7,00 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, John Dos Passos, Felicia Browne, John Cornford, Stephen Spender... These were just some of the talented, committed and adventure-hungry men and women who travelled to Spain to join the struggle against General Franco's fascist rebellion. Through their personal letters, diaries and memoirs, David Boyd Haycock brings the experiences of these remarkable individuals -- as well as many less celebrated but equally compelling figures -- stunningly to life. He describes the mingled excitement and trepidation with which they set out for Spain, and their sheer relief that here at last was a chance to do something against the calamitous threat posed by Fascism. He evokes the glamour and the terror of wartime Barcelona, as Stalin's security forces lethally stifled dissent and imposed Party orthodoxy. And he charts the painful disillusionment of a generation of men and women as they witnessed the triumph of realpolitik over morality, and came to understand their impotence in the face of greater forces. Hemingway described the Spanish Civil War as 'the dress rehearsal for the inevitable European war'. I am Spain is at once a compelling, scrupulously researched account of this pivotal 20th-century conflict, and a moving, psychologically exact portrait of an extraordinary, passionate and gifted group of men and women whose minds and lives were changed by the experience of war.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Ähnliche
PRAISE FOR A CRISIS OF BRILLIANCE
‘Haycock manages the drama in this tale with such skill that his story unfolds like a well-plotted novel … Never before have the private vicissitudes of these artists’ lives been made so real, or their exuberance so vivid’
Frances Spalding, Daily Mail
‘A vintage decade of early twentieth-century British art, told in vivid and entertaining detail through the adventures of five highly gifted young painters. I greatly enjoyed it’
Michael Holroyd
‘What gives David Boyd Haycock’s book its freshness is that, through skilful use of letters and memoirs left by his five subjects, he injects it with the anxiety, ambition, self-doubt and jealousy that possessors of youth and talent are fated to feel’
John Carey, Sunday Times
‘Haycock’s narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel, hard to put down … We should call for a joint exhibition of their work, to complement the moving portrayal of their lives in this engrossing and enjoyable book’
Jenny Uglow, Guardian
‘An extraordinary book. I read it avidly … The familiar cast is handled in a quite new and original way. They have been made fresh and vulnerable once more, and their work re-evaluated – made new to us’
Ronald Blythe
‘Truly fascinating from every angle – almost a work of art in itself’
Books Quarterly
‘Haycock wears his learning lightly and has an enviably fluent and assured style of writing: you pick this book up and simply start reading. Rarely has art history seemed so agreeable’
The Art Newspaper
‘A sad tale, wonderfully told … Haycock fades the many different narratives in and out with ease’
Country Life
I AM SPAIN
The Spanish Civil War and the men and women who went to fight Fascism
DAVID BOYD HAYCOCK
For Genevieve and Nathaniel
CONTENTS
CHRONOLOGY
1936
17 July: Military rebellion against the Republican Government starts in Spanish North Africa.
18 July: Military rebellion spreads to mainland Spain.
20 July: General Franco sends emissaries to Mussolini and Hitler, requesting military assistance. General José Sanjurjo, nominal leader of the revolt, killed in an air crash.
20 July: Republican siege of the Alcázar in Toledo begins.
26 July: Comintern agrees to raise funds and send international volunteers to support the Republic.
27 July: German and Italian airlift of the Army of Africa from Morocco to mainland Spain begins.
27 September: Rebels retake Toledo and lift the siege of the Alcázar.
14 August: The Army of Africa storms Badajoz.
16 August: Catalan Republican forces attack Majorca.
3 September: Republican assault on Majorca abandoned.
24 August: Accompanied by numerous ‘advisors’, the Russian Ambassador to Spain arrives.
28 August: First bombing of Madrid by rebel planes.
4 September: Socialist leader Largo Caballero becomes Prime Minister.
9 September: In London, the Non-Intervention Committee holds its first meeting.
18 September: The International Brigades established by the Comintern.
1 October: General Franco proclaimed rebel Commander-in-Chief and Head of State.
6 November: Republican government quits Madrid for Valencia.
7 November: start of the battle for Madrid.
18 November: Franco’s regime is officially recognized by Germany and Italy.
14 December: The battle of Boadilla begins.
24 December: First Company of the English-Speaking Battalion mobilized.
1937
17 January: Rebels forces capture Malaga.
6 February: Rebels attempt again to capture Madrid, and the battle of Jarama begins.
8 March: Battle of Guadalajara begins as rebels attempt to take Madrid from the north.
26 April: German and Italian planes bomb Guernica.
3 May: Street fighting breaks out in Barcelona as anarchists and the POUM fight with communists.
15 May: Largo Caballero resigns as Prime Minister and is soon succeeded by Juan Negrín.
6 July: Battle of Brunete begins with a major Republican offensive.
25 August: Rebels capture Santander on the north coast of Spain.
31 November: Republican government moves from Valencia to Barcelona.
15 December: The Battle of Teruel begins.
1938
12 March: The Anschluss: Austria is annexed by Germany.
16 March: Italian bombers begin three days of intensive air raids on Barcelona.
1 May: Juan Negrín’s attempts to negotiate peace with Franco are rejected.
24 July: The Battle of the Ebro begins with a major Republican offensive.
21 September: Juan Negrín announces in Geneva that the International Brigades will be withdrawn from action.
15 November: the International Brigades hold leaving parade in Barcelona.
29 September: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flies to Munich to meet Hitler in attempt to end the Czechoslovakian crisis.
9 November: Kristallnacht: Nazi pogrom against Jews in Austria and Germany.
23 December: Rebels launch offensive to capture Catalonia.
1939
26 January: Rebel forces capture Barcelona.
27 February: The British and French governments recognize Franco’s regime.
27 March: Rebel forces march into Madrid.
1 April: General Franco announces that the Spanish Civil War is over. US Government recognizes his regime.
1 September: Germany invades Poland.
3 September: Britain and France declare war on Germany.
GLOSSARY
Carlism: A political movement originating in the early 19th century with the aim of establishing a separate Bourbon monarchy in Spain.
CEDA: The Spanish Confederation of Right-Wing Groups, established in 1933.
CNT: The National Confederation of Labour: an anarcho-syndicalist labour union founded in Barcelona in 1910.
Comintern: The Communist International, established by Lenin in 1919 as a world-wide union of communist parties.
Commune de Paris Battalion: A unit of the International Brigades, chiefly made up of French and Belgian anti-Fascists.
