The Spanish Civil War (70 page)

But what, it will be asked, of General Mola, the commander of the Army of the North, the old conspirator of Pamplona? He was present on 18 April on the balcony of Franco’s headquarters at Salamanca. But he only expressed himself by a petty objection to the use, in the decree, of a verb not registered by the Spanish Academy.
¹
Queipo de Llano was also summoned from Seville and his adhesion reluctantly obtained. From all over Spain, meantime, servile congratulations reached Franco by telegram. He had brought off a second
coup d’état.

Hedilla was allocated a place on this new political secretariat. He refused it. Those who accepted were all unimportant in the movement.
²
Franco tried to persuade him, through emissaries. Hedilla continued to refuse, on the advice of Pilar Primo de Rivera, of Aznar (whose motives were mixed), of Ridruejo, the young poet who was provincial chief in Valladolid, and the German ambassador, all of whom still had hopes for an independent Falange of ‘old shirts’. A telegram was sent to all provincial chiefs in nationalist Spain which (apparently written by José Sainz) told them that, to avoid possible wrong interpretations of the decree of unification, they were only to follow orders received directly from the supreme command. This was later considered to be an act of defiance of Franco, but apparently Hedilla did not know that it had been sent. The circumstances were ambiguous enough for misunderstanding to be almost inevitable. During the next day or two, Hedilla went from person to person seeking advice: perhaps his actions seemed
like plotting to the Generalissimo and his advisers. The Nazi leader, Kroeger, offered to Hedilla to ensure his safe conduct to Germany, and the Italian fascist Guglielmo Danzi offered a similar safe conduct to Italy.
¹
Hedilla refused. Aznar, meantime, was arrested on charges relating to the events of the night of 16 April.

On 25 April, Hedilla was also detained and placed in Salamanca gaol.
²
There he was charged with the illegal detention of Dávila; with the illegal use of government lorries to carry the cadets of Pedro Llen to Salamanca; and with causing the laboratory of the Faculty of Science at the University of Salamanca to be transformed for his personal benefit, in order to manufacture a gas which, in its turn, would have enabled him to assault the Generalissimo’s headquarters.
³
These bizarre charges enabled the régime to keep him in gaol while other prominent falangists were also arrested and charged with one act of subversion after another. On 1 May, all the provincial leaderships (
jefaturas
) of the Falange were abolished and, in June, while some falangists were released, Hedilla was newly charged, with the murder of Peral, Dávila’s bodyguard, and with trying to overthrow the Caudillo. Franco’s legal adviser, Colonel Martínez Fuset, and the new commander of the civil guard in Salamanca, Major Lisardo Doval, of sinister memory in Asturias, played a prominent part in all these charges, both seeing the falangists as dangerous ‘reds’. Hedilla was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted. There were some public demonstrations in support of Hedilla, but those who took part in them were arrested as ‘reds’ and disappeared into gaol. Several other prominent falangists were similarly charged, receiving long sentences which were in the end all commuted. Few of them, however, played any subsequent part in Spanish politics.
⁴
Other more accommodating falangists served Franco willingly, often with enthusiasm.

This clash between fascism and authoritarian conservatism was
won by the latter because of Franco’s contempt for ideas; and, to be honest, many of the ‘ideas’ which he smashed were un-thought-out, second-rate and second-hand, as a great many are in the century of mass culture, in Spain and elsewhere.

So ended the so-called ‘Hedilla plot’, in which Hedilla was almost the only person not to have conspired: yet he was to spend the next four years in detention, hunger and discomfort.
¹
The treatment of Hedilla by Franco is another example of the latter’s coldness of heart, in this case shown to one who had helped the cause a good deal in the first months of the war. It was a bizarre moment, as well as a tragic one for Hedilla, since, the very day of his arrest, the new salute, with the arm extended, with the palm facing outwards, was adopted as a national salute for formal occasions. This ‘dialectic of fists and pistols’, in José Antonio’s words, had been won by those who had most of the latter.

Serrano Súñer became secretary-general of the new movement. He palliated the different sections of the political Right, in particular those falangists who gathered in the drawing-room in Salamanca of Pilar Primo de Rivera.
²
Pilar Primo de Rivera, who had been herself restless in the spring of 1937, became the presiding figure in Auxilio Social from October 1937. General Monasterio, a cavalry officer, and one of Gil Robles’s aides as war minister, took on the post of commander of the militias—an honorific post, since Carlist and falangist militiamen were all integrated in the army.

