The Spanish Civil War (24 page)

Another explanation for the conflict was that Spain was a conservative country in which an under-exploited economy was kept backward by
a stagnant social structure, while a sophisticated political education and the pressure of population made the old system unworkable. There had to be political change if the resources of the country were to be creatively employed. But while radicals were prepared to overthrow the social structure to secure changes, conservatives were prepared to use force to shore up what they judged good in the old world. Some of the Left were impatient, the Centre could not hold.

The Second Spanish Republic failed because it came to be rejected by powerful groups both to the Left and to the Right. To the anarchists, the first government of Azaña and the socialists had seemed ‘slow and legalistic’.
¹
Many socialists agreed with the anarchists on this matter by 1936. But in attempting to solve the most pressing problems which then faced Spain (and whose existence had led to the collapse of previous régimes), the republic estranged many who had at first, with whatever reluctance, contemplated collaboration with it. The five and a quarter years between April 1931 and July 1936 were thus a time when two sides were taking shape in Spain powerful enough to prevent each other from winning immediately, if swords should be drawn. There had been three main quarrels in Spain since the collapse of the monarchy in 1808: that between church and liberals; that between landowners and, later, middle class, on the one hand, and working class, on the other; and that between those who demanded local rights (notably in Catalonia and in the Basque provinces) and the advocates of central direction by Castile. Each of these three disputes had fed, or been superimposed, onto each other,
²
so that any desire for moderation on the part of one group of contestants was quickly extinguished by a renewed violence on the part of the other.

The problems of Spain were posed also by the question as to whether the democrats, the socialist revolutionaries or the authoritarian Right would be responsible for the modernization and industrialization of the country. The principles of, and hatred for, the French and Russian Revolutions were equally at stake. The desire for renaissance, and the knowledge that Spain was capable of it, was widespread: ‘We declare war on black capitalism, exploiter of the poor … more re
ligion and less Pharisaism; more justice and less liturgy’; thus a founder-member of the CEDA.
¹

The republic was a failure, despite much promising legislation and many good schemes begun (such as, for example, the irrigation and resettlement programme of the Badajoz plan, carried through years later under very different political auspices). A liberal historian is tempted to blame individuals: Azaña, for excessive pride and an occasional frivolity; Gil Robles, for vacillation, rhetoric and lack of candour; both Largo Caballero and Calvo Sotelo for incendiary speeches and disdain for their opponents. Lerroux was indolent and corrupt; Alcalá Zamora meddlesome and vain. Leaving aside lesser persons such as Miguel Maura or Giménez Fernández, Prieto was the outstanding figure who knew what was the right course, even if he was too mercurial to pursue it. In order to keep his standing with the increasingly revolutionary mainstream of the party, even he had to launch himself into impetuous projects, such as the arms smuggling in 1934 or the removal of Alcalá Zamora in 1936. A certain ambiguity and a certain pessimism also characterized him: ‘I am a weak man … I do not believe that there is anyone so insensate as actually to wish to exercise public power in Spain in these circumstances’, he wrote.
²
In 1933, Azaña made a doleful comment that the difficulties of the republic derived less from its explicit enemies than from the men of the régime: their hatreds, ambitions and jealousies.
³
Yet to blame individuals is to forget that politicians are the expression of public moods which are the masses’ collective dreams. The republic really fell for the same reasons that upset both the dictatorship and the restoration monarchy: the inability of the politicians then active to resolve the problems of the country within a frame generally acceptable, and a willingness, supported by tradition, of some to put matters to the test of force. ‘Already there are no pacific solutions’, said the falangist bulletin
No Importa,
on 6 June; ‘the state must disappear’, said
Solaridad Obrera
on 16 April. Spectres caused the war and, afterwards, ghosts dominated the country.

The country seemed constructed upon quarrels. There were now no habits of organization, compromise, or even articulation respected, or
even sought, by all. Insofar as there were traditions common to all Spain, these were of disputes. Spain was invertebrate. As the years went by, all these disputes partook at the same time of half-religious, class, and regional characteristics. The youth of both the CEDA and the socialists were intoxicated by absolute visions of exclusive futures, they allowed those to swing against each other, and hence brought down the state. During the republic, the country had been drenched in politics.
¹
At the same time, also, many people wanted a ‘new Spain’ (which might mean a hundred different things) which would be worthy of Spain’s great past and, indeed, of the continuing qualities of her people. Such motives moved either superficially or profoundly many of those
señoritos
who sang the falangist hymn ‘
Cara al Sol
’ (‘Face to the Sun’):

Face to the sun, wearing the tunic
Which yesterday you embroidered,
Death will find me, if it calls me
And I do not see you again …
Arise [
¡Arriba!
] battalions and conquer—
For Spain has begun to awaken.
Spain—United! Spain—Great!
Spain—Free! Spain—Arise!
²

Similar thoughts moved those passionate revolutionaries who sang the anarchist ‘
Hijos del pueblo
’ (‘Sons of the People’):

Sons of the people, your chains oppress you
This injustice cannot go on!
If your life is a world of grief,
Instead of being a slave, it is better to die!
Workers,
You shall suffer no longer!
The oppressor
Must succumb!
Arise
Loyal people
At the cry
Of social revolution!
¹

On 23 June, General Francisco Franco wrote from his banishment in the Canaries to the Prime Minister, Casares Quiroga. The letter showed a preoccupation with the divisions within the officer corps, themselves the reflection of the divided nation. Franco protested against the removal of right-wing officers from their commands. These events, said the general, were causing such unrest that he felt bound to warn the Prime Minister (who was also war minister) of the peril ‘involved for the discipline of the army’.
¹
This letter was a final statement by Franco, ‘before history’, that he had done his best to secure peace, though he must have known that little could be done at that late hour. The Prime Minister did not, however, reply. Well on into this summer of 1936 (and despite his activities immediately after the elections) Franco seems to have been vacillating. ‘With Franquito or without Franquito,’ expostulated Sanjurjo in Lisbon, ‘we shall save Spain.’
²
At the end of June, all that seemed necessary for a date to be given for the rising was an agreement with the Carlists. For, on 29 June, José Antonio sent orders to local Falange chiefs as to how to conduct themselves; Falange units were to maintain their identity; and only one third of any Falange party in a given locality could be placed under military control.
³

Yet, on 1 July, Mola had to circulate a document to his co-plotters counselling patience. The army was still far from united, and he had to resort to threats: ‘He who is not with us is against us: with
compañeros
who turn out not to be
compañeros,
the triumphant movement will be inexorable’. Franco’s vacillations, if they were genuine, were presumably intolerable to him. The Carlists and the falangists were so full of demands. The Carlists’ obsession was with the colour of the flag under which the rebels should march, the falangists’ with problems of authority. Mola contemplated a withdrawal to Cuba, where he had been born; he even thought of suicide, or of killing Fal Conde, but he persevered.

In Morocco, the army of Africa began summer manoeuvres. The capital was in the grip of a building strike: the contractors, as well as the anarchist workers, refused to accept arbitration while the UGT did.
¹
So much for Largo Caballero’s hopes of achieving a workers’ alliance. There were also strikes by lift-workers, waiters, and bullfighters—the two former called by the left of the UGT. (The bullfighters’ strike, however, derived from the success that summer of two Mexican matadors who were fighting
mano a mano.
The press suggested that Mexicans were braver than Spaniards.) The socialists, meantime, were divided, as ever, particularly over the results of elections which had been held for the party presidency. González Peña, the Asturian miners’ leader but a friend of Prieto none the less, was elected in a low poll: the
Caballeristas
complained that the
Prietistas
had cheated, when it turned out that they had not unreasonably excluded all those who had not paid their dues in 1934.
²

At the end of June, the long expected merger came, between the socialist and communist youth movements, resulting in the JSU (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas). In this, while the leaders were mostly socialists, such as Santiago Carrillo, the policy was communist. Even among Largo’s entourage, this caused alarm. Araquistain, editor of Largo Caballero’s newspaper,
Claridad,
burst out (illogically, in view of his ardent pro-communist views until then): ‘We have lost our youth.
What will happen to the Spanish socialist party?’
¹
Prieto could not contain his anger. But Largo Caballero did not seem perturbed. The Madrid socialists were even thinking of a merger of the socialist and communist parties. The socialist youth, like other groups, continued military training, its organizer in this work being an Italian socialist from Turin, Fernando de Rosa, celebrated for his attempt, in Brussels in 1929, on the life of Prince Umberto of Savoy.
²

The middle path still had some friends. Miguel Maura, one of the fathers of the republic in 1931, called for ‘a national republican dictatorship’ to save Spain from anarchy: ‘Peaceful citizens’, he wrote in
El Sol
in late June, ‘now believe the laws are a dead letter.’ Neither Prieto nor Maura were to have the chance of a coalition. Too many rumours abounded. Panic spread because of the repetition of an old tale that a group of nuns had poisoned workers’ children’s chocolates. Murders for political reasons were reported daily. On 2 July, for example, two falangists sitting at a café table in Madrid were killed by shots from a passing motor-car. Later the same day, two men leaving the
casa del pueblo
in Madrid were killed by a gang of men armed with submachine-guns. Such minor warfare had continued unchecked since the elections of February. On few of these occasions were the killers apprehended. On 8 July, seventy falangists were arrested in Madrid, and several hundred in the provinces, on a charge of sedition. These included Fernández Cuesta, secretary-general of the Falange. (José Antonio claimed that there were 150,000 falangists in June, of whom nearly 15,000 were ex-
JAPistas,
and 2,000 were in gaol.) In the ministry of war, meanwhile, loyal republican officers observed conferences
among those whom they knew to be enemies of the republic. García Escámez, a subtle and charming Andalusian, who had led part of the Legion in Asturias, and was now Mola’s lieutenant at Pamplona, appeared with news and plans.
¹
In the countryside, more and more land was taken over, landowners left their estates, those who stayed were forced to employ more workers than they needed, cattle were killed, the unions encouraged occupations, and the harvest lay neglected. There was much agitation too on the subject of autonomy: representatives of the Aragonese provinces met at Caspe, the mayor of Burgos proposed a statute for Old Castile, while the municipal government of Huelva proposed that that town should withdraw from Andalusia and join an autonomous Estremadura. Upper and middle class Spaniards, on the other hand, left with their families for holidays on the north coast: to remain in Madrid during the summer had once been a social stigma. In 1936, it seemed a risk.

On 7 July, Mola wrote to Fal Conde (with the other leading Carlists, in St Jean de Luz) promising to settle the question of the flag after the rising and affirming that he had no relations with any political party. ‘You must realize,’ he added, ‘that everything is being paralysed by your attitude.
Certain things
have so far advanced that it would be impossible now to withdraw. I beg of you for the sake of Spain an urgent reply.’
²
On 7 July, the Carlist wrote back demanding guarantees that the future régime would be anti-democratic and insisting that the question of the flag be decided immediately. Lamamié de Clairac, the inveterate enemy of the republic’s agrarian policy, demanded that there should be no collaboration with Mola without a promise that the monarchy would be restored. Mola, beside himself with anger, refused these conditions. ‘The traditionalist movement’, he wrote, ‘is ruining Spain by its intransigence as surely as is the Popular Front.’
³
The point was, as Mola wrote to the more amenable Conde de Rodezno (still Carlist leader in Navarre), that since the garrison of Pamplona was composed of men who could not be relied on for a rebellion, being chiefly Asturians, a handful of Carlists were needed to make them soldiers.
⁴
On 9 July,
General Sanjurjo from Lisbon wrote a conciliatory letter, suggesting that the Carlists might use the monarchist flag even if Mola used the republican one: Sanjurjo would guarantee a political régime in accordance with Carlist principles. This solved nothing, but it was about then that Franco in Tenerife finally agreed to join the rebellion, receiving command of all the troops in Morocco—that is, of all the most reliable troops in the Spanish army.
¹
‘Do you think Franquito will come?’ General Varela asked General Kindelán, a retired air-force officer of distinction. ‘Mola thinks so,’ was the reply.
²
It seemed by no means certain. Meanwhile, the streets of Pamplona were prepared for the festival of San Fermín. Now, as in other years, young bulls were let loose in the street on their way to the bull-ring and were raced indiscriminately by the young men, watched by women in carnival dress from balconies. Among the men were many who, within a week, would be enrolled among the Carlist forces. Among the spectators could be seen the bespectacled face of Mola, accompanied by the bearded General Fanjul, the leading plotter in Madrid, and by Colonel León Carrasco, who was to direct the rising of San Sebastián.
³

In London, Luis Bolín, correspondent of the monarchist daily paper
ABC,
had chartered a Dragon Rapide, from the Olley Airways Company of Croydon, to transport Franco from the Canaries to Morocco, where the plan was that he would seize command of the Army of Africa. A foreign aeroplane was chosen because there were no reliable civil aircraft in Spain. Bolín’s instructions from his editor, the Marqués Luca de Tena, a conspirator since 1931, were to go to Las Palmas, but, if no further news reached him by 31 July, he was to re
turn to England.
¹
On 11 July, the English aeroplane left Croydon, piloted by a Captain Bebb, who had no idea of the nature of the enterprise in which he was engaged.
²
Accompanying him were Bolín, a retired major, Hugh Pollard, and two fair-headed young women, one of them Pollard’s daughter, the other a friend. These passengers, likewise in ignorance of the purpose of the journey, had been procured by the Catholic publisher Douglas Jerrold, to give the flight the air of an ordinary, rather than an extraordinary, intrigue.
³

That night in Valencia, the radio station was seized by a nervous group of falangists who announced, mysteriously, that ‘the national syndicalist revolution’ would soon break out, and vanished before the police arrived. The same day in Madrid, the Prime Minister had been again warned of what was to occur. ‘So there is to be a rising?’ he inquired with misinterpreted joviality. ‘Very well, I, for my part, shall take a
lie-down
!’
⁴
A little earlier, he had similarly mocked a report of Carlist activities in Navarre, from Jesús Monzón, communist leader in Pamplona, who came to see him, accompanied by La Pasionaria.
⁵
But the minister of marine, Giral, was more provident: naval manoeuvres were restricted from being held off Morocco or the Canaries; and loyal telegraph operators were posted at the Madrid naval radio headquarters at Ciudad Lineal and on major ships.
⁶

On 12 July, Mola and the Carlists still seemed at odds. But the former managed to secure his ends without surrendering too much by playing, first, on the enthusiasm for a fight among the Carlist youth in Navarre, who seemed increasingly indifferent to the terms of their participation in the rising, and, second, on the flexibility of the Conde
de Rodezno, who had always desired collaboration with others on the Spanish Right (the Alfonsine monarchists, above all), who hated Fal Conde, and who now, as leader of the Carlists on the spot in Pamplona, was able to secure from Prince Xavier de Bourbon-Parme in St Jean de Luz an agreement to support the rising, if one should come, before he was able to consult effectively his uncle Alfonso Carlos in Vienna and secure his reply. Mola thus swept, or was swept, into war with the Carlists on his side, with the terms of Carlist participation left vaguer than Fal Conde, Xavier or Alfonso Carlos wanted.
¹

In Morocco, the manoeuvres of the Foreign Legion and
Regulares
ended with a parade taken by Generals Romerales and Gómez Morato, respectively commander of the east zone of Morocco and commander of the Army of Africa. Neither of the two generals, nor the interim high commissioner, Captain Álvarez Buylla, were privy to the plot in which many of the officers at the parade had parts. Gómez Morato was the object of dislike in orthodox military circles, since he had organized the changes in command ordered by Azaña to secure loyal officers in important positions. The night of the parade, these two generals telegraphed to Madrid that all was well with the Army of Africa. But, at the manoeuvres, the conspirators held meetings. At a conference of young officers, Colonel Yagüe, a senior commander in the Foreign Legion, had even used the word ‘crusade’ (afterwards to become conventional usage in nationalist speeches) to describe the movement behind the rising. Yagüe, tough, politically ambitious and frustrated in his career by the republic, was sympathetic to the Falange. The cry of
CAFE!
—which, to initiates, signified ‘
¡Camaradas! ¡Arriba Falange Española!
’—was heard at the official banquet at the end of the parade. Álvarez Buylla asked why people were demanding coffee, while the fish was still on the table. He was informed that the cry came from a group of young men, who were, it was to be feared, a little drunk.
²
The same day, meanwhile, the Dragon Rapide reached Lisbon, where Luis Bolín conferred with Sanjurjo, who assured him that Franco was ‘
the
man’ for a successful rising;
³
afterwards, the plane left for Casablanca, Cape Yubi, and then, Las Palmas.

That evening at nine o’clock, Lieutenant José Castillo of the assault guards was leaving home, in the Calle Augusto Figueroa, in the centre of Madrid, to begin his duty. Earlier in the year, in April, he had been in command, responsible for quelling the riots at the funeral of Lieutenant de los Reyes of the civil guard who had been shot on the fifth anniversary of the start of the republic. Castillo had afterwards helped to train the socialist militia. From that time, Castillo had been marked out for revenge by the Falange. In June, he had married; and his bride had received an anonymous letter on her wedding-eve demanding why she was marrying one who would so ‘soon be a corpse’. As he left home on 12 July, a hot Sunday of the Madrid summer, Castillo was shot dead by four men with revolvers, who swiftly escaped into the crowded streets.
¹