Пол Престон – Franco (страница 4)

In November 1905, the Barcelona offices of both the Catalan satirical magazine, Cu-Cut! and of the Lliga Regionalista’s newspaper, La Veu de Catalunya, were ransacked by three hundred fiercely centralist junior officers to the applause of the officer corps throughout Spain. Given widespread military approval of what was happening, the government was unable to impose discipline or to resist military demands for measures to punish offences against the honour of the Army. In 1906, politicians bowed to military readiness to interfere in politics by introducing the Ley de Jurisdicciones which gave the Army jurisdiction over perceived offences against the Patria, the King and the Army itself.²⁴ It was a considerable boost to the Army’s sense of superiority over civilian society.

On reaching the age of twelve, first Nicolás and then Francisco, together with their fourteen year-old cousin, Francisco Franco Salgado Araujo, entered the Naval Preparatory School run by Lieutenant-Commander Saturnino Suanzes. There they became friendly with Camilo Alonso Vega, who was to remain a lifelong comrade. Nicolás, and a friend of the two brothers, Juan Antonio Suanzes, were successful in their efforts to join the Cuerpo General de la Armada. Nicolás chose to go to the Naval Engineering School. Franco and his lanky cousin Pacón^* nurtured hopes of going to the Escuela Naval Flotante, the naval cadet ship. Then a decree was published restricting entry which closed the way to them. There was never any question of seeking a career other than a military one and so the now fourteen year-old Franco was sent to the Academia Militar de Infantería in Toledo. Pacón failed the entrance examination for 1907 but was successful the following year.²⁵

When he accepted a post in Madrid in 1907, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo went alone and gradually severed his links with his family. Members of his family have suggested that he was obliged to take the post, but having been able to spend nearly twenty years in El Ferrol without threat of being moved away, it seems more likely that he deliberately sought the posting to the capital in order to escape an unhappy marriage.²⁶ Although there was no divorce from Pilar, he later ‘married’ his lover Agustina Aldana in an informal non-religious ceremony in Madrid and lived with her in the calle Fuencarral in Madrid until his death in 1942. A child who lived with them and to whom they were devoted has been variously described as their illegitimate daughter or Agustina’s niece whom they had informally adopted. The scandalized family referred to Agustina as his ‘housekeeper’ (ama de llaves).²⁷

Accordingly, it was an embittered home in El Ferrol which the young Francisco left in July 1907 to take the entrance examinations for the military academy. He was accompanied on the long journey from La Coruña to Toledo by his father. Despite the fascination of the new landscapes through which he passed, the tension between him and his father made it a less than pleasant experience. Don Nicolás was unbending and rigid in the course of a journey during which his son needed encouragement and affection.²⁸ Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Franco passed his examinations and entered the Academy on 29 August 1907 along with 381 other aspirants, including many future comrades-in-arms such as Juan Yagüe and Emilio Esteban Infantes. The Academy occupied the Alcázar built by Carlos V which dominated the hill around which the town was built. Far from the misty green valleys of Galicia and the placid ría in which he used to sail, dusty Toledo in the arid Castilian plain must have constituted a brutal shock. Although there is no evidence of his being sensitive to the wealth of religious art with which Toledo abounded, it appears that he responded to the sense of the past which pulsates in its streets. In his novel Raza, the character representing Franco (the cadet José Churruca) ‘got more from the stones [of Toledo] than from his books’.²⁹ A growing obsession with the greatness of imperial Spain made him receptive to Toledo as a symbol of that greatness. His later identification with the figure of El Cid may also have had its origins in his adolescent ramblings around the historic streets of the town.

