We Saw Spain Die (3 page)

In the following days, reports from the Reuters correspondent were equally lurid. It was alleged that bodies were piled in the underground stations and that: ‘The victorious Government civilian forces, composed of Anarchists, Communists and Socialists have burned and sacked practically every church and convent in Barcelona.’ The Reuters report went on: ‘The mob drunk with victory, afterwards paraded the streets of the city attired in the robes of ecclesiastical authorities.’
³

Over the next few days the stories became ever gorier. The reign of terror was described under the sub-heading ‘Priests Die Praying. The mob is uncontrollable and class hatred rules.’ According to this account ‘Priests are being dragged with a prayer on their lips from their monasteries to be shot – in the back – by firing squads. Some of them have had their heads and arms hacked off after death as a final vindictive act.’ Delight in the bloodshed went hand in hand with an almost racist patronage of the simplicity of the perpetrators:

like children with a new and dangerous toy which they scarcely understand. Alongside them on the firing line are city clerks who have let their beards grow and are heavy eyed with free liquor and days without sleep. The Robespierre of Barcelona sits on a pedestal fashioned like a throne on the balcony of a magnificent house in the Ramblas, the famous thoroughfare between the Plaza Cataluña and the port… On either side of the throne the leader’s lieutenants sit on chairs with rifles over their knees and blood red silk scarves round head and waist. But for their menacing and unkempt appearance they would be like fancydress pirates. As armed men pass in the street below they salute the ‘Committee’ with a shout and shaking of the fist in the Communist salute.
⁴

The Canadian James M. Minifie left the Paris office of the
New York Herald Tribune
with the instructions of his bureau chief, Leland Stowe, ringing in his ears: ‘Look under every stone and write what you find
there.’ Accordingly, he confined his reports to what he knew to be true. Like Delmer and many of his fellow newspapermen, on his arrival on the Catalan side of the Spanish–French frontier, Minifie was confronted by a gun-toting anarchist in blue overalls who gave him a safe-conduct which would be regarded as valid only by other members of the same faction:

I found Catalan officials very gracious about giving interviews; they damned the Communists as little better than enemy agents, and blamed nightly murders and executions on them. I heard reports of mass graves, looted monasteries, raped nuns and the whole deck of cards; but I never found what I would accept as irrefutable evidence in support of these charges.

He did, however, find ample evidence of looting, whether of farms or urban luxury car showrooms. The anarchists had seized every Rolls Royce, Hispano-Suiza or Cadillac that they could lay their hands on, ostensibly to motorize their columns but often to destroy them in wild joy-rides. After a brief stay, the lack of decent cabling facilities obliged Minifie to return to Paris, prior to going to Madrid and capture by rebel forces three months later.
⁵

As Minifie’s example made clear, not all the visiting firemen were in search of a sensational scoop. Indeed, the journalists who knew Spain well wrote more sober accounts of what was happening. However, passing British journalists who visited His Majesty’s Consul, Norman King, in search of orientation were treated to a gruesomely exaggerated account of what was happening. What he told them can be deduced from his consular despatches from Barcelona. He built a lurid picture in which ‘anarchists, and the escaped criminals with other armed hooligans for a time spread terror throughout the town’.
⁶
Even when things had calmed down, he speculated almost gleefully that economic collapse ‘will produce widespread distress, and possibly lead to a massacre’, and predicted that ‘a time is not far distant when a wave of xenophobia might set in’.
⁷
He confided in the British poet Stephen Spender that he wished Lluís Companys, the President of the Catalan Generalitat, had been shot after the rising of 1934.
⁸

