Читать книгу The Last Days of the Spanish Republic - Paul Preston - Страница 10

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 of the armed forces largely made up of career officers who sympathized with their erstwhile comrades of the other side. However, infiltration of one-time militia units could also be found. Cazorla investigated Fifth Columnist infiltration of the ineffective secret services (Servicios Secretos de Guerra) run in the Ministry of Defence by the CNT’s Manuel Salgado Moreira. Shortly before the dissolution of the Junta de Defensa by Largo Caballero, on 14 April 1937, José Cazorla announced that an important spy-ring in the Republican Army had been dismantled. Among those arrested was Alfonso López de Letona, a Fifth Columnist who had reached a high rank in the general staff of the 14th Division of the People’s Army, commanded by the anarchist Cipriano Mera. López de Letona had become a senior member of Manuel Salgado’s staff on the basis of a recommendation by Mera’s chief of staff, Antonio Verardini Díez de Ferreti.8

The belief that the anarchist movement was infested with Fifth Columnists was not confined to the Communists. Largo Caballero told PSOE executive committee member Juan-Simeón Vidarte that ‘the FAI has been infiltrated by so many agents provocateurs and police informers that it is impossible to have dealings with them’. That view was shared by the Socialist Director General de Seguridad, Largo Caballero’s friend Wenceslao Carrillo. One of José García Pradas’s collaborators in the CNT–FAI newspaper Frente Libertario was the prominent Fifth Columnist Antonio Bouthelier España, who also held the position of secretary to Manuel Salgado.9 The easy acquisition of CNT membership cards provided the Fifth Column with access to information, an instrument for acts of provocation and relative ease of movement. Once equipped with CNT accreditation, Fifth Columnists could also get identity cards for the Republican security services.10

While Negrín was still in Catalonia, the anarchist movement initiated contacts with the generals who were also being sounded out by Casado. On 1 February 1939 the secretaries of the three principal anarchist organizations, the CNT, the FAI and the anarchist youth movement, the Federación de Juventudes Libertarias, jointly sent an obsequious letter to General Miaja. They suggested that they create for him an organization uniting all anti-fascist forces in the centre-south zone, insinuating that it exclude the Communists. Over the next three days, the anarchists held meetings with Miaja, Matallana and Menéndez. Since all three generals were already conspiring with Casado, it is reasonable to suppose that areas of mutual interest were sketched out. According to the anarchist chronicler José Peirats, in the meeting with the anarchists Miaja declared that the Communists intended to impose a one-party government led by Vicