A Broken Land (6 page)

A trained man can change an ammunition belt in under half a minute, but that is an eternity if you are faced with accurate and quick rifle fire. If the Spaniards had been sensible they would have employed one machine gun at a time so as not to be caught exposed, but, smarting from the drubbing they had just received, they had run the belts right through and were cack-handed in replacing them, there being a very strong possibility that it was not the usual gunners manning the weapons, indeed a couple seemed to be blueshirts.

They got five rounds rapid from two Mausers, then more from the loaded weapons handed to Vince and Cal by the athletes, which first
disrupted the reloading, then drove them away from the weapons in a continuous hail of bullets, two of them clearly taking lead and spinning away, certainly wounded, possibly on the way to being dead.

Whatever else happened, the guns had not been used on the crowds in the plaza. They were now thinning as their leaders exercised late control and sought to get them under cover, safe from the remains of those they had chased, now behind stout walls, closed gates and regrouping.

‘Vince, you stay here and keep those bastards honest.’

‘We’ll need more ammo, guv.’

‘I’ll get it sent up.’

‘See if any bugger has a sniper rifle too,’ Vince croaked. ‘In fact, a proper sniper would be ace.’

Cal called to the youngsters, not easy with Florencia seeking to drag him away again. ‘Stay with him and make sure he has a loaded rifle at all times. Anything else, Vince?’

‘Order me up a pint of draught bitter, guv, I’m sick of bleedin’ wine.’

It was a relief to get off the roof – the temperature was now in the nineties – and into the shade of the stairway; only then did Cal realise how dry was his own throat, but a mouth turning to something like leather is the first thing that happens in combat and he was quick to put his whole head under a landing tap.

Once he reached the doorway to the plaza, he was wise enough to stop and have a good look before proceeding, though he had to drag Florencia back from just exposing herself; the gates and walls of the barracks were in range and plain sight.

‘Why worry? They are beaten.’

‘They are behind stone walls, the best soldiers have survived and you don’t take chances, ever.’ The air expelled from her heaving chest was immediate and derogatory, as was his anger, manifested in him grabbing and shaking her. ‘Why is it all you Spaniards want to martyr yourselves? I’m sick of it. Now, do as I do or as I say, or go and find someone else to bury you.’

‘
Querido
.’

The Spanish word for ‘darling’ he knew only too well; it was the one Florencia always employed when patently in the wrong and always expressed with warmth. She then smiled and gave him a kiss on the cheek, before walking right out of the door and into the exposed plaza without looking.

The battle, as recounted later in all its confusion, soon became fluid and not always decisive; the army had a plan to seize strategic buildings as well as dominate the streets and wide avenues, before taking control of the city centre, and that made things harder as it began to take proper shape.

While they succeeded in some of the former – they held the captain general’s headquarters and the area surrounding it – the latter was proving difficult and that led to them being trapped in places like the main telephone exchange, previously occupied and closed down by the government. Unbeknown to Cal, they were also cooped up in some of the big luxury hotels, like the Ritz and the nearby Colón.

Everywhere he went, trailing Juan Luis Laporta, loudspeakers were blaring out news of the progress of the battle, or relaying messages for those not already engaged in a fight where to find one. They rushed from position to position, in one of which Cal witnessed a sight that was doubly cheering, the scattering of the Santiago Cavalry
Regiment, one of the elite mounted units of Spain, by the men of the POUM, armed workers all shouting out, he was told, in Catalan and in shades of 1917, that it was time to kill the Cossacks.

At another barricade, the newspaper workers – printers, typesetters, electricians and even some journalists, members of the UGT – had driven out of their buildings the lorries carrying the huge rolls of newsprint required to produce the paper and set them up across a wide boulevard, creating a defence so solid it was impervious even to artillery fire. The workers had another weapon: a fellow feeling for those soldiers reluctant in their efforts, fighting from fear of their officers, not from conviction.

If they could get to them, and they often did, brave women especially, persuading men from their own social class to down their weapons and join the Republican cause was not only successful, it was often decisive. It one case a group of anarchists even persuaded the artillerymen in charge of two 75 mm Schneider cannon to turn their fire on their own comrades.