CPGB: The Communist Party of Great Britain
CPUSA: The Communist Party of the United States of America.
Falange: The Spanish fascist party, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933.
FAI: The Iberian Anarchist Federation, founded in Valencia in 1927.
Garibaldi Battalion: A unit of the International Brigades, chiefly made up of Italian anti-fascists.
League of Nations: An international organization founded in 1919 with the aim of keeping world peace through disarmament and arbitration. Its effectiveness was undermined by the failure of the US to join.
PCE: The Spanish Communist Party.
POUM: The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification: a chiefly Catalan anti-Stalinist communist organization founded by Andrés Nin in 1935.
PSOE: The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, founded in 1879.
Thälmann Battalion: A unit of the International Brigades, chiefly made up of German and Austrian anti-fascists.
UGT: The Amalgamated Union of Workers: A Spanish socialist trade union founded in 1888.
Introduction
‘The Politics of Desperation’
What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.
W.H. Auden, Spain (May 1937)
The Civil War that raged through Spain between 1936 and 1939 was a ruthless conflict: a local catastrophe that, in a world seemingly poised on the brink of another global war, quickly acquired international significance. As Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish friend José Luis Castillo-Puche reflected long afterwards, the war was
a direct confrontation between two radically different, fanatical, totally irreconcilable antagonists who had sworn to destroy each other. The issues were black and white; what was at stake was a whole style of life, a worldview, the acceptance or the rejection of all human history. This was not a war fought in the front line according to tactical plans drawn up by general staffs; it was a battle fought in the streets and the countryside according to the instincts of the people, a total destruction of the enemy improvised from moment to moment. Not only were there grimacing corpses on the battlefields; civilians, too, died dramatic deaths. Above and beyond the horror of soldiers whose dead bodies were riddled with machine-gun bullets, there was the brutal, inhuman slaughter of non-combatants, a collective sadism, senseless cruelty.
Yet this war was not simply a Spanish affair. The overt involvement of the fascist forces of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and the communists of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union – as well as thousands of international volunteers from over forty countries, fighting on both sides of the political divide – created what many contemporaries called ‘a world war in miniature’, a microcosm of greater forces at work, greater conflicts. For as the English poet Stephen Spender observed, within a few weeks of the outbreak of the Civil War, Spain had become ‘the symbol of hope’ for anti-fascists everywhere. And as he added, ‘since the area of struggle in Spain was confined, and the methods of warfare comparatively restrained, the voices of human individuals were not overwhelmed, as in 1939, by vast military machines and by propaganda. The Spanish war remained to some extent a debate, both within and outside Spain, in which the three great political ideas of our time – Fascism, Communism, and Liberal-Socialism – were discussed and heard.’
This book tells the story of the war through the interwoven voices of just a handful of those many individuals who came from outside Spain either to fight or to observe and record the war. The principal British participants whose letters, diaries, newspaper reports and recollections I draw upon are Felicia Browne, Claud Cockburn, John Cornford, George Orwell, Esmond Romilly and Tom Wintringham; the Americans are Alvah Bessie, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and William Herrick (who later changed his name to William Horvitz). But the Spanish war touched the lives of many other foreign anti-fascists, and the names that appear in this book include Britons, Americans, Irishmen, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans and a Hungarian: names such as W.H. Auden, Kitty Bowler, Robert Capa, Cyril Connolly, Martha Gellhorn, Laurie Lee, Herbert Matthews, Dorothy Parker, Gustav Regler, Frank Ryan, Stephen Spender, George Steer, Gerda Taro and Philip Toynbee.
That most of these foreign participants were writers and artists is not intended to diminish the role played by the tens of thousands of other men and women who travelled to Spain to aid the Republican cause, nor that of the millions of Spaniards who fought or endured the war. Furthermore, this is a story of only one side of the conflict: the Republican side, a loose affiliation of leftists, liberals and anarchists who for almost three years stood up to a repressive tyranny of militarism, repression, dictatorship and fascism. For this was a war that almost compelled people to take sides. As Ernest Hemingway (who already knew Spain well) told a young American writer in February 1937:
The Spanish war is a bad war, Harry, and nobody is right. All I care about is human beings and alleviating their suffering, which is why I back ambulances and hospitals. The Rebels have plenty of good Italian ambulances. But it’s not very Catholic or Christian to kill the wounded in the hospital in Toledo with hand-grenades or to bomb the working quarter of Madrid for no military reason except to kill poor people, whose politics are only the politics of desperation. I know they have shot priests and bishops but why was the church in politics on the side of the oppressors instead of for the people – or instead of not being in politics at all?
It’s none of my business and I’m not making it mine but my sympathies are always for exploited working people against absentee landlords even if I drink around with the landlords and shoot pigeons with them. I would as soon shoot them as the pigeons.
Inevitably, this is a book with both a position and an opinion, but these, I hope, emerge through the voices of those who were there and who saw it happen. ‘In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book,’ George Orwell counselled in his classic 1938 account of his war-time experiences in Catalonia, ‘I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war.’
Chapter 1
The Sun Also Rises
I
Spain in 1936 was a land not well known to many foreigners. W.H. Auden memorably described it as ‘that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe’. To George Orwell, writing of how he pictured Spain before he first travelled there, it was a land of white sierras and Moorish palaces, of goatherds and olive trees and lemon groves; of gypsies and girls in black mantillas, bullfights, cardinals and the half-forgotten terrors of the Inquisition. Of all Europe, he would write in 1937, Spain was the one country that had the most hold upon his imagination.
But Spain was not simply a land of the imagination. In the years immediately around the Great War a number of British and American writer and artists travelled – even settled – there. Their books and paintings added layers of modernity to Orwell’s almost oriental vision. Yet they, too, sometimes mirrored his exotic impression. For Spain was a land not quite like anywhere else in Western Europe.
The American novelist John Dos Passos first visited Spain in 1916, a few months after graduating from Harvard. He had travelled already in France, Italy and Greece, yet wrote that nowhere else in Europe had he so felt ‘the strata of civilization – Celt-Iberians, Romans, Moors and French have each passed through Spain and left something there – alive … It’s the most wonderful jumble – the peaceful Roman world; the sadness of the Semitic nations, their mysticism; the grace – a little provincialized, a little barbarized – of a Greek colony; the sensuous dream of Moorish Spain; and little yellow trains and American automobiles and German locomotives – all in a tangle together!’ When the author Lytton Strachey visited Granada in the spring of 1920 he too was captivated: ‘Never have I seen a country on so vast a scale,’ he wrote home, ‘wild, violent, spectacular – enormous mountains, desperate chasms, endless distances – colours everywhere of deep orange and brilliant green – a wonderful place, but easier to get to with a finger on the map than in reality!’
