A Broken Land

CHAPTER FIVE

Laporta and his fellow leaders were not behind barricades as the troops prepared to emerge; they were observing the great double gates of the barracks as the lead units of the infantry regiments appeared, proud officers first on tall gleaming mounts, unsheathed swords at their shoulders, the troops marching behind them in column, wearing forage caps instead of steel helmets, in between each company the carts carrying their ammunition and the equipment for the machine gun and mortar sections.

‘Pigs!’ Florencia yelled, shaking her fist, from the position that had been selected on the rooftops.

‘That’ll scare them, luv.’

Vince had responded with deep irony, pleased that he got a glare no less ferocious than that aimed at the army. She looked at Cal to put him in his place, getting in response only a grim smile through stubble and tired eyes; his old army chum was not a man you easily put down.

Her anger and a pout made her look damned alluring and rendered it doubly galling he had not been able to get back to the Ritz; quite apart from his present thoughts, a clean shirt and a shave would have been welcome. Time to concentrate on examining the enemy, which he did through a pair of binoculars she had acquired.

From a distance they looked impressive in their grey-green uniforms and the initially tidy formations of four-abreast columns; eyed through magnification it was a different story. Cal Jardine saw neither of the two attributes which might induce caution, if not downright apprehension: either the steady gaze of the professional warrior at ease with the prospect of battle or the fiery glare of the right-wing zealot.

Such an attitude was palpably present in the group that brought up the rear, individuals in dark-blue shirts, young and steely-eyed, staring straight ahead with a look of grim determination, the lead cohort carrying a flag with the yoke and arrows device of Spain’s only openly fascist movement, the Falange.

Made up of mostly young middle-class men, as soon as the insurrection was announced, they had rushed to support the army, or, as Florencia had it, scurried like mice into the safety of the barracks to avoid being strung up to a lamppost.

Apart from their numbers, they could be discounted; such youths were irregulars and, if by reputation murderous, no more to be feared in close combat than any other untrained body. The soldiers before them held the key to what was about to occur and they, in the main, were surreptitiously glancing right and left in a manner that implied trepidation, while the lack of a high standard of discipline was soon apparent as their ranks lost a fair amount of cohesion.

Like most military establishments there was a lot of clear ground in front of the barrack gates, not just for pageantry but a must in any country with a history of revolt. In this case it was a parade ground forming one part of a spacious plaza. There was no attempt to immediately deploy; it was clear the officers were heading with determination straight for the city centre.

The small band of anarchist skirmishers placed close to the walls sought to make their exit as uncomfortable as possible, seeking to pick off the odd target, especially those mounted fools too arrogant to foot-slog with their men. That they succeeded twice, and that those they missed refused to dismount, pointed to a conceit bordering on folly.

There was no wisdom in what was happening; the man in command must have known their opponents were waiting for them and that their march to the centre would not happen unopposed, which must entail street fighting. If an army is poorly trained to fight a conventional war, it is doubly at a disadvantage when it comes to combat in a built-up area, which would become obvious once they sought to exit the open ground.

Such fighting requires tight battlefield control, a clear understanding between leaders and the led, more individual initiative and a high degree of application in tactical and weapon skills. It was obvious the men in command were hoping — or were they even convinced? — that numbers alone, the mere sight of marching troops, would overawe the workers of Barcelona, which fitted exactly Cal’s nostrum delivered to Laporta the day before about not underestimating your enemy.

There had been no overnight reconnaissance, no probing of possible resistance to test the workers’ strength, which would then allow for the use of alternatives, like moves to outwit those waiting to engage them in battle by the use of small mobile teams. There had to be more than one entrance to such an extensive barracks complex, yet they were massed and coming out of the main gate! Runners were already out, sent to the far-off barricades to denude the positions of most of their men so that they could be concentrated to meet the soldiers head-on.

