Unhappy Spain
by .
THE FORGING OF A REBEL, by (Reynal and Hitchcock, $5.00)
COMPLACENT DICTATOR, by Sir Samuel Hoare (Knopf, $3.50)
THE RED DOMINATION IN SPAIN,drawn up by the Ministry of Justice (Madrid, 1946)
In 1820 the Duke of Wellington wrote in a memorandum to Viscount Castlereagh: “There is no country in Europe in the affairs of which foreigners can interfere with so little advantage as Spain.” Although the Iron Duke’s words were based on firsthand experience, there are many fervent non-thinkers in this and other countries who are once more proposing to interfere in the current affairs of Spain. That, if they do so, little advantage will result to anyone of genuine good will is a conviction reinforced by a reading of the three volumes listed above.
There is a growing consciousness in the democratic countries that a new examination of historical facts and a possible revision of opinion concerning the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish position during World War II are due and overdue. For ten years the Nationalist Revolt, headed by General Franco, and the government which he formed after the defeat of the Popular Front have been held up to the world as an unqualified record of black reaction and terror. Few revolutionary efforts have ever had so continuously hostile a press as those of Nationalist Spain. The reasons are obvious enough. First, the world knows little about Spain or Spanish polities. Second, the Nationalist movement incurred the enduring, implacable enmity of Communist Russia. Hitler and Stalin might join hands when the gesture seemed expedient, but Franco was always the unbending enemy of the Soviets, their Public Enemy No. 1, to be destroyed by any means whatsoever. Third, the Revolution, the Falange, the Nationalist Government, were linked by ideological sympathy with our own enemies, with the powers we hated most and with which we were engaged in doubtful and dreadful battle. Given these circumstances and years of unbridled and unanswered propaganda, there is good reason for our conviction that Franco’s government is beyond the pale and should be barred from the comity of nations.
These books do not disprove the indictments. The first two are frankly hostile and the third may be dismissed as an ex parte plea that the Communists and Anarchists were worse than the Nationalists. But they do throw light on actual conditions; they present the circumstance which controlled or produced the event, the problems which faced, not American or English newspaper readers, but the unhappy Spaniard, caught in the trap of inexorable conflicts.
Señor Barea’s book is long, long. He has no gift of omission. But those strong spirits who read honestly on to the end will be rewarded by the breadth and sincerity of his story. They cannot fail to be convinced of his sobriety, his entire good faith, and his conviction. Perhaps his reiterated detail is necessary to paint justly the somber picture of Spanish poverty, corruption, and distrust. The son of a widowed washerwoman in Madrid, his childhood was one of continuous struggle and bitter destitution, a period when he learned once and for all the lessons of grinding Spanish poverty, from which there seemed to be no release, no escape. Being intelligent, he acquired some education in the parish schools and began to emerge from the proletariat and to join the edges of the clerkly caste. All this period the author presents in great detail, with a kind of fascinated, nostalgic horror. Whatever he might become, he could never forget his origin. He was a proletarian.
From his precarious clerkdom in a bank, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Morocco in 1920. His military service in that small, dreadful war, that inglorious misery of blood and death, left him after a year a physical wreck, and grievously shaken in mind and spirit. There he had met firsthand the ultimate horrors of war and experienced complete disillusion as to the honesty of man. Returned to Morocco after sick leave at home, he encountered less fighting but more dishonesty. The whole Army was corrupt, it seemed. Every officer was a grafter; the generals were incompetent careerists; the rank and file ranged from illiterate peasant boys to the wild criminals of the Spanish Foreign Legion.
This last organization, more terrible than its French original, represented the desperate mercenary of all time. A spellbinder like Lt. Col. Millán Astray might inspire these hopeless men by addressing them as “Caballeros legionarios!", “the Betrothed of Death,” and send them into battle shouting “Viva la Muerte!” But when out of the line, only the most hideous discipline could hold them. One day, Barea writes, a soldier of the Tercio refused to eat the rotten food of their mess. “ He took the mess tin and shoved it back. The officer on duty shot him clean through the head. The next man refused the filled tin. The officer shot him. The third wavered, carried his mess tin away from the field kitchen and smashed it on the ground. The officer shot him. The others ate their portions.
“A few days later three officers of that Company were killed in action at Akarrat, shot in the back.”
Among the officers of this almost bestial body was one who stood out by sheer force of military power, as hard a soldier as Spain has produced since Hernán Cortés. This, contrary to our mental picture of the man, was Francisco Franco, who in his early thirties rose to the command of the Legion. Barea quotes a Legionnaire: —
“You see, Franco . . . No, look. The Tercio’s rather like being in a penitentiary. The most courageous brute is the master of the jail. And something of this sort has happened to that man. He’s hated, just as the convicts hate the bravest killer in their jail, and he’s obeyed and respected — he imposes himself on all the others. . . . You know how many officers of the Legion have been killed by a shot in the back during an attack. Now, there are many who would wish to shoot Franco in the back, but not one of them has the courage to do it. They’re afraid that he might turn his head and see them just when they have taken aim at him.”
“But surely it is the same story with Millán Astray.”
“Oh, no. One couldn’t take a pot-shot at Mill&n Astray, he takes too good care of himself. But it wouldn’t be difficult to fire at Franco. He takes the lead in an advance. . . . I’ve seen him walk upright in front of all the others, while they hardly dared to lift their heads from the ground, the bullets fell so thick. And who would shoot him in the back then? You just stay there with your mouth open, halfhoping that the Moors’ll get him at any moment, and half-afraid of it, because if they did, you would run away. . . . It’s funny because he’s still so young.”
And, as the author added, when Franco had been promoted to chief: “But from being a hero of this kind to being a rebel-and a Fascist-there is only one step.”
The Moroccan War bled Spain while in men and treasure. The horror it inspired brought about the dictatorship of Primo and the fall of the monarchy. Barea is weakest in his description of the years between Alfonso’s Might and the establishment of the Popular Front. He was confused, himself. A Socialist, a member of his Union, deeply concerned by the profound corruption of Spanish life, the intrenched greed of the capitalists, the scoundrelism of the politicians, and the misery of the working class, he was for the people as against their rulers and exploiters, but he could not subscribe to the doctrines of the Communists or the Anarchists. Yet these two parties, superior in numbers and organization, were clearly taking over the government of the Popular Front. They were bitterly hostile and antagonistic.
Barea abhorred the excesses and atrocities which marked the usurpation of power by the “parties,” when the Popular Front dissolved under the fact of the Franco revolution. He chose the people’s cause as his upbringing and sympathies forced him to do. Propertied people, the Army, the church, the haves as against the have-nots, chose the revolutionary side as the force of liberation, the upholders of Law and Order.
It is impossible for an outsider to assess the rightness or wrongness of either side. Our sympathies have been totally enlisted on the part of the “Loyalists,” as democratic forces fighting in the battle against Fascism. That picture is woefully inadequate. The long, gallant battle of the Loyalists was led by the Organized forces of Anarchy and Communism, which have little or nothing to do with Democracy. These two dreary doctrines can only take root and thrive in a soil of ignorance and misery, and Spain provided such a soil. The guilt for the civil war does not lie with the Fascists or the Communists, but with the sad, proud, willful wrongness of Spanish life. “Pobre España ” produced these two contenders for dictatorship, both of them wrong — from the standpoint of a happier land. Barea served to the best of his ability the government of his choice. Ill health, overwork, “shell shock,”and Communist discipline overcame him before the end of the war, and he escaped to begin life as a writer with a new wife and a new hope.
This review is longer than the importance of his autobiography warrants as a work of literature. But a full consideration of the book is justified for its careful presentation of an episode of great significance to all thoughtful people in the world today.
The account rendered by Sir Samuel Hoare, now Viscount Templewood, of his very important mission to Spain from 1940 to the end of 1944 lacks fireworks and, at times, suffers from understatement or undue insistence on trivia. But this competent former member of the Chamberlain Government, assigned to a strange and almost impossible task, was quick to seize the essential purpose and method of his undertaking and to adhere to them with complete consistency and ultimate success. His job was to keep Spain from joining with the Axis and to keep Hitler out of Spain. It was a diplomatic job with a high strategical purpose. It was immensely difficult. Not only were the fortunes of the United Kingdom at the lowest point, not only were almost all Spaniards convinced that an Axis victory was inevitable, but the Spanish government was in full sympathy with Hitler and even with Mussolini. The Spanish press and the police were under German domination; the German Army stood at the Spanish border; German agents and diplomats and propagandists were everywhere.
Sir Samuel set himself first to create good will and an atmosphere of confidence. With firmness and patience he stuck to his guns, which must, at times, have seemed to be loaded with cotton wool, and helped to maintain an always precarious status quo until the tide turned. There is much that is quotable and many anecdotes of lively interest in this book. Throughout, the author understood the situation, summed it up justly, and acted wisely to promote his country’s cause.