In stark contrast to King’s alarmism about ‘raw undisciplined youth armed to the teeth and mostly out of control’ were the considered reflections of Lawrence Fernsworth. The distinguished, grey-haired Fernsworth, who was born in Portland, Oregon in 1898, had lived in Barcelona for a decade and wrote for both
The Times
of London and the
New York Times.
He also wrote for a Jesuit weekly publication called
America.
A fervent Catholic, Fernsworth spoke both Spanish and Catalan. Reflecting on his first wartime experiences in Barcelona, he commented that ‘our escorts and the Republican crowds in the towns, all armed to the teeth, were the most amiable and solicitous revolutionaries one might wish to meet’ and that: ‘The danger to foreigners in Barcelona seems small. Even the Communists and Anarchists have shown respect for foreigners.’
⁹
On 19 July, while the workers were fighting with the military rebels, Fernsworth noted groups of picnickers coming down the street with hampers hoping to get on a train for their customary Sunday trip out to the countryside. He also noted popular outrage that many military rebels and their civilian sympathizers had been permitted to establish machine-gun emplacements in numerous church towers before the coup. Fortified therein, these rebel supporters opened fire on the workers. The outrage fed the church burnings but, as Fernsworth also noted, the Catalan government made every effort to save those that it could, such as the cathedral. The Capuchin church in the Passeig de Gràcia was saved because the Franciscan friars were noted for their close relation to the poor. Of others, he wrote, ‘I could hardly consider that these churches were being desecrated. In my eyes, they had already been desecrated by the anointed money-changers and were no longer holy temples of worship.’ In describing the subsequent terror, in which those believed to be ‘enemies of the people’ were murdered, Fernsworth was careful to point out that the Catalan government, the Generalitat, was not responsible, and laboured incessantly to keep itself in business and to save property and lives. Of the efforts of the government to re-establish public order, Fernsworth wrote: ‘Persons in official positions risked the anger of extremists, and consequently their lives, to save priests, nuns, bishops and certain other Spanish nationals by getting them aboard foreign ships or across the frontier.’
¹⁰

Fernsworth felt a deep sympathy for the Republic, but had strict professional ethics. Not only did he not attempt to diminish what he knew about atrocities, but he actually took considerable risks to get stories out when he knew them to be true. In the early days of the war, he crossed clandestinely into France in order to send a report about the liquidation of the ‘enemies of the people’ in Barcelona:

It was a dangerous story to bring out and I took care that my departure and return were unobserved and my passport had no telltale marks to show I had been in France. It was well that I did so, for the publication of the story caused a furore in Barcelona. It was an unpleasant task. I knew the facts would be harmful to the Republican cause for which, as an American, I felt a deep sympathy believing that in its essence the struggle was one for the rights of man. But it was the truth and had to be told. As a reporter I have never shirked at telling the truth regardless of whom it might please or displease.

He regularly used to board a Royal Navy cruiser in Barcelona harbour ‘to visit the captain’ and then be taken to Marseilles on a fast destroyer. Having sent his despatch, a day later he would step off the cruiser, having apparently just ‘visited the captain’.
¹¹

The unnamed Barcelona correspondent of Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
had none of the Spanish experience of Fernsworth but nor, it would appear, did he have need for much prompting from Norman King. Five days before the military coup, an editorial had already claimed that ‘The present year has seen Spain fall under the control of a Government bearing the sinister stamp of Bolshevism.’ A few days later, another alleged that ‘highly trained groups of revolutionaries were being sent to Spain, France and Belgium to direct operations on the spot’.
¹²
The rising itself was acclaimed as Spain’s opportunity to be ‘brought back to order or turned into a vassal of USSR’ by the forces in Morocco and Spain gathered ‘for a simultaneous effort of liberation’ (printed in bold). The Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero, ‘the Spanish Lenin’, it was asserted, would try to ‘force the pace to make Spain a vassal state of Soviet Russia’.
¹³

When reports began to reach London from Barcelona, they were printed in the most sensationalist manner possible. Refugees were quoted to the effect that ‘between 2,000–3,000 people’ had been killed: ‘The streets of Barcelona, they claim, are splattered with blood.’ In contrast, Harold Cardozo with General Mola’s forces at Soria approvingly quoted the general’s declaration (printed in bold) that the purpose of the coup was ‘to wrench out by the roots, for ever, all that represents the organisations and principles of Marxism’.
¹⁴
Some of the stories sent were not without their inadvertently comic elements. Under the headline,
LONDONERS FORCED TO FIGHT FOR REDS. REFUGEES TELL OF SPANISH TERROR,
ran a story of a man who had his car commandeered by ‘some communists’ and was forced to give them driving lessons for two hours.
¹⁵
The general line was that Republican Spain was in the hands of Moscow and that the crimes of the anarchists were committed at the behest of Soviet agents. An editorial declared: ‘As Moscow is the stronghold of the Reds in the east, so Madrid has become their headquarters in the west.’ In the same issue, under the headline
MOB RULE PREVAILS IN BARCELONA TONIGHT,
a report claimed that ‘The flag of the sickle and hammer floats over many buildings. Homes of the Spanish nobility are being plundered and burned by Communists and anarchists.’ Another asserted that ‘Anxieties caused by the Communists’ murderous reign of terror are spreading far beyond the frontiers of Spain.’ To add spice to the red-baiting, there was added an element of misogyny. Under the headline
THE WOMEN WHO BURN CHURCHES
–
SPAIN’S RED CARMENS,
it was asserted that female volunteers in the militias were women who had ‘thrown off religion, parental authority and all restraint’.
¹⁶