Finally the commanders of the Civil Guard, no doubt with an eye on the way matters were progressing, threw in their lot with the workers, emerging from their barracks to parade down the wide avenue of Las Ramblas, before a cheering crowd, as well as Lluís Companys, the head of the regional Catalan government, before proceeding to become engaged in the actual fighting.

News also arrived that at the Castle of Montjuïc, a formidable mediaeval stronghold which overlooked the city, the soldiers had refused to obey their officers; instead they had shot them and armed the workers. At the airport, an officer sympathetic to the Republic had refused to join the uprising and instead sent his planes to bomb the rebels.

Now it was the turn of the workers to go on the outright offensive and attack the military barricades with that same suicidal bravery – or was it foolhardiness? – Cal had witnessed the day before at the
Capitanía Marítima
.

But it was not just bare flesh they employed; those armoured trucks, ungainly as they looked in their newly acquired sheet plating, were sent towards the hastily erected obstacles, crashing through them, driven by men who did not care if they survived the assault, and many did not.

By the end of the day, the battle, while not over, was well on the way to being won, with the various flags of the numerous workers’ organisations flying all over the city centre, while at the same time some of the good news began to be disseminated to back up the action of the eight-hundred-strong and highly professional Civil Guard.

Now the fight was on to take the buildings into which the rebellious soldiers and their Falangist allies, unable to get back to their now-besieged barracks, had taken refuge.

O
ne very important building was the telephone exchange, and taking that, delegated to Laporta, was to be an operation wholly carried out by the anarchists of the CNT-FAI, though he accepted Cal, Vince and their party, now back together as one unit, as honorary members; after all, each had been issued with a black and red armband to confirm their status.

Offered aid from the Civil Guard, including trained marksmen, he declined; let them do their work elsewhere. Whatever the man’s faults, an inability to learn was not apparently amongst them. Without any acknowledgement to the man who had berated him the day before, he vetoed any attempt by his followers for an immediate mass charge on the place.

Instead, he elected to wait until the artillery taken earlier in the day became available to subdue the defence in what was another formidable stone building – weapons presently being deployed
against the army headquarters, seeking to get General Goded to surrender. Added to that, the exchange was held in the most part by the zealots of the Falange; they would not sell their lives cheaply, and knowing the fate that most likely awaited them, surrender was out of the question.

The event was not without comedy: first, Laporta had been required to see off the consul of the USA, who insisted that damage to the building was out of the question; it was American property, belonging to the communications giant, ITT, who had bought the Spanish telephone system from a previous government. Pompous and emotional, he was seen off with a waved pistol and much jeering.

The besiegers were then free to turn their minds to the problem of capture, though they were required to do so from a distance and good cover, given the sporadic shots coming from the exchange. Square and massive, it had narrow alleyways to either side separating it from other buildings.

These, unfortunately, had lower roofs which were easily dominated from the higher elevation of the exchange, and that was a place with few windows, none at ground level, while it also had, as seemed to be ubiquitous in Spain, both a low parapet wall on the roof and a large open concourse to the front, dotted with trees for shade, and in this case a narrow entrance with two massive metal doors.

Briefly Laporta had suggested trying to use the alleyways to get to the rear of the building, but it was plain to Cal that the defenders had good observation from the roof as well as, very likely, a supply of grenades, either manufactured or makeshift, in the same manner as those Vince had employed earlier. In such confined space as an alleyway between high walls, such a weapon, dropped from above,
would be extremely effective. It had to be a frontal assault, and even with cannon, that was going to be gory.

Patience, for all the talk of
mañana
, is not a truly Spanish virtue and certainly not one to which the Catalans of Barcelona subscribed; argument is, however, a national pastime and, being anarchists, as usual everyone was convinced that their opinion had as much validity as any other being voiced.

For all his evident authority Laporta had a great deal of trouble in stopping a rush on the building, finding himself in the end shouted down by a series of arguments that, translated, both Cal and Vince knew to be insane. One group was particularly troublesome. Florencia explained they were ex-miners from the coal-mining region of the Asturias, pure anarchists to a man and from an occupation internationally famous for its industrial militancy.

‘They fought the army two years ago in their uprising. There is a bastard general called Franco Bahamonde they would love to cut into little pieces. He dropped bombs on them and had a cruiser shell the coastal towns from the sea. Many women and children died as well as miners.’