Cal had elected to keep Vince and all of his athletes on the rooftops; without both training and Spanish they were as likely to be shot by their friends as their enemies. They had carried up a sack full of dynamite, sticks that, once fused, had been kept in a cool cellar to avoid them sweating their nitroglycerine. They were being kept in the shade on the roofs for the same reason, for the sun would soon be full up and handling such unstable objects was fraught with risk.

From such a vantage point Cal had a panoramic view of the military stupidity unfolding before him, and it was on both sides. The workers’ militias, at a rush, emerged far too quickly, attacking the marching column with neither order nor fear, bringing them to a halt certainly, before they were forced to fall back from a badly coordinated fusillade, which nevertheless left the plaza dotted with bodies, some writhing, most still.

The infantry then began to manoeuvre, with no shortage of confusion, from column to line, fixing bayonets for an attack, every shouted order floating up in the warm air. Cal was shaking his head in disbelief. Surely, even the most dense military brain must first look to secure the integrity of the plaza.

It was essential to observe the high surrounding buildings and assume the rooftops would have riflemen, the answer to take them first while holding off the ground assault. With the advantage gained, the soldiers would be able to enfilade the area and seriously disrupt any further attacks from the workers’ militias.

Like most spacious plazas it had, leading off it, a number of streets, some wide and sunlit, others narrow and dark. Strong parties should have been detached to secure those and close them off to guarantee the integrity of the position before any advance, making sure the flanks were secure by sealing off all the exits except the one by which they wished to move towards the city centre! Failing that, they should have at least set up machine guns or mortars to turn every avenue and alleyway into a potential death trap for any forces concentrated there who might try to get behind them.

‘Not too good,’ Vince whispered in Cal’s ear as they observed the endless attempts of the Spanish NCOs to properly dress the untidy line. ‘I don’t think we’re going to see Trooping the Colour, guv.’

‘It’s a mess, Vince, but have a gander at the bloke in command.’

Cal passed over the binoculars and watched as Vince focused in on the fat sod he had indicated, sat on his charger, huffing and puffing in frustration, his sword twitching as though he was dying to run through one of his own men as an example. Red-faced and with bulbous eyes, he reminded Cal Jardine of the military donkeys he had met too often in the British army, aged majors and colonels full of grub and port, erroneously too sure of their own military genius to be left in charge of a pisspot, never mind a company or regiment.

Their sole function in life, when not making the life of their juniors a misery, seemed set on blocking any chance of promotion for anyone with half an unaddled brain. He had often said that his leaving of the army was due to such idiots and there was some truth in the level of frustration he had felt, but the final straw that had him sending in his papers had been the indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi villages and the killing of women and children under the banner of putting down an Arab insurrection.

He had been part of an army with tanks, trucks and artillery, plus a vast advantage in firepower, facing committed insurgents with rifles, and still they could not prevail, for their enemies had possessed a willingness to die for that in which they believed. The Arabs felt betrayed by a combination of powers, French and British, who had promised them full self-determination when seeking their aid in throwing off their Turkish overlords, only to find they had a new oppressor when the Great War guns fell silent.

The excuses to mask what was naked greed were not long in coming. The locals were no good at governance; left alone the area would descend into chaos. In truth, the sandy desert was rich in oil. His had been a lone voice in the mess when it came to condemnation of both the enforcement of the League of Nations mandate, something to which the unrepresented Arabs had not been allowed to object, and of the methods of control, most tellingly the bombing — to most of his fellow soldiers, officers and other ranks, airmen included, it had been the proper way to make war on folk they saw as lesser mortals.

The overweight bugger Vince was examining had, no doubt, exactly the same attitude: the men and women opposing him were scum; he was an officer, a gentleman and he had a God-given right to both his position and the blood he was sure he was about to spill. Maybe if he had had good troops under him he might have succeeded; he did not, he had command of what was now, clearly, a uniformed rabble.

‘They’re getting ready to move,’ Vince said, passing the binoculars back.

‘At least set up your machine guns,’ Cal spat, exasperated.