Strachey’s travelling companion, the artist Dora Carrington, would be equally moved, capturing the landscape and its people in scintillating oil colours. She would be one of the first in a long line of post-war British artists to visit Spain: Ben and William Nicholson, Augustus John, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Henry Moore, Edward Burra, to name only the most well-known. And there were English-speaking writers, too, making of Spain a place to wander: Ralph Bates, Waldo Frank, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Laurie Lee, Malcolm Lowry, V.S. Pritchett, as well as Dos Passos. According to one contemporary literary critic, what had initially attracted Dos Passos (and no doubt some of the others, too) was the discovery in Spain of ‘an attitude toward life and a way of living which are in pleasant contrast to the mad turmoil of industrial Europe and America’. Nonetheless, in his 1917 essay ‘Young Spain’, Dos Passos observed a country – with its corrupt, inefficient politicians and its ill-educated, underpaid workforce – ripe for revolution. It was only, Dos Passos considered, a sort of despairing inaction that prevented it.
Insight into the country’s deeper complexities often came only with time. Strachey and Carrington’s host in Spain, the writer and Great War veteran Gerald Brenan, admitted that when he had chosen to settle there the previous year he had known next to nothing about the country. In due course, and over many decades, he wrote a series of books that would bring Spain – its language, its culture, its politics – to life for many English-speaking readers. Ernest Hemingway would call Brenan’s 1943 study, The Spanish Labyrinth, a ‘splendid book’, ‘the best book I know on Spain politically’.
Hemingway was the writer who really captured for a broader audience the foreigner’s experience of Spain in the decade following the Great War. Born in Chicago in 1899, the son of a prosperous doctor, Hemingway passed a seemingly idyllic childhood, enjoying sports and writing at school and long summers hunting and fishing with family and friends. Having launched on a career as a journalist with The Kansas City Star, early in 1918 he decided to head for Europe and the Great War, volunteering with the Red Cross. He served (like John Dos Passos) as an ambulance driver in Italy, where he was seriously wounded by a mortar burst and machine-gun fire. This – and the doomed romance with an American nurse that followed – would prove life-defining experiences.
It was on his way home to a hero’s welcome that Hemingway made his first, short stop in Spain. Having married and settled in Paris as a journalist for the Toronto Star Weekly, in 1923 he made two longer trips. Seeking the truth and courage and conviction in human experience that Hemingway believed existed only in the face of imminent death, he was almost immediately transfixed by the corrida de toros. Before his first visit, he thought bullfights ‘would be simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them’; but he also hoped that he would witness in them the ‘certain definite action which would give me the feeling of life and death’ that he was looking to describe in his fiction.
In July at Pamplona Hemingway and his wife Hadley attended the San Fermín fiesta: ‘five days of bull fighting dancing all day and all night,’ he told a friend, ‘wonderful music – drums, reed pipes, fifes … all the men in blue shirts and red handkerchiefs circling lifting floating dance. We the only foreigners at the damn fair.’
‘It isn’t just brutal,’ he wrote of the corrida. ‘It’s a great tragedy – and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you. I’ve seen 20 of them.’ To use the Spanish word for a devotee of bullfighting, Hemingway was already an aficionado.
The couple returned the following year with a group of friends, including Dos Passos. After the fiesta they explored the Basque country and the foothills of the Pyrenees, where they hiked and fished. Hemingway had travelled extensively in Europe, and like Dos Passos felt that Spain was ‘the only country left that hasn’t been shot to pieces … Spain is the real old stuff.’
Ernest Hemingway, Duff Twysden, Hadley Hemingway and friends, Pamplona, July 1925 (JFK Library)
It was a visit to Pamplona in 1925 that provided Hemingway with the material for his breakthrough book, The Sun Also Rises.1 Published when he was still only in his mid-twenties, the novel told the story of a handful of British and American tourists who (according to one reviewer) ‘belong to the curious and sad little world of disillusioned and aimless expatriates who make what home they can in the cafés of Paris.’ Closely based on Hemingway’s unrequited love for a beautiful Englishwoman, Duff (Lady) Twysden, its finest passages related with brusque relish the Pamplona bullfights. As Dorothy Parker observed in The New Yorker, almost as soon as The Sun Also Rises was published its author ‘was praised, adored, analyzed, best-sold, argued about, and banned in Boston … and some, they of the cool, tall foreheads, called it the greatest American novel … I was never so sick of a book in my life.’ Hemingway’s sparse prose and gritty, realistic dialogue would quickly spawn dozens of less gifted imitators.
However, The Sun Also Rises said more about Hemingway, bullfighting, fishing, drinking, loving and the post-war malaise than it did about Spain. Its epigraph was a truncated version of a remark Gertrude Stein had once made to Hemingway: ‘That’s what you all are,’ she had told him. ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.’ The effects and after-effects of the Great War permeated the book: one approving American reviewer – the critic Edmund Wilson – considered ‘the barbarity of the world since the War’ to be its very theme: a theme that was then still consuming Western culture. ‘What gives the book its profound unity and its disquieting effectiveness,’ Wilson suggested, ‘is the intimate relation established between the Spanish fiesta with its processions, its revelry and its bull-fighting and the atrocious behavior of the group of Americans and English who have come down from Paris to enjoy it.’
Hemingway’s novel – like his letters and short stories – had almost nothing to say about Spanish politics. Yet in September 1923, only a couple of months after Hemingway’s first extended visit to Spain, General Miguel Primo de Rivera had led a coup d’état that established him as dictator. Perhaps this was unremarkable to Hemingway because coups, revolutions and revolts had become relatively common events in recent Spanish history. Since the extraordinary heights of imperial power and wealth it had enjoyed in the seventeenth century, the country’s standing had steadily declined. After the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the peninsula in 1808 they left behind a country economically ruined and politically divided.
