The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ To this, Negrín’s understandable reaction was: ‘In a war like ours, a pitiless and savage civil war, either all crimes are common crimes or none are.’ Accordingly, he offered himself as an expiatory victim, letting it be known through the British and French representatives that he would hand himself over if Franco would accept his symbolic execution in exchange for the lives of the mass of innocent Republican civilians. He did not reveal this offer to the majority of his own cabinet. Zugazagoitia knew about it, but Negrín did not make it public until after the Second World War.55

      Negrín commented to Vidarte after the session: ‘People want peace! Me too. But wanting peace is not the same as facilitating defeat. As long as I am prime minister, I will not accept the unconditional surrender of our glorious army, nor a deal that might save several hundred of the most at-risk individuals but allow them to shoot half a million Spaniards. Rather than that, I would shoot myself.’56 Negrín’s offer to hand himself over as the sacrificial scapegoat was ignored by Franco. The government remained in Spain at the Castillo de Figueras until the last units of the Republican army had crossed the frontier on 9 February.

      The situation was summed up succinctly by the correspondent of The Times of London, Lawrence Fernsworth. A conservative and Roman Catholic, he sympathized with the plight of the defeated Republicans. He wrote: ‘At all points where the Pyrenees here slanted away toward the sea, fleeing hordes of Spaniards, each one the embodiment of an individual tragedy, spilled over the mountainous borders, immense avalanches of human debris.’ Negrín planned to hold out, as Fernsworth put it, to ‘protect the escape from Madrid of thousands who would otherwise fall victims of Franco’s reprisals’. Casado opposed Negrín by launching the falsehood that resistance was merely a cover for the establishment of a Communist dictatorship.57 This notion obviously was already axiomatic for the Francoists, but it also appealed to the anarchists and Socialists who had resented the arrogance and harshness of Communist policies during the war. Assuming, as Casado and the anarchists did, that the PCE was a puppet of the Kremlin, a Communist dictatorship in Spain would have made little sense. Nothing could have been less in accord with the USSR’s needs throughout both 1938 and 1939. In 1938, Soviet priorities were for collective security via alliance with France and Britain against Nazi Germany. After the Munich Agreement, the USSR – now moving towards the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 – was not prepared to alienate Hitler.58

      On the night of 8 February, one of the few colleagues who remained in Spain with Negrín, his friend Dr Rafael Méndez, said to Álvarez del Vayo: ‘I have no idea what we are doing here. I rather fear that tonight we’ll be awakened by the rifle-butts of the Carlist requetés [militia].’ Hearing this, Negrín called Méndez aside and said: ‘We won’t leave here until the last soldier has crossed the frontier.’59 Yet again at the forefront of his mind was the determination to see these Republicans safe from the reprisals of Franco. The Carlists, an extreme right-wing monarchist faction, had shown elsewhere that they were all too ready to carry out mass executions. As Negrín wrote later to Prieto: ‘From the last house on the Spanish side of the frontier which the rebels occupied an hour later, I stood for eighteen hours watching the file of the last forces that were retreating into France. I managed not to lose my head, and simply by dint of doing my duty, it was possible to save those half a million Spaniards who are now awaiting our help.’60

      Only after General Rojo had arrived to announce that the final Republican troops in Catalonia had crossed the frontier on the morning of 9 February did Negrín enter France. His most loyal ministers wept. At the Spanish Consulate in Perpignan, an improvised cabinet meeting was held. Negrín announced that he would travel on to Toulouse and from there fly to Spain. Some ministers thought that he was mad, but as he himself later explained: ‘If I hadn’t done that then, today I would die of shame; I probably would not have been able to survive my disgust with myself. Was the Government going to leave those still fighting in the Central zone without leadership or support? Was it the Government of Resistance that would flee and surrender them?’61

      Shortly after Negrín had reached Perpignan on Thursday 9 February, an emissary from General Miaja reached the Spanish Consulate. Captain Antonio López Fernández, Miaja’s fiercely anti-Communist secretary, came with the mission of persuading Negrín to remain in France and for President Azaña to grant Miaja permission to negotiate peace with the rebels. Prior to leaving Alicante on the plane for Toulouse, he had telephoned General Rojo, who had asked him to come to the Spanish Embassy in Paris to meet both himself and Azaña on 10 February. On reaching the Consulate in Perpignan late on Thursday evening, Captain López was received by Negrín, Álvarez del Vayo and the Minister of Finance, Francisco Méndez Aspe. He gave them a detailed report on the situation in the central zone, the thrust of which was that there was no possibility of further resistance and that the only possible solution was to entrust Miaja with the task of negotiating surrender on the best terms possible. Negrín listened in silence until López concluded with the words: ‘Prime Minister, at this moment, the Centre-South zone is like an aircraft in flight whose engines have stopped. The salvation of those on board depends on the skill of the pilot. In the view of all the senior officers in the zone, that pilot is General Miaja.’ When Negrín asked what was needed for resistance to continue, López replied: ‘There is no possibility of resisting; there are no weapons, no food, no fuel and our armament is so worn out, with no possibility of replacement or repair, that to oblige the Army to resist is self-evidently senseless and criminal.’ When Álvarez del Vayo pressed him further, López replied that resistance would be possible only if huge deliveries of arms and aircraft could arrive immediately. Negrín told López that he would consider his report and that, the next morning, he and Vayo would go to the central zone and discuss future prospects with Miaja.62

      López then went to Paris and had a meeting with Azaña and Generals Rojo and Hernández Saravia and Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Jurado. There he found a more receptive audience for his pessimistic report. He asked Azaña to return to the central zone to oblige Negrín to resign and to give constitutional legitimacy to negotiations with the Francoists. López’s message from Miaja was as hopelessly naive as the beliefs of Casado. It echoed the conclusions of the lunch shared by Miaja a week before with Casado, Matallana and Menéndez in Valencia. He told the President that it was necessary to form a government of professional soldiers who would be able to secure a reasonable peace treaty with Franco. Azaña allegedly replied: ‘I have decided to wash my hands of the problems of Spain. Whisper to General Miaja that he should do whatever he thinks best and what he considers to be his duty as a soldier and a Spaniard.’ Rojo then gave López letters for Miaja, Matallana and Negrín. López later claimed implausibly that the letter to Negrín urged him to resign and leave Spain while those to Miaja and Matalla instructed them to execute Negrín if he refused to leave. No such letters have been found subsequently.63

      According to Vicente Uribe, ‘The majority of the Ministers had no desire to go to Madrid, morale was extremely low. No one dared say no and preparations to leave were made in accordance with Negrín’s orders.’ Negrín issued instructions to the soldiers and civilians who had accompanied him, some to return to the centre-south zone and others to remain in France to deal with the refugees and other issues regarding the evacuation. From Toulouse, he flew that night to Alicante, arriving on the morning of the next day. He was accompanied by Julio Álvarez del Vayo, his Foreign Minister, and Santiago Garcés Arroyo, the head of the Republic’s security apparatus, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar. They flew under assumed names, paying their passage on a scheduled Air France flight.64

      Before leaving, Negrín and Méndez Aspe had a meeting with Trifón Gómez, the quartermaster general of the СКАЧАТЬ