Franco considered that, since Serrano was a man without followers and owed everything to himself, he would be easily manageable. Indeed, no dispute between the two seems to have occurred till after the end of the civil war. Serrano remained isolated, distrusted and feared. He was strongly, even passionately, pro-German, though he was disliked by the German ambassador. As a onetime member of the CEDA, Serrano had old friendships with many on the Right in Spanish politics. He was well prepared to create a ‘new state’. This was,

what it is convenient to name the authoritarian state, the unique type of modern state which appears expedient, the only form which can carry out the re-education and reorganization necessary for the political life of Spain. Perhaps, in its outward form, this state offers some resemblance to régimes already adopted by certain other peoples, but what, truly, varies from people to people is the dogma which covers this form, and the spirit with which it is obeyed. There can, as in totalitarian Russia, be a complete divergence between government and governed. The form can, as in the case of Germany, have an immoral side. We, on the other hand, have nothing to do with such doctrinal points. Our position derives from our national tradition and our confessional faith. We reject political relativism and political agnosticism. Outside the vast field left to discussion and doubt, there exist permanent truths, certainties, of which political life is composed, and which give limits to governmental action. These are the great and unchanging principles which affect the ‘to be or not to be’ of the country and of the whole of civilized society.
¹

Serrano sought an ideology which would ‘absorb Red Spain, our great ambition and our great duty’ and he supposed that the Falange would do this more than would traditionalism. The main achievement of the April decree was, however, not to give the new state a structure, but to remove the necessity for political speculation at least until the war was won.

Franco’s allies, Generals Faupel and Roatta, met to discuss these developments. The latter now thought that, unless Germany and Italy intervened to exercise a decisive influence both on operations and on the development of Spanish society, the war could not be won. Faupel gave to Franco a Spanish translation of the Nazi labour law. He suggested that he should embark on similar social legislation, and offered to place appropriate ‘experts’ at his disposal. The Italian fascist representative, Danzi, gave Franco a draft constitution for Spain on the Italian model. But the Generalissimo paid attention neither to Danzi nor to Faupel.
²
Serrano Súñer said that these schemes and their inspirers would have been more welcome if the latter had taken the trouble to translate what they had to say into Spanish.
³

Meantime, what of the monarchy? Franco told
ABC,
the monarchist paper, his ideas, later in the year: ‘If the moment comes for a restoration,’ the new monarchy would have to ‘be very different from what fell on 14 April … the person who incarnates it must come as a pacifier.’ But that meant that the return of monarchy would be delayed: delayed a long time.
¹
The only monarch in Spain would be Franco. Surrounded by an escort of Moroccans, greeted with reverence by all who met him, the title of sultan would indeed have been a more appropriate one for the new conqueror, if it did not suggest to the modern ear a certain regard for the pleasure of life. Perhaps ‘Caesar’, much used by nationalist propaganda in 1937, would have been appropriate.

During 1937, Franco’s position received further buttressing; a decree of 4 August, obliging all serving officers to affiliate to the FET de las JONS, stated that the Caudillo would designate his own successor. Franco began to appear dressed as an admiral, as well as a general. At the same time, the walls of nationalist Spain were covered with posters crying ‘
Franco, Caudillo de Dios y de la Patria
’, and with photographs of the ‘smiling general’,
²
while new books often contained a pious dedication to Franco, such as ‘paladin of new epics, present and future, of Western Christian civilization’.
³
The propagandists of the new Spain of the era of Franco were the bellicose priest from Navarre, Father Yzurdiaga; the ‘proto-fascist’, Giménez Caballero; and Eugenio D’Ors, once a radical Catalan republican, student of the Free Institute, now a fervent falangist. (He had remarked: ‘the Spaniards love a uniform, provided it is multiform’.) During early 1937, the press department of the Generalissimo continued to be directed by Vicente Gay, the alcoholic, anti-semitic professor from Valladolid. New polemical
‘Franquistas’
—the word began now to be used—included the monarchist journalist Joaquín Arrarás, who would soon publish Franco’s first bi
ography; the police writer Mauricio Carlavilla, an expert on the relation between ‘
Anti-España
’ and homosexuality; and ‘El Tebib Arrumi’, a doctor turned journalist, whom Franco had known in Morocco, and who was the headquarters’ official reporter.
¹
Gay’s assistant was Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the ex-CEDA deputy for Granada who had been implicated in Lorca’s death.
²
Other intellectuals of the Right came forward to fill posts as rectors of universities, directors of new institutes and newspapers. It was a wonderful time for all those disgruntled, or unsuccessful, writers who had failed during the republic due, as they purported to believe, to the ‘Jewish-Marxist-masonic conspiracy for the capture of patronage’ in the universities or for favour in the arts.

