Iberia (115 page)
Authors: James Michener
One obvious question must be asked. Are the three reasons
cited above mere ex post facto rationalizations masking the fact
that I was afraid to volunteer? In any sensible man fear of battle
will always be a partial motive, and in my case it could have played
a decisive role. On the other hand, in World War II, I was exempt
from military service because I was a Quaker, but I joined the
navy anyway. In Asia, I have seen a good deal of war, more than
most, and I cannot recall ever having shied away from battle. I
therefore conclude that the reasons cited above are not spurious
and did actually govern my behavior.
It was with a sense of doom that I followed the news which
began to come out of Teruel in late 1937. We have seen that in
1171 the city was founded because a fortress was needed to
stabilize the battle line that existed between the Christians in
Zaragoza and the Moors in Valencia. Now, almost eight hundred
years later, Teruel found itself serving the same function, except
that this time it was General Franco’s troops that were in Zaragoza
and the Republicans that were in Valencia. It had become the
keystone of the Republican line running between Valencia and
Barcelona and its retention would determine who would win the
war.
In October, Franco’s army occupied Teruel and in forays from
it began to cut the Republican lines. If the Republic were to
survive, it must recapture this city, even though winter was
approaching.
Teruel was defended by some ten thousand Franco troops
under the command of a colonel bearing a French last name, Rey
d’Harcourt, who had ordered the building of defense positions
on all slopes leading up to the city. Teruel would be difficult to
assault, but for the job the Republicans had assembled a force of
a hundred and ten thousand well-trained men, and on December
15 they began the attack.
It coincided with the beginning of one of Teruel’s famed
winters; for several weeks the thermometer dropped each night
to zero degrees Fahrenheit, bringing some ice and much snow,
which helped the Franco men inside the city. Nevertheless, the
Republicans attacked, only to be repulsed by slanting fire. Again
and again the Republicans tried to climb the sloping flanks, but
had to retreat, leaving their wounded to die between the lines.
Here in this significant city, which I had stumbled upon years
ago, developed the most terrible battle of the war, and here the
fate of the world, at least for this period, was being decided.
The Republican attack continued for twenty-four gruesome
days, during which frightful crimes were perpetrated by both
sides. Prisoners were shot. Bystanders were executed. Dead bodies
were mutilated. Buildings were wantonly destroyed and vengeance
was exacted on any enemy at hand. If the brutality of the two
armies was about equal, so was the heroism. To storm the hills
of Teruel over ice and snow and then to penetrate the rubbled
defenses required courage of an absolute order, and this the
Republicans had; to remain inside the city walls, with no water,
no food and diminishing supplies of ammunition, while
determined assaults came hourly, required of Franco’s men a
determination which never faltered.
In America, I followed the siege with a sense of tragic despair.
The hills I had tramped were the ones under contention and the
city streets I had found so meaningful were those where the
shellfire struck with such fury. Reports said that several columns
of Franco’s troops were rushing south to relieve the handful of
men inside Teruel, and I prayed that they would not arrive before
the Republicans had won the city.
Shortly after January 8, 1938, I read with enormous relief that
Colonel Rey d’Harcourt had surrendered Teruel to the
Republicans. His men crawled down out of the rubble, looking
like emaciated ghosts, and women who had undergone the siege
and the bombardment appeared half dead as they begged for
water. It was a tremendous Republican victory and aroused hopes
throughout the eastern half of Spain. In Fascist capitals like Berlin
and Rome, especially the latter, it caused despair, for it seemed
the first of what might be many Republican triumphs. In America,
I breathed deeply and looked at the new map. The great cities,
Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, remained in Republican hands,
and the war had obviously become a contest between the
reactionary rural sections and the liberal metropolitan ones, and
I could not believe that in an age of technical development rural
areas could win a war.
But almost immediately the relief columns which Franco had
set in motion toward Teruel began arriving to start a new siege.
This time it was the Franco forces who had to attack up the
dreadful slopes; it was the Republicans who were trapped inside
the city, with inadequate food, water or ammunition. Only the
cold remained the same. At first the ice and snow exacted more
casualties than the bullets, but finally the Franco forces moved
heavy Italian batteries into position and these began the systematic
destruction of the city. Row after row of houses were pulverized.
In early February the Republicans had to evacuate the
commanding hill on which the Bull of Teruel had appeared, and
it was soon occupied by an Italian battery which fired point-blank
into the city.
Throughout the middle weeks of February, in intense cold, the
Franco forces inched their way forward, and it was during this
fatal time, when the result of the battle was obvious, that the worst
atrocities were committed. On February 20, Franco assault troops
broke through to the first line of houses and bayoneted all in sight.
On February 21 the Franco men swept into the heart of the city,
took all the major buildings and began those reprisals which
would permanently remove from Teruel any persons with
Republican connections.
The battle had lasted sixty-nine days. Twenty thousand
Republican troops were dead, ten thousand Franco men.
Twenty-eight thousand prisoners had been taken and the number
of wounded could not be calculated. Thousands of civilians were
dead; on each side thousands had been assassinated under one
pretext or another. But at last the battle was over and Teruel,
almost totally destroyed, was permanently in Franco’s hands. The
Republican lifeline from Valencia to Barcelona and to Madrid
was threatened if not wholly cut, and the uprising of the rural
areas against the cities had succeeded. Germany and Italy had
won the first round in the test of arms, and a world war was
inevitable. Of course, the war in Spain would struggle along for
another year, with the terrible Battle of the Ebro still to unfold
and the final siege of Madrid, but after Teruel sensible observers
knew that the outcome was determined.
With the death of this mountain city I experienced a spiritual
agony that has not diminished through the years. A noble effort
of men to govern themselves perished with the collapse of Teruel,
and not all the rationalizations of the postwar period can deny
that fact. Now it is popular to describe the whole war in terms of
white (the victorious forces) and red (the Communist), but when
the war began this was not the distinction nor was it the
commanding consideration at the Battle of Teruel. When I read,
as I do in the book before me, that ‘finally the white forces of
freedom triumphed over the Russian-led reds,’ I feel sick at my
stomach. When I see official publications which seek to prove
that all Republicans were Communists, that only Republicans
slaughtered civilians, that only Republicans were guilty of heinous
crimes, my reason balks. The war had begun on different
principles, even though I do now admit that it ended in a debacle
in which those original concepts were engulfed.
In March 11, 1939, Almería, Murcia and Cartagena surrendered
and the long struggle ground to a halt. About 900,000 Spaniards
were dead, of whom some 175,000 had been assassinated. More
than 170 monasteries and convents were burned and nearly 1900
ravaged to the point where they could not be used. Some 3000
others were wrecked in part. More than 250,000 homes were
destroyed, and nearly 400,000 Spaniards preferred exile in
countries like Mexico and France to the reprisals that awaited
them in Spain. Any rehabilitation of the country was made more
difficult by the fact that 8,000,000,000,000 pesetas had been sent
out of the country by the Republican government to purchase
arms; 1,500,000,000,000 were subsequently recovered by the
Franco government, but the remainder stayed abroad, mainly in
Russia and Mexico. (The data in this paragraph come principally
from Georges-Roux,
, translated from
the French, 1964.)
As to the number of priests and nuns assassinated in the early
days of the war, the figures are uncertain, but at least fifteen
thousand perished, including fourteen bishops, not one of whom
would commit apostasy in order to escape martyrdom. In one
town after another, where for the last two hundred years observers
had reported that the citizens were above all else Catholics who
loved their priests, one of the first things that happened when war
started was the indiscriminate slaughter of clericals, and this
occurred even in areas where Communists were not in control.
On the other side, events such as those at Málaga, where eighty
suspected Masons were garroted, were common.
Today, looking back at such evidence as has so far been made
public, I must conclude that the apprehensions which kept me
from volunteering in 1936 were sound. I was a better judge than
I knew, for the seeds of the final Communist debacle in Spain
began to mature fairly early in the fight, even though at the time
I was not intelligent enough to identify them. I think that no one
can see the photographs of Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid taken
in the final winter of 1938-39 without realizing that Communism
had pretty well taken charge of the Republic; if the leadership of
that time had somehow triumphed, there can be little doubt but
that it would have organized a Communist dictatorship. But
during the Battle of Teruel, Communism was not inevitable.