‘You sound as if you want them to win.’

‘You know me, Vince, I’m all heart.’

As in all fights, the people who did battle on the side of the Republican government only saw the action before their eyes, and for what happened elsewhere that Sunday a severe filter to boasting was required to sort fact from fiction, yet the nature of this fight seemed to have been replicated throughout. Released from any other care, the workers of Barcelona, both sexes, in their hundreds outside the Parque Barracks, in their thousands throughout the city, inflicted total defeat on the army over a long and sultry day of continuous combat.

Every military column was halted and very often quickly thrown back. Others were forced to seek shelter themselves by throwing up hasty barricades or retreating into buildings in which they became besieged. On the ground, it was the sheer fury of the counter-attacks; from the rooftops the riflemen could pick their targets early and thin the advancing units, while others rained down on them home-made bombs that caused numerous casualties as they pressed forward.

In the plaza below the Olympians, once the soldiers eventually began a slow advance, they marched into a maelstrom. Having driven off the initial assault, their officers no doubt thought progress would be easy. They had no idea of the numbers they now faced or the arms they possessed and, having made no attempt to find out, they, as well as the men they led, paid a prohibitive price.

Vince had the discus thrower from the Olympiad hurling the dynamite sticks on which he had trimmed and lit the fuses, causing more confusion than casualties given the distance from landing to flesh, but once the massed workers had debouched from the various side streets, they had to desist, for they risked killing their own, now a dense and screaming mass hurling themselves forward.

The infantry were first checked by that, then driven into a disordered retreat, many throwing down their weapons — those, and this was risible in the midst of a bloody battle, to be embraced by folk who had been intent on killing them a few seconds before, while another comrade snatched up their weapon and turned it on their fellows.

No such leniency was afforded the Falange blueshirts, exposed by the break-up of the rankers who had shielded them. It had to be admitted they sought no mercy, fighting with as much fervour as those they faced, killing many, but eventually either forced to retreat or die. The Spanish officers were glad of their horses, which gave them the speed to escape certain slaughter, and if it shamed them to abandon their men, there was little evidence of it.

Those that did stay loyal to their commanders retreated back towards the barrack gate slowly, and in many cases bravely and in reasonable order, downing their opponents as they went, while the more intelligent had secured and withdrawn the carts carrying the machine guns and mortars.

From being dotted with bodies the plaza was now full of the wounded and the slain, while before the barrack gates they lay in a mass, the price of facing bayonets with nothing but naked flesh and empty weapons, as well as the sustained fire of those not willing to surrender, men who knew how to reload on the move.

‘You must come, you are needed elsewhere.’

Florencia, having received the message from a runner, had been required to tug hard at his sleeve to get his attention — with so many weapons being discharged the air was full of noise, but there was another reason he was concentrating; from this vantage point Cal could see that a pair of machine guns were being set up on the walls of the barracks on either side of the gates — there had to be a proper parapet there — and they would sweep the plaza and make it a killing zone as deadly as any wartime no man’s land.

‘Vince,’ he shouted, shrugging her off.

Carrying his rifle, Vince was with him in seconds, taking the proffered binoculars, through which it took only a couple more for him to see the problem. Without another word both men set themselves to steady their aim, taking as a target one machine gun each. There was no blasting off, it was one round at a time, with tiny adjustments made for a fresh aim as stone chips began to fly around the gunners, who were just getting ready to fire.

The reaction was immediate; the weapons swung to aim at them, not an easy shot, but given the rate of fire and the range of under a thousand yards, potentially deadly. Vince rolled behind a chimney, Cal had to grab a half-standing Florencia and drag her down as the air cracked with passing shot. Now it was their turn to be splattered with dislodged stone as, crouched down, they quickly reloaded, shouting for others to be ready to join them, waiting for the belt of both machine guns to run through.

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 Colon.

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 Lluis 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 Montjuic, 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 Capitania Maritima.

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.