The Spanish Civil War (25 page)

This was the second socialist officer who had been murdered in recent months—Captain Carlos Faraudo, an engineer also active in helping to train the socialist militia, had been killed by falangists while walking with his wife in Madrid in May. So the news of the death of Castillo caused fury when it reached the assault guard headquarters at Pontejos barracks, next to the ministry of the interior in the Puerta del Sol. The body was laid in the directorate general of security. The ex-comrades of the dead Lieutenant were incensed at the government which had allowed this to happen; they demanded measures against the Falange. A group went to complain to the elderly minister of the interior, Juan Moles, and asked him for authorization to arrest certain falangists still at large. He agreed, demanding the word of honour of the officers that they would only detain those whose names were on the list, and that they would hand over those whom they did arrest to the appropriate authority. They gave their word. Among these men was a captain of the civil guard, Fernando Condés, an intimate friend of Castillo. Condés was broken by Castillo’s death. He drove out in an official car without any clear idea where he was heading, accompanied by several assault guards in civilian dress. The driver took Condés to an address of one falangist; it appeared false. ‘Let us go to the house of
Gil Robles,’ said someone. Condés, still bemused, said nothing. They went to the house of Gil Robles, but he was at Biarritz. Someone then suggested that they should go to the home of Calvo Sotelo.

Calvo Sotelo had some premonitions of his danger. On 11 July, La Pasionaria was alleged to have openly threatened his death.
¹
One of the two police escorts attached to Calvo Sotelo as a member of the Cortes told Calvo Sotelo’s friend, the deputy Joaquín Bau, that his superior officer had been given orders not to prevent any attack on Calvo Sotelo, and that indeed, if the attempt should occur in the country, he was to aid the murderers. The escort had then been changed for one on whom Calvo Sotelo could rely—though the minister of the interior apparently gave no further attention to the matter. It was, it must be said, difficult to know what to believe that summer.

At all events, at about three o’clock in the morning of Monday, 13 July, the
sereno
(nightwatchman) outside the building in which Calvo Sotelo lived in the Calle Velázquez, in a fashionable part of Madrid, allowed Condés and some of the assault guards to go upstairs to the apartment of their victim. Calvo Sotelo was roused from his bed and persuaded to accompany the intruders to the police headquarters, though his status as a deputy gave him freedom from arrest. Calvo Sotelo saw to his satisfaction the papers of Captain Condés identifying him as a member of the civil guard. One socialist suggested later that Calvo Sotelo believed that he was being taken not to the director general of security, but to Mola, whose code-name in the conspiracy was ‘the Director’.
²
Anyway, Calvo Sotelo promised to telephone soon to his family,—‘unless’, he added, ‘these gentlemen are going to blow out my brains’. The car started off fast, no one speaking. After a quarter of a mile, Luis Cuenca, a young Galician socialist sitting beside the politician, shot him in the back of his neck. Neither Condés nor anyone else had expected this
dénouement.
Condés thought first of killing himself, since Calvo Sotelo had given himself up to him. Instead, he drove on to the East Cemetery and handed over the body to the attendant without saying whose it was. Cuenca drove to the office of
El So
cialista
and gave Prieto an account of what had happened. The body was identified at noon the next day. Soon afterwards, Cuenca, Condés and others who had been in the car were arrested. They made no attempt to escape. Rumours began; conspiracy was alleged; the name of the Prime Minister was invoked as an accomplice; and accusations have never ceased to multiply.
¹

