Пол Престон – Franco (страница 11)

By 17 September 1921, Berenguer was able to order a counter-attack to recoup some of the territory lost. The Legion was once more in the vanguard. On the first day of the offensive, near Nador, Millán Astray was seriously wounded in the chest. He fell to the ground shouting ‘they’ve killed me, they’ve killed me’ then sat up to shout ‘¡Viva el Rey! ¡Viva España! ¡Viva la Legión!’. As stretcher-bearers came to carry him away, he handed over command to Franco.

When the young major and his men entered Nador, they found heaps of the unburied, rotting corpses of their comrades killed six weeks earlier. Franco wrote later that Nador, with the bodies lying in the midst of the scattered booty of the attackers, was ‘an enormous cemetery’.⁹⁹ In the following weeks, he and his men were used in many similar operations, taking part in the recapture of Monte Arruit on 23 October. He saw no contradiction in the fact that, although he approved of the atrocities committed by his own men, he was appalled by the mutilation of the hundreds of corpses of Spanish soldiers found at Monte Arruit. He and his men left Monte Arruit ‘feeling in our hearts a desire for revenge, for the most exemplary punishment ever seen down the generations’.¹⁰⁰ Franco himself recounted that, on one occasion during the campaign, a captain ordered his men to cease firing because their targets were women. One old Legionarie muttered ‘but they are factories for baby Moors’. ‘We all laughed’, wrote Franco in his diary, ‘and we remembered that during the disaster [at Melilla], the women were the most cruel, finishing off the wounded and stripping them of their clothes, in this way paying back the welfare that civilization brought them.’¹⁰¹

On 8 January 1922, Dar Drius fell to Berenguer’s column and much of what had been lost at Annual had been recaptured. Franco was indignant about the fate of Spanish soldiers massacred by the Moors at Dar Drius in 1921 and outraged that the Legion was not permitted to enter the village and take its revenge.¹⁰² However, they had their chance a few days later. An incident took place which led the press in Galicia to praise ‘the sang froid, the fearlessness and the contempt for life’ of the ‘beloved Paco Franco’. A blockhouse near Dar Drius was attacked by tribesmen and the defending legionãrios were forced to appeal for help. The Commander of the Spanish forces in the village ordered the entire detachment of the Legion there to go to their aid. Franco said that twelve would be enough and asked for volunteers. When the entire unit stepped forward, he chose twelve and they set off. The attack on the blockhouse was driven off. The next morning Franco and his twelve volunteers returned carrying ‘as trophies the bloody heads of twelve harqueños (tribesmen)’.¹⁰³

When occasional leave permitted, Franco would visit Carmen Polo in Asturias. On these trips to Oviedo, as an ever more celebrated military hero, he was a welcome guest at the dinner parties of the local aristocracy. His presence was entirely compatible with a reverence for the nobility which would remain constant throughout his life.¹⁰⁴ Here, as he socialised, he began to make contacts which would be useful in later life and he also began to make an investment in his public image which suggests the scale of his ambition. The press began to seek him out. In interviews, speeches made at banquets given in his honour and in his publications, he began consciously to project the image of the selfless hero. Shortly after he had taken over command of the Legion from Millán Astray, Franco had received a telegram of congratulations from the Alcalde (mayor) of El Ferrol. In the heat of battle, he found time to make a self-deprecatory reply: ‘The Legion is honoured by your greeting. I merely fulfil my duties as a soldier. An affectionate greeting to the town from the legionarios’.¹⁰⁵ It was typical of Franco’s perception of himself at the time as the brave but self-effacing officer who is interested only in his duty. It was an image in which he believed implicitly and also one which he made some effort to project publicly. On leaving an audience with the King in early 1922, he told reporters that the King had embraced him and congratulated him on his success commanding the Tercio during Millán Astray’s absence: ‘What he has been said about me is a bit exaggerated. I merely fulfil my duty. The rank-and-file soldiers are truly valiant. You could go anywhere with them’.¹⁰⁶ It would be wrong to say that when Franco spoke in such terms he was merely being cynical. There is little doubt that the young major sincerely saw himself in the Beau Geste terms of his own diary. Nonetheless, his behaviour in interviews and the fact that he published the diary in late 1922, freely giving away copies of it, suggest an awareness of the value of a public presence in the longed-for transition from hero to general.

