The Spanish Civil War (56 page)

By the spring of 1937, the balance of power at sea lay with the nationalists, due chiefly to the neglect of this side of the matter by their opponents; and this, as much as military organization, was a determining element. The republican fleet based in Cartagena never sallied out into the Atlantic again after the end of September, leaving the Cantabrian coast ill defended; a victory for the nationalists as great, if not so noticeable, as the advance of the Army of Africa to Madrid.

The nationalists were, however, adversely affected by other technical factors: namely, that the international telephone was controlled throughout the war by the republic. They had also only one of Spain’s three cableheads at the beginning: that at Vigo, whereas both those at
Málaga and Bilbao were in republican hands. Communications from Salamanca to Vigo were bad. This meant that the nationalists’ links with the outside world were less satisfactory than those of the republic. Journalists with the republican press were thus usually first with the news.
¹

Franco had now no rivals among his fellow generals and neither the falangists nor the Carlists were in a position to make any effective challenge to him, much less the old political parties. The falangists, the few ‘old shirts’ and the vast number of new ones, were still trying to find their political bearing. Few political parties, after all, have ever grown so fast as they—not even the communist party in the republic. From 75,000 as a maximum in July, they had, from whatever origin, nearly a million members at the end of the year. New falangist newspapers had sprung up everywhere. Hedilla, the new if temporary national
jefe,
worked hard to make of the vastly expanded movement a genuine party, but the demands of war prevented him from meeting with much success. The new
junta
of the Falange did found two small ‘military schools’ for militia officers at Salamanca and Seville but these were not successful. Their best units were taken over by the army proper. At the end of 1936, the movement claimed that it had sent 50,000 men to the front, with 30,000 in the rear—though those figures may have been exaggerated.
²
Actually, the Falange had more difficulties in their own ranks than they had with Franco. Some falangists were looking to Franco as a potential leader of a fascist Spain, and some hoped for much more from Hedilla. Others conspired with the Germans and Italians. Meantime, much the most remarkable falangist institution was the Auxilio de Invierno (Winter Help) founded in Valladolid by the dynamic, and energetic, Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, the widow of Onésimo Redondo. It began in October in a single room in Valladolid as a centre for orphan children. Within a few months, it had branches throughout nationalist Spain and Mercedes Sanz Bachiller was competing with Pilar Primo de Rivera, the founder’s sister, as the dominant female leader.
³
Since its title seemed too close to that of a similar Nazi body in Germany, it changed its name to Auxilio Social
(Social Help). Some of the staff of this organization were trained in Germany. One dour task was to look after the children of dead republicans or ‘Marxists’. (‘First the fathers are shot, then the children get charity’ was a cynical comment.) These improvised social centres were nevertheless lively places, run by the wives and daughters of the rich, a little patronizingly perhaps, but with a dedication that, had it been geared to society before the war, might have rendered the war unnecessary.
¹
Other bodies grew out of Auxilio Social. These included the Cocinas de Hermandad (‘Brotherhood Kitchens’), organizations for making clothes for the destitute, and maternity homes. The ‘Margaritas’, the Carlist women’s organization, also did much social work.

General Franco’s only serious difficulties in the winter of 1936–7 were with the Carlists. On 8 December, the Carlist high command set up a ‘Royal Military Academy’ for the training of young officers in both military and ideological matters. Mola gave his approval. The Falange, after all, had two such centres of the military arts. But the initiators had not consulted Franco, who told General Dávila to inform the Conde de Rodezno that the creation of the Military Academy could only be considered an attempt at a
coup d’état.
Fal Conde, the Carlist supreme leader, the inspiration of the plan for the Academy, was ordered by Dávila to leave the country within forty-eight hours, unless he wished to appear before a war tribunal. The Carlist war
junta
considered this peremptory instruction on 20 December. They decided to agree, under protest, in order to prove their innocence of any attempt at a
coup;
and Fal Conde left for Lisbon, the favourite resort of right-wing exiles from Spain. Franco followed this with a decree uniting all the militias—Carlist, falangist and CEDA—and placing them all under an orthodox military authority.
²
Franco later told the German ambassador that he would have had Fal Conde shot had he not feared for the effects upon Carlist morale at the front.
³
The fighting spirit of the Carlists, indeed, could not be gainsaid. One
requeté
was apparently asked who should be told if he were to die. ‘My father, José María de Hernandorena, of the Montejurra militia, aged sixty-five.’ ‘And if he should be killed too?’ ‘My son, José María de Hernandorena,
of the Montejurra militia, aged fifteen.’
¹
The Carlist movement, meantime, had expanded almost as much as the Falange and, since October, had been launching initiatives to influence the development of the nationalist state.

By January, the number of Peninsular volunteer battalions must have been a hundred. Many young middle-class Spaniards and ex-rankers were under training at the twenty-two officers’ schools, all aged between eighteen and thirty, all with a
bachillerato,
all with two months’ experience of war and directed by General Orgaz, with the help of German instructors. These ‘provisional officers’ (
alféreces provisionales
), who had twenty-four days of training, would be the core of the future nationalist army, despite their high death rate: ‘provisional officer, certain corpse’ was one macabre joke current in Burgos. Some 3,000 or 4,000 officers had been provided by Orgaz by the end of the winter of 1936–7.
²

The commanders preferred to organize their recruits, as at the beginning of the war, in columns, not brigades, so that, in that way, they remained more old-fashioned than the republicans. During the spring, nevertheless, the first mixed brigades of the nationalist army, with ordnance, machine-gun and technical arms combined, began to be formed. By then, over 200,000 men were under arms in nationalist Spain: the Army of Africa reached 60,000, the
requetés
and falangists together numbered 120,000; and there were 25,000 cavalry, artillery, engineers and other services. Soon this army began to be composed of divisions, with territorial names.

Some intellectual framework to these diverse efforts seemed in that time of ideologies desirable. Nicolás Franco favoured the creation of a ‘patriotic party’, such as Primo de Rivera’s Patriotic Union. A hundred ideas were canvassed: a Francoist Falange? ‘Restoration’?—words which went further than One Country, One State, One Leader. But how far could they go in the course of the war? On 27 February, the ‘Royal March’ became the national anthem of Franco’s Spain. But the ‘
Oriamendi
’, the ‘
Cara al Sol
’, and the anthem of the Legion also had to be listened to standing up, in honour of the dead. Even so, with the red
and gold flag, the change seemed encouraging to monarchists. But what monarchy? Surely not that of 1931, much less that of 1923. The ‘new state’ of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose emblem, the yoke and the arrows, was everywhere to be seen? The Moorish bodyguard outside Franco’s headquarters, on the other hand, suggested a more despotic style of authority than Spain had seen in its kings for generations. One political attitude, negative though it might seem, was constant: to kill the nineteenth century, ‘liberal, decadent, masonic, materialist and Frenchified’, and ‘to return to impregnate ourselves with the spirit of the sixteenth century, imperial, heroic, proud, Castilian, spiritual, mythical and chivalrous’.
¹
One sign of this new heroic attitude was the change in street names: nineteenth-century politicians, such as Castelar or Salmerón, disappeared as well as, naturally, ‘14 April’ from the cities, which were taken over by ‘Berlin’, ‘Labour’, or ‘San José’. In the no-man’s-land where propaganda, ideology, and battle cries became one, it was sometimes hard to know if these thoughts represented revolution or counter-revolution. There was a press campaign, for example, in favour of ‘concision, rapidity, and an end to the spirit of procrastination’. The rehispanization of customs, names of hotels, and even of dishes became a fever in the minds of propagandists, who tried to insist that everything sounding foreign should vanish from the vocabulary: Russian salad became ‘national’ salad,
ragoût
left the menus, even the
tortilla a la francesa
lost its gallic name. (What should it become? Simply
tortilla.
)
²
That was the way to talk with ‘an imperial accent’. Major Bruno burned 5,000 books in Córdoba. There was a comparable drive to banish other ‘liberal’ ways of behaving: the full bathing-suit was
de rigueur
at two years old and for all men, there was ‘war on the
decolleté
dress’, and the short skirt. The sleeve had to go to the wrist, while all egalitarian manners and styles of address were severely frowned upon. Anyone who said
salud
in republican style risked a visit from the police.

There were many other manifestations of the fascist counter-renaissance of which there were so many comparable examples in Italy and Germany.
³
Nationalist Spain was thus in the early stages of a cul
tural revolution. Three elements—conservatism, reactionary nostalgia and fascism—were alike present in the nationalist movement, but there was also Millán Astray’s evangelical medievalism and his appeals for a return to chivalrous christianity. ‘To me,
mutilados!
’ he would bellow to the war-wounded, in his capacity as president of their association, just as once he had called ‘
A mí la Legión
’ to the Foreign Legion; and the men in wheelchairs and crutches would do their poor best to come to attention. The propaganda worked. Fighting for ‘old Spain’, against Russia, ‘Marxismo’, and masonry, many upper- and middle-class Spaniards found in ‘the movement’ something which almost did take them back to the days of the Crusades. The young Duque de Fernán Núñez, for example, who was killed on the Madrid front in November, wrote a classical last letter to his wife which expresses in mood the unreflective nobility of a paladin: ‘Thus I am going, tranquil and constant, regretting only making you suffer … I hope [the children] may live in a world calmer and more normal than this, one where Manolo will continue the traditions of the house, practising virtue, duty and work, and knowing how to choose our friends.’
¹
It may be, however, that young Manolo and his friends would have been already ranged in the ranks of nationalist Spain’s equivalent of Mussolini’s
balilla
or youth movement: under the name of
pelayos, cadetes
or
flechas,
the small boys of Salamanca, Seville and Burgos paraded these days in uniforms of the Falange, or the Carlists, with wooden rifles.

The church remained a fervent ally of the régime. Characteristic of the régime’s propagandists was the depiction on nearly all its postage stamps of views of cathedrals, taking the place of the faces of republican or socialist leaders. Divorces and civil marriages concluded under the republic were annulled. Sermons were often close to political harangues. Priests would often end their sermons with a ‘
¡Viva España!
’ or a
viva
for the Generalissimo. One Sunday, in the monastery of La Merced at Burgos, during high mass, the priest broke off spontaneously in the middle of administering the sacrament.

O, you that hear me [he said]! You who call yourselves Christians! You are to blame for much that has happened. For you have tolerated in your
midst, yea, and even employed in your service workmen banded together in organizations hostile to our God and our country. You have heeded not our warnings and have consorted with Jews and freemasons, atheists and renegades, so helping to strengthen the power of the very lodges whose aim it was to hurl us all into chaos. Be warned of the tragedies of today! You should be to all these people—as we must all be—as fire to water … no dealings with them of any kind … no pardon for criminal destroyers of churches and murderers of holy priests and ministers. Let their seed be stamped out—the evil seed—the seed of the Devil. For verily the sons of Beelzebub are also the enemies of God!
¹

Catholics knew that hundreds of priests had been murdered in republican Spain, and believed that the numbers of the dead churchmen were greater even than they really were. There were few families too by now who had not had some relation, or close friend, shot on the other side of the battle-line. Further, the nationalist zone was increasingly reached by people after amazing journeys of great danger, and the stories of such people filled the papers. The Civil Governor of Córdoba, Marín Alcazar, would end his wild speeches on the radio with medieval cries such as ‘
¡Santiago ¡Cierra España!
’ (‘Santiago’ and ‘Close ranks Spain’.
²

There was a difference between the commitment of the Spanish hierarchy to the nationalist cause, and the attitude of the Vatican. True, when, in September, Pope Pius XI had received six hundred Spanish refugees from the republic, he had spoken of the ‘satanic’ behaviour of the godless in Spain.
³
But now, at the end of December, Franco complained to the Italian ambassador, Cantalupo, of the Pope’s attitude to the nationalist cause. His representative at the Vatican had suggested to the Pope that he should publicly condemn the Basques. But Pius refused, perhaps due to the influence of Monsignor Múgica, the bishop of Vitoria. The furthest that the Pope would go would be to issue a condemnation of Catholic cooperation with communists. He also complained of the execution of Basque priests by nationalist troops, and showed himself gloomy about Franco’s prospects.
⁴
Presumably
this attitude on the part of the Pope was caused by the relations of Franco with Mussolini and Hitler. But these Roman hesitations were only rarely felt by priests and Catholics in Spain. For them, the ‘crusade’ was a holy war; the bishop of Salamanca had described communists and anarchists as sons of Cain, and the primate had designated the war as a punishment for the laicism and corruption imposed on the Spanish people by the political leaders: ‘the Jews and masons had poisoned the national soul with absurd doctrines, and tartar and mongol tales had been converted into a political system’.
¹
There was a steady increase in attendance at church: in one village in Aragon, for example, in 1937 only 58 out of a population of 1,200 of an age to go to communion did not confess at Easter; in 1936, the figure had been 302.
²