The Spanish Civil War (54 page)

At the same time as the 12th International Brigade, Durruti also arrived in Madrid, with 4,000 volunteer anarchists, having been persuaded to leave Aragon by Federica Montseny.
²
He and García Oliver, minister of justice, desired an independent sector of the front on which to operate, and also new weapons; both requests were granted, after a fashion, though the rifles were Swiss 1886 models bought by Russia on the free arms market. Miaja agreed to allot to the anarchists the Casa de Campo. Durruti received orders to attack on 15 November, with all the republican artillery and aircraft in support. The orders given to him were confused, but they implied a frontal attack on the enemy: ‘an imbecility,’ thought another anarchist leader; ‘they are looking for a defeat to discredit us … the communists cannot permit Durruti to be the saviour of the capital’.
³
At all events, when the hour came, the machine-guns of the Moroccans—which they had, of course, not met before—so terrified the anarchists that they refused to fight. Durruti, furious, promised a new attack the next day. Varela chose this moment to advance once again, being covered by the German Condor Legion for the first time.
⁴
Three times the van of Asensio’s column reached the Manzanares, and three times it was driven back. Eventually, Asensio gained a foothold on the edge of the river beneath the Palacete de la Moncloa. After a heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, two Moroccan
tabors
and one
bandera
of legionaries charged across. They found that the column ahead of them (the Libertad column of Catalan socialists) had suddenly been withdrawn. But their replacements were not there. The nationalists’ way up to the
University City was almost clear. The heights were swiftly scaled. The School of Architecture and other neighbouring buildings were captured. The 11th International Brigade was sent from the Casa de Campo to defend the Hall of Philosophy and Letters. But more and more of the Army of Africa, including men from the columns of Delgado Serrano and Barrón, crossed the river.
¹

A bloody battle began in the University City. The babel of tongues, the frequent multilingual singing of the ‘International’, the insults exchanged between the nationalists and republicans, added to the macabre confusion. The marching songs of the German communists brought to the crumbling masonry of the laboratories and lecture halls a Teutonic sadness. Anarchists fraternized with men from the Brigade. Muffled commands sounded in the darkness addressed to men who had never seen the city which they had come to defend: ‘
Bataillon Thaelmann, fertig machen!
’ ‘
Bataillon André Marty, descendez vite!
’ ‘
Garibaldi, avanti!
’
²
Hours of artillery and aerial bombardment, in which neither side gave way, were succeeded by hand-to-hand battles for single rooms or floors of buildings. In the still unfinished Clinical Hospital, the Thaelmann Battalion placed bombs in lifts to be sent up to explode in the faces of the Moroccans on the next floor; and, in that building, the Moroccans suffered losses by eating inoculated animals kept for experimental purposes. Great courage was shown on both sides. A company of Poles from the Dombrowsky Battalion resisted in the French Institute’s Casa de Velázquez to the last man. An advance guard of Moroccans drove back Durruti’s anarchists once again at the Plaza de la Moncloa, the first square inside Madrid proper, and began to fight their way along the Calle de la Princesa. Some even drove down the Paseo de Rosales to reach the Plaza de España. All were killed. But the rumour that ‘the Moors are in the Plaza de España’ was not easy to staunch. Miaja appeared on the battle-line to re-establish the courage of the militia. ‘Cowards!’ he cried, ‘die in your trenches! Die with your General Miaja!’
³

On 19 November, while the battle was still raging, Durruti was mortally wounded in front of the Model Prison. He died the next day
in the Ritz Hotel, converted into a hospital for the Catalan militia. His death was said to have been caused by a stray bullet from the University City. It may also be that he shot himself by accident with his own rifle while getting out of his car. It was rumoured too that he was killed by one of his own men, an ‘uncontrollable’, who resented the new anarchist policy (‘the discipline of indiscipline’, since August advocated by Durruti) of participation in government, but of that there is no proof, nor is it likely.
¹
Durruti’s funeral in Barcelona was an extraordinary occasion. All day long, a procession eight to a hundred people broad marched down the Diagonal, the widest street in the city. In the evening, a crowd of 200,000 pledged themselves to carry out the dead man’s principles. But the death of Durruti, at the age of forty, marked the end of the classic age of Spanish anarchism. An anarchist poet proclaimed that Durruti’s nobility while living would cause ‘a legion of Durrutis’ to spring up behind him. He was wrong.

