The Patron Saint of Andalusia: Being an Honest Recital of the Incredible

I

ALL Nationalist, Spain looks on General Franco as its savior. Queipo de Llano is its living legend. He has said the ineffable word; he has done the impossible deed; he has walked the impassable way. You can tell it by the look with which men touch their caps, while women smile and children follow him. In his heroic moods he is the incarnation of the Cid, but the Spanish heart needs more than heroism. It needs the support of shrewd and homely wit; and something of Sancho Panza’s prudence, something of his humor, all of his devotion, have given General Queipo the common touch. He has saved the rich, and the poor love him. Of the new Spain he is the perfect common denominator.

It was at the Andalusian Palace Hotel in Seville that I saw him. He had asked us to lunch, and punctually at two he came. Cooks and maids came crowding to the pantry doors to catch a glimpse, and not one but was laughing broadly to see him. He might have been a great actor coming into his own. To me, the first impression of him was of the leader of men — tall, soldierly, and confident of the adoration that surrounds him. Suddenly in the crowd he caught sight of an old lady dressed in rusty black. Anyone who looked at her face would know she had seen good days, but Queipo was familiar with her story (there is not a Sevillian whose story he does not know) — her husband shot by the Reds, her house burned over her head, and she surviving by the charity of friends. The General took her hand and kissed it in homage to all that she had suffered for Spain. Then he turned to his guests.

He was chuckling audibly as he came up and handed me the latest paper from Barcelona. On the first page was a large photograph picturing a number of workmen digging a trench. Below them stood three guards fingering their rifles with easy nonchalance, and beneath was the caption: ‘Workers, this is the way Fascists make you toil. Will you stand it?’ To me it seemed no laughing matter, but in an instant I saw the point, for General Queipo produced from his pocket another newspaper bearing a date just six years earlier. Its first page bore the identical photograph, but the caption was different: ‘Workmen protected from violence during the late strike.’ It was a neat riposte.

For a self-respecting Spaniard, four courses for lunch are a modicum, and it takes at least seven to fill the chinks of comfort. From two to five we sat, the staff doing its full duty, the general eating sparingly and drinking less. But almost ceaselessly he talked — talked with laughter and sudden seriousness of the capture of Seville, and then, in deadly earnest, of the necessity in the long war against the Reds of convincing the poor, not by words only, that in the new Spain they should have new life and hope.

This, with details from many sources, is the story General Queipo told of the Miracle of Seville.

II

It was on the nineteenth of July, 1936, that the Revolution broke out. General Franco landed in the South. General Mola marched from the North. Between these two lay Andalusia, the essential link in the chain of victory. As Seville goes, so goes Andalusia, and the capture of this vital city was the imperious duty of the Inspector General of Carabineers, Queipo de Llano.

The Revolution was a race against time. Conspirators, French, Russian, and Spanish, had their plan perfected to rise in Red Revolution with Largo Caballero as their Stalin. Spain was to be ruled by Soviets, but General Franco started first. Such was the situation when Queipo, accompanied by his faithful aide-de-camp Lopez Guerrero, returning from an inspection tour in Huelva, put up, as was his custom, at the Hotel Simon in Seville. The zero hour was on him. His first visitor was the bullfighter, Pepe el Algabeño. Queipo was in mufti. The matador looked at him anxiously.

‘Have you heard the news?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Queipo; ‘it’s do or die.’

‘I’ll tell my friends. I can give you fifteen hundred Falangistas. What will you do?’

‘I,’ said Queipo, like a true Spaniard, ‘shall lunch. Then into my uniform and off to headquarters.’

Two officers dropped in, Air Captain Carrillo and Major Rementeria. These, with Staff Major Cuesta, who was at a meeting at Divisional Headquarters, were the only field officers to be absolutely depended upon. One or another of the friends mentioned an occasional captain or lieutenant as likely to go through with the business. It was another Seven against Thebes, but these heroes had no army behind them. Hardly eight score men, at most, was an inadequate force to capture a great city, the headquarters of a division of the regular army reenforced by upwards of 50,000 union radicals supplied with small arms. Rut in the sequel, when, as the Red Terror collapsed, citizens everywhere rallied to the White cause, it was at least an adequate reply to those who maintain this to be a struggle with the whole army on one side and all the people on the other.

Speed was their only chance. At any moment the police might swoop down and arrest Queipo, just as all Franco’s officers were at that very moment being rounded up in Madrid and Barcelona. The General dressed hastily that morning, and Captain Carrillo, in his smart little car, drove him to headquarters. Lopez Guerrero, the tried and true, was the third member of the revolutionary army. At headquarters, Captain Escribano was waiting with news.

