The Spanish Civil War (14 page)

Most of the leading officers of the army had fought in the wars in Morocco, to whose brutal atmosphere of comradeship under fire many looked back nostalgically. As the years passed, they forgot the blood and remembered the glory. Though many of their comrades had been killed in Morocco, there had been opportunities for swift promotion and unfettered military rule. Many believed, wrongly, that political incompetence at Madrid had caused them to fight that war on a shoestring, without adequate arms or supplies. After Primo de Rivera, with the aid of the French, had defeated the Riffians, the officers who had made their name in those campaigns, the
africanistas,
looked with scorn on those of their colleagues (
peninsulares
) who had not volunteered for the imperial adventure. The Moroccan War had so often been so near to failure, the events of 1921 in particular had been so terrible, that the ultimate victory gave the veterans a special pride. Since the King had been an enthusiastic influence in favour of the protectorate, it was natural that many of these officers should be monarchists. These men could scarcely be described as old-fashioned, for they, unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, had been conquering territory, not withdrawing from it. The
africanistas
were an offensive élite, romantically moved by having ‘written a glorious page’ in history, by riding in triumph to sacred Xauen. Many of them had had a desire to improve, in a paternal way, no doubt, the lot of the sixty-six tribes of Spanish Morocco: Silvestre, the general who lost at Annual in 1921, had exclaimed in horror when he saw the prisons in Larache: ‘This is horrible, inhuman: I will not stand it in a country which is under our protection’.
²
The French General Beaufre, across the hills, wrote ‘We fought these colonial wars with a clear conscience, sure that we were bringing with us civilization and progress, certain that we
would help these people to emerge from their backward state’.
¹
Such were officers’ memories; a sergeant recalled: ‘For the first twenty-five years of this century, Morocco was a battlefield, a brothel and an immense tavern’.
²

The ‘epic’ of Morocco plays an important part in the story of the collapse of the republic, for Generals Sanjurjo, Goded, Franco, Millán Astray, Queipo de Llano and Mola, to name the best-known knights of Africa, as well as some junior officers, such as Colonels Varela and Yagüe, looked on Spain itself as a Moroccan problem of a new kind: infested by rebellious tribes masquerading as political parties and demanding an iron, if fatherly, hand. The
africanistas,
though they might have home-postings by now, also recalled with affection the two special units which had helped them to win. These were the special, ruthless Foreign Legion, composed, despite its name, mainly of Spaniards, with some Portuguese, French, and Germans, which had been founded in 1920 by General Millán Astray as a shock force; and the Moorish
Regulares,
created by General Berenguer, Primo de Rivera’s eventual successor, who were native troops raised from 1911 onwards as half-soldiers, half-policemen, under Spanish officers, to destroy banditry.

Many Spanish army officers saw, in their own traditions, a certain idea of a timeless, supremely Castilian Spain, without politics, creating order and banishing all things non-Spanish (by which they understood separatism, socialism, freemasonry, communism and anarchism). They could persuade themselves that their oath, as officers, to ‘maintain the independence of the country and defend it from enemies within and without’
³
took precedence over their oath of loyalty to the republic. In Spain, as elsewhere, the young officer, when still supported by family money, was generally happy. He was happy too while his uniforms and handsome figure could still dazzle the marriageable girls of his family’s acquaintance. There followed a short engagement, promotion to captain, marriage. There were mounting expenses, appearances had to be kept up, yet pay remained low. The military zeal of youth departed. The high-spirited lion of the ballroom became an
embittered employee of the state: really little more than a policeman in a provincial town. His wife was worn by the exigencies of incessant economizing. She pointed enviously at her husband’s once-scorned civilian contemporaries. The average Spanish officer was by middle life dissatisfied, irritable, and right-wing. These experiences might be part of the lot of officers in all countries. In Spain, there seemed a way out. The officer could dream of a
pronunciamiento,
which would place him in a position superior to his clever liberal and commercial contemporaries.
¹
Such action was fully in the tradition of Spanish politics and was not an entirely right-wing one either. Yet few officers ‘rose’ or ‘pronounced’ out of ambition in Spain, at least in the twentieth century; the would-be rebels were usually dedicated men, according to their lights, whose political restlessness was encouraged by the psychological willingness of their comrades to countenance rebellion on historical grounds.

