Ghosts of Spain (5 page)

The three victims in the Candeleda grave, Damiana suggested, were not as innocent as those who dug them up have claimed. ‘It was said that these women were involved [in the killings], that they pointed people out,’ she said. Lorente’s grandmother
Virtudes
, the mayoress claimed, had once threatened to kill her own mother with a cobbler’s spike after an argument over a loaf of bread. The mayor had to organise an escort for her.

In a place this small, the renewed arguing over events of
sixty-six
years earlier had quickly turned personal. ‘The younger
generations
of the Lorente family and my family are friends. He has told them one side of the story. I never wanted to tell them mine. I never talked about it. But now I have been forced to,’ she said. Her own, personal, vow of silence had been broken.

Her uncle had, she suggested, turned to violence only after
several
members of his own family were killed by the left. ‘My uncle fled. He hadn’t done anything by then, but they would have killed him if they could. Another uncle hid in the roof of a house. There were many families like that,’ she said.

She was unable, or unwilling, to explain, however, the
enthusiasm
that her uncle would put into his job as the self-appointed avenger of the Tiétar Valley. His nickname of
Quinientos Uno
, she suggested, was an exaggeration.

For every person killed by the left, however, his men killed
several
times more. That does not mean they were necessarily more bloodthirsty. They did, after all, have more time.

One of Franco’s generals, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, had been explicit about what was expected of the Nationalist forces when the rebellion broke out. ‘For every one of mine who falls, I will kill at least ten extremists. Those leaders who flee should not think they will escape [that fate]; I will drag them out from under the stones if necessary and, if they are already dead, I will kill them again.’

When the right started to wreak its revenge, Damiana’s mother kept her indoors. Her explanation to her eleven-year-old daughter
for what was going on was simple: ‘Just as they treated us badly, so they are now being treated badly.’

Damiana really could not understand the fuss about the graves of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana. Educated under Franco, she still believed the propaganda of the time. Had not the Generalísimo built, at the ‘
Valle de Los Caídos
’, ‘The Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid, a monument to all the dead of the Civil War, regardless of which side they were on? The common grave of the three women had not been such a big secret. ‘If they didn’t get them before, it was because they didn’t want to. It was always known that they were there. They should do what has to be done, but not go around saying these things. We would be better off keeping our mouths shut, those on one side and those on the other.’

Damiana, like so many of her generation, preferred silence. The stories of who did what to whom, she says, were
cosas del pueblo
– village matters. ‘It was all about envies and old hatreds. What was the war for? For nothing.’

Damiana’s version of the Civil War, and especially what it was for, is accepted by many of those Spaniards who simply found themselves caught up in history. This is no more so than those with men called up by one or other side, forced to fight and die purely on the basis of whether the area where they lived had
fallen
under Republican or Nationalist control.

But the Spanish Civil War, was never about ‘nothing’. British historian Hugh Thomas, who wrote the definitive history of the conflict at a time when Spaniards were only allowed to hear the winners’ account, declared it to be, at least in its opening days, ‘the culmination of a hundred years of class war’. That, however, was just one of the many battles fought out on Spanish soil, and with Spanish blood, between 1936 and 1939.

The Spanish Civil War was many things. A Spain that had stumbled its way through political chaos for more than a century, and where the division between the ‘two Spains’ of right and left had reached epic and bloody proportions, would fall under the yoke of the former.

The Civil War was the end of the Second Republic. This had
been a well-intentioned, if messy and poorly directed, affair. At its best, the Republic was an attempt to free Spain from the
backwardness
and moral straitjacket imposed on it by landowners, the Church and a monarchy that had been forced to flee in 1931.

The Republic was born with massive hopes and ambitions, some of which, especially in the field of education, bore early fruit. Had it worked, it might have transformed Spain. In the end, unfortunately, it was no exception in an ongoing history of
political
tragedy. It had been under assault from all sides, from within and without. Attempted revolutions, military insurrections, strikes, political assassinations, street violence and secessionist moves in Catalonia had left it worn and torn. Franco’s latter-day apologists, proponents of a theory that the Generalísimo saved Spain from a workers’ revolution, claim that it was already on its deathbed.

