The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Life in Madrid was full of contradictions. Near the Puerta del Sol two foreign journalists, Sefton Delmer and Virginia Cowles, passed an old woman on the pavement selling black and red anarchist scarves to enter a tailor’s shop which made cavalry and opera capes. Delmer and Cowles were fascinated by the continued existence of such an establishment in the middle of revolutionary Madrid. The proprietor, who clearly lacked customers, welcomed his visitors with enthusiasm. Delmer asked him how business was going. ‘It is very difficult, señor,’ he replied sadly. ‘There are so few gentlemen left in Madrid.’³² They left for lunch on the Gran Vía, ‘having to take shelter along the way from the daily preprandial artillery salvoes.’ Cowles was most impressed at the way the streets filled again after the last round had landed, shopkeepers emerged to take down shutters and people strolled along pavements again.

An English International Brigader told her later that what had struck him the most on reaching the country was to see a Spaniard, standing in the road during a bombardment, nonchalantly picking his teeth with a match. Foreigners were intrigued by the Spanish cult of conspicuous fearlessness. A Serbian International Brigader noted: ‘Spaniards are very brave in the fighting. But this courage, too, is of a knightly, poetical sort. It is hard for them to adapt to the volatile, pedantic and prosaic demands of modern war.’³³

Even with the intense air attacks of 19–23 November life was almost normal. People went to work each day and the trams still ran, even though their tracks had to be repaired continually. The underground was, of course, safer, though people joked that at least the tram had to stop before the front line, whereas on the metro you might come up behind it on the far side. These communication systems meant that reinforcements and supplies could be moved rapidly over the relatively short distances involved. Hot food for the front-line troops was far easier to provide than in normal defensive positions and the troops themselves could be relieved frequently, or even visited at the front.

The troops, and particularly the International Brigades, received visits in their trenches from the large numbers of foreigners brought to Madrid by the siege. These groups included journalists and a few war tourists, as well as politically committed supporters of the Republic. Some of the visitors were there for ‘pseudo-military excitement’ as one International Brigader described it. On visits to the front line they would often borrow a rifle or even a machine-gun to fire off a few rounds at the nationalist lines. Ernest Hemingway was a good example of the genre and, much as the men may have liked seeing new faces, especially famous ones, they became less enthusiastic when the thrill seekers provoked enemy bombardments.

By the end of November the struggle for Madrid had settled into a cold, hungry siege, punctuated by bombardment, air raids and the occasional flare-up. In Carabanchel, where the front line cut through the middle of streets, a strange deadly struggle continued, with sniping, flame-thrower attacks and tunnelling under houses to lay dynamite. The Carlists lost most of a company in one explosion. Nevertheless, the enthusiastic commitment of Madrid’s population diminished as the immediate danger receded. This was accompanied by the gradual replacement of the committees by centralized control. The activities of the communist secret police continued even after the danger was past, which also damaged morale. Anarchist militiamen clashed violently with communist authorities and attempts were made to censor the anarchist press. It was the beginning of a process which led to a major explosion in May of the next year, the start of a virtual civil war within the civil war.

At this time the communists made their first open move against the POUM, as mutual accusations between the Marxist rivals increased. The POUM had outraged the communists on 15 November, when its newspaper, La Batalla, analysed Russian policy too accurately. ‘Stalin’s concern’, the article said, ‘is not really the fate of the Spanish and international proletariat, but the protection of the Soviet government in accordance with the policy of pacts made by certain others.’ Soviet advisers immediately accused La Batalla of having ‘sold out to international fascism’. With the great increase in direct Soviet control, the Party line in Spain began to reflect the witch-hunt for Trotskyists in the USSR. Having kept them off the Madrid junta, the communists now stopped pay and supplies to the small POUM force on the Madrid front. The POUM militia in the region thus had no option but to disband and its members joined either UGT or CNT units.