The Spanish army was, nevertheless, more politically divided than any other in Europe, though the establishment of military academies, during the era of the restoration, had caused the majority of officers to be more often conservative than liberal, as well as creating something of a caste spirit. The divisions within the Spanish middle class were, however, seen in the army as well as in other professions. In 1931, a small minority of officers were radical; a larger minority had strong right-wing views; another group again were loyal to the new republic without other political commitment; the remainder, perhaps half the total, were apolitical and opportunistic, if by education inclined to conservatism and to suspicion of civilians. Senior generals would often be surrounded by a permanent court of civilian admirers rather as if they were bullfighters.

In 1932, passions were aroused among many officers by the passage of the Catalan statute. It was not only that the creation of a Catalan state seemed to threaten the integrity of the Spain which the officers had sworn to defend. Catalan home rule seemed a deliberate affront to the army itself, which between 1917 and 1923 had spent so much time maintaining Barcelona in a condition of martial law. Had not General
Primo de Rivera been harder on Catalan nationalists than on any other of his critics? Further, most officers were Castilian or Andalusian in origin: few Catalans entered the army.

At the same time, other anti-republican schemes were prospering. The meetings which had begun in the Calle Alcalá in May 1931 were continuing, with an ever-widening group of participants. At the end of 1931, King Alfonso in Paris abandoned his discouragement of his would-be insurrectionary followers. This followed his own condemnation in the Cortes to exile for life, and the confiscation of his property
in absentia.
A pact was now signed between his party, the orthodox monarchists, and the followers of his distant Carlist cousin. The ‘Alfonsists’ had now few constitutional prejudices to dispute with the Carlists, who now called themselves ‘traditionalists’. So in September 1931, the two groups formally agreed to cooperate. Some future Cortes
fainéant
would no doubt decide who would be absolute king.

The Carlist movement in 1931, for it was no mere political party, had maintained its identity, though little more, since its last defeat in 1876. Like many apparently lost causes, it had split and its members had attacked each other with increasing venom as their numbers dwindled. The Carlist claimant, Don Jaime, was happy to make concessions to ex-King Alfonso, in return for a quiet life. He was a bachelor and his only male heir was his octogenarian uncle, Alfonso Carlos.
¹
Alfonso Carlos, though married, had no children. Who knew what would happen to Carlism after these two princes had died? The idea of a monarchy with power exercised by a council of notables, a corporatively elected Cortes, and regional devolution might survive, under more promising circumstances, now that the Carlists’ other cause, that of Catholic direction of education and culture, was being challenged so vigorously by republicans. The coming of the republic, indeed, revived Carlism at its grass roots in Navarre, to a lesser extent in Castile, Valencia and Catalonia, in a way which surprised its claimant and its old leaders. The various strands of the movement came together again; a Carlist writer, Víctor Pradera, founded a new journal, a daily newspaper,
El Siglo Futuro,
flourished in Madrid and, while Don Jaime made friends in Paris with Don Alfonso, young middle-class Carlists began
to appear in places, such as Seville, where the cause had never flourished before. Money and members were alike found by an Andalusian lawyer, Manuel Fal Conde, who, for the first time, brought organization to Andalusian Carlism. His recruits were usually young and sometimes working-class and, since there were few family links with Carlists of the 1870s, there was greater emphasis on planning. When Don Jaime died in late 1931, his successor as claimant, Alfonso Carlos, broke off relations with the Alfonsine monarchists. The Carlists were, indeed, happier denouncing the errors of the constitutional monarchy than collaborating with it. Some Carlists, such as the Conde de Rodezno, Carlist secretary-general from 1932 onwards, a Navarrese aristocrat, hoped still to capture all monarchists for Carlist views. But the Navarrese youth movement wanted an end to gentlemanly plots in grand hotels; they wanted action, and not to stay forever, as one of them strangely put it, ‘hard-hearted ombre players, assiduous frequenters of cafés’.
¹
As in the nineteenth century, the Carlists’ greatest strength remained in the north, especially in Navarre. Though technically a Basque province, and though Basque was spoken in many Navarrese villages, the political accidents of the past, and the economic developments of the present, caused Navarre to follow the Carlist, rather than the Basque nationalist, path. For the Navarrese were a contented group of peasant proprietors nestling in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The reason for their majority against the Basque statute was that Navarre had no bourgeoisie anxious to be free to carry on a western, commercial life. Navarre was zealously Catholic, with nothing to cause its priests to modernize christian doctrine. A journey to Navarre was still an expedition in the middle ages. Needless to say, the clerical reforms of the republic caused peculiar resentment in Navarre, and would have been enough by themselves to rekindle the old spirit in those Pyrenean valleys—and elsewhere, for, by mid-1932, there were few large towns which did not have a Carlist branch, usually directed by some polite and aristocratic man of violence.