‘The General is adamant, sir. I cannot persuade him; perhaps you can.’

‘Right,’ said Queipo, and together they entered the central patio, where the general of division, Villa Abrille, was talking with his second in command, General Lopez Viota. A group of officers stood about. When he saw Queipo in uniform, General Villa looked at him narrowly.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I am here,’ replied Queipo, ‘to tell you that the time has come when minds must he made up. You must choose between the gang that is running this country and your brother officers.’

‘I shall always be on the side of the Government.’

‘Well, my orders are to blow your brains out. But we are old friends and I don’t want to go too far.’

‘I am on the side of the Government.’

‘Then I’ve got either to shoot you or to lock you up. So I’ll lock you up. Go to your room.’

‘I’ll go; but note, gentlemen,’ Villa turned to the others, ’I act under compulsion.'

‘ Compulsion or not is the same to me,’said Queipo, and in describing the scene afterwards he remarked sagely, ‘I must admit he acted with discretion. If he had shown one trace of resistance, I’d have shot him in his tracks.’

Then up spoke General Lopez Viota. ‘I also wish to be taken prisoner.'

‘Right,’ grunted Queipo.

‘I, too,’said Staff Major Hidalgo.

‘Permission granted.'

So the group, all except Cuesta and Gutierrez Flores, were shoved into the inner office. Queipo started to lock the door. Nobody interfered, but there was no key. He called the corporal of the guard. ‘Take two men,’ he ordered, ‘ and watch that door. If anyone attempts to come out, shoot him.’ Two minutes before that the corporal would have taken orders from General Villa alone. But in those few minutes the world had changed. Hardly had the door slammed when Queipo wrenched the telephone wires loose. The Revolution had begun.

In the first moments of the campaign, General Queipo had won the spolia opima. He had conquered the general opposing him in single combat. But he had conquered very little else. Time was flying. Cuesta sat down to draw up the proclamation of martial law. Queipo, the valiant Lopez Guerrero at his heels, went to address the Granada regiment, whose barracks were close by. Its support was essential. The commander, Colonel Allanegui, had a good reputation as a soldier and a patriot. Queipo could not doubt his heart was in the right place.

It was no pleasant surprise, then, to find the guard drawn up under arms, and the colonel, instead of walking forward to receive his distinguished visitor, standing stiff as a ramrod beside his lieutenant colonel and the other regimental officers. The atmosphere was chill, and Queipo took the offensive.

‘I have come, Colonel,’ said he, ‘to congratulate you on taking your stand beside your brother officers in the service of your country.’

The reply was curt. ‘I take orders only from General Villa Abrille.’

Queipo was deadly calm. ‘We will continue our conversation in private,’he said, in the clipped speech he can use on occasion. Then they all went into a little room in the corner of the barrack square. It was a box of a place, so small it would only hold the colonel, his lieutenant major, and a couple of captains crammed in for good measure. Queipo and Lopez Guerrero stood in the doorway and the others just without. ‘So, in spite of the way country and army are being tricked by the Government, you take its side, do you?’

‘I do,’replied the colonel a little unhappily.

‘Then I deprive you of your command. Lieutenant Colonel, take command of the regiment.’

‘I follow my Colonel.’

‘Major Perez,’thundered Queipo, ‘take command!’

‘I follow my Colonel, too.’

The two captains gave the same reply. It looked like a crisis. Queipo turned to his aide. ‘Fetch Major Cuesta,’ he said. The aide obeyed, and Queipo was left absolutely alone with the hostile officers. But for some of them the strain was too much. Major Perez, tears pouring from his eyes, said that the group was with Queipo in their hearts, but, after the cruelties which had been inflicted following the fatal rising of August 1932, they dared not, for their families’ sake, risk failure.

Queipo broke in with that ring of finality in his voice which so often wrung triumph from defeat. ‘Failure is n’t the alternative here. The alternatives are victory and death. There’s no third way.’ He followed with a brief harangue, and at a particularly opportune moment Lopez Guerrero returned with Major Cuesta.

Pistoling seemed the only way out, but Queipo tried once more. Turning to the officers outside, he called sharply, ‘Is there no officer here capable of forming the men?’ The silence was breathless. Then up spoke Captain Fernandez de Cordoba, and Queipo noticed he was smiling.

‘I can, sir.’

‘Then, sir, have the bugle sound “Fall in."'

It was too much for Colonel Allanegui. He tried to step out of his coop.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Queipo roughly.

‘To talk to my men.’

‘You force me to use violence,’ said Queipo, seizing him by the arm and feeling for his revolver. ‘Do you imagine I am not prepared?’

