The Spanish Civil War (22 page)

His plans were soon made clear. Two branches of the plot, one civil, one military, were to be set up in the main cities of Spain, the Balearic and Canary Isles, and Spanish Morocco. Unlike some, Mola realized that the age of the old-style
pronunciamiento
was past: civilian support was necessary. The aim of the movement, declared Mola, was to establish ‘order, peace, and justice’. But it was obvious that the subsequent government envisaged would be tougher, and more lasting, than Primo de Rivera’s directorate had been: Mola envisaged no mere ‘brief parenthesis’ in the constitutional life of Spain, as Primo did, in his first
pronunciamiento.
All could take part in the rising ‘except those who receive inspiration from abroad, socialists, freemasons, anarchists, communists, etc.’. The provincial representatives were instructed to work out detailed plans for seizing public buildings in their localities, particularly lines of communication, and to prepare a declaration announcing a state of war. General Sanjurjo would fly in from Portugal and become President of a military
junta,
‘which will immediately establish the law of the land’. In some places, such as Seville, the Falange was given an important part in the rising, but nowhere were the political aims of that party mentioned. Mola’s first plan included the following provision:

It will be borne in mind that the action, in order to crush, as soon as possible, a strong and well-organized enemy, will have to be very violent. Hence, all directors of political parties, societies, or unions not pledged to the movement will be imprisoned: such people will be administered exemplary punishments, so that movements of rebellion or strikes will be strangled.
¹

The document was signed ‘
El Director
’—that is, Mola. This conspiracy was organized by a minority of officers relying on the patriotism of
others to join in, if the occasion to act were appropriately chosen: not many officers were falangists, and few were even monarchist. But many retired officers were happy to play a part. Perhaps their wives egged them on: ‘You tolerate this? What is the army doing? When will it rise?’
¹
During the course of the spring, more and more officers became disturbed at the continuing disorder. In Madrid General Rodríguez del Barrio, meantime, died, as expected. General Varela was imprisoned in Cádiz, and Orgaz exiled to the Canaries. Their activities in April had become known to the government.

The Carlists were busy in Lisbon trying to arrange with Sanjurjo the nature of the future Spain after the revolution. Fal Conde wanted the dissolution of all political parties, and a government of three men only—Sanjurjo as President and in control of defence, an education minister, and an ‘industrial’ minister. During the spring, meantime, negotiations between the conspirators and the Basque nationalists were begun: Mola and the monarchists sought to draw the latter away from their understandings with the Left, and some arms were even made available to them.
²
The canvassing of possible leaders of the rising continued. Through the headquarters of the eight military commands of the Spanish army on the Peninsula, to the smaller commands in the Balearics and the Canaries, to the three mountain brigades and the three general inspectorates, Mola’s messengers, sometimes upper-class girls, sometimes officers in civilian dress, travelled patiently and secretly by rail or road: names, dates, tasks were assigned, and reassigned.

Each of the eight military regions in Spain at that time had on paper one division, and each division had two brigades. Usually, the second brigade was undermanned, because of men being on leave, or because many conscripts had bought themselves out. Hence, the commander of the first brigade in each division was the important officer. His headquarters were in the same city as that of the regional divisional commander: the other brigade would be in a lesser city, such as indeed was Mola’s brigade, in Pamplona (the second, attached to the 6th Division, whose headquarters was at Burgos). Each brigade had two regiments, of which the first was quartered at divisional head
quarters: the other three regiments were scattered in other towns, the unit being sometimes only a platoon.

Azaña’s government had ensured, as they thought, that all the divisional commanders were republicans; but General Cabanellas in Saragossa, in command of the 5th Division, was party to Mola’s plans. The others were hostile. Mola’s plan envisaged that those hostile divisions and the other units dependent on them would be seized by other generals or colonels, either serving in the city concerned, or specially sent there.

Mola’s agents went too, of course, to the headquarters of the Army of Africa. But Mola’s name was not a magic one. Many commanders were reluctant to commit themselves. What was Goded going to do, they asked, and what of Franco? The generals in Madrid, the UME, and the Carlists still seemed to pull in different directions. ‘The children normal, the nannies worse,’ one of Mola’s representatives telegraphed from Andalusia to Pamplona in April, suggesting the unpreparedness of the senior officers and the readiness of younger ones.
¹
What, too, of the Falange? José Antonio in prison still warned, ‘We will be neither the vanguard, nor the shock troops, nor the invaluable ally of any confused reactionary movement’.
²
Brave words, and they may well have expressed the real views of those old falangists who had been brawling in the streets ever since Ledesma launched
La Conquista del Estado
in 1931. But, by this time, the die was cast. The Falange could obviously not stand aside from a military rising.

On 1 May, the traditional working-class parades were held throughout Spain. They were accompanied by a general strike called for most cities by the CNT. Along the avenues of the great cities, the now virtually bolshevized socialist youth paraded menacingly and confidently, as if part of an embryo Red Army. (
Claridad
on 25 April called on every village to form a militia of a hundred men.) The salute of the clenched fist was given to the sound of the ‘International’, or to
one of the songs composed in the fighting in the Asturias; or perhaps to ‘Primero de Mayo’ (First of May), or ‘The Young Guard’. Large portraits of Largo Caballero, Stalin, and Lenin were carried like banners down the Castellana in Madrid, from whose elegant balconies the aristocracy, representing the Spain of King Alfonso, watched with fascinated horror. Surely this could not go on? Prieto took the opportunity in a major speech in the by-election at Cuenca to point out that ‘What no country can endure is the constant blood-letting and public disorder without an immediate revolutionary end’. He argued intelligently that the current excesses merely made things easier for fascism; and he spoke of General Franco as a man of sufficient gifts and youth to lead a military rebellion.
¹
But his audiences did not wish to hear caution. Prieto was physically threatened, in a tumultuous meeting at Ecija, by the socialist youth and other
Caballeristas.
²

5. Spanish military arrangements, 1936

The elections in the disputed provinces (Cuenca and Granada) were in the end held. In Granada, all thirteen Popular Front candidates won; in Cuenca, three of them, a centrist, a
CEDAista,
and an agrarian were elected: José Antonio’s candidature there was disqualified on doubtful grounds, while the proposed candidature of General Franco was withdrawn. In both elections, intimidation by hooligans of the Left may have influenced the result.
³
Four days later, from his prison, José Antonio (who had always liked Sanjurjo) wrote an open letter to the Spanish soldiers, calling upon them to make an end of all the attacks made upon ‘the sacred identity of Spain’. ‘In the last resort,’ he added, ‘as Spengler put it, “it has always been a platoon of soldiers who have saved civilization”.’
⁴
Gone were the days when José Antonio would say that serving soldiers were useless, that they were all chicken-hearted, and that the most cowardly was Franco.
⁵

On 10 May, Azaña was elected President in place of Alcalá Zamora, by 238 to 5. The occasion was marred by a fight in the corridors between Araquistain, still supporting Largo Caballero, and Julián Zugazagoitia, editor of
El Socialista,
which supported Prieto. (The CEDA and right-wing parties had not put forward any candidate, and
abstained from voting.) After a few days, Casares Quiroga became Prime Minister, with a cabinet much like Azaña’s.
¹
The acid-tongued Casares had a reputation for strength, but it derived from his time as minister of the interior in 1933, and anyway was unjustified: Azaña recalled him at the time of Casas Viejas sitting nervously on the side of his bed, unable to dress himself. Casares was now ill with tuberculosis. Before he was offered the premiership, Azaña approached Prieto, who had had to refuse, since, as expected, his socialist parliamentary group voted against participation in the government (by 49 to 19). The hope of Azaña was for a grand coalition of men of the Centre which, had it been achieved, might just have saved the country from war. But he did not press the idea as hard as he should have done, and the project perhaps owes more to the hindsight of historians than to its practical possibilities. Still, Giménez Fernández remained in touch with Prieto on behalf of the CEDA. But these ideas always foundered on the same rock as in early May: the hostility of Largo Caballero, and Largo Caballero’s control over his party.

On 21 May, the Madrid socialists agreed on the following aims: ‘First, the conquest of power by the working class and by whatever means possible. Secondly, the transformation of individual proprietorship into collective social and common property. In the period of transition, the form of government will be the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ On 24 May, Largo Caballero made a major speech at
Cádiz: ‘When the Popular Front breaks up,’ he announced, ‘as break up it will, the triumph of the proletariat will be certain. We shall then implant the dictatorship of the proletariat, which does not mean the repression of the proletariat, but of the capitalist and bourgeois classes!’
¹
Admittedly, Besteiro told a French newspaper that the conditions in Spain were quite different from those in Russia in 1917, and hence the country could not be heading for communism. The communist newspaper
Mundo Obrero
mocked his inadequate Marxism.
²
Though there was now much real violence, the verbal excessiveness on both sides in these months explains much of how matters went from bad to worse. Did Largo hope, by his speeches, to provoke a right-wing military rising whose defeat would lead to his capture of power? It is hard to believe, in fact, that Largo really knew where his rhetoric would lead him. Did the communists?
³
Their leadership was still modest in quality, the ‘instructor’ from the Comintern, the Argentinian-Italian Vittorio Codovilla, no doubt even more insistent than ever on following Moscow’s instructions: it was a difficult situation for him to find real revolutionary possibilities opening in Spain at the moment that Stalin desired maximum cooperation with democrats.

In May, too, the anarchists made their contribution to the debates about the future of Spain at their annual congress at Saragossa. The five-year-long controversy between the
treintistas
and the FAI was patched up, the former being reincorporated into the movement, but the FAI’s policy for the piecemeal achievement of ‘libertarian communism’ by the lightning action of dedicated anarchists in different
pueblos
remained the most favoured tactic. The congress demanded a continuation of these strikes but also suggested new efforts to reach alliance with the UGT, and made demands for both a thirty-six-hour week and one month’s holiday with pay and higher wages. On the other hand, there was no sign that anyone realized that there was a danger of fascism; and no agreement, in consequence, on the arming of
militias, much less the organization of a revolutionary army, as suggested by Juan Garcia Oliver. Durruti opposed this idea on the ground that a revolutionary army would stifle the revolution.
¹
Idealism there was in plenty, but it seemed so purblind in face of likely military moves that the secretary of the CNT, Horacio Prieto, resigned.

One conference document, prepared by the FAI doctor from Rioja, Isaac Puente, author of an influential study,
El comunismo libertario,
well expressed what the anarchists expected:

At the end of the violent stage of the revolution, the following will be declared abolished: private property; the state; the principle of authority; and, in consequence, the classes which divide men into exploited and exploiters, oppressors and oppressed. Once wealth is socialized, the producers, already free, will be charged with the direct administration of production and consumption. After the setting up in each locality of the free commune [
la comuna libertaria
], we will set the new social mechanism on foot. The producers … will freely decide the form in which they are to be organized. The
comuna libre
will take over the previous property of the bourgeoisie, such as food, clothes, work implements, raw materials, etc. These … will pass to the producers so that they can administer them directly for the benefit of the community. The
comunas
will first provide the maximum of commodities for each inhabitant, ensuring assistance to the ill and education to the young … all able-bodied men will seek to carry out their voluntary duty to the community in relation to their strength and skill. All those functions will have no executive or bureaucratic character. Apart from those with technical functions … the remainder will carry out their duties as producers, meeting in sessions at the end of the day to discuss the questions of detail which do not require the approval of the communal assemblies …