Free The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas Page B

socialist party responded by despairing of, even denouncing, the republic. In a speech in his constituency of Granada, even Fernando de los Ríos said as much. From that time on,
El Socialista
regularly argued that the republic was as bad as the monarchy had been and that, in this ‘bourgeois republic’, there was no place for the proletariat. Azaña tried to point out to the socialists the danger of this attitude. If the socialists really tried to bring ‘the revolution’, he said, they would fail. De los Ríos, to whom he spoke, said that ‘the masses dominated the leaders’. Azaña replied, ‘the feelings of the masses can be changed’. He pointed out that, to prepare an insurrection, as the socialists seemed to be doing, was to invite the army to reenter politics: ‘The army would be delighted to launch a repression against the workers’. De los Ríos passed on Azaña’s remarks to Largo who, however, brushed them aside and, three weeks later, the extremist ‘Caballerista’ view triumphed in the national committee of the Spanish socialist party resulting in the resignation of moderates such as Besteiro, Saborit and Trifón Gómez. A ‘pre-revolutionary’ commission was then formed, and, on 31 January, Largo told the Madrid socialist party that he desired to reaffirm his belief in the necessity of preparing a proletarian rising. 1 It was a fatal error of judgement.
    From that time onwards, the socialists began to arrange military training for their youth, and thus joined the insurrectionary Right, as well as the minuscule groups on the edges of Spanish politics such as the Falange and the communists, in the character of their challenge to the republic. They became intoxicated by the prospect of revolution.
    The Carlists had been active in this way for months. In Navarre, their red berets (
boinas rojas
) were weekly seen in the market-places. A dashing colonel, Enrique Varela, who had twice won Spain’s highest medal for gallantry in Morocco, was procured to train these new
requetés
—as the levies had been named in the Carlist Wars, from a line of the marching song of their most ferocious battalion. Varela (whom the Carlist leaders Fal Conde and Rodezno had met in gaol after the 1932 rising) travelled about the Pyrenean villages dressed as a priest, known as ‘
Tío Pepe
’ (Uncle Pepe), acting as a missionary of war. When officially promoted a general, he was replaced by Colonel Rada. 1 The Carlist communion claimed no less than 700,000 members, in 540 sections, in early 1934 and, though that surely was an exaggeration, there is no doubt that the movement was growing fast, as a result of the quickening political awareness of the Catholic petty bourgeoisie in western Andalusia, Navarre, Valencia and parts of Catalonia. 2
    On 31 March 1934, Antonio Goicoechea, the monarchist leader in the Cortes, together with two Carlists (Rafael Olazábal and Antonio Lizarza) and General Barrera (the unsuccessful coordinator of the plot of 1932), visited Mussolini. The Spaniards gave an impression of disaccord as to their aims. Mussolini, however, brushed this aside by saying that all that was necessary was that the movement should be ‘monarchist and of a corporative and representative’ character. He promised 1½ million pesetas, 20,000 rifles, 200 machine-guns, and 20,000 grenades to the Spanish rebels, and agreed to send more whenthe rising started. The money was paid the next day. 1 Thereafter, the
requetés
developed fast, committees being formed to deal with, for example, recruitment of officers, propaganda, arms purchase, and strategy. 2 There had been several previous tentative expeditions by monarchist or other plotters to Italy; and now, with the arrival there of ex-King Alfonso, Rome became a new focus of conspiracy against the republic. On the other hand, with the appointment of the energetic Fal Conde as ‘royal secretary-general’ of the Carlists in May 1934, that movement differentiated itself