But, as Queipo tells the story, just as he was about to lire an inspiration came to him. Lowering his weapon, he cried out with ferocious energy, ‘You are all prisoners! Follow me.’

Out they marched, past General Queipo, as if he had been a reviewing officer, past the guards, up the street into headquarters, where they were herded into the little back room like lambs with the sheep already in the fold — all except Major Perez, who had shown his true colors and was given command of the regiment.

Back Queipo went to the barrack square, confident that by this time at least a thousand men had lined up for Spain and victory. There were just 130 in the ranks. Concealing his dismay, he threw the whole energy of his nature into an impassioned harangue. He told the troops that Spain was theirs. Queipo is not the man to boggle at facts when facts must be transcended. Everywhere, he assured them, the risings were victorious. The God of Things as They Are must have smiled at that. His peroration was on safer ground. They were heroes to live forever in the gratitude of the nation. Volley after volley of cheers told the orator that the fight was his. A hundred men were told off under Captain Ignacio Trasella to proclaim martial law through the city, leaving Queipo’s own army thirty strong.

Crisis followed crisis like bullets from a machine gun. Trasella’s detachment had not been gone two minutes when news came that three armored cars from headquarters were firing in the streets. Queipo knew his city. Instantly he had a light gun unlimbered and posted at the strategic corner where the restaurant Vinicola juts into the Calle O’Donnell. That done, he thought it prudent to have a look at his prisoners. Back to headquarters he went, and just as he strode through the patio there was the sharp report of a cannon. The first shot had been fired by his one-gun battery. It had missed the car, but so frightened its occupants that they scattered, leaving it empty in the streets, and Riding Master Captain Fuentes leapt to the controls.

The motorization of Queipo’s army had begun. Fifteen minutes later its efficiency was doubled. A patrol from the Granada regiment met the second car. The corporal saw it coming, posted his men in a doorway, and as it passed fired a volley into the engine. The car was repaired and manned with Nationalists within an hour, but before it was running again the third car had been captured and put to use.

Queipo’s force was increasing. Hatred of Red domination among the decent classes grew every hour. Little groups were gathering. One of the General’s first orders was to seize the Artillery Park. Twenty-five thousand rifles and seven thousand carbines were stacked there. It was Saturday afternoon, and the munitions workers were off duty, so a handful of men under Captain Corretcher took possession of it. By this time the Government forces in the city were wide awake to their danger. The arsenal was a crucial point, and a series of violent attacks were made to regain it, but the game little garrison beat them back.

There were pleasant surprises as well as unpleasant. Major Nuñez of the Army Service Corps was a cousin of President Azaña. Suddenly he turned up at Divisional Headquarters, where Queipo was now installed, and asked for orders.

‘Take the Telephone Building,’ was the reply. ‘ I ’ll send a machine-gun company to help you.’

It was no easy assignment. The Telephone Building was a substantial edifice, crowded with Government soldiers. Seeing there was no chance of rushing it, Major Nuñez made a dextrous flank attack. Sweeping into the Town Hall and merely pausing in his stride to arrest the surprised councilors, he posted his machine gun in the window embrasures just opposite the Telefónica.

To Queipo’s practised eye the attack was still doubtful. The Telephone System must be his. He rang up the colonel of the Artillery Corps. Now this was a delicate proceeding, for of all the officers of the corps the colonel alone had been put down in his mind as doubtful, or something worse. However, it was an ill time for lack of confidence, and Queipo allowed no hesitancy to creep into his voice.

‘That you, Colonel? Send a battery immediately to Plaza de San Francisco, at the corner of Calle de Hernando Colon. Then drag the guns by man power to a point where they can fire at the Telefónica point-blank.’

‘To whom have I the honor of speaking?’

‘General Queipo de Llano — now in command of the Division,’

Queipo breathed again. The colonel was hesitating only on account of military difficulties.

‘It is impossible to cross the Guadaira Bridge. Machine guns are posted to command it.’

‘Have the battery knock them down. Then send another battery to protect the first.’

‘I’ll give the orders, General.’

The artillery captured, Queipo attacked the cavalry. The colonel had been a fellow cadet of his, so Queipo relied on his support. But when Queipo rang up, the answer was evasive. Soon it appeared that the colonel had sent a troop of horses to the assistance of the civil government, but fortunately its captain ordered his men into Queipo’s ranks. Then the General knew his ground. He rang up Major Figuerola, a brilliant officer who had served as his lieutenant in Morocco. ‘Take command of the regiment,’ was his order, ‘and send the colonel to me as a prisoner.’

But where were the 1500 Falangistas which Pepe the Bullfighter had promised him that morning? Not 1500, but 15 presented themselves. The rest, they told him, were not far away, but the roads were cut off and all the known Nationalists in the city were arrested and in prison. It was not until two o’clock on Sunday morning that Queipo could spare a couple of lorries and a file of soldiers to open one prison and let 65 of them out. Meantime the colonel of artillery had been bettering his reputation. He reported that at the first shot the Telefónica had surrendered.

‘Government House next,’ ordered Queipo. ‘Fire a percussion shell at the Inglaterra Hotel and breach it so that Government House will be exposed.’ The first shot produced its effect on the civilian garrison.

General Queipo’s telephone rang. ‘Who is it?’

‘I am the Civil Governor. We are prepared to surrender on conditions.’

Queipo, as he said afterwards, could have hugged him, but there was terror in the Governor’s voice, and the General played up to it.

‘No conditions.’

‘But spare our lives!’

‘Yours—but no further promises. Order the police to stack their arms in the patio. I’ll send the new governor promptly with a guard.’

Now Queipo was in a quandary. There was n’t a soldier to send. However, after an awkward interval, he did get hold of a corporal and three men, and to this imposing show of authority the Governor, his aides, the Provincial Council, the Town Council, and two hundred police surrendered. Nothing could show more patently the state of terror which had compelled obedience to the Red régime. Queipo admits he rubbed his eyes to make sure he was not dreaming.

The surrender came none too soon. There were still 400 police in the barracks distributing carbines, pistols, and ammunition among the mob, who celebrated the opportunity by assaults on several churches. But now, with the Civil Governor standing before him to reenforce his orders, Queipo directed that the Chief of the Barracks for All Arms be locked up, that a carefully selected officer be placed in charge of the men, and that everybody else come at once as prisoners to Divisional Headquarters. The Chief of Police endorsed the order. It was obeyed, and within half an hour all the former officers were under arrest, while a group which had been dismissed by the Frente Popular were restored to their old commands. Thenceforth the corps was absolutely loyal.

The airdrome remained. Three machines had just arrived with orders to proceed to bomb Ceuta and Melilla, the Moroccan outposts where the Revolution had begun. Queipo turned to his redoubtable telephone, got the commandant, Major Esteve, on the line, and told him that if his command were not instantly relinquished in favor of Major Azaola, who Queipo knew was to be trusted, the airdrome would be destroyed. The prudent major capitulated on the spot.

The diary of twenty-four hours of a man’s life was never packed with more adventure than this of Queipo’s. It bettered D’Artagnan’s record. But for three days longer danger threatened him from every quarter. The radical unions declared a general strike. The General broke it in twenty-four hours. In Madrid the Reds triumphed, and a bombing squadron was dispatched to call Seville to account; the miners of Rio Tinto marched against the city with two lorries of dynamite to blow it up under orders of General Pozas, who raised the spirits of his mob by giving them permission to violate the wife and daughter of any man found in arms against the Government. Lust and rape are strong incentives.

Seville was wholly cut off from the ‘Movement,’ as it is always called, in the North and South. Every long-distance line was ruptured. It was absolutely essential that communication be reestablished. The radio station was three miles away. How was it guarded, Queipo asked. ‘Four men and a corporal,’ was the reply. Instantly Queipo had his cavalry commander on the wire and ordered a squadron to ride there hell-forleather. Ten minutes’ delay would have lost them the station. Hardly had it been occupied when an organized body of Reds attacked and was with difficulty dispersed. The news was radioed to the General. It filled him with enormous hope.

His friend, the distinguished lawyer Señor Cuellar, was by his side, as he had been at intervals all day (though what need the General had of legal advice history sayeth not). Cuellar said to him, ‘Now you can talk to the people.’

‘What shall I say?’ queried the General.

‘Tell them how the Movement is progressing.’

‘Where,’ asked Queipo, ‘is the transmitting centre?’

‘We can install it on your desk,’ replied Cuellar.

‘Do it now,’ said Queipo, and within half an hour he began those talks which lasted for eighteen months and made him a radio artist of the first magnitude and the patron saint of Andalusia.

III

A Spanish poet, writing in French, puts it prettily. ‘In the iconography of the Spanish War,’ he writes, ‘Don Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, seigneur of Andalusia, will be ever pictured with a microphone, like Saint Joseph with his spray of lilies, like Saint George with his sword. It is his sign manual, his authentic attribution.’

In our own Temple, in the niche dedicated to Mr. Roosevelt, our children’s children will see him pictured before his famous fireside, waving with airy grace the slender holder of his cigarette, governing his people by the charm of his pleasant voice. But Don Gonzalo raises the radio to the level of a finer art. His evening talk is a serenade. He makes love to Andalusia, and Andalusia, listening behind her grille, flashes her response. He gives her comfort and confidence, strength and vast amusement. When she was in the grip of the Red Terror he laughed at her, cajoled her, told her stories so magnificent that in the face of every fact she believed them. For in her soul she knew that in Don Gonzalo truth is not fact that is, but fact that must and shall be.

As Inspector General of Carabineers he was familiar with the personnel of every garrison. He knew his fellow officers as gentlemen and brothers. When in Valencia and Madrid they failed him, it was they, not he, who sinned against the truth, and his assurances to the people of their loyalty and success grew with each defection to a new crescendo. When in the first terrible week, with half of Seville still in Red hands, a fleet of bombers left Madrid to destroy her, with no anti-aircraft guns to defend the city, he turned to the magnificent offensive of the microphone. ‘Tetuan Street, San Francisco Place, the whole Red quarter must be brought under control,’ he told his people. ‘I have ordered up a squadron of bombing planes. Soon you will see them darkening the sky over the city. Remember how uncertain is the aim of aircraft. Rombs may fall accidentally in your own quarter. Keep off the streets.’

When the civil governor of his own choosing, Señor Parias, who had remained all day in his office absolutely without protection and at the mercy of a squad of police who were nominally his prisoners, telephoned him imploring instant aid, Queipo, who had n’t a solitary soldier to send, radioed his reply through the loud-speaker: ‘A company is on its way.’ Relief did come from Huelva, small but welcome. Queipo bundled the troops into lorries, switched them first in one direction, then in another, and paraded them through different quarters of the city, giving an impression of an army corps at the least. For all the while the radio was buzzing, ordering companies, battalions, regiments, this way and that — and, between orders enough to manipulate 100,000 men, news, exciting glamorous news, from every quarter. The Reds were running. Madrid was safe. Valencia had run up the Nationalist flag. The fleet, which had returned, was loyal to a man. Barcelona was safe. Franco was coming. Huzza! Huzza! The air hummed with victory.

In the midst of the hurly-burly, the corps of Moroccans, billed through the week for an overwhelming performance, arrived. They numbered precisely twelve. But switched from one lorry to another, appearing now here, now there, they became 12,000. The Andalusian is cousin-german to the Gascon. He revels in huge numbers and Gargantuan deeds. General Queipo whistled the very tune he wanted.

Within a week the tempest in Seville was stilled. Order was everywhere. The gap between General Mola and General Franco was closed. Still the radio talk went on, penetrating even to Red Barcelona. The General told me that twelve young men caught in the act of secretly ‘listening in’ there were summarily shot.

Don Gonzalo knows precisely how long the heroic mood should last. His talks were interspersed with laughter, satire, ridicule. He told stories such as Spaniards love, not wholly seemly, but by their innuendo irresistibly comic to the ears that heard them. Sometimes he skirted the further borders of decency in telling anecdotes of his ‘friend Caballero’ or ‘that other friend of mine, Ignacio Prieto,’ but. would check himself with a quizzical grunt: ‘Oh, you did n’t believe that I meant that!’ I have seen old ladies rocking themselves in a spasm of delight before the loud-speaker. The utterance was too rapid for me to attempt to follow, but from their expression there was a consciousness within me that it would be well for the old ladies if they could catch no more of the discourse than I.

As truth is to Don Gonzalo no more than emphasis on facts as they should be, so is his justice the dispensation, not of law, but of equity. In front of the old Palais de Justice stands a figure, gaunt and naked, representing The Law. Litigants used to look up at it and say, ‘There is the likeness of a man who has won his suit — and lost his shirt.’

Times are changed. Within that hall now sits Don Gonzalo dispensing justice. In hot weather he uses a fan for a sceptre, and after the fashion of Haroun-alRaschid he cuts through the intricacies of law to the heart of justice. Here is a judge who would hold Don Quixote harmless for freeing the galley slaves, and Jean Valjean for stealing the silver candlesticks.

Canonized or no, Don Gonzalo Queipo de Llano is ensconced as patron saint of Andalusia, firmly and finally as El Cid Campeador. For he is such another. The Devil’s advocate may maintain that his truth is not that Eleventh Commandment which Christian Business has added to the Israelitish Ten. The military critic may insinuate that making love as he does is not a recognized method of making war; the legalist may attack decision where equity is secured at the expense of precedent; but as long as uninstructed people prefer the irregularities of Robin Hood to the virtues of the excellent Sheriff of Nottingham, so long will Queipo the Sinner be enshrined as Don Gonzalo the Saint in the hearts and minds of every freeborn Andalusian.