The Last Days of the Spanish Republic. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ zone. Negrín allegedly told him to continue sending food but to be careful not to build up stocks. Méndez Aspe allegedly went even further, saying that the war would probably last only another couple of weeks, and that, if there were enough supplies for that time, he was opposed to Gómez sending more. General Rojo made a similar point in his memoir of the period: ‘The supply services in the other zone were being dismantled: nothing could be sent, neither men, nor arms, nor matériel, nor munitions, nor raw materials; on the other hand, the political authorities were concentrating on bringing things to an end.’65

      Assuming this to be true, it shows two things: first, that Negrín was returning to make peace and thus using the rhetoric of resistance as a bargaining chip and, second, that he and Méndez Aspe wanted to conserve resources for the inevitable exodus and subsequent exile. After overseeing the passage of the last Republican troops over the French frontier, Zugazagoitia remembered Negrín saying: ‘Let’s see if we can do the second part. That’s going to be more difficult.’ Zugazagoitia went on: ‘We were bringing things to an end and when he contemplated returning to the Centre-South zone, Negrín had only one thing on his mind, the end, with as little damage as possible, of a war that was lost.’ This coincides with the testimony of Negrín’s secretary Benigno Rodríguez, to whom he said that he was returning to Spain ‘to save as much as we can’.66

4

       The Quest for an Honourable Peace

      It was assumed by many of the politicians, army officers and functionaries who had crossed into France in early February 1939 that the government would not be returning to Spain. Even some cabinet ministers had their doubts. In cafés where exiles gathered and even in a meeting of senior members of the CNT, there was much venomous gossip about Negrín ranging from blaming him for the fall of Catalonia to accusing him of abandoning the Republic.1 Of course, Negrín did no such thing but went back in the hope of being able to negotiate a reasonable settlement. He arrived totally exhausted and drained emotionally and physically. Since becoming Prime Minister nearly two years earlier, the stress that he endured had increased exponentially. As well as exercising the basic duties of president of the council of ministers, he had continued to work hard to build on his achievements as Minister of Finance in ensuring the Republic’s economic survival. In April 1938, he had also become Minister of Defence with an intensely active involvement in the role. Throughout, he had carried out a notable diplomatic effort in a vain quest for international mediation to bring the war to an end without reprisals on the part of the Francoists. In addition, he had to deal with the petty squabbles and more than petty jealousies both within the wider coalition of Republican entities, the Popular Front, and within the Socialist Party. Inevitably, all of this took its toll. Just before midnight on Saturday 28 January, Azaña met Rojo and Negrín to discuss the situation in the wake of the loss of Barcelona. Azaña was shocked to see the ‘utter dejection’ of a Negrín who was ‘beaten and on his knees’. After the fall of Catalonia, and the Prime Minister’s long vigil at the frontier, his closest collaborators were alarmed at the visible deterioration in a man of once boundless energies.2

      The full horror of the defeat in Catalonia, the subsequent exodus and the suffering of those condemned to the makeshift camps in southern France was never fully reported in the centre-south zone. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of rumours, together with some reliable information and considerable exaggeration. It all fed the fears of the already exhausted, starving and demoralized population. The sense that a similar fate awaited them led to a widespread hope that someone in authority would appeal to the other side for a negotiated peace. For some at least, in the eloquent phrase of Ángel Bahamonde, ‘The psychology of defeat led to an acceptance of blame, the confession of sin and the payment of repentance, sieved through the imagined forgiveness of our brothers on the other side.’3 In fact, many hundreds of thousands of Republicans expected nothing of ‘brothers on the other side’. They knew only too well what Franco’s clemency and justice meant. They were those who would flee en masse to the coast at the end of March 1939 in the vain hope of evacuation. Yet they too longed for an end to the war. In fact, for two reasons, there would be virtually no more fighting in the centre zone. On the one hand, Franco needed time to reorganize his forces after the titanic effort involved in the Catalan campaign. On the other, he had confidence that the treachery of Casado, Matallana and other pro-rebel officers would bring down the Republic without further military effort on his part.

      Palmiro Togliatti, the senior Comintern representative in Spain, later reported to Moscow on the situation after the loss of Catalonia: ‘The great majority of political and military leaders had lost all confidence in the possibility of continued resistance. There was a general conviction that the army of the central zone could not repel an enemy attack because of their overwhelming numerical superiority and because of our lack of weaponry, aircraft and transport, and its organic weakness.’ Many professional officers, including the Communist ones, with the sole exception of Francisco Ciutat, believed that prolonged resistance was impossible. Colonel Antonio Cordón, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, the recently promoted General Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, the chief of the air force, and Colonel Carlos Núñez Maza, the under-secretary of air, all career officers but also members of the Communist Party, told Togliatti ‘openly’ that they did not believe resistance was possible in the centre zone unless the men and weapons taken into France could be returned to Spain. In his report to Moscow, Togliatti wrote: ‘I also believe that the conviction that further resistance was impossible was also quite widespread among the officers who had risen from the ranks of the militia. The same belief was also unanimous among the cadres of the Anarchists and of the Republican and Socialist parties, and in the police and state apparatus. Accordingly, the problem was no longer how to organize resistance, but how to end the war “with honour and dignity”.’ There were divergent opinions on how to do this. However, the one point on which there was widespread agreement was that the Communists were the ‘sole obstacle’ to ending the war. By smearing the Communists as ‘the enemies of peace’, the defeatists had found a way of channelling the war-weariness and fear of the masses. Togliatti saw this slogan as the ‘cement’ that united the disparate elements of the non-Communist left. At least retrospectively, he believed that Negrín himself had ‘no faith in the possibility of further resistance’.4

      The most visceral hostility to the Republican government was to be found in the anarchist movement. This derived in part from the bitter resentment of many anarchists about the way in which the libertarian desire for a revolutionary war had been crushed in the first half of 1937 in the interests of a more realistic centralized war effort. However, the anarchists had also been on the receiving end of extremely harsh treatment by the Communist-dominated security services because of the ease with which the CNT–FAI could be infiltrated by the Fifth Column. The Republican press, Communist, Socialist and Left Republican, frequently published accusations about Fifth Column networks that functioned on the basis of using CNT membership cards.5 The crack security units known as the Brigadas Especiales were focused on the detention, interrogation and, sometimes, elimination of suspicious elements. This meant not only Francoists but also members of the Madrid CNT. The Communist José Cazorla, who in December 1936 succeeded Santiago Carrillo as the Counsellor for Public Order in the Junta de Defensa de Madrid, believed the CNT to be out of control and infiltrated by agents provocateurs of the Fifth Column.6 The Communist press demanded strong measures against these uncontrolled elements and those who protected them, calling for the annihilation of the agents provocateurs who were described as ‘new dynamiters’, a term intended to invoke echoes of anarchist terrorists of earlier times.7 The presence of Fifth Columnists was perhaps to be expected in an officer corps СКАЧАТЬ