^* Francisco in memory of his paternal grandfather, Hermenegilda in memory of his paternal grandmother and in honour of his godmother, Paulino in honour of his godfather and Teódulo because he was christened on the feast of Saint Teódulo.

^† There has been much idle speculation that his family was Jewish, on the basis of his appearance and because both Franco and Bahamonde are common Jewish surnames in Spain.

^‡ Indeed, after Franco’s death, there were press revelations concerning Nicolás’s relationship in Manila with a fourteen-year-old girl, Concepción Puey, with whom he was said to have had an illegitimate son, Eugenio Franco Puey, who made himself known to Francisco Franco in 1950 – Opinión, 28 February 1977; Interviu, No. 383, 14–20 September 1983.

^* Nicolás was born 1 July 1891, Pilar 27 February 1895 and Ramón 2 February 1896.

^* Often he would join her in the difficult trek up the Pico Douro to the east of El Ferrol to pray to the Virgen de Chamorro in fulfilment of promises she had made in her prayers for his safe return.

^* ‘Pacón’ means ‘big Frank’ which he was always called to distinguish him from Franco, who was known in the family as ‘Paquito’ or ‘little Frank’.

^* In retrospect, he nurtured considerable resentment about his failure to receive the Gran Cruz for what happened at El Biutz. Forty-five years later, when he reconstructed the episode, he said that the wound had been to the liver rather than the lower abdomen, which might suggest some sensitivity about its alleged consequences for his masculinity. He claimed that, despite the gravity of the wound, he had heroically continued directing operations from his stretcher. In this fanciful recollection, he had missed the medal only because the doctor who attended him had reported later that he had been on the verge of collapse, in the mistaken belief that this would strengthen his case for the award. As it was, according to Franco, this led the adjudicators to conclude that his state of health would not have permitted him to continue in command. Ramón Soriano, La mano izquierda de Franco (Barcelona, 1981) pp. 141–2.

II

THE MAKING OF A GENERAL

1922–1931

FRANCO WAS beginning to evince signs of cultivating his public image, but he was genuinely popular with his men because of his methodical thoroughness and his insistence on always leading assaults himself. He was a keen advocate of the use of bayonet charges in order to demoralize the enemy. With his exploits well reported in the national press, he was being converted into a national hero, ‘the ace of the Legion’. The rotund and plain-speaking General José Sanjurjo, himself one of the heroes of the African campaign and Franco’s superior officer, said to him ‘you won’t be going to hospital as a result of shot fired by a Moor but because I’m going to knock you down with a stone the next time I see you on horseback in action’.¹

In June 1922, Sanjurjo recommended Franco for promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel for his role in the recapture of Nador. Because enquiries were still being held into the disaster of Annual, the request was turned down. Nevertheless, Millán Astray was promoted to full colonel and Sanjurjo himself to Major-General. Franco merely received the military medal and remained a Major. Outraged by civilian criticisms of the Army and by indications that the government was contemplating withdrawal from Morocco, Millán Astray made a number of injudicious speeches and was removed from command of the Legion on 13 November 1922. To his chagrin, Franco was not invited to take his place since, still a major, he was too junior. Command was given instead to Lieutenant-Colonel Rafael de Valenzuela of the Regulares. Having been passed over for command, Franco then left the Legion. For the man who had built it up from scratch with Millán, the prospect of being second-in-command to a newcomer must have seemed unacceptable.² He requested a mainland posting and was eventually sent back to the Regimiento del Príncipe in Oviedo.

To the dismay of most Army officers, the collapse at Annual reinforced the pacifism of the Left and diminished the public standing of both the Army and the King. Alfonso XIII was widely suspected of having encouraged Silvestre to make his rash advance.³ In August 1921, General José Picasso had been appointed to head an investigation into the defeat. The Picasso report led to the indictment of thirty-nine officers including Berenguer, who was obliged to resign as High Commissioner on 10 July 1922. Throughout the autumn of 1922, the Picasso report was the object of hostile scrutiny by a committe of the Cortes, known as the ‘Responsibilities Commission’, set up to examine political responsibilities for the disaster. The brilliant Socialist orator Indalecio Prieto denounced the corruption which had weakened the colonial Army and so ensured that Silvestre’s temerity would turn into overwhelming defeat. The Socialist deputy called for the closure of the military academies, the dissolution of the quartermasters corps and the expulsion from the Army of the senior officers in Africa. His speech was printed as a pamphlet and one hundred thousand copies were distributed free of charge.⁴