dynamite. But with the workers of Barcelona and Madrid refusing to rise, its suppression was inevitable. It was carried out by Spain’s ablest general, Francisco Franco, using four columns of regular and colonial troops.

Franco had hitherto opposed military risings and he continued to do so. But he now saw Spain threatened by a foreign disease: ‘The fronts are socialism, communism and the other formulae which attack civilization to replace it with barbarism.’
⁴⁶
In 1935 he discovered that 25 per cent of army conscripts belonged to the Left parties, and that organizing and leafleting them was the primary task of Left cadres. In August 1935, at the seventh meeting of the Comintern, Dimitrov introduced the ‘Popular Front’ conception
with the words: ‘Comrades, you will remember the ancient tale of the capture of Troy …. The attacking army was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the famous Trojan Horse, it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy camp.’
⁴⁷
Franco feared that once the army was divided or neutralized there would be nothing to prevent a take-over by the extreme Left, leading to all the horrors of Lenin’s Russia and, not least, a Stalinist forced collectivization of the peasants. Early in February 1936, with a Popular Front formed and on the eve of the elections, he told the Spanish military attaché in Paris that the army must be prepared to act ‘if the worst came to the worst’. But he thought the crisis would blow over, and no military intervention was planned.
⁴⁸
Even after the Popular Front victory on 16 February, he thought that the army without respectable civil backing would lack ‘the moral unity necessary to undertake the task’.
⁴⁹

That the army got this backing was entirely the work of the Socialist and other Left extremists. The Left had been the first to desert democracy for violence in 1934.
⁵⁰
The result was to set up a frenzy of fear in the main democratic right-wing grouping, the
CEDA
(Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), led by Gil Robles. Robles was a genuine republican; he was hated by the monarchists and fascists as much as by the socialists.
⁵¹
His party was a mass-movement of the middle class which did not need to use force to obtain what it could obtain through the ballot – security. Yet totalitarian corruption was present in the
CEDA
too. Its youth movement, the Juventudes de Acción Popular (
JAP
), responded eagerly to the violence of the Leftist youth organizations. It greeted Robles himself with cries of
‘Jefe, Jefe, Jefe!’
and the slogan ‘The
Jefe
is always right’. It called the Left ‘anti-Spain’. It proclaimed: ‘Either Acción Popular smashes Marxism or Marxism will destroy Spain. With the
Jefe
or against the
Jefe!
There can be no dialogue with anti-Spain. Us and not Them. Let us annihilate Marxism, freemasonry and separatism so that Spain may continue her immortal road!’ Some of Robles’s followers fought the 1936 election on a panic-programme: victory for the Left would be ‘the arming of the rabble; burning of private houses and banks; distribution of private goods and lands; wild looting and the common ownership of women’.
⁵²

When the Left took office after the elections, it proceeded to confirm most of these fears. Although the Popular Front parties won, they actually got less than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The Left improved its position by 1 million votes; but the Right added an extra 750,000 votes too.
⁵³
These figures dictated caution. Instead the Left brushed aside constitutional niceties, such as waiting for the
second-round run-off, and formed a government the day after the first ballot. That night the first burnings of churches and convents took place; in Orvieto the gaol was opened. In parliament the Left began an immediate campaign to deprive
CEDA
deputies of their seats for alleged ‘irregularities’, and to attack the President, Alcala Zamora, who was a perfectly decent republican.

The most alarming development was the rapidly growing influence of the Communists. They had succeeded in electing only seventeen deputies – including Dolores Ibarruri,
‘La Pasionaria’
, said to have cut a priest’s throat with her teeth – but on 5 April they staged a
coup.
Thanks to the efforts of a skilful Comintern agent, Vittorio Codovilla, and the treachery of the Socialist Youth leader, Santiago Carrillo (who had already been attending meetings of the Communist Party Central Committee), the Socialist and Communist Youth Movements were amalgamated, which meant that 40,000 militants were swallowed by the Communists.
⁵⁴
Ten days later a full-blooded Popular Front programme was announced, making no concession to the narrowness of the electoral victory or the even division of the country. When he heard its terms, Robles warned the Cortes: ‘Half the nation will not resign itself to die. If it cannot defend itself by one path, it will defend itself by another…. Civil war is being brought by those who seek the revolutionary conquest of power … the weapons have been loaded by … a government which had not been able to fulfil its duty towards groups which have stayed within the strictest legality.’
⁵⁵

The forcing of a revolutionary programme through the Cortes would not of itself have provoked a military rising. The determining factor was the failure of the Popular Front to control its own militants or indeed to form any kind of stable government. The Socialists were hopelessly split as to what path to pursue. The leader of the moderates, Indalecio Prieto, hated Caballero and refused even to be in the same room with him: ‘Let Caballero go to hell!’ When he warned that Socialist violence would provoke the military he was accused of ‘menopausal outbursts’.
⁵⁶
The result was the worst of both worlds: a combination of weak government and strong rhetoric, mainly supplied by Caballero. The activities of the Popular Front youth movement on the streets of the cities, and of the anarchists organizing peasant take-overs in the country and anti-government strikes in the factories, made the rhetoric seem serious to the already frightened middle and artisanal classes, and ordinary army and police officers. The militant Left, meaning the youth movement street gangs, the anarchists, the newly formed revolutionary Marxist party, the
POUM
[Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista)
and the
‘Syndicos Libres’
took the lead in the violence, to which emergent fascist
gangs responded with enthusiasm. Attempts later made to attribute Left violence to fascist
‘agents provocateurs’
are not plausible.
⁵⁷
The Popular Front youth gangs undoubtedly bred sadistic killers, who later became the worst agents of the Stalinist terror during the Civil War.