Life as an Army cadet would itself have strengthened his interest in Spanish history. Even by his own restrained account in later life, it is clear that he suffered some considerable agonies. Away from the loving care of his mother for the first time, young Franco had to grit his teeth and find inner reserves of determination to get on. In the austere conditions of the Alcázar, he would also have to deal with the problems arising from his anything but imposing physique (1.64 metres/5′4″ tall, and painfully thin). Already vulnerable because of the desertion of his father, the separation from his mother, his central refuge, must inevitably have forced him to cope with acute insecurity. He seems to have dealt with it in two related ways. First, he threw himself into Army life, fulfilling his tasks with the most thorough sense of duty and making a fetish of heroism, bravery and the military virtues. The rigid structures of military hierarchy and the certainties of orders gave him a framework to which he could relate. At the same time, he began to create another identity. The insecure teenager from Galicia would become the tough desert hero and eventually, as Caudillo, the El Cid-like ‘saviour of Spain’.³⁰

On account of his size and high-pitched voice, he was soon called Franquito (little Franco) by his companions and, during his three years in the Academy subjected to various minor humiliations. He was forced to drill with a rifle which had had fifteen centimetres sawn off the barrel. He worked hard, with a particular interest in topography and the uncritical and idealized military history of Spain served up to the cadets. Having no interest in sexual or alcoholic safaris into the more disreputable parts of the town, he became a target for the cruel initiation ceremonies (novatadas) of his fellow students, against which he reacted with some violence. In his own muted version, recollected nearly seventy years later, he spoke of the ‘sad welcome offered to those of us who came full of illusions to join the great military family’ and described the novatadas as a ‘heavy cross to bear’ (un duro calvario).³¹ Other accounts, seeking traces of the later hero in the young cadet, recount his virile reactions. One oft-repeated story tells how his books were hidden and he was punished for not having them in the correct place. They were hidden again. The cadet officer was about to punish him again when Franco threw a candlestick at his head. When taken before the C.O., he refused to name those who had picked on him.³² Such behaviour helped him to make some friends, including Camilo Alonso Vega, Juan Yagüe and Emilio Esteban Infantes, although he was never to be close to any of them.

In Britain and America, the Army cadet at the turn of the century began his military studies only after completing his civilian education. In Toledo, young, relatively uneducated boys began to absorb Army discipline and the conventions of the military view of the world when they were that much more ignorant and impressionable.³³ In professional terms, Franco can have learned little beyond the practical skills of horsemanship, shooting and fencing. The basic text-book was the Reglamento provisional para la instrucción teórica de las tropas de Infantería which was based on the lessons of the Franco-Prussian war and ignored the sweeping changes which had taken place in German military thinking since 1870. The increasing prominence given in both the German and British armies to the artillery and engineers was not replicated in Spain where the infantry remained dominant. The recent experience in Cuba was not used to draw any military conclusions, although they would have been immensely useful for the colonial adventures in North Africa. The stress was rather on discipline, military history and moral virtues – bravery in the face of the enemy, unquestioning faith in military regulations, absolute obedience and loyalty to superior officers.³⁴ Cadets were also imbued with an acute sense of the Army’s moral responsibilities as guardian of the essence of the nation. No slight or insult to the Army, to the flag, to the monarch, to the nation could ever be tolerated. By extension, when a government brought the nation into disrepute by permitting disorder then it was the duty of the patriotic Army officer to rise up against the government in defence of the nation.

The method of training was usually the rote learning of masses of facts, in particular of the details of the great battles of the Spanish past. However, these battles were examined as exemplars of bravery and resistance to the last rather than analysed for their tactical or strategic lessons. Franco’s own central memory of his time at the Academy was of a major on the teaching staff who had been decorated for heroism with the Cruz Laureada de San Fernando (the Spanish equivalent of the Victoria Cross). He had been given the medal for a hand-to-hand knife fight in Morocco from which, Franco recalled with pleasure, ‘he still had the glorious scars on his head’. The impact on Franco’s way of thinking – and, indeed, on his own methods when Director of the Spanish General Military Academy at Zaragoza twenty years later – was revealed in his remark that ‘this alone taught us more than all the other disciplines’.³⁵ When the cadets eventually went into the field, they had to improvise since they had been taught very little of practical application.