By 1898 Spain had lost those New World colonies that had once brought its ruling classes great wealth. With the Philippines, Mexico and Cuba gone, the acquisition of northern Morocco as a colony in 1904 was nothing but an expensive, troublesome burden. Compared to the rest of Western Europe, early twentieth-century Spain was a poor and (with the exception of Catalonia) under-industrialized backwater. Two-thirds of its twenty million or so population lived and worked in the countryside, with large tracts of land owned by a tiny minority of the population. Productivity was low, mass education minimal, and in many regions of the rural south poverty was endemic. The Church appeared to take little interest in the plight of the poor, perpetuating a status quo that had lasted centuries, an attitude which resulted in widespread resentment of the clergy. This was a land of stark contrasts. ‘You can’t be in Spain more than half an hour,’ wrote one English visitor in 1936, ‘without becoming painfully aware of the extremes of feudalism that still linger on side by side with the growth of modern capitalism.’
The political situation was no happier. The 1830s had seen a seven-year civil war, and the Republic declared in 1873 was short-lived. Foreign monarchs were invited to intervene, and attempts at introducing land reform, and loosening the grip of the Church and Army, made little progress. Despite the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1890, government was characterized by factionalism, corruption and rigged elections. In Barcelona in 1899 only ten per cent of the electorate bothered to vote. ‘Wretched Castile,’ wrote the poet Antonio Machado, a member of a turn-of-the century group of intellectuals and liberals who sought a way to redeem Spain, ‘once supreme, now forlorn, wrapping herself in rags, closes her mind in scorn.’
More powerful than the new Republican movement – more powerful, perhaps, than the upsurge in regional nationalism – was anarchism. Drawing on the ideas of the Russian revolutionary and philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, Spanish anarchists rejected all forms of government: instead, free individuals would manage their own affairs through consensus and co-operation. Anarchists promised their followers freedom, social justice, land reform and the total destruction of the capitalist system, ideals that caught the imagination of Andalusia’s largely illiterate, landless peasantry and Catalonia’s exploited factory workers. Tens of thousands of Spaniards joined this visionary, idealistic movement, and as the Spanish anarchist Juan García Oliver would tell the English author Cyril Connolly in 1937: ‘If I had to sum up Anarchism in a phrase I would say it was the ideal of eliminating the beast in man.’ In response to the charge of anarchist violence, Oliver replied: ‘Anarchism has been violent in Spain because oppression has been violent.’
And violent it certainly was, for anarchists believed in direct action. A bomb dropped into the audience of Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House in 1893 killed twenty-two people, and by 1921 Spanish anarchists had assassinated three prime ministers. Repression followed, and violence exploded periodically into chaos and devastation. The Church – which owned much of the land and along with the Army shouldered the State’s authority – was a frequent target of public anger. During Barcelona’s ‘Tragic Week’ of July 1909 an orgy of anticlericalism saw 42 churches and convents attacked. Soldiers crushed the uprising with considerable bloodshed.
Barcelona, the so-called ‘city of bombs,’ was the epicentre of Spanish anarchism. A large proportion of the million inhabitants of the ‘Manchester of the Mediterranean’ worked in the textile factories that, through the city’s busy port and railway network, supplied Spain, Cuba and South America with cloth. In 1926 an American tourist described the outskirts of Barcelona as ‘a rampart of warehouses, machine shops, flour, cotton and textile mills, dyeworks, chemical factories’. By contrast, its broad, tree-lined boulevards and wide, residential streets reminded many a visitor of Paris. When the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky passed through Barcelona in 1916 he noted in his diary: ‘Big Spanish-French kind of city. Like Nice in a hell of factories. Smoke and flames on the one hand, flowers and fruit on the other.’
Barcelona considered itself different from the rest of Spain; it was more industrialized and modernized, the people spoke Catalan, they were wealthier, and thought themselves more cosmopolitan, more European. There was a flourishing artistic scene: Pablo Picasso, Antoni Gaudí, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí were all either natives or residents of Catalonia. Distant Castile, and its government in Madrid, was regarded with caution, and sometimes fear. As in the Basque region of northern Spain, there was a burgeoning independence movement.
When the horror of the Great War rolled across Europe in 1914 Spain remained neutral. For a while, the country’s economy thrived on supplying the Allies with minerals and industrial goods. But there was also rampant inflation, and affiliation to workers’ organizations soared. Membership of the anarchist trade union, the CNT, ballooned fifty-fold. Inspired by the Bolshevik revolutionaries who had helped overthrow the Russian Tsar in 1917, anarchists and socialists in Spain attempted to foment an armed rebellion. Even liberal elements in Catalonia began demanding home rule, the first step on what traditionalists feared would be the road to independence and the break-up of their country.
It was in Barcelona in 1923 that General de Rivera staged his ‘proclamation’. King Alfonso XIII appointed him head of a military directorate, charged with restoring order, stability and unity. The General curbed press freedom, outlawed strikes and restricted political activity, but he also encouraged capital investment, and there was a period of economic growth.
There was plenty of drama for a novel in these political upheavals. But it was not a story Hemingway chose to tell. His next book on Spain, Death in the Afternoon, was an idiosyncratic guide to bullfighting. Published in 1932, after he had witnessed the deaths of over a thousand bulls in the corrida, its one reference to Primo de Rivera was to remark that under the dictator a more humane measure had been introduced into the ring. Padding would now protect the picadors’ horses from goring by the bulls’ horns. Though Hemingway admitted that the frequent death of the horses was one of its most sickening aspects, he considered the move ‘the first step toward the suppression of the bullfight’.
II
Even dictators fall. By 1930 General Primo de Rivera had become unpopular with both the Army and the people; facing a rising tide of republicanism he retired to Paris, where he soon died. Municipal elections held in 1931 sent a clear message to King Alfonso: he too was no longer wanted. Declaring that he was ‘determined to have nothing to do with setting one of my countrymen against another in a fratricidal civil war,’ he too went into exile. To widespread celebration – but also some trepidation – the Second Republic was declared.
For much of the population, expectations were enormous. A general election saw a landslide victory for the parties of the Republican-Socialist coalition. Immediate improvements followed: women received the vote, divorce was legalized, land and labour laws were reformed, with attempts made to redistribute land from the large estate owners to the peasants who actually tilled the soil; home rule was granted to Catalonia, which established its own parliament in Barcelona – the Generalitat – and measures were passed to relax the Army’s grip on the state, with many senior officers forced into retirement. Action was also taken against the Church: schooling was taken from clerical control, religious symbols were removed from classrooms and public buildings, and freedom of belief was declared. Even this, though, was not enough for some: in Madrid, Seville and several other cities churches were torched, and there were rural insurrections and even an anarchist uprising near Cadiz.