The political ideas of the Carlists were primitive. Some years later, a group of politicians were discussing the idea of a return of the monarch in the presence of the Conde de Rodezno, who then led the
traditionalist party in the Cortes. One of the politicians turned to Rodezno and asked who would be Prime Minister if the King should come back. ‘You or one of these gentlemen, it is a matter of secretaries.’ ‘But what would you do?’ ‘I!’ exclaimed the count. ‘I should stay with the King and we should talk of hunting.’
¹
The
politique
of the chase was, indeed, the essence of the Carlist view of society. The orthodox monarchists, the Alfonists, were rich landlords or financiers. The Carlists were to be found among poorer aristocrats, peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers, particularly in regions forgotten by the central government.

There was nothing fraudulent about the Carlists’ religious, semi-mystical hostility towards the modern world (especially liberalism and the French Revolution) and their fervent loyalty towards
Dios, Patria,
and
Rey.
Yet, while the anarchists thought that a pistol and an encyclopedia would give them a new world, the Carlists put similar faith in a machine-gun and a missal. Others, it is true, were seeking to give the new Carlism a more intellectual colour. Thus Víctor Pradera wrote
El estado nuevo,
an attempt at a new utopia which introduced a strong element of corporativism; but the author admitted that, in the end, ‘the new state’ was nothing more than the old one of Ferdinand and Isabella.
²

The conspiracies against the republic which had begun so soon after the republic had been born came to a premature head in the
pronunciamiento
of General José Sanjurjo, in August 1932. This officer was then the most famous soldier in Spain. It was he, ‘the Lion of the Rif’ who, as military governor of Melilla and in charge of the successful landing at Alhucemas Bay, had brought back victory to Spain in 1927. Subsequently, he had been a competent high commissioner in Morocco. He was a brave, hard-drinking philanderer, whose sensuous face indicated a mixture of indolence and strength. In 1931, he, as commander of the civil guard, had told the King that he could not count on that corps to support the monarchy. In 1932, when he had been transferred, to his annoyance, to the less important post of commander of the carabineers (customs guards), he was easily persuaded by his
friends that it was his duty to rise against the republic. ‘You alone, my general, can save Spain,’ they told him.
¹
He had doubts about the matter and hardly gave adequate attention to the plot’s organization. Apparently, he had been appalled by the village tragedies the previous winter. He had visited Castilblanco soon after the events themselves, and had heard eye-witnesses describe how the women of the village had danced round the corpses of the civil guard.

Several Carlist leaders, including Rodezno and Fal Conde, were involved in this plot of 1932. A number of aristocratic officers, however, formed the backbone of the conspiracy—including most of those who had been meeting intermittently since May 1931.
²
The rising was partly a bid for the restoration of the monarchy, partly an attempt to overthrow the ‘anti-clerical dictatorship of Azaña’. Alfonsists, such as the Conde de Vallellano, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez and Antonio Goicoechea, and Generals Goded and Ponte, were also implicated, while General Emilio Barrera who, having been the general who had put down the Andalusian anarchists in 1917–18, had been Primo de Rivera’s ‘viceroy’ in Catalonia, and was the chief, if incompetent, coordinator of the plot.
³
The plan envisaged the capture of the main governmental buildings by prominent officers in about a dozen cities. The plot was organized in a box in the Comedy Theatre in Madrid. In his manifesto, at Seville, Sanjurjo made use of precisely those words which had been employed by the makers of the republic two years before: ‘A passionate demand for justice surges upwards from the bowels of the people, and we are moved to satisfy it …’
⁴
Before the rising occurred, a young monarchist airman, Major Ansaldo, was dispatched to try and gain the support of the Italian régime. Ansaldo saw Marshal Balbo; promises of diplomatic help in the event of victory were forthcoming.
⁵
Inside Spain, a fledgling fascist group, the so-called national
ist party, of Burgos, led by a fanatical lawyer of modest importance, Dr Albiñaña, also gave support.