The consequence was, as John Langdon-Davies of the
News Chronicle
wrote in September 1936, ‘Today most English people have been convinced that the government supporters are not only “reds” but ghouls; that the reason why they have not defeated the fascists is that they spend their time raping nuns and watching them dance naked.’
¹⁷
Fernsworth, like Langdon-Davies, understood why things were happening as they were in Barcelona. It was not, as the
Daily Express
and the
Daily Mail
would have it, that it was to put a stop to the red terror that the military had risen, but rather that the coup had unleashed the red terror by removing the structures of law and order. As Fernsworth
wrote later, ‘the props were knocked out from under directing authority. Such local and provincial governments as existed in the large provincial capitals were like ships without rudder or motive power or sail, desperately battling ungovernable waves.’
¹⁸

Langdon-Davies made every effort to present a more realistic view to a British audience. Since first visiting Catalonia in 1920, and living there during the years 1921–22 and 1927–29, Langdon-Davies had been an enthusiastic student and advocate of Catalan culture. His book,
Dancing Catalans,
published in 1929, reflected his admiration for the humanity and egalitarianism that he believed were the essence of social relations in rural Catalonia. The persecution of the Catalan language and popular culture under the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–30) intensified Langdon-Davies’ sympathies for Catalan nationalism. Unsurprisingly, the establishment of the democratic Second Republic on 14 April 1931 seemed to him to promise a freedom for the region that he loved.

On 6 August 1936, barely three weeks after the military coup, he arrived at Puigcerdà on the Spanish border on a second-hand motorcycle with his fifteen-year-old son, Robin. After leaving Robin with Catalan friends in Ripoll, he went on to Barcelona as a special correspondent of the liberal London daily, the
News Chronicle.
Between 11 August and 7 September, on an almost daily basis, he wrote articles in which he tried to put the disorder and church-burnings into their historical context. He believed that King’s consular staff were contributing to an atmosphere of panic among British citizens in Barcelona: ‘Many of these lost their heads completely, and one can sympathise with them, seeing that the British officials supposed to look after them completely lost theirs.’ He claimed that Norman King ‘became so childishly terrified that he refused to send a conservative newspaperman a car to go to the local airport, saying that it was too dangerous, and that he would not risk the lives of his chauffeurs. This was in mid August when everyone else was settling down to normal existence.’
¹⁹
The man in question was almost certainly the correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph,
Cedric Salter.
²⁰

Thereafter, Langdon-Davies went to Valencia, Madrid and Toledo before returning to England on 19 September. He used the material gathered as the basis for lectures on behalf of the relief organization,
Spanish Medical Aid, and for the book
Behind the Spanish Barricades
which he wrote in barely five weeks in the intervals between his lectures. During his brief time in Spain, Langdon-Davies was quickly convinced that the British policy of non-intervention was disastrous for both the Spanish Republic and for Britain. This brought him into direct conflict with the views being propounded by Norman King. In September 1936, he vainly visited the Foreign Office in London in an attempt to counteract the apocalyptic view emanating from right-wing sources about the Catalan President, Lluís Companys, and of the situation in Barcelona. Langdon-Davies mistakenly underestimated the scale of the killing in Barcelona, and this led to officials checking his figures with Norman King. The Consul gloated and he seized the opportunity to brand Langdon-Davies as a Communist, which he certainly was not.