Unfortunately, the birth of the Second Spanish Republic coincided with the Great Depression. If the Great War had been the first global disaster of the twentieth century, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the second. After the Crash, the Depression descended upon the world (to use George Orwell’s apt phrase) ‘like a new ice age,’ spawning the conditions for the rapid rise to power of fascists in Germany, and the emergence of potent right-wing forces in Britain, France, the US and Japan. It was no exaggeration to say that many liberal thinkers in the 1930s saw Western civilization as on the brink of collapse: with world trade declining, exports fell sharply, unemployment rose and state finances collapsed. The Spanish Government, saddled with a huge deficit following the profligate years of de Rivera’s dictatorship, lacked funds to carry forward its programme of reform. The Right, still fearing Bolshevism and the break-up of Spain into independent states, united with the Church to obstruct further change.
Elsewhere in the world there were many who believed that only strong leadership and a mass ideology could solve national problems of mass unemployment, labour unrest, debt and rampant inflation. The few countries appearing to have bucked these trends were the Soviet Union and Germany, and they offered two contrasting visions – or delusions – of hope. As the English philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote after visiting Russia in 1920, ‘the war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously. Bolshevism has supplied the new religion.’ Then, in a 1931 book simply titled Hitler, the Anglo-American artist and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis aired a cautious judgment in favour of Nazism, suggesting that since the ‘political and economic structure of Western Europe and of America are in a state of violent disequilibrium,’ something ‘has to be done of a most radical sort, very rapidly indeed, it seems. And I suggest that sort of solution indicated in Hitlerism is not entirely to be despised …’ Yet both these new ideologies were based on oppression, and they were dangerous – if also tempting – choices. ‘Cruelty lurks in our instincts,’ Russell had warned, ‘and fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty. Fanatics are seldom genuinely humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a fanatical creed.’ Nazism, of course, was just as fanatical as Bolshevism. Following their rise to power in 1933 the Nazis had set about ruthlessly crushing Germany’s communist and socialist opposition, as well as its Jewish population and other marginalized minorities, exiling, oppressing, imprisoning, executing. ‘In the political panorama of Europe I can see only the formation of Marxist and anti-Marxist groups,’ the right-wing Spanish politician José María Gil Robles declared at a rally in Madrid. ‘This is what is happening in Germany and in Spain also. This is the great battle which we must fight.’
That fight was close at hand. When John Dos Passos revisited Spain shortly after the foundation of the Second Republic he was deeply troubled by what he saw. The Prime Minister, Manuel Azaña, told him that his country had escaped ‘the uncivilizing influences’ of the Great War, and that Spain had nothing to fear from fascism. But after witnessing a left-wing rally in Santander, Dos Passos was sceptical. He saw ‘the hatred in the faces of the well-dressed people seated at the café tables … as they stared at the sweaty Socialists straggling back from the bullring with their children and their picnic baskets and their bunting. If eyes had been machine guns not one of them would have survived that day.’ He jotted in his notebook: ‘Socialists innocent as a flock of sheep in the wolf country.’
In 1933 two powerful new elements entered Spanish politics. A nationwide confederation of Catholic parties, the CEDA, was formed, taking much assistance from the organizational networks of the Church; so too was the Falange Española, the ‘Spanish Phalanx’. Founded by General Primo de Rivera’s son, José Antonio, the Falange was Spain’s fascist party, and it spawned a cult of violence with its blue-shirted militias, its mass rallies and war cry of ¡Arriba España! (‘Arise, Spain!’). With the Left divided between anarchists and socialists, a centre-right coalition won that year’s general election, and the so-called ‘two black years’ followed. The liberal programme of social improvement was halted; Catalonia’s statute of autonomy was suspended, agricultural wages were cut, land reform was abandoned, and unemployment soared. The Left did not sit still: ‘It is better to die on your feet,’ declared Dolores Ibárruri, figurehead of the small Spanish Communist Party, ‘than to live on your knees.’ An attempt to launch a revolutionary general strike in October 1934 failed, but in the coal-mining region of Asturias in northern Spain some 40,000 workers formed an armed ‘Workers’ Alliance’. The government sent in the Spanish Foreign Legion and colonial African troops from Morocco, led by an ambitious and brutal young general called Francisco Franco. A miniature civil war ensued. After two weeks of fierce fighting the miners were defeated, leaving over a thousand dead. In the ensuing clampdown, some 30,000 political opponents were jailed throughout Spain.
As the Right had united into a National Front, so too did the Left, forming a Popular Front that fought the elections of 1936 as a coalition of socialists, communists and moderate republicans. By a fraction of the vote, and to the horror of the Right, they won a majority of seats in the Cortes.
Immediately the working class took revenge. Political prisoners were released; the estates of wealthy landowners were raided and lands seized; churches were burnt; workers went on strike. Having failed at the ballot box, both Gil Robles and the Falange abandoned the democratic process in favour of bullets. They deliberately fomented disorder and unrest, pushing forward the moment when an authoritarian regime could impose itself by force; anarchists likewise attempted to undermine the state system they despised with their own acts of brutal resistance, whilst socialists intensified their violent attempts to bring revolutionary change. Activists of the Left and Right clashed on the streets; political opponents and bystanders were shot down in public. Falangists in motorcars opened fire with machineguns on demonstrators and picket lines, killing women and children as well as workers. Anarchists murdered their opponents; politicians carried revolvers into Parliament, where they spoke to their opponents in increasingly inflammatory terms; the Government, clearly weak, did not know how to respond.
May Day in Madrid saw workers bearing red banners and huge portraits of Stalin and Lenin. Graffiti around the country declared ‘Death to Gil Robles,’ ‘Viva Rusia,’ ‘Down with Fascism,’ while the illiterate drew hammers and sickles on walls. Workers and peasants raised clenched fists in the salute of international socialism; supporters of the Right responded with the raised arm and outstretched palm of fascism.
The young English artist Edward Burra was holidaying in Spain at this time. He later recalled sitting in a restaurant in Madrid as smoke blew past the window. He asked where it came from. ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ someone answered, with a gesture of impatience. ‘It’s only a church being burnt.’
The response sickened him. ‘It was terrifying: constant strikes, churches on fire, and pent-up hatred everywhere. Everybody knew that something appalling was about to happen.’
III
Things were not quite so bad in Barcelona; some in Madrid were even calling the city ‘an oasis of peace’ (though this was a comparative judgment). With regional autonomy re-established, this semi-independence (together with a Catalan sense of superiority) gave a different perspective on events. Politically motivated murders were still commonplace (at the start of July union gangsters murdered a Scottish businessman, whilst right-wing troublemakers sent threatening notes to union officials; the dockers were out on strike, with the railwaymen threatening to join them). But the church burnings and provocative acts of random violence were less widespread, and for a while at least, sport offered an alternative to fighting.