The political crisis in Franco’s Spain caused the death of two people only, even if it resulted in the imprisonment of many. It did not affect the war. The concurrent crisis in republican Spain, of greater complexity, more important for Spain and the European socialist movement, killed several hundred, damaged morale, and prevented the republic from launching any offensive which would have taken advantage of their enemies’ preoccupation with the north.

The republic’s crisis was the consequence of the emergence, since July 1936, of a new force in Spanish politics: namely, communism, a movement sustained by Russia’s diplomatic and military help, guided by a group of experienced international agents, and supported by many members of the middle class. For this was no ordinary communist party. If its propaganda harked back to the Russian revolution, its practice suited, and reflected the desires of, the small shopkeepers, farmers, taxi drivers, minor officials and junior officers who joined it between July and December 1936, without reading much Marx or knowing much of Russia, in the hope of finding protection against anarchism and lawlessness. The communists stood for a disciplined, left-of-Centre, bourgeois régime, capable of winning the war, with private industry limited by some nationalization, but not by collectivization, or workers’ control. Prieto, hostile to revolution, with the right-wing socialists, was still a supporter of collaboration with the communists.
Companys, despite his knowledge that communism spelled centralism, preferred to use the Catalan communists of the PSUC, well organized by the ex-socialist Juan Comorera, against the anarchists who had helped Catalan separatism in the past and whom he, Companys, had so often defended. It has previously been shown how many army and air force officers, for technical reasons, preferred the communists to the other parties and how, while some joined the party explicitly, many others looked on it with sympathy. The astonishing triumphs since July 1936 of the self-confident communists seemed a sure token that they possessed an elixir for continuous success.

Against the new party was ranged—though that suggests a nonexistent formality—a heterogeneous gathering. There were the left-wing socialists, headed by Largo Caballero, still the Prime Minister, resentful of communist infiltration into the organs of the state and of communist arrogance. There were some officers and officials, such as General Asensio, who had kept their heads, failed to surrender to the emotions of the mass and were shocked by the communists’ cynicism. There were the revolutionary communists of the POUM, whose emotions were to be chronicled so well by George Orwell (then serving with the POUM militia in Aragon); and there was the anarchist movement, though that was divided—it was a long way, intellectually, from the nationally influential anarchists, such as the CNT’s secretary-general, Mariano Vázquez, and the anarchist ministers who had been convinced of the need for authority of some sort while the war lasted, to those who still, and independently, controlled the forces of public order in Catalonia. There were also the anarchists who ran half Aragon as ‘the Spanish Ukraine’; and there were those in the factories of Barcelona, who resented the stealthy way in which the state had mastered the revolution, through the manipulation of credit, raw materials and the insistence on the priority of war production.

In the unfolding drama, ordinary people, non-political workers or secret sympathizers with the nationalists, were in a weak position, since the censorship was in communist hands, and often prevented the truth being known. Under the excuse of the needs of war, less and less accurate knowledge of what was happening was available to good republicans, while their picture of the outside world became almost as narrow as that in the zone of Franco. Meanwhile, the economic position was worsening: in May 1937, food prices in Barcelona were almost
double those of July 1936.
¹
Most factories were running down. Only the metallurgical industries, in which war production was concentrated, showed an increase over July 1936.
²
The industrial use of electric power in April 1937 was down 27 per cent on what it had been in the same month of 1936.
³
Wages meantime had risen only 15 per cent over July 1936
⁴
—a stability in one part of the economy due to the fact that strikes, at which both UGT and CNT had been such expert practitioners, were unthinkable.