The Civil War was also a curtain-raiser for a much greater, global war of ideologies. For this was an early round in the great clash between the fascist ideals being promoted by Hitler and Mussolini and the communism of Stalin’s Russia. Hitler’s
Luftwaffe
tested out the carpet-bombing of civilian populations, with infamous consequences, in Guernica. Mussolini also provided abundant troops and supplies. Stalin backed the International Brigades, and eventually ended up with much of Spain’s gold. It was also a piece of calculated fence-sitting by Britain, France and the other European democracies. These turned their back on the elected Republican government and remained neutral, partly out of fear that communism might be the eventual winner, but
mainly
to avoid a punch-up with Hitler and Mussolini. Appeasement had an early outing in Spain.

But the Civil War was, first and foremost, the most important event in twentieth-century Spanish history. It could be argued, in fact, that it was the most important thing to happen for several centuries. A country that had slowly, over several hundred years, lost a once vast empire, finally turned against itself. This loss of empire had reached its final point in 1898 with what became known as
el Desastre
, the Disaster. In that year Spain lost Puerto
Rico, the Philippines and, in a humiliating naval defeat by the United States, the Caribbean jewel of Cuba. Admiral George Dewey sank the Pacific fleet in the Philippines in May. The Atlantic fleet was ‘picked off like pigeons in a shoot’ near Cuba two months later. Spain’s empire was thus reduced to a few poor
possessions
in Africa. The events of that year provoked a long bout of national soul-searching and self-flagellation led by a group of intellectuals – including Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Pío Baroja – known as ‘the generation of 98’.

The Civil War was also a bloodbath that pitted brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. By the time the guns had stopped smoking and Franco had signed his final
parte de guerra
on 1 April 1939, some half a million Spaniards were dead. There are no exact figures, but it is thought that some 200,000 were executed by the two sides. There were also
thousands
of dead Italians and Germans, who fought for Franco, and other foreigners who had volunteered for the International Brigades. One in thirty Spanish men were dead. Some 400,000 went into exile.

The war dragged on for three years. Franco could probably have won it in a lot less time. But he preferred to avoid an early battle in Madrid and, anyway, he was not just after military
victory
. He wanted more than that. His fellow generals appointed him ‘Head of Government of the Spanish State’ in September 1936, thinking they were creating a wartime dictatorship. In fact, in the words of one historian, ‘They had created a Hobbesian sovereign endowed with greater powers than Napoleon, a sovereign who was to shed few of those powers over forty years.’

It was not, at the very start, Franco’s rebellion. The head of the military revolt was the conservative general José Sanjurjo. He was an inveterate conspirator who died in an aeroplane accident on the third day of the war – apparently provoked by the weight of the ceremonial uniforms he was carrying with him. Franco was, at the time, based in the far-off Canary Islands. He started off by taking control of the army in Morocco, moving it across the Strait of Gibraltar and organising a campaign that quickly won much of
south-west Spain. A third general, Emilio Mola, did similar work in north-west Spain, while most of the rest of the country remained faithful to the Republic.

Once Franco took control, however, the war had two specific aims apart from military victory. For Franco the war was a
cruzada
, a fundamentalist Roman Catholic crusade against a conspiracy of Marxists (and their ‘Jewish spirit’), freemasons and separatists. The crusade’s purpose was not just to defeat the enemy but, in good measure, to eradicate it. It was, in that respect, a repeat of what Franco considered one of the most glorious moments of Spanish history – the Christian
Reconquista
of Spain from the Moors. The
Reconquista
had pitted Spain’s Christians against its Muslims over several centuries. It led, eventually, to the forced conversion or expulsion not just of the latter, but also, in 1492, of the Spanish Jews.