In 1931 Barcelona had been the chief contender with Berlin to host the 1936 Olympic Games; it was of course the German bid that won the approval of the International Olympic Committee. Little more than a year later, however, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and the political situation was transformed. The repressive nature of the Nazi regime was apparent, made obvious to the sporting community by the treatment of Germany’s Jewish athletes, most of whom were banned from competing. Hitler was soon turning the Berlin Games into a propaganda stunt, a symbol of Germanic ‘efficiency’ and Aryan ‘superiority’.
Late in 1935 a US member of the International Olympic Committee warned the organization’s Belgian Chairman that if he permitted the Games to go ahead in Berlin, ‘the Olympic idea will cease to be the conception of physical strength and fair play in unison, and there will be nothing left to distinguish it from the Nazi ideal of physical power.’ His warning was ignored. Though The Times of London admitted that there existed ‘a very ugly background to the glittering pageant’ in Berlin, boycott campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic failed. But there was an alternative. In 1936 the new Spanish government declared that its athletes would boycott the Games. Instead, Barcelona would host a rival ‘People’s Olympiad’.
The first such ‘Workers’ Olympics’ had been staged in Prague in 1921; the one held in Vienna in 1931 was said to have compared favourably with the ‘official’ Games in Los Angeles the following year. But the Spanish had only a few months to organise their event. It was not until 22 June – only four weeks before the planned opening – that a letter of invitation reached the American Amateur Athletic Union. The Spaniards apologised for the short notice: ‘we hope that you will do your utmost to attend the Games,’ they urged. ‘In the struggle against fascism, the broad masses of all countries must stand shoulder to shoulder, and Popular Sport is a valuable medium through which they may demonstrate their international solidarity.’
Jesse Owens, the brilliant African-American sprinter, had already told a reporter: ‘if there is discrimination against minorities in Germany then we must withdraw from the Olympics.’ His coach had immediately warned him to lay off politics: he was going to Berlin. Nevertheless, in mid-July eight American athletes arrived in London en route for Barcelona. ‘This team,’ their manager told a reporter from the communist newspaper The Daily Worker, ‘compose real fair play lovers, ready to strike a blow for the Olympic Spirit and ideal.’
Despite last-minute attempts by the Amateur Athletic Association to prevent any of its members attending, 41 British athletes also went to Spain. They would step into Barcelona’s Montjuïc stadium, The Daily Worker declared, as ‘standard bearers of clean sport, fair play and racial equality.’ The paper added: ‘Every lover of peace and progressive culture, every opponent to fascism or reaction in any form, is intimately bound to the People’s Olympiad … The People’s Olympiad is the true Olympic Games.’
The British team was a mixed bag of amateurs and enthusiasts (including a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl); they would be competing in athletics, wrestling, cycling, swimming, table tennis and chess tournaments. On the morning of Friday 17 July they gathered for a rowdy send-off from London’s Victoria Station, accompanied by the four Scots bagpipers who would be participating in the folklore events that would form an integral part of the Games. Despite the short time that had been available to prepare, the Spanish organizing committee claimed that over 10,000 athletes from some twenty countries would be participating. Most came from Spain and France, but there were competitors from the USSR, Canada, Poland, Scandinavia, Holland, Britain and the USA, as well as a Jewish team from Palestine. Lluís Companys, the President of Catalonia, would officially open the Games that Sunday.
IV
The British team arrived in Barcelona late in the afternoon of 18 July. The city was decked with brilliantly coloured posters advertising the forthcoming events, and the mood that weekend should have been light-hearted. Instead, the visitors felt an ominous atmosphere.
They checked into a hotel just off Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s handsome main thoroughfare, but trouble was already threatening. As the athletes strolled in the warm evening streets they were disconcerted to see armed civilians in the boulevards, and policemen stopping cars: suspected right-wing agitators and Falangists were being arrested. Almost everyone seemed to know what was coming. As several Catalans warned them, making hand gestures imitating guns firing, ‘Plenty revolution soon.’
Only a few days before in Madrid a young police officer had been machine-gunned from a passing car. At first it seemed just another incident in weeks of random attacks. This murder, however, was not random. The dead man was a popular left-wing officer of the Assault Guards, the Republic’s armed police. Seeking retaliation, his colleagues had searched that night in vain for Gil Robles; instead, they arrested and shot dead another leading right-wing politician, dumping his corpse outside the city cemetery. It was the spark that would ignite the Spanish tinderbox.
Yet in fact the plan for an armed rebellion had already been hatched and launched. On the day the British Olympiad team left London, an English plane flown by an English pilot transported General Franco from the Canary Islands to mainland North Africa. Franco had agreed only at the last minute to join the more senior generals in a conspiracy that had been long in the making; but he was a crucial recruit. That night, the Army in Spanish Morocco rose in rebellion, and Franco issued a proclamation claiming that he was obliged ‘to restore the empire of ORDER within the Republic,’ and re-establish ‘the principle of AUTHORITY, forgotten in these past years,’ through the use of serious and rapid ‘exemplary … punishments’. Martial law was declared. Army officers in Morocco who remained loyal to the Republic were summarily executed; likewise any officials, workers or citizens who attempted to resist. From there, the military revolt spread to Spain.
In Madrid, the Popular Front government continued to hesitate. For weeks, rumours – and intercepted plans – of a military rising had been reaching the President, Manuel Azaña. Yet despite a tradition of coups dating back to the previous century, he had refused to believe what was before his eyes, and could not believe that the Army’s senior officers were not loyal to the Republic. As Pamplona, Saragossa, Oviedo, Salamanca and Cadiz fell into rebel hands, socialists, communists and anarchists demanded that the workers be armed. The government, fearing the far Left almost as much as it feared the far Right, did nothing.
In Barcelona the President of Catalonia refused to issue weapons to the people. So the workers prepared to defend their city any way they could. Through the night dockers fashioned hand grenades from dynamite; a prison was raided and weapons were seized from the warders; gun shops were stripped bare, even air rifles being taken. Vehicles were commandeered and fashioned into makeshift armoured cars. At dawn on Sunday 19 July the rebel officers led their men from their barracks, and people woke to the noise of shooting. As the morning progressed, the sounds of machineguns, heavier guns and government aeroplanes joined the fray. The foreign athletes remained in their hotels, watching from windows as armed men poured into the streets.