The political crisis in the republic came to a head in May 1937, but its roots need to be sought in the events of the previous winter. Thus, at their annual conference on 21 February, the FAI threatened that their ministers would be withdrawn from the government unless the Aragon front, still manned mainly by anarchists, were supplied with arms.
⁵
Some time during the spring, the FAI seized a shipload of arms in Barcelona harbour. Largo Caballero brought up the matter in the cabinet and asked the anarchist ministers to surrender the material. García Oliver said that he would give up the arms if the government gave the anarchists some aeroplanes. Largo accepted this without protest.

The communist party held a conference from 5 to 8 March at Valencia.
⁶
The speeches were moderate in tone, save on the subject of the POUM. Díaz praised the republicans of Azaña’s persuasion for participating in the ‘anti-fascist movement hand-in-hand with the proletariat’. He denied that the republic stood for a battle against religion. He left open the question of whether confiscated estates should be collectively, or individually, run. But he, and all speakers, urged speed in unifying the army, and organizing industry for war. Otherwise, he added, ‘the government will cease to be the government’.
⁷
Lister, increasingly depicted in propaganda as the most popular commander, and his commissar, Santiago Alvarez, became members of the central
committee.
¹
As for the POUM, their leaders were vilified. With Trotsky, they had recently spoken of ‘Stalinite Thermidorians’ who had established in Russia ‘the bureaucratic régime of a poisoned dictator’. They also insisted that they were fighting for socialism against capitalism, and that ‘bourgeois democracy in this country’ had had its day—dangerous attacks on the communists’ defence of ‘the democratic republic’.
²
The POUM had even suggested that Trotsky be invited to make his home in Catalonia. Díaz denounced the party as ‘agents of fascism, who hide themselves behind the pretended slogans of revolutionaries to carry out their major mission as agents of our enemies in our own country’. The few POUM newspapers and radio stations outside Catalonia were seized, as harmful to the war effort. During the spring, the POUM leaders became more and more apprehensive. They were mostly ex-communists who had known Moscow well in the 1920s. Nin had known the Russian consul-general in Barcelona, Antonov Ovsëenko, when he had been a follower of Trotsky. Undoubtedly, from Stalin’s point of view, he knew too much. The minister responsible for press and propaganda, Carlos Esplá, explained to the Valencian
POUMista
Gorkin: ‘At this time we cannot have polemics with the Russians.’ His deputy warned the POUM that he thought the communists were preparing their physical suppression.
³

A committee of liaison between communists and socialists had meantime been created. This dangerous step, as Largo Caballero thought it, was counterbalanced by his own reassignment of a number of communist officers—‘communistoids’ (as their enemies called them)—to remote fronts. This plan included the dispatch of the chief of personnel, Major Díaz Tendero, to the north.
⁴
He had attacked Largo Caballero anonymously in a military journal as senile and so incapable of directing the war. During March—when the Russian military advisers and senior communist officials were at their most influential, following the victory of Guadalajara—the Comintern’s directors of the Spanish communist party evidently resolved to destroy Largo Caballero once and for all.

The communists had by then also probably got wind, through Al
varez del Vayo, of a scheme of Largo Caballero’s whereby a settlement of the war would be internationally sought and guaranteed, giving bases to Italy, mines to Germany, in return for the total exclusion of Russia’s influence: this idea was apparently put to the French by Araquistain, the ambassador in Paris, who fully shared Largo Caballero’s views on the subject of communist influence. Nothing came of the scheme, just as nothing had come of the plan to stir up trouble for the nationalists in Morocco, by sponsoring an independence movement there. At all events, Largo Caballero seemed busy on the international scene,
¹
in a way which might be to Russia’s disadvantage, and he had obliquely attacked the communists by publicly saying that his feet were surrounded by ‘serpents of treason, disloyalty and espionage’.

