The Spanish Civil War (34 page)

The atrocities behind the ‘Republican’ and the ‘Nationalist’ lines at the beginning of the civil war were part of the same phenomenon whereby, in the years since 1931, Spanish politics had become sharpened to exclude compromise; this political extremism had fallen into violence, illegality and intolerance before July 1936. The manner in which the military rebellion was carried out, and in which the government replied to it in the first hours, caused a breakdown of restraint. On one side, schoolmasters were shot and
casas del pueblo
burned down; on the other, priests and churches. The psychological consequence of this breakdown was to cause each party in the dispute to become dominated by hatred and fear: ‘Hatred distilled during years in the hearts of the dispossessed, hatred by the proud, little disposed to accept the “insolence” of the poor, hatred of counterposed ideologies, a kind of
odium theologicum
with which one sought to justify intolerance and fanaticism. One part of the country hated the other and feared it.’
¹
Hence there were no opportunities for truces of compromise and, apart from pessimists (such as Azaña) and a few neutrals (such as Madariaga), no understanding for the attitude of the enemy. There were innumerable instances of heroism, as well as of brutality. The two seem juxtaposed. The case of General Batet, commander of the 6th Division at Burgos, is of special significance: he had arrested Companys for rebellion in 1934, and he himself was arrested, for refusing to rebel in 1936, by his own troops. He was then sixty-four and was shot, after seven months’ imprisonment, in 1937, with his equally innocent ADC. Queipo de Llano and Cabanellas vainly begged Franco for a pardon. Batet addressed the execution squadron thus: ‘Soldiers, carry out your duty without allowing it to cause remorse tomorrow. As an act of discipline, you must fire, obeying the voice of the high command. Do it with all your heart. So your general asks you because you commit no crime in carrying out your superiors’ orders.’
²
Batet ‘knew how to die’ like a Spaniard. Many did.

The leadership of the nationalists was vested from 24 July onwards in a
junta
established at Burgos under the presidency of the bearded General Cabanellas, the commander at Saragossa. He was allotted this post by Mola to pacify, rather than to dignify, him. He was the senior general concerned, the only divisional general who joined the rebellion: Mola was technically a mere brigadier. Mola consulted the monarchists Goicoechea and the Conde de Vallellano before setting up this
junta,
but not Franco,
¹
nor the Carlist leadership, nor the falangists. Mola desired civilians to join, but no names were suggested which commanded general acceptance. Goicoechea had urged Mola at all costs to form a
junta:
‘Even though it is a
junta
of colonels, form a
junta
immediately, my General’.
²
The committee was composed at first of the leaders of the rising on the Peninsula alone—Generals Mola, Saliquet, Ponte, and Dávila, together with Dávila’s two aides, Colonels Montaner and Moreno Calderón. Franco became a member in early August. But he remained for some time a myth. He was spoken of incessantly, but no one seemed to know where he was.
³
People said that he was organizing to such a pitch of perfection that defeat would be
impossible.
¹
Mola, in fact, only established contact with Franco by dispatching to Morocco an emissary by air, Captain Angel Salas Larrazábal, on 21 July.
²

Mola inaugurated the
junta.
Amid the ringing of all the bells of Burgos in a deafening saraband, the foxy general shouted hoarsely from a balcony in the main square:

Spaniards! Citizens of Burgos! The government which was the wretched bastard of liberal and socialist concubinage is dead, killed by our valiant army. Spain, the true Spain, has laid the dragon low, and now it lies, writhing on its belly and biting the dust. I am now going to take up my position at the head of my troops and it will not be long before two banners—the sacred emblem of the cross, and our own glorious flag—are waving together in Madrid.
³

The
junta
then held its first meeting, recognized the existence of two armies in rebel Spain, one of the north under Mola, one of the south under Franco (Morocco included), and adjourned for lunch to an inconspicuous table in the Casino. Cabanellas and the two colonels thereafter formed a secretariat to give such administrative directions to nationalist Spain as were necessary. The business of government was made difficult by the absence both of civil servants and of all records. But the want of the former was made up for by the voluntary service of members of the middle class. A simple adherence to the well-tried rules of martial law compensated for the lack of records. Further, most judges, solicitors, and police simply carried on in rebel Spain without change of routine, going back, if necessary, on all concessions to change made during the republic. So in truth, Cabanellas and his
junta
were as much
rois fainéants
as were Giral, Azaña, and Companys. Mola ruled north Spain from El Ferrol to Saragossa and from the Pyrenees to Avila. Franco controlled Morocco and the Canaries. Queipo de Llano ruled nationalist Andalusia. His nightly
broadcasts, full of inconsequent ribaldries, of threats to kill the families of the ‘reds’ on the republican fleet, of boasts of the terrible sexual powers of the
Regulares,
and promises to kill ‘ten Marxist
canaille
’ for every rebel dead, made him famous throughout Spain. He gathered around him a coterie of falangists, Sevillian Carlists, bull-breeders and sherry producers, together with the fashionable bull-fighter ‘El Algabeño’, who became his ADC. He had executed several of his own old friends. In the north, Mola spoke occasionally on Navarre Radio, Castile Radio, or Saragossa Radio, reserving his special hatred for Azaña, ‘a monster who seems more the absurd invention of a doubly insane Frankenstein than the fruit of the love of woman. Azaña must be caged up so that special brain specialists can study perhaps the most interesting case of mental degeneration in history.’
¹
The general strikes declared by all the workers’ organizations had usually been broken by shooting the strike leaders and the UGT and CNT chiefs, as happened in Saragossa.
²
The republic’s agrarian reform was for the moment allowed to stand if it had been carried out before February 1936; but everything done by the Popular Front was abolished, except in Estremadura, where some
yunteros
who had received grants in the spring of 1936 were permitted to hold on to them for another year or two, eventually being forced to give them back, however.
³

Beneath the military government, the Falange was disorganized. José Antonio, Ledesma, Ruiz de Alda and most other known leaders were far away in republican gaols. Redondo had been killed in an ambush near the Guadarramas. The local leaders who survived, coming out of the confinement where they had passed the last weeks of the republic’s life, had little national standing. For the next month, their old members acted more as a police than a political party. Some members of the Falange, it is true, organized columns of volunteers, but they were undisciplined, more so than the Carlists, and they found themselves engaged in bureaucratic organization, looking after hospitals, carrying out arrests and executions, as well as fighting: they had little time for securing formal places in the new order, alongside the generals.
⁴
Some falangists roamed the countryside with their followers,
shooting people of whom they disapproved, afterwards volunteering for one of the more established columns. These actions were deplored, more than is sometimes realized, but they were pardoned too. A German representative, Eberhard Messerschmidt, who travelled in nationalist Spain in August, complained that the Falange had no real aims or ideas. They seemed ‘merely young people for whom it is good sport to play with firearms and round up communists and socialists’.
¹
Patrols of falangists certainly prowled the streets of nationalist Spain giving the fascist salute with outstretched arm, stopping suspicious persons, demanding papers, and shouting ‘
¡Arriba España!
’ at every opportunity. But after a while the mood changed. All the old political parties were discredited. The Carlists appealed only to the ultra-conservative. Many young
JAPistas
had played a part in the fighting on 18 July and now happily exchanged their green shirts for blue ones, joining the Falange in great numbers. Although invited by Mola to return to Spain, Gil Robles delegated his responsibilities to a
junta de mando de las milicias
and withdrew from politics. He ‘authorized’ his followers to join up in the army as regular recruits and told them to avoid the forces of repression. On the whole they followed his instructions; but they had anticipated them too. He stayed in Portugal.
²
Lerroux, who had escaped from Madrid to Portugal, declared his backing for the rising, but also withdrew from active politics. The mass of the non-military middle class began to see the Falange as their way of identifying themselves with the ‘Crusade’. These recruits soon greatly outnumbered the old survivors. Almost none of them knew anything of ideology. They knew the Falange was against the ‘reds’; what else mattered? Thus, 2,000 people signed on for the Falange in Seville in twenty-four hours in July.
³

In Seville, Queipo’s dashing portrait was plastered up all over the city. Elsewhere, after a few days, photographs of Franco were seen everywhere. Shops sold patriotic emblems. Falange posters covered façades of buildings. ‘The Falange calls you,’ these cried, ‘now or never. There is no middle course. With us or against us?’ Carlist posters were also large, not only in Navarre. ‘Our flag is the only flag,’ they announced, ‘the flag of Spain! Always the same!’ The question of
which flag the rebels should use was actually undecided. It seemed still an important issue. In Burgos, when Mola had arrived on 21 July, the flags on the balconies were all the red and gold ones of the monarchy: an effect achieved by Eugenio Vegas Latapié. When Mola left, however, he insisted that they were all taken away.
¹

The working class in nationalist Spain were cowed, and with reason. In a decree of 23 July, for example, Queipo included passive resistance as a serious offence. Many who had previously been attached to some working-class party rallied to put on the
salvavida,
as Queipo called the blue shirt of the Falange, to secure protection. In several cases, such secret political malingerers were discovered and later punished, sometimes by death.
²
Others were sent to the front with shock battalions. Some Asturians in this position joined the Foreign Legion.

The nationalists needed, for the establishment of the new society, the support of the church. Except in the Basque country, this they obtained. Franco began to speak of God and the church in the same reverent tone which he had until then reserved for regiments and barracks.
³
Nevertheless, just as there were some priests and monks who supported the republic even though so many of their brothers were being killed, so there were churchmen who felt qualms at the cold-blooded murders in nationalist Spain committed in the name of Christ. For example, two fathers of the Heart of Mary in Seville complained to Queipo de Llano at the execution of so many innocent persons. The priest of the Andalusian city of Carmona was deprived of his living by the Falange for protesting at their executions.
⁴
There were also the two Franciscans shot in Burgos and Rioja. When, later, Mola’s forces entered Oyarzún (Guipúzcoa), an assistant priest, Eustaquio de Uriarte, was forced to write ‘
Viva España
’ a thousand times to make up for a supposed previous lukewarm attitude towards the rising.
⁵

Among the hierarchy, only the archbishop of Tarragona, Dr Vidal y Barraquer, and (to a lesser extent) Dr Mateo Múgica, the bishop of
Vitoria (whose diocese was the southernmost Basque province), were reluctant to give full support to the ‘movement’. Vidal y Barraquer escaped abroad from revolutionary Catalonia. The bishop of Vitoria supported the rising at the beginning but changed his mind, because of the shootings in Navarre. Eventually, he was to leave Spain altogether, officially in order to protect his life against attacks by falangists, really because he was unacceptable in nationalist territory.
¹
The primate, Cardinal Gomá, archbishop of Toledo, was slow to give his full support to the movement, although the start of the war found him in Pamplona; it was not till the relief of Toledo (at the end of September) that he was fully forthcoming.
²
Monsignor Marcelino Olaechea, bishop of Pamplona, in a generous speech, did exclaim, at a ceremony in the city on 25 August, ‘Enough blood, my children, enough bloody punishments, the blood flowing on the battle-fields is enough in itself!’
³
He also refused, on one occasion, to bless a column of falangists setting out for the front, on the grounds that they were going forth to kill their brother workers.
⁴
Meantime, the falangists began to show a religious concern which had not marked their policy before. They began to attend mass, confession, and to take communion. Propagandists represented the ideal falangist as half-monk and half-warrior. The ideal female falangist was described as a combination of St Teresa and Isabella the Catholic.
⁵
Bishops, canons, and priests, meantime, daily implored the protection of the Virgin for the nationalist troops, begging her to arrange for their swift entry into Madrid.
⁶
Nationalist Spain
seemed one immense church, full of fantastic images and passions, battered flags, relics and middle-class communicants. Some priests fought with the nationalist forces. The priest of Zafra (Estremadura) was known for brutality.
¹
Other priests, such as the fanatical Father Fermín Yzurdiaga, from Pamplona, a member of the Falange since 1934, came into their own. Yzurdiaga was, for a time, chief of propaganda at nationalist headquarters.

The rebels needed money as much as they needed the church. Their leaders appealed for it on the radio, in public speeches, and in newspapers. Juan March had made credit available, through his foreign interests, and that helped with arms purchases abroad,
²
but much more was needed. Jewellery, precious stones, big and small donations of money and of goods poured into nationalist headquarters. The constant need for more explains the headiness of the speeches and propaganda: one might give to the Cid, to the memory of Ferdinand and Isabella, to the Virgin of the Pillar, even if one might be reluctant to help General Mola. Thus to Pamplona there came twenty thousand bottles of marmalade, a thousand woollen capes, thousands of boots, helmets, motor-cars and lorries both by the hundred, and one by one.
³
Middle-class backing for the
Movimiento salvador
was unquestionable. The cities of nationalist Spain reawoke, with the coming of war: bands, drums, flags, meetings, broadcast speeches sustained the rebels, as if the war were a continuous fiesta, in which the
Marxistas,
not the bulls, would be ‘exterminated’. Loudspeakers played bloodthirsty songs such as ‘
El Novio de la Muerte
’ or ‘
Los Voluntarios
’. Meantime, the local military governors had power to requisition buses, taxis, private cars and even private houses. Most public buildings were taken over, including all headquarters of left-wing parties. In some places, contributions to the ‘movement’ were forced, in others bank accounts investigated. Wages and prices were controlled, usually at the level of February 1936 (more favourable to employers than July), and one of Queipo’s first decrees was to increase the working week in the copper mines of Río Tinto to forty-eight hours. Subscriptions were opened for contributions to the war. Queipo de Llano also ensured continuity of wine, olive and fruit exports, thereby pleasing the important Anglo-
Andalusian community, and established good relations with Portuguese business too. There were less severe regulations in the zone of Mola than in that of Queipo but it was in the north that, in August, a special series of committees (Comisiones Provinciales de Clasificación) were set up to investigate the economy. These were later made into a public state body (the Comisión de Industria y Comercio). Such was the character of the ‘New Spain’ in the first days of what was variously known as the Blue Age (
Era Azul
) after the falangist colours, and the Year I of the Movement.