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.
CHAPTER SIX
One 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.