An astonishing meeting of the Spanish communist party executive was shortly held, attended by Marty, Codovilla, Stepanov, Gerö, Gaikins (the Russian chargé) and apparently even Orlov, of the NKVD. One of these—it is obscure who
²
—announced that Largo Caballero should be removed from the premiership. Díaz and Hernández protested. Díaz added that Spanish communists should not always have to follow the lead of Moscow. Fear or ambition kept the other Spaniards from speaking. Stepanov said that it was not Moscow but ‘history’ which condemned the Prime Minister, for his defeatism and for his defeats. Marty agreed. Díaz called Marty a bureaucrat, and Marty growled that he was a revolutionary. ‘So are we all’, said Díaz. ‘That remains to be seen’, answered Marty. Díaz told Marty that he was a guest at meetings of the Spanish communist party. ‘If our proceedings do not please you,’ said Díaz deliberately, ‘there is the door.’ Uproar followed. Everyone stood up. La Pasionaria shrieked, ‘Comrades! Comrades!’ Gerö sat open-mouthed in surprise. Only Orlov seemed imperturbable. Codovilla tried to calm Marty. Such scenes were unheard of at such meetings. Eventu
ally, Díaz was brought to accept the proposal if the majority voted for it. Díaz and Hernández were alone in voting against. One Comintern representative next said that the campaign to destroy Largo Caballero should begin at a meeting in Valencia, and blandly suggested that Hernández should make the keynote speech. As for the next Premier, Juan Negrín, the finance minister, would be the best choice. He was less obviously pro-communist than Alvarez del Vayo, who was anyway foolish, and less potentially anti-communist than Prieto. Hernández soon made his speech, in the Cinema Tyris, Valencia. Largo Caballero asked for his resignation. Hernández said that he was in the government as a communist representative and, if he left, the communists would all withdraw. Largo Caballero vacillated, asked the communists for another man in place of Hernández, but, in the end, did nothing.

The tension in the streets in Barcelona between the anarchists and the POUM, on the one hand, and the government and PSUC, on the other, was becoming acute. Companys’s lieutenant, Tarradellas, wanted to fuse all the Catalan police into one body, thereby dissolving the control patrols which were still directed by the CNT. In this matter, as in so many others, the aims of the communists, and those republicans or Catalans who placed the efficient conduct of the war above all else, again coincided. Problems had been continuous since January. There had been many murders in both Barcelona and Madrid, with anarchists killing communists and
vice versa,
squabbles over control on committees and, in industries, sudden attempts by communists at intimidation. In March, a communist group stole twelve roughly made tanks from an anarchist depot, by forging an order from an anarchist commissar.
¹
When, on 26 March, Tarradellas forbade police to have political affiliations, and ordered all political parties to hand over their arms, the anarchists resigned from the
Generalidad.
The succeeding governmental crisis lasted so long that the Plaza de la República became nicknamed the Plaza ‘of the permanent crisis’.
²
The anarchist youth, meanwhile, inspired by the implacable cripple Escorza, explained that they could not, and would not, die for that ‘pretty April democracy [of 1931] that used to deport us … the tragic alternative is, as it was in the days of the First International: ei
ther state or revolution’.
¹
The fact was, however, that José Asens, the anarchist chief of the control patrols, had arrested and killed innumerable people without cause and still terrified Barcelona. Other anarchist patrols inspired private ‘expropriations’, which were no better than thefts.
²

Eventually, on 16 April, the agile Companys formed a new government of much the same complexion as before. The main difference was that the important communist minister of supply, Comorera, moved to the portfolio of justice.
³
The parties kept their arms, the control patrols survived, and nervousness in Barcelona continued. The anarchist ministers in the government at Valencia had done their best to restrain their Barcelona comrades, but only lost influence with their own followers, over whom they had anyway slight authority.

On 25 April, the anarchist paper,
Solidaridad Obrera,
published a determined attack on José Cazorla, the communist commissar for public order in Madrid. He had closed the anarchist newspaper there simply because it had printed a denunciation by Melchor Rodríguez, the anarchist prison director, of the communists for retaining a private prison and interrogation chamber. The ensuing scandal resulted in a communist setback: Largo Caballero dissolved the entire Madrid defence
junta,
which, as has been seen, was dominated by the communists. He handed back the administration of the capital to a town council representing all the parties. Also on 25 April, a prominent communist in Barcelona, Roldán Cortada, was found dead, presumably shot by anarchists. The same day in Puigcerdá, the east Pyrenean frontier town, a clash occurred between the carabineers and the anarchists of the local collective. Negrín, the finance minister, had decided to end the anomaly whereby that crossing-point was controlled by the CNT. The Puigcerdá collective had become a centre for spying, false passports and secret escapes, and the lame mayor, Antonio Martín, was believed to keep his own cat
tle while insisting on collectivization for others. He was as much an eccentric as a smuggler, more a man of action than an anarchist. Nevertheless, after a violent clash, apparently provoked by the carabineers, he and several of his followers were killed.
¹
Negrín had less difficulty in resuming governmental control over the other customs posts.