In the meantime, Franco, having apparently remarked before Portuguese journalists that he would destroy Madrid rather than leave it to the ‘Marxists’, embarked on the experiment of trying to bomb Madrid into surrender. The German officers of the new Condor Legion were interested to see the reaction of a civilian population to a carefully planned attempt to set fire to the city, quarter by quarter. The bombing included also buildings such as the Telefónica and the war ministry, whose destruction would cause special damage. The air raids were accompanied by artillery bombardment using incendiary grenades from Mount Garabitas. From 19 November until 22 November, the bombings by Savoia 81s and Junkers 52s, especially at night, continued, and some 150 people were killed.
²
No city in history had then been so tested—though the attack was a foretaste of what would happen in a few years in London, Hamburg, Tokyo, and Leningrad—as commentators in Madrid at the time eloquently prophesied. Russian fighters were unable to maintain an effective reply at night. But the military and psychological effects of the air attacks were nugatory,
since, as has almost always been the case with ‘aero-psychological warfare’, as it later became known, the bombing inspired greater hatred than it did fear. Only about a hundred houses were destroyed and the Telefónica remained. The Palacio de Liria, the town house of the Duke of Alba, was hit, but militiamen succeeded in carrying off most of the art treasures within.
¹
The correspondent of
Paris Soir,
Louis Delaprée, wrote apocalyptically in his diary: ‘Oh, old Europe, always so occupied with your little games and your grave intrigues, God grant that all this blood does not choke you’.
²
(He was himself mortally wounded in an aerial battle, a few days later, when flying home to complain that his editor had not published his most sensational dispatches.)
³

The battle of the University City continued until 23 November. By this time, three-quarters of the area was in Mola’s hands. The Clinical and Santa Cristina Hospitals, with the Institutes of Hygiene and Cancer, were his furthermost points of penetration. His advance towards the Plaza de la Moncloa was prevented by the continued defence in the Hall of Philosophy and Letters. The two almost exhausted armies now dug trenches and built fortifications. The nationalists realized that any further advance into Madrid would cost too much. The republicans understood that a dislodgement of their enemies would be equally difficult. The Russian aircraft, though used timidly, with few long-distance bombing attacks, were adequate to give the republic full protection. A sombre meeting of nationalist commanders met at Leganés, on 23 November, under Franco’s chairmanship. The rebel generals agreed that they should call off the frontal attack on Madrid. The next attacks would be attempts at encirclement. Thus there could be no hope for Mola of a cup of coffee in the Gran Via’s Café Molinero.
⁴

The question of how many were killed in these famous battles in Madrid remains a matter of controversy. Though the deaths were fewer than might be supposed, given the 30–40,000 involved on both sides, the casualties on both sides probably amounted to about 10,000.
¹

Madrid now settled down to what was described as a siege, though only part of the city was invested. Measures continued against the Fifth Column, especially those suspected of firing at nights from ‘phantom cars’—an act of sabotage planned by a chief of the falangists in the Faculty of Medicine, Ignacio Arevalo, who was shortly killed. The police knocked one night at the Finnish Embassy in the Calle Fernando el Santo, to be refused admittance. From inside, someone opened fire (one policeman being hit). Finally breaking in, the police, headed by the young communist director of security, Serrano Poncela, and the ubiquitous Koltsov, found 525 Spanish bourgeois persons within. The Embassy officials, save one Spanish-born employee, had all left for Valencia.
²
Another characteristic event at the start of the winter was the murder of the Baron de Borchgrave, the Belgian chargé. He had persuaded several of his compatriots in the International Brigade to desert. One night, his body, with two others, was discovered outside Madrid.
³
By then, nearly all the embassies in Madrid had been removed to Valencia, the American one being the last; yet the situation remained diplomatically odd since, while the ambassadors lingered on at St Jean de Luz as if the summer were lasting forever, small staffs of officials remained in Madrid to look after right-wing refugees.

On 13 December, the nationalists sought to continue an offensive tentatively begun ten days earlier, aiming to cut off the republicans in the Guadarramas and ultimately to surround Madrid from the north.
⁴
The battle took the form of a struggle by the nationalists to reach the Madrid-Corunna road some miles short of El Escorial. General Orgaz, newly appointed supreme commander of the Madrid front in place of Mola, directed operations. Varela commanded in the field. Beneath him were assembled 18,000 infantry and cavalry, organized into four mobile brigades under García Escámez, Barrón, Sáenz de Buruaga, and Monasterio.
¹
The nationalists began, as usual, with a heavy artillery bombardment. On 14 December, the advance began on Boadilla del Monte, a lonely
pueblo
in the plain of Castile (though less than twenty miles from Madrid) dominated by a small monastery. By
night, the town had fallen. The republican defence there consisted of a series of heterogeneous battalions under Major Barceló, a republican army officer who, like many other regular soldiers, had joined the communist party since he was attracted by its discipline. A detachment of Russian tanks, under General Pavlov, recently appointed to take over command from Krivoshein of the tanks sent from Russia to Spain, and both International Brigades, were flung into the battle. (The two British volunteer groups attached to the Thaelmann and the Commune de Paris Battalions, Cornford’s group and Romilly’s, met for the first time beneath the ilex trees on the road to Boadilla.) The nationalists retired from Boadilla, and the Dombrowsky and Thaelmann Battalions entered it. Then the nationalists surrounded them. A terrible fight ensued. Casualties on both sides were high. The Dombrowsky and Thaelmann Battalions left seventy-eight corpses behind in the town itself. All but two of the ten still remaining English members of the Thaelmann Battalion’s first company were killed.
¹
Another violent hand-to-hand battle occurred for the nearby castle of the Duque de Sueca, held by republican members of the civil guard, who eventually retired leaving behind a hundred bodies. After this, the nationalists, having won only Boadilla and Villanueva de la Cañada, five miles to the north, called off their attack.

17. The battles of Boadilla and the Corunna Road, December 1936

No sooner had these battles been concluded than the republic launched an abortive attack on the Córdoba front. A new republican Army of the South had just been organized under General Martínez Monje, with the Russian Meretzkov as adviser, commanding columns which were about to be transformed into Mixed Brigades. A minor nationalist advance had begun, and the republic judged it wise to respond vigorously. It was during this battle that the famous communiqué was apparently issued: ‘During the day the advance continued without the loss of any territory’. By this time, the British volunteers for the International Brigade had been numerous enough to permit the formation of a full British ‘No. 1 Company’, 145 strong, now at
tached to the French, Marseillaise, Battalion of the newly organized 14th International Brigade, commanded by the Polish General ‘Walter’ (Šwierczewski).
¹
These Anglo-Saxons were commanded by Captain George Nathan, who, having risen to the rank of CSM during the First World War, had then become briefly an officer in the Brigade of Guards. He genuinely found himself as a leader in Spain—resourceful, brave as a lion, and respected by all.
²
One section of the British was composed of Irishmen who all had, it was said, ‘experience of warfare in Ireland’. Their chivalrous leader, Frank Ryan, had been a radical member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) since 1918.
³
The company left by train for the Andújar front on Christmas Eve and fought with the rest of the Brigade between 28 and 29 December, without success, to capture the small village of Lopera. In this battle died Ralph Fox, the commissar of the company, and communist poet.
⁴
Another promising English poet, John Cornford, was also killed, on the day following his twenty-first birthday.
⁵
In the same action died Pepe, ‘El Algabeño’, the aide of Queipo de Llano, bull-fighter turned falangist, and now column commander. He died as he had lived, violently; ‘we killed a lot of people, it’s true’, he once admitted, ‘but they had the last rights and could confess. They no. You can see the difference.’
⁶
The consequence of this action was the rebel capture of some 1,000 square miles of good land, some towns, and the hydro-electric
station at El Carpio. In their retreat, as usual, the republicans shot any prisoners which they had made of the Right, especially at Montoro.