The middle class in Spain were aghast at this murder of the leader of the parliamentary opposition by members of the regular police. It was now natural to assume that the government could not control its own agents, even if it wished to do so. Republicans of the Right or centre, such as Lerroux, or Cambó, or even Gil Robles, thought that, henceforth, they could not contemplate loyalty to a state which could not guarantee their lives.
²
The president of the Catholic student association, Joaquín Ruiz Jiménez, who had previously upheld the line of non-violence, decided that St Thomas would have accepted a rebellion as just.
³
The cabinet, meantime, spent 13 July in continuous session. They ordered the closing of monarchist, Carlist, and anarchist headquarters in Madrid. But the members of the two former organizations and many others were busy calling at Calvo Sotelo’s home to pay tribute to the dead man. At midnight, Prieto (who declared in that day’s issue of
El Socialista
that war would be preferable to this intolerable series of murders) led a delegation of socialists, communists, and the UGT to demand from Casares Quiroga that he should distribute arms to the workers’ organizations. Casares refused, acidly adding that, if Prieto continued to come to see him so often, he would be governing Spain himself.
⁴
Throughout
another hot night, Madrid waited. The militiamen of the left-wing parties—those, that is, upon whom the parties would rely if fighting should come, and who had already been provided with the few arms there were in the arsenals of their organizations—kept watch. Members of right-wing parties wondered who would be the next to hear a fatal knock at the door.

Mola at last gave a firm date for the rising: his telegrams read: ‘On the 15th last, at 4 A.M., Helen gave birth to a beautiful child.’ That meant when interpreted that the rising would begin in Morocco on 18 July at five o’clock in the morning. The garrisons in Spain itself would follow on 19 July. José Antonio had sent a message through his law clerk, Rafael Garcerán, that, if Mola did not act within seventy-two hours, he would himself begin the rebellion with the Falange in Alicante. The plotters accepted that it would be hard to win in Madrid and, they thought, Seville (though not, apparently, Barcelona). In those places, the garrisons, with the Falange and other supporters, were to maintain themselves in their barracks and await relief. Mola, from the north, Goded, from the north-east, and Franco, from the south, would march on the capital. Sanjurjo would fly from Portugal to take command in Burgos. The old campaigners of the Moroccan Wars, headed by ‘the Lion of the Rif’, would thus be in command of their own country. At the last minute, Goded changed places with General González Carrasco, another but less prominent
africanista,
to go to Barcelona, on Goded’s insistence, since Barcelona was recognized as being more important.
¹
Though the conspiracy had been so long discussed, Calvo Sotelo’s death really decided the plotters to go ahead; otherwise, they might not have screwed up their courage to the sticking point. Now if they had not acted, they might have been brushed aside by their followers.

The next day, 14 July, there were two funerals in the East Cemetery in Madrid. First, that of Lieutenant Castillo, whose coffin, draped in the red flag, was saluted, with clenched fists, by a crowd of socialists, communists, and assault guards. Then, a few hours later, Calvo Sotelo’s body,
swathed in Capuchin hood and gown, was lowered into another grave, surrounded by vast crowds saluting with arms outstretched in fascist style. On behalf of all present, Goicoechea, Calvo Sotelo’s lieutenant in Renovación Española, took an oath, before God and before Spain, to avenge the murder. The vice-president and permanent secretary of the Cortes who were present were attacked by well-dressed women who shrieked that they wanted nothing to do with parliamentarians. Some shots were fired between falangists and assault guards, and several people were wounded, of whom four died. These two funerals were the last political meetings in Spain before the civil war.
¹

The atmosphere in Madrid was excited all day. The government suspended the right-wing papers
Ya
and
Época
for publishing sensational accounts of the murder of Calvo Sotelo without submitting their copy first to the censor. The government also prorogued the Cortes, in an attempt to give passions time to cool. The leaders of the right-wing parties protested, and threatened to withdraw from parliament altogether. Largo Caballero, returning from a visit to London for a meeting of the Socialist International, left his train near El Escorial at the request of the government and motored to Madrid to avoid the demonstrations which would have attended his arrival at the North Station. But Casares Quiroga assured a parliamentary public works commission in Madrid that there was no truth in a rumour that Mola had been arrested, adding, Mola ‘is a general loyal to the republic, and to spread rumours of that sort is to demoralize the régime’.
²
The dispute between UGT and CNT continued, sporadic firing between the two unions being heard in southern suburbs.

