Пол Престон – Franco (страница 55)

Press liaison in the north was put in the hands of the notorious Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, Conde de Alba y Yeltes, a polo-playing excavalryman, mainly on the grounds of his manic bigotry and the fact that he could speak excellent English, German and French. Captain Aguilera did more harm than good by outrageous and eminently quotable remarks to journalists. Much of what he said merely reflected the common beliefs of many officers on the Nationalist side. On the grounds that the Spanish masses were ‘like animals’, he told the foreign newspapermen that ‘We’ve got to kill and kill and kill’. He boasted to them of shooting six of his labourers on the day the Civil War broke out ‘Pour encourager les autres’. He regularly explained to any who would listen that the fundamental cause of the Civil War was ‘the introduction of modern drainage: prior to this, the riff-raff had been killed by various useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves.’ ‘Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers. The perfect birth control for Spain is the birth control God intended us to have. Sewers are a luxury to be reserved for those who deserve them, the leaders of Spain, not the slave stock.’⁷⁴ He believed that husbands had the right to shoot their unfaithful wives. When accompanying the influential journalist Virginia Cowles, Aguilera maintained a constant flow of sexist remarks which he occasionally interrupted to say things like ‘Nice chaps, the Germans, but a bit too serious; they never seem to have any women around, but I suppose they didn’t come for that. If they kill enough Reds, we can forgive them anything’.⁷⁵

That Millán was hardly the best man to present the cause of Franco’s New State to the outside world was made starkly clear on 12 October 1936, during the celebrations in Salamanca of the Day of the Race, the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America. The magnificent and regal choreography stressed the permanence of the New State. A tribune was erected in the Cathedral for the distinguished guests. Franco was not present but was represented by General Varela and by Doña Carmen. A sermon by the Dominican priest Father Fraile praised Franco’s recuperation of the ‘the spirit of a united, great and imperial Spain’. The political, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries then transferred to the University for a further ceremony under the presidency of the Rector Perpétuo, the seventy-two year-old philosopher and novelist Miguel de Unamuno. He announced that he was taking the chair in place of General Franco who could not attend because of his many pressing commitments.

A series of speeches stressed the importance of Spain’s imperialist past and future. One in particular, by Francisco Maldonado de Guevara, who described the Civil War in terms of the struggle of Spain, traditional values and eternal values against the anti-Spain of the reds and the Basques and Catalans, seems to have outraged Unamuno, who was already devastated by the ‘logic of terror’ and the arrest and assassination of friends and acquaintances. (A week earlier Unamuno had visited Franco in the Bishop’s Palace to plead vainly on behalf of several imprisoned friends.)⁷⁶ The vehemence of Maldonado’s speech stimulated a Legionaire to shout ‘¡Viva la muerte!’ (long live death), the battle cry of the Legion. Millán Astray then intervened to begin the triple Nationalist chant of ‘¡España!’ and back came the three ritual replies of ‘¡Una!’, ‘¡Grande!’ and ‘¡Libre!’ (United! Great! Free!). When Unamuno spoke, it was to counter the frenzied glorification of the war and the repression. He said that the civil war was an uncivil war, that to win was not the same as to convince (vencer no es convencer), that the Catalans and Basques were no more anti-Spanish than those present. ‘I am a Basque and I have spent my life teaching you the Spanish language which you do not know’. At this point he was interrupted by a near apoplectic Millán Astray who stood up to justify the military uprising. As Millán worked himself into a homicidal delirium, Unamuno stood his ground pointing out the necrophiliac inanity of the slogan ‘Long live death’. Millán shouted ‘Death to intellectuals’ to which Unamuno replied that they were in the temple of intelligence and that such words were a profanity.

With shouting and booing rising to a crescendo and Unamuno being threatened by Millán Astray’s armed bodyguards, Doña Carmen intervened. With great presence of mind and no little courage, she took the venerable philosopher by the arm, led him out and took him home in her official car. It has been suggested by two eyewitnesses that Millán Astray himself ordered Unamuno to take the arm of the wife of the Head of State and leave.⁷⁷ Such was the ambience of fear in Salamanca at the time that Unamuno was shunned by his acquaintances and removed at the behest of his colleagues from his position in the University.⁷⁸ Under virtual house arrest, Unamuno died at the end of December 1936 appalled at the repression, the ‘collective madness’ and ‘the moral suicide of Spain’.⁷⁹ Nevertheless, he was hailed at his funeral as a Falangist hero.⁸⁰ Nearly thirty years later, Franco commented to his cousin on what he saw as Unamuno’s ‘annoying attitude, unjustifiable in a patriotic ceremony, on such an important day and in a Nationalist Spain which was fighting a battle with a ferocious enemy and encountering the greatest difficulties in achieving victory’. In retrospect, he regarded Millán Astray’s intervention as an entirely justified response to a provocation. Nevertheless, at the time, it was thought prudent to have Millán Astray replaced.⁸¹

The incident with Unamuno was a minor embarrassment in the process of consolidation of Franco as undisputed leader. In political terms, everything was going his way. In the course of the attack on Madrid, Franco was fortunate to see, indeed to an extent to facilitate, the removal from the scene of one of his last remaining potential rivals. The panic provoked by the advance on the capital and the broadcast of boasts by Mola about the imminent capture of Madrid by his ‘Fifth Column’ of secret Nationalist sympathisers had seen violent reprisals taken among rightists, either against individual saboteurs who were caught or against the large groups of prisoners taken from Madrid jails and massacred at Paracuellos de Jarama.⁸² The conservatives and other middle class victims of atrocities in Madrid were not the only Nationalist civilians to lose their lives. The most celebrated was José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Although the Falangist leader had been in a Republican jail in Alicante since his arrest on 14 March 1936, an escape bid or a prisoner exchange was not inconceivable.^* Obviously, given the pre-eminence of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, his release or escape would not be easy. In the event, however, lack of co-operation by Franco ensured that it would not happen.

This was entirely understandable. Franco needed the Falange both as a mechanism for the political mobilization of the civilian population and as a way of creating an identification with the ideals of his German and Italian allies. However, if the charismatic José Antonio Primo de Rivera were to have turned up at Salamanca, Franco could never have dominated and manipulated the Falange as he was later to do. After all, since before the war, José Antonio had been wary about too great a co-operation with the Army for fear that the Falange would simply be used as cannon fodder and fashionable ideological decoration for the defence of the old order. In his last ever interview, with Jay Allen, on 3 October, published in the Chicago Daily Tribune on 9 October and in the News Chronicle on 24 October 1936, the Falangist leader had expressed his dismay that the defence of traditional interests was being given precedence over his party’s rhetorical ambitions for sweeping social change.⁸³ Even taking into account the possibility that José Antonio was exaggerating his revolutionary aims to curry favour with his jailers, the implied clash with the political plans of Franco was clear. In fact, Allen told the American Ambassador, Claude G. Bowers, that José Antonio’s attitude was defiant and contemptuous rather than conciliatory and that he had been obliged to cut short the interview ‘because of the astounding indiscretions of Primo’.⁸⁴

Franco, as something of a social climber, might have been expected to admire the dashing and charismatic socialite José Antonio who was after all son of the dictator General Primo de Rivera. However, despite the efforts of Ramón Serrano Suñer over the previous six years, their relationship had never prospered. José Antonio had come to regard Franco as pompous, self-obsessed and possessed of a caution verging on cowardice. Their relationship had definitively foundered in the spring of 1936, during the re-run elections in Cuenca when José Antonio had vehemently opposed the general’s inclusion in the right-wing list of candidates. Franco had never forgiven him.