Franco’s victories rarely brought instant peace. They brought, instead, what would later be called ‘the politics of revenge’. In its earliest stages this meant retribution, vengeance and more
bloodshed
in a deliberate and thorough cleansing of all possible
opposition
. This was made all the more justified, in the minds of those who carried it out, by the fact that some
rojos
had been
enthusiastic
church-burners, priest-killers and creators of anonymous mass graves themselves. Their victims included thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 friars and 283 monks. Up to 60,000 people were killed by the left, a number probably doubled by Franco’s followers. The difference was not just in scale. ‘Neither the
Republican
authorities, nor the political parties of the left sanctioned reprisals,’ one historian points out. ‘The savage repression
perpetrated
on the Nationalist side, on the other hand, was an official, systematic and calculated strategy.’

‘Everyone who is openly or secretly a supporter of the Popular Front should be shot … We have to sow terror. We must eliminate without scruples all those who do not think like ourselves,’ General Mola had declared. ‘If I found my father amongst my opponents, I would have him shot.’

Franco preferred a slow, thorough war to a lightning victory.
There was work to be done not just at the front, but behind one’s own lines – weeding out and eliminating the enemy. ‘There can be no ceasefire or agreement … I will save Spain from Marxism at any price,’ he would tell the American journalist Jay Allen when asked whether he would shoot half of Spain.

That work was, in great measure, carried out by the Falange, a political party which, despite its meagre showing in elections five months before the war, became the only approved party. It quickly attracted the right in all its forms, as well as chancers, opportunists, the vengeful and thugs.

The other aim of the war eventually became to consolidate Franco’s own position. Although he initially appeared to be a wary and unwilling plotter, he soon revealed a natural dictatorial bent. A small man with no sense of physical fear and certainly no belief that he might be wrong, he also made sure that, by the time war was over, there was only one person in charge – ‘
Franco,
Caudillo de dios y de la patria
’ (‘Franco, Caudillo of God and of the nation’). As the title shows, he served God as much as his country.

One reason that Spaniards, especially older Spaniards, do not like to talk about the Civil War is that they still disagree so
radically
on it. Scratch the surface and most, even those on the
modern
right who profess dislike of Franco, will find themselves blaming the bloodletting on one side or the other. Better silence, anyway, than an argument that might see the blood of one’s grandparents being swapped across the table.

It is a sign of just how much Spain has changed that one of the volunteers involved in digging up graves should be José Antonio Landera – a young member of the same Civil Guard police force that did much of Franco’s dirty work. He told me that his
schooling
had left him with only vague notions of what had happened in the 1930s. ‘The Civil War was only talked about superficially. There was no mention of the civilian deaths in virtually every village, of the mass graves or of the disappeared,’ he said.

Many books have been written on Spain’s Civil War. Few Spaniards, however, have yet managed to write impartially
about it. Rafael Borràs Betriu, an emblematic editor who is Spain’s most prolific publisher of twentieth-century history books, says the time is not yet ripe for agreement. ‘Winners and losers have mostly offered their personal and subjective vision because … the Civil War remains alive in the social cloth of family tradition and in the historical memory of Spaniards. Quite a few years will have to go by before what is currently a minority trend can impose itself in the writing of history: seeing the part of the truth which corresponds to the adversary, freed of all connotations of “enemy”.’

Film-makers and novelists have, generally, suffered the same partiality. British director Ken Loach cast his eye on the subject with
Land and Freedom
in 1995. ‘What shame Spanish cinema must feel. It has to be a foreigner who recovers for us one of the most transcendental pieces of our history,’ wrote one critic.

A recent exception to that rule is the novelist Javier Cercas, whose 2001
Soldados de Salamina
– which fictionalises the story of how a Republican soldier helps a Falangist leader escape
execution
in the dying days of the war – was a surprise publishing
success
(even to the author). The novel seemed to tap a desire for reconciliation – or understanding – at least amongst the
minority
of Spaniards who read books. A notable recent attempt to bridge the divide was, appropriately, called
A History of the Civil War that Nobody Will Like.