One of the first international reporters on the scene was the British journalist Claud Cockburn. He had come out to Spain to cover the Olympiad for The Daily Worker, and (at least from a left-wing perspective) was one of the best people the paper could have had to cover such a story. Though Cockburn possessed a lax attitude to facts, his old school friend, the novelist Graham Greene, would call him one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century. The British Secret Service was perhaps more accurate in its assessment: one report described him as a ‘professional mischief maker’ whose ‘intelligence’, ‘capability’ and ‘unscrupulous nature’ made him ‘a formidable factor with which to reckon.’
A graduate of Oxford University, Cockburn had worked in the late 1920s for that bulwark of the British establishment, The Times, first in Berlin, then in America. Arriving in New York City in 1929, he had soon realized that what was happening on Wall Street was what mattered most. ‘You could talk about prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses,’ he later wrote, ‘but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was where the conversation became serious.’
Cockburn had read Karl Marx in Germany, and he was a convinced communist, certain that ‘the Party’ was the one organization with the power to resist the rising tide of fascism. In 1932 he had quit The Times to launch his own political paper, The Week. Relying on a network of sometimes brave, sometimes corrupt fellow-journalists, as well as inside informers, disaffected civil servants, tip-off merchants and whistle-blowers, Cockburn published on three pages of foolscap accounts of international rumour, supposed plots, libellous gossip, plausible intrigues and assertive opinions (largely his own). For it was Cockburn’s opinion ‘that rumours were just as important, just as significant, just as – in the last analysis – “valid” as “facts” … unless one imagines one is God, how on earth can one tell truth from rumour in less than perhaps fifty years? And fifty years is too long to wait if one is in the business of issuing a weekly newspaper.’ He later boasted that readers of his scurrilous periodical included the foreign ministers of eleven nations, the staff of all the embassies in London, a dozen US Senators, fifty MPs, the King of England and the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
Cockburn had travelled down the Catalan coast for a few days of sunshine and bathing before the Olympiad opened. But as soon as he heard news of the revolt he caught a train back to Barcelona. At each stop on the line people surged round the carriages, reporting the news of the fighting as it came through the railway telephone service. ‘At first the people in the train stood silent,’ Cockburn wrote, ‘or murmuring to one another as the news of the attack sank in and became real.’ Then a young bank clerk, standing beside Cockburn in his Sunday suit, leaned out from the window and shouted: ‘Long Live the Republic!’
As his cry rang out across the station, railway workers, peasant women, fisherfolk, clerks, businessmen and hotel porters surged towards the train, everyone taking up his call. Suddenly people were shaking hands with strangers and calling one another ‘Comrade’. As the train pulled on towards Barcelona, ‘Long Live Democracy! Long Live the Republic!’ thundered down the crowded corridors.
Another foreign journalist with a grandstand view of the day’s events was an American, F. Theo Rogers. Having served with the US Army in Cuba and the Philippines, he was holidaying in Barcelona when the rebellion erupted. His hotel room overlooked the wide expanse of the Plaça de Catalunya, the broad open square at the head of Las Ramblas. Woken by gunfire, Rogers watched as hundreds of rebel soldiers and cavalry, supported by civilian Falangist gunmen, stormed into the square. ‘And with them,’ he later wrote, ‘from all side streets, came the armed Anarchists, running, nondescript, mad and wild.’ He watched from his balcony as ‘carnage reigned supreme for the next fourteen hours.’
The Plaça de Catalunya was the heart of Barcelona, the strategic key to the city. It included the Telefónica building, where both the central telephone exchange and one of the city’s two radio stations were located; the Presidential Palace itself was only a few hundred yards away, down the narrow streets of the old city. A machinegun placed at the centre of the square could command every important thoroughfare. It was here that the principal battle for Barcelona would be fought.
Armed civilians manning a barricade in Barcelona, July 1936 (Imperial War Museum)
At first only a few thousand badly-armed civilians opposed the rebels. They pulled up cobblestones to erect barricades to block the streets, trams were driven at the soldiers to break up their columns, while those with guns fired down from windows and rooftops. Neither President Companys nor his Chief of Police knew whether the Civil or Assault Guards would remain loyal; traditionally, these armed police units had favoured the Right, and in many parts of Spain they had come out on the side of the rebels. In Barcelona, however, they threw their weight behind the Republic, to the amazement and delight of the people in the streets.
A police captain led the charge against the machinegun nest placed by the rebels in a flowerbed at the centre of the Plaça de Catalunya: it was a suicidal dash of fifty or sixty yards across open ground. According to one account, the policeman was hit eight times before he reached the gun. ‘He must have been dead while he was still running,’ it was reported, ‘as a shot rabbit is dead but still goes on kicking and leaping. He fell over the machine-gun, and the weight of his body knocked it off its tripod. The men who had followed him picked it up and turned it against the rebel soldiers.’ The Generals had never anticipated such fanatical resistance to their coup, and for some time the fighting in the Plaça de Catalunya hung in the balance.
Forced off the streets, rebel snipers occupied rooftops and built strong points inside churches; the Telefónica building was taken, then lost and retaken by anarchists. From his vantage point, Theo Rogers watched it all. When it appeared that the rebels were gaining the upper hand, he was surprised by a sudden lull in the fighting.
A worker shouted: ‘Soldiers, brothers, why are you fighting us?’
‘We don’t know,’ one replied.
A flag of truce appeared, followed by calls for talk. Their officers had told the soldiers they were quelling an anti-Republican uprising. Now they realized they were on the wrong side. Abruptly, they changed allegiance and disarmed their superiors. By late afternoon the only resistance in the Plaça de Catalunya came from a group of rebels keeping up desultory gunfire from one of the larger hotels. Assault Guards turned a captured field gun on them, and they surrendered.
The Army General who had flown in from the Balearic Isles to command the revolt in Barcelona soon found himself a prisoner. Fortunate not to be killed on the spot, he was persuaded to make a radio broadcast admitting defeat. Streets that had been almost deserted now filled with jubilant crowds, mopping up the last resistance. Then the arsenal at the artillery barracks was broken open. Within a few hours 10,000 rifles and machine guns were ‘liberated’. ‘That was the moment,’ a Catalan textile worker later recalled, ‘when the people of Barcelona were armed; that was the moment, in consequence, when power fell into the masses’ hands.’
The workers and their leaders had not set out to make a revolution; but when the opportunity came, they had seized it.