In May the anarchist and
POUM
strikers began to take over factories, the peasants to occupy large properties (especially in Estremadura and Andalusia) and divide up the land. The Civil Guard was confined to its barracks. Most of the army was sent on leave. The new republican riot-police, the Assault Guards, sometimes joined in the violence, or stood watching while crops were burned. In June the violence became worse. On 16 June, Robles, in a final warning, read out to the Cortes a list of outrages and atrocities: 160 churches burned, 269 (mainly) political murders, 1,287 cases of assault, 69 political offices wrecked, 113 ‘general strikes’, 228 partial strikes, 10 newspaper offices sacked. He concluded: ‘A country can live under a monarchy or a republic, with a parliamentary or a presidential system, under Communism or Fascism! But it cannot live in anarchy.’
⁵⁸
It was the failure of the government to respond to this plea which gave the conservative army leaders the ‘respectable civil backing’ they regarded as the precondition of a take-over. The last straw came on 11 July when the body of the right-wing parliamentarian, Calvo Sotelo, was discovered, murdered by Assault Guards in reprisal for the killing of two of them by a right-wing gang.
⁵⁹
Two days later Robles publicly accused the government of responsibility. Civil war broke out on the 17 July and Robles, unwilling to be a party to a
putsch
, went to France.
⁶⁰

The Civil War occurred because the indecisive February election reflected accurately a country which was almost equally divided; foreign intervention prolonged the war for two-and-a-half years. No episode in the 1930s has been more lied about than this one, and only in recent years have historians begun to dig it out from the mountain of mendacity beneath which it was buried for a generation. What emerges is not a struggle between good and evil but a general tragedy. The insurgent generals quickly established control of the south and west. But they failed to take Madrid, and the government continued to control most of the north and east until well into 1938. Behind the lines thus established, each side committed appalling atrocities against their opponents, real or imaginary.

For the Republicans, the Catholic Church was the chief object of hatred. This is curious. The clergy were anti-liberal and anti-socialist; but they were not fascists. Most of them were monarchists, if anything. The Cardinal-Primate, Archbishop Pedro Segura of Toledo, was anti-fascist; he was also pro-British. It is true there were
too many clergy: 20,000 monks, 60,000 nuns, 35,000 priests, out of a population of 24.5 million. But the clergy had lost their lands in 1837, being compensated in cash; and though the Church was supposed to be rich, the ordinary parish priest certainly was not. It was very rare for peasants to kill their own priest; but they might help to kill one from a different village. They were anti-clerical in general; but not in particular. Just as the Left intelligentsia of the towns were humanitarians in general; but not in particular. The Archbishop of Valladolid said of the peasants: ‘These people would be ready to die for their local Virgin but would burn that of their neighbours at the slightest provocation.’
⁶¹

Most of the Republican atrocities were carried out by killer gangs, formed from union militants, youth, political cadres, and calling themselves the ‘Lynxes of the Republic’, the ‘Red Lions’, ‘Furies’, ‘Spartacus’, ‘Strength and Liberty’, etc. They claimed that insurgents had fired from church towers; but this was untrue, with the exception of the Carmelite Church in Barcelona’s Calle Lauria.
⁶²
In fact the Church did not take part in the rising, and the help some clergy subsequently gave to the nationalists was the result, not the cause, of the atrocities. Eleven bishops, a fifth of the total number, were murdered, 12 per cent of the monks, 13 per cent of the priests.
⁶³
The slaughtered were revered in Paul Claudel’s famous poem, ‘Aux Martyrs Espagnols’:

Sœur Espagne, saittte Espagne – tu as choisi!

Onze évêques, seize-mille prêtres massacrés – et pas
une
apostasie!

Some 283 nuns were killed, a few being raped before execution, though assaults on women were rare in Republican Spain. In the province of Ciudad Real, the mother of two Jesuits was murdered by having a crucifix thrust down her throat. The parish priest of Torrijos was scourged, crowned with thorns, forced to drink vinegar and had a beam of wood strapped to his back – then shot, not crucified. The Bishop of Jaén was murdered with his sister in front of 2,000 people, the executioner being a ferocious militiawoman known as
La Pecosa
(the Freckled). Some priests were burned, others buried, alive; some had their ears cut off.
⁶⁴

The Republicans also murdered nationalist laity, chiefly the Falange. In Ronda 512 people were flung into the gorge which dramatically bisects the town, an episode used in Ernest Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Lenin was the mentor; the Left murder-gangs were known as
checas.
But they used Hollywood argot:
dar un paseo
was ‘taking for a ride’. There were dozens of these gangs in Madrid alone. The worst was led by the Communist youth boss, García Attadell, who ran the much-feared ‘dawn patrol’
and murdered scores of people. He lived in a palace, amassed quantities of loot, tried to make off to Latin America with it, but was captured and garotted in Seville prison, after being received back into Mother Church.
⁶⁵
Many of these killers graduated into the Soviet-imposed secret police organization in Barcelona. In all, the Left appears to have murdered about 55,000 civilians (the National Sanctuary at Valladolid lists 54,594), including about 4,000 women and several hundred children.
⁶⁶