But I had not returned to Teruel to exacerbate the feelings of
guilt occasioned by its fall. I had quite a different purpose. During
the war no city had given Franco’s army more trouble than this,
and at various points in Spain I was warned not to bother with
Teruel: ‘The victors are disgusted with it. They hated its stubborn
people, and the Franco government would give the city nothing.’
Others said, ‘If you want to see Spain at its worst, go to Teruel.
It’s a ghost town.’ In a well-produced volume called
Each Province
, sponsored in part by the government, native sons
write about and illustrate each of the fifty provinces, but
apparently Teruel still produces no writers, for its essay is written
by a man from Madrid. It is a beautiful thing, an elegy for a dead
city, and the painting which illustrates it is a handsome, mournful
black gash, recalling barbed wire and broken bottles. Because I
had an affinity for Teruel, I wanted to see what had happened to
it in defeat, for this would constitute a real test of contemporary
Spain: How did the victors treat the vanquished?
First I went out into the country to see if it had changed much.
I chose the remote village of San Augustín, on the border of
Castellón Province, and there under a perfect July sky I walked
for several miles through ripened fields where the reapers were
at work according to a division of labor laid down prior to Bible
times: a young man swung the large scythe; his strong wife
gathered the fallen grain; an old man twisted stalks into a rope
and tied the bundles. As I watched them I said, ‘The recurring
sound of rural life has been the swish of the scythe over stubble
and rocks, but no musician has been able to put it into music.’
In the fields at least nothing had changed, and the trio at work
looked just as poor and just as tired as their predecessors had
looked thirty-four years before.
Nor had the village changed. The central square was still
unpaved; most of the houses were still unpainted; the dust was
omnipresent and the heat still kept people indoors. The meanness
of the life continued too: the earthen floors, the sparse furniture,
the inadequate clothing, the harsh poverty of Spanish rural life.
I recalled that day in Badajoz when our car had taken the injured
man to the hospital, and in San Agustín the standard of living
was the same. Of all the countries in which I have traveled, only
India and Turkey have had rural poverty as grinding as that in
Spain, and the much publicized ‘Twenty-five Years of Peace’ have
brought little to the farmers.
Yet even as I thought this, I became aware of the improvement.
Out beyond the village I could see electricity wires which had not
been there a generation ago; in what once had been barren fields
I could see where millions of young trees had been planted, as
they have been throughout Spain. The roads were better and the
village even had an automobile and two television aerials. The
farmers looked poor, but nowhere did I see any in rags, nor did
they look underfed. On balance I would say that in the country
things were a little better than they had been before; but when
one considered what had been accomplished in rural areas in
Germany, Denmark and Britain, the comparison was
disadvantageous. On the other hand, Spain had accomplished
more than Turkey and much more than India.
On my return to Teruel, I picked up, along the road, a
fine-looking young man in clerical garb who said he was
hitchhiking home from his studies at the seminary in Valencia,
and his pleasant chatter was so charming that I shall repeat it
without interruption: ‘I’m twenty-two years old and entered
seminary training at eleven. I was an orphan, you see, and was
stuck away in an orphanage and this was the only way that I could
see of getting out. I wasn’t a real orphan, I suppose, because my
mother and three sisters were living, but my father died and we
could scarcely live on what my mother earned, so it was decided
that I should go to the orphanage, and I made up my own mind
to go to the seminary. We have no students there from the middle
class. I suppose when I become a priest I’ll be sent to some small
village like the one you’ve been visiting, and I’ll bring my mother
to live with me and I’ll find jobs in the village for my three sisters,
who will live with me until they’re married. I’ve noticed a priest
can usually find jobs of some kind for his relatives. You mention
the novels of Pío Baroja, but we’re not allowed to read them. He’s
much too anti-clerical, but the disappointing thing is that the
Spanish novels we are allowed to read are so pro-clerical they
aren’t much fun. But I understand the Church’s problem and
obey its suggestions. I saw your motion picture