V
Having witnessed the street fighting and the immediate aftermath of the rebellion in Barcelona, Claud Cockburn rushed off to file an uncensored story across the French border. Passing through Gerona on his way north, he reported in The Daily Worker, it had been ‘a magnificent sight to see the workers drawn up to receive their rifles beneath the ancient panelled roof and golden candelabra’ of the government building.
That evening the US Consul General in Barcelona informed Washington that ‘the life of the city appeared to be assuming a more normal aspect.’ He added, however, that ‘it remains to be seen whether or not the radical labor elements now in possession of guns and ammunition will confine their use to legitimate purposes or return them to the constituted authorities, or vest vengeance on their enemies such as church elements and adherents to the subdued Fascists.’
They did the latter. There had been numerous reports of armed priests joining the rebellion, and of religious buildings being used as rebel armouries and strong points. Within hours, an Englishman peering inside one of Barcelona’s burning churches saw the body of an elderly priest hanging from the pulpit ‘by his sickeningly elongated neck’. Near the British consulate a crowd gathered outside a convent: ‘coffins were being excavated from the convent burial ground, and a peseta was being charged for the hire of a long stick with which to strike or insult with unprintable obscenities these sightless, shrunken relics. A charnel house stench and my own sick horror drove me back into the street.’
The British athletes helped to extinguish a fire in the church beside their hotel. Inside they discovered the body of a priest. ‘So badly was it burned,’ recalled the team’s triple-jumper, ‘that it was completely beyond recognition. Only a limb or two and some ribs could be distinguished.’
With the authority of the sate shattered in the aftermath of the rebellion, the following weeks witnessed a frenzy of vengeance throughout Spain. In Barcelona the bishop was ejected from his palace and the Diocesan Seminary was converted into a Workers’ University. More churches were sacked or burnt, and across the country thousands of bishops, priests, monks and nuns were murdered. A member of the British consulate in Barcelona claimed to have seen ‘Red militiamen’ with ‘huge road hammers’ smashing in the heads of monks. ‘We witness here in 1936 scenes reminiscent of the French Revolution,’ the Mexican Consul General reported home, ‘the only difference being that Madame Guillotine has been replaced by the modern Mauser. Every day people accused of being fascists, industrialists, landlords, etc. are taken from their homes and shot.’
Anarchists formed judicial committees: Theo Rogers called them ‘police, jury, judge and executioner combined’. By night, people were visited at home or picked off the streets and ‘taken for a ride’. Known supporters of the Right – Falangists, conservative politicians, landowners, businessmen – were the principal victims, whilst captured rebel officers were courtmartialled and executed. This period of lawlessness also offered an opportunity to settle grudges: some of those murdered were actually supporters of the Republic.
The revolution extended to the workplace. Waiters and chefs took over cafés and restaurants abandoned by their owners; hats and ties were discarded in favour of neckerchiefs and overalls; factories and businesses were appropriated by the workers and collectivized. Ford Motor Company and General Motors were confiscated by the Central Committee of the Marxist Militia of Catalonia and turned over to the production of armoured cars. By October around 400 factories employing some 85,000 workers were manufacturing weapons, explosives, gas masks, plane engines. Over the coming months the various political parties and trade unions would enact a wide range of policies to improve working conditions, from increases in wages and reduction of working hours to the provision of free medical cover, pensions and maternity benefits. In certain sectors of the economy, anarchists outlawed money altogether, introducing a barter system instead. In a heady, revolutionary rush hundreds of new schools would be opened.
On 1 August a report in The Times was headlined ‘Red Rule in Barcelona’. The newspaper’s special correspondent on the Spanish frontier claimed that whilst the city presented ‘an appearance of outward calm’ it was in fact ‘under a reign of terror’. The ‘extremists’ were ‘out of hand’ and ‘purification squads’ had ‘assassinated many of the supporters of the Right.’ One of the so-called ‘revolutionary chiefs’ told the British journalist that this was the way of revolutions: ‘These excesses are a retaliation to be expected of persons who have been the victims of the terrible and merciless repressions by the Government of the Right.’
What had started as an Army coup had turned – in Catalonia, at least – into a full-scale workers’ revolution. The rebel Generals had expected to be in control of Spain within a matter of days. Instead, most of the country’s chief cities, including Madrid – where the fighting and subsequent retribution had been equally vicious – were still in Republican hands. But Morocco, a considerable swathe of southern Spain and large parts of the north were now in rebel hands. Their supporters included much of the landed class, the fascists of the Falange, Carlists who wanted a return of a monarchy, and those many devout working-class Catholics who resented the Republic’s attacks on the Church. And they too were committing mass murder in an orgy of revenge. ‘It is necessary to spread an atmosphere of terror,’ one rebel General declared. ‘We have to create an impression of mastery.’ Union members, Popular Front politicians, intellectuals, bohemians, freemasons, pro-Republican officers and any suspected supporters of the Left were rounded up; many were simply shot out of hand, executed either by the Army or by their fellow citizens. Meanwhile, the Church welcomed the rebels as the liberators of Spain who would purify it of extremism.
A letter from the US Ambassador in Spain to the Secretary of State in Washington set out the exact elements supporting the rebellion. It was a catalogue of conservatism:
The monarchists, who wanted the King back with the old regime.
The great landowners, who wished to preserve the feudalistic system by ending agrarian reforms.
The industrialists and financiers, who wished to put, and keep, the workers ‘in their place’.
The hierarchy of the Church, hostile to the separation of Church and State.
The military clique that had in mind a military dictatorship.
The fascist element, which was bent on the creation of a totalitarian state.
At his home in Key West, Ernest Hemingway – who loved Spain and the Spanish people dearly – wanted to be where the action was. But he was finishing a book. Developed from a short story he had started writing in Madrid in 1933, To Have and Have Not told the interlocking stories of life in Depression-era Florida and Cuba. This was his first novel since A Farewell to Arms – the story based on his experiences in Italy during the Great War, the story of a wounded young American who falls in love with a beautiful British nurse and loses her, the story that had really made him famous. It had been published to great acclaim almost seven years before.
‘I hate to have missed this Spanish thing worse than anything in the world,’ he would tell his literary editor in September. But for the time being he waited. He left the heat and interruptions of Key West in the summertime and headed for the solitude of Wyoming. There he worked on his book. It seemed that the fighting in Spain might well be over before he could return to Madrid.
1 The book appeared in Britain as Fiesta, Hemingway’s original choice of title.