To the observation that Laporta was in charge, all the two Brits got was a shrug; the miners, added to their natural radicalism, came from an extreme political sect. You did not have to be around the workers’ militias for long to find out that a common agenda was missing. Purists like these mining men thought their anarcho-syndicalist allies were backsliders, that left socialists were class traitors, communists of whatever hue were not only wrong but could not be trusted, and social democrats purblind fools.

The present Popular Front government, as well as its Catalan equivalent the Generalitat, was nothing more than a corrupt
compromise manned by men who could never be relied on to follow the proper course necessary to bring about a just society. Naturally, everyone else viewed these political Jesuits with equal suspicion.

Cal did not bother to point out, as Florencia explained their various travails, that their actions in 1934 had not been an uprising so much as a full-blown attempt at revolution, the aim to overthrow a democratically elected government, albeit more to the right than the present one. It was no different from the coup they were seeking to contain now.

Armed to the teeth, the miners had taken control of their region of north-west Spain, even capturing the major city of Oviedo, beating a military garrison of over a thousand men. It had taken units brought in from the Army of Africa, and every modern weapon in their armoury, naval and air included, to subdue them and, as was only to be expected, the reprisals had been horrific, given what the insurgents had done when they rebelled.

Neither side had shown an ounce of mercy; at the outbreak, if you were rich – a landowner or an unsympathetic manager, even a priest – the miners were likely to shoot you out of hand. When the army recaptured territory they took a like revenge.

Quite apart from bombing and shelling, if you were poor or had skin ingrained with coal, had served as a mayor or a provincial councillor, or had held any kind of union office, you stood a very high risk of becoming a victim of the reprisals, leaving the region soaked in blood.

Now these miners, forced with their families to come to Barcelona to find work, wanted revenge and that desire was crowding out any common sense they might have possessed. Worse was the support they were receiving from others around
them, buoyed up by the successes of the day and now sure they were invincible.

Sometimes a person will do something so brave or unexpected that it will entirely colour the way you see them and even radically affect a previously held view; Juan Luis Laporta did that now. Pulling out his pistol, he walked up to the most vociferous of the ex-miners, a tall, loud-mouthed fellow called Xavier, and put the muzzle to his head.

The reaction was swift: each of the threatened fellow’s companions was armed and their weapons were levelled at Laporta, the bolts snapped to put a bullet in the chamber. It made no difference that the anarchist leader’s men responded in kind; this was a showdown he could not survive if it went wrong. Cal, with Florencia whispering in his ear, was treated to a simultaneous translation.

‘The only way you can mount an attack,’ Laporta said, with an air of remarkable calm, ‘is to kill me, comrade, but I shall see you in hell with me.’

‘Hell?’ Cal asked in a soft voice. ‘I thought you lot didn’t believe in God?’

‘Every Spaniard believes in God,
querido
. It is priests and the church they don’t believe in.’

‘We are here to kill fascists, brother,’ the miner replied, his eyes swivelling to try and see the muzzle of the gun, ‘not each other.’

‘The Commission of Public Order—’

That was interrupted by a low growl; the aforesaid committee, hastily set up to seek to coordinate local resistance to the coup, contained politicians of every hue, including social democrats and Catalan Nationalists, as well as the regional government – naturally it was treated with deep suspicion.

‘The committee has given me the task of taking this building, which we will do, but when and how it will be done is a decision I will make. So, friend, you obey me or we will both die.’

‘If you pray, Cal,’ Florencia said, when she had completed her translation, ‘do it now.’

Pride makes fools of us all and it was obvious Xavier was unwilling to lose face by a quick submission, so it was a tense several seconds till he allowed himself the very slightest of nods. Of course, when he spoke, he took care to include a caveat designed to protect his honour, one that barely required conversion to English.

‘Let us beat the fascists, brother,’ Florencia whispered, as Xavier spoke. ‘Then perhaps you and I may have a talk alone.’

‘Can’t beat brotherly love, can you, guv?’

Said really loudly and not understood by the majority, it still turned every eye on Vince, which gave Laporta a chance to lower his pistol and take a step backwards. Try as he might, the miner could not help but release the pent-up breath from his body.

‘Good thinking, Vince,’ Cal said softly, knowing what his friend had done to be deliberate, a way to break down the tension.

‘Any idea how many fights I’ve had to break up in my time?’

Several shots from the exchange broke what stress remained and had everyone hunching their shoulders and making sure they were behind cover again; the dispute had broken up that concern. They were not aimed at the assault group, but at a messenger dodging from doorway to doorway and heading in their direction.

His final dash brought him to Laporta, who passed on the message that the army HQ had surrendered and General Goded had been taken into custody, the radio station was firmly in Republican hands and the cannon were on the way.

The continuing bulletins from loudspeakers had been like a background buzz throughout all that had previously occurred, and now, if you listened hard, the name of Goded was just audible. News of his surrender was being broadcast and it had to be the case that those defending the telephone exchange had a radio and thus knowledge of that fact.

Would they believe it to be true, would they realise their position was hopeless and ask for safe passage; would Laporta grant that to save lives? No one was crazy enough to walk out into the open with a white flag and ask, which was just as well; waved from behind a thick tree trunk and in full view of the building, it was shredded by rifle fire within seconds. It was going to be a fight to the finish and it seemed the defenders had ammunition to spare!

The two 75 mm Schneiders arrived, drawn by horse teams now under the control of local carters. The man in charge of loading and firing them, a dock worker by trade, had been an artilleryman at one time, so he knew not to bring them too close, to a point where the gunners would be at risk from concentrated rifle fire, just as he knew to warn those along the avenue to get out of the way. Given the angle from which he was required to fire, shells could very well ricochet off the stone frontage and bring more destruction further on.

The first target was the parapet, yet even blasted – and some of the shot went right over – it was impossible to utterly destroy that, which still left good fire positions for the men occupying the roof, who, under bombardment, had been safe from anything other than flying stone by a mere withdrawal, protected by an angle of fire that could not directly do them harm.

Next it was the nearest set of windows, a row rising to the sixth
storey; a shell entering through one of those would do massive interior damage, both in terms of destruction and noise, but his first efforts proved the wisdom of his earlier precautions. Hitting the front of the building the shell bounced off and within seconds had reduced to splinters one of the large trees a good hundred yards further on. Aim adjusted, the next shell hit the joint between the window and the surround, smashing through in a cacophony of tearing wood and shattering glass, followed by audible screams.

Laporta had been standing by, or to be more precise, reinforcing his restraint, given the mere sound of the shot and the long-flamed muzzle flashes were acting on his already excited cohorts to make the task ten times harder. The safe option was to fire at the rooftop and windows from cover, to keep the heads of the defenders down while not exposing yourself. It was a testimony to the level of excitement that both Vince and Cal had to yell at their own party of eager young athletes to stay still and not do as was being demonstrated to them by the others – stepping out into the open to blast off full magazines.

Even with shellfire hitting the building, and at least half the shot doing serious internal and external damage, the amount of returned fire was lethal, and several of the workers paid the price, this just as the cannon fire shifted to the main target, the double doors, which were well pounded. Yet they, being bronze, seemed like a sort of malleable armour plate, buckling but not cracking, despite taking several hits. It became increasingly clear they would need to be blown; from the angle at which the shells were striking they could not break open the part that mattered, the point at which the doors joined.

Charges were sent for while the windows of the telephone exchange building were systematically blown in until not one remained intact. Parts of the frontage, knocked off, now sat as a
layer of disordered rubble before the building, yet still the defenders returned fire and inflicted casualties on anyone foolish enough to overexpose themselves, which they did regularly, leading to a steady stream of wounded and dying being borne away to the hospitals under covering fire.

When the dynamite did arrive, brought by a runner, Vince nearly had a fit as he saw the amount it had sweated. Like a father with a new baby, he held it and wiped each stick clean, careful with the cloth as well, so unstable was the nitroglycerine, before he bound the sticks into one tenfold charge, inserting a short length of fuse, while others were made ready singly and with even less fuse, to be thrown through the now-destroyed first-storey windows.

The problem, exacerbated by the fact that they were still being observed from the rooftop, was now twofold: the charge had to be laid by the doors and that meant crossing open ground under the eyes of the men on the roof; even coming from the sides, if they exposed themselves for short periods, those defenders could see what was being executed. Then, with the possibility of dropping grenades, the fuses had to be lit, and the man doing that, who must be the last to run and therefore a lone target, had to get far enough away to be safe.