It is, however, in his opinions of Franco and Franco’s policies that Sir Samuel’s judgment seems to have been a affected by his natural antipathies. To him Franco, as the friend of the Axis and the unfriend of England, was to be cajoled and threatened into maintaining an attitude of non-belligerency. Sir Samuel could promise economic assistance and assure the dictator that the Allies were bound to win in the long run, and he could keep on protesting and complaining about unneutral acts and the treatment of British representatives and nationals. But all his blows seemed like punching a feather pillow. Franco was evasive; action bogged down in bureaucratic delays and subterfuge; the Caudillo’s suavity thinly veiled the hostility of his subordinates. Above all, Sir Samuel felt impotent before what he constantly refers to as the incredible “complacence” of the Spanish dictator. A plump, mousy little man, like a quiet country doctor, could this be the brilliant, ruthless soldier? How could he be so complacent, so cloaked with a smug infallibility? Sir Samuel seems to have avoided the obvious answer: that Franco, in about as hot a spot as a dictator could be placed, a grain between two millstones, with dreadful forces pulling him this way and that, with nothing before him but the prospect of being damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, must have possessed a complacency founded in sang-froid and a complete self-confidence, He did pull his country unharmed through four years of daily crisis and, even if he was quite repulsive in his opinions or his methods, he succeeded in playing both ends against the middle and saved Spain. No mouselike nonentity could have achieved this miracle.
Sir Samuel became a friend of Spain and the Spaniards. His conclusions on the Spanish question are worth quoting. Why, he asks, had Spain lost the poise and balance of its great days and “drifted into resentful isolation from the rest of civilized Europe”? His answer is that the most important reasons are:
First, a Spanish disinclination to finish off the simple and necessary tasks of life, second, the Spanish failure to achieve community of thought and action between the government and the people.
As a political being, “the ordinary Spaniard regards the government, be it monarchist, republican or military, as his chief enemy, while the government, in its turn regards him as a potential criminal to be watched and controlled with unceasing vigilance.”
Spanish governments have been consistently bad. For example; —
In the last century Spain had tried every form and shade of Government from the extreme right to the extreme left, and every one, with the exception of the constitutional liberalism of Alfonso XII’s reign, had not. only failed but ended in force. There had been thirteen different constitutions and only one chief of state had succeeded in avoiding exile or disgrace. . . .
The Republicans in particular suffered from their past. The Civil War had left in the hearts of the great majority of Spaniards in Spain a profound desire for order, and a passionate fear of anarchy. However good may have been the intentions of the Republican leaders in 1931, the fact remained that the subsequent five years was a period of autocracy alternating with anarchy. In the ninety-six months of the Republic’s life, there were no less than thirtythree ministries, and the ambitious Constitution of 11,000 words was superseded for eighty-six months out of the ninety-six by a Law of Public Safety that abrogated every personal liberty. Worse, however, than the abrogation of personal rights was the anarchy that broke out in the later years of the regime.
Franco promised at least stability, but his great and unforgivable fault lay in his unwillingness to forgive his opponents and heal the wounds of civil war. A proper and satisfactory government for the Spanish people has yet to be found, but there is every reason to believe it cannot be imposed by foreigners.
The proofreading of this volume is not up to Knopf’s usual standard. Sir Samuel is made to deliver a speech in 1936 which he obviously delivered in 1940. “Ambassadress” becomes “Ambassadors,” to everyone’s confusion. But these are tiny faults in a volume of great interest and vigor.
Having been brought up on a sound New England diet of Prescott and Motley, with overtones from Westward Ho! and grisly hints from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, to say nothing of General Weyler and the “Spanish Mar,” this reviewer for a long time nursed the comfortable belief that Spaniards delighted in cruelty, that they rejoiced in the thumbscrew and the rack as other people enjoy music or perfumery. Mature experience in Spain has weakened this conviction, but it is probably true that Spanish civilization, which certainly does not enjoy the suffering of beasts or humans, is less sensitive to it than our own. It accepts the ugly facts of blood and death. It is definitely, in its hard Latin logic, not squeamish.
Therefore it is not surprising that The Red Domination of Spain should be illustrated with no end of repulsive photographs of murdered priests, nuns, and civil persons, in full, horrid detail. The lists of these “martyrs” are tragically long. The recital of crimes by the Loyalist “checas,” the bewildering documentation — all this may be accepted as substantially true. But, at this late date, the necessity for proving that there were massacres and church burnings by the “Loyalists” seems superfluous. The public has accepted these incidents as among the mournful facts of revolution; their full-dress rehearsal, ten years later, is no more valuable than the flogging of a dead horse. As well produce affidavits to prove that tumbrils rolled and heads fell during the Terror in Paris. Let us hope that the Japanese are not moved a decade from now to document — with photographs a new edition of Hiroshima.
One wonders, if the Spanish government thought this volume necessary or valuable for propaganda in the U.K. and the U.S.A., why someone was not secured who could translate the original documents into good journalistic English. Instead, the job was turned over, apparently, to some local scholar who rendered Anarchist as Anarquist, Confessional as Confessionary, economic as economical, and so on, and pursued a plodding course of literal translation which makes little or no sense to Anglo-Saxon readers.
Here are the documents without index or table of contents but with all their miserable quoque’s to prove that atrocious deeds were done by the officials of the Popular Front. They demonstrate the obvious. File them away!