On 15 July, the permanent committee of the Cortes (that is, representatives of the leading parties in the Cortes in proportion to their numbers) met in Madrid. First, the Conde de Vallellano, for the monarchists, made a formal protest at the death of Calvo Sotelo, and announced that his party would take no further part in parliament, since the country was in anarchy. Within a few hours, he, Goicoechea, and many leading right-wing persons who knew that their lives would be endangered if there were to be fighting in the capital left for safer cities. Gil Robles, back from Biarritz (with his own life threatened, as
it had been for months), paid tribute to the memory of Calvo Sotelo, so lately his rival, whose fate he had so nearly shared. He concluded by announcing that the cabinet had become an administration of blood, mud, and shame. He publicly admitted that he had failed to incorporate the CEDA in the democratic process of parliamentary government, and that he washed his hands of parliament. Afterwards, he left again for Biarritz. The Cortes committee, meanwhile, agreed to summon the parliament for the ensuing Tuesday, 21 July—a request being issued by the party leaders that all deputies should leave firearms in the cloakroom. The forthcoming meeting (which never occurred) was nicknamed the disarmament conference.

The next morning, on 16 July, Mola went to Logroño to meet General Batet, theoretically his superior, and commander of the 6th Division, with its headquarters at Burgos. Batet was known to be loyal to the government, though it had been he who, while in command at Barcelona, had coolly crushed the revolt of 1934 in that city. Mola feared assassination, and the officers who went with him were armed. But Batet merely told Mola that he had heard that certain
pistoleros
were on their way from Barcelona to kill him, and suggested that he should leave Navarre. Mola smiled at the idea. Batet (unaware that his own chief of staff, Colonel Moreno Calderón, was a plotter) also asked Mola for a declaration that he did not intend to rise against the government. ‘I give you my word that I shall not launch myself upon an adventure’, answered Mola, who later boasted of the adroitness of this remark.
¹

In Madrid, the day passed calmly. The ministry of labour published its award in respect of the building strike, which the employers refused. They nevertheless re-opened their works, pending an appeal. Some UGT workers returned, but the CNT remained out. The government were taking certain steps designed to limit the extent of a rising if one should occur. The destroyer
Churruca
was dispatched from Cartagena to Algeciras, the gunboat
Dato
told to weigh anchor at Ceuta. These measures were to prevent the transport of any units of the Foreign Legion or the
Regulares
to the mainland. But the government was hampered in its precautions by having no knowledge of the loyalty of the commanders of these ships. In fact, they need not have
worried: Mola and his friends had made no serious provision for naval commitment to the plot.
¹

6. Captain Bebb’s flight, July 1936

In the Canaries, the English captain of the Dragon Rapide was dissimulating, with success, to the authorities at Las Palmas, as to why he had landed without papers at the airport.
²
A message that Bebb had arrived was taken by a diplomat, José Antonio Sangróniz, to Franco, who prepared to leave Tenerife. Then, General Amadeo Balmes, military governor of Las Palmas, was shot dead at target practice. This mishap (which in the excitable atmosphere was rumoured to be murder, since he had refused to join the plotters) gave Franco, the commander of the army in the whole archipelago, an excuse to go to Las Palmas for the funeral. Otherwise, he had planned to say that he had to make a tour of inspection. The under-secretary at the ministry of war, General Cruz Boullosa, gave Franco permission by telephone to leave Tenerife. Half an hour after midnight on the night of 16–17 July, the general boarded the small island boat, accompanied by his wife and daughter, on the first stage of a journey which would lead him to supreme power in Spain. He carried with him not only Sangróniz’s diplomatic passport but a letter saying that he wished to go to Madrid to help to crush the rebellion. In Pamplona, Mola’s brother, Ramón, arrived from Barcelona to express his fears lest the rising should fail in the Catalan capital. The general calmed his brother (adding, ‘I don’t doubt you know how to die like a gentleman’), who, therefore, returned to Barcelona by the night-sleeper and, like many brothers, and indeed many gentlemen, to his death.
³
Also on a night-sleeper the poet Lorca was going home from Madrid to Granada.
⁴
Lerroux, meantime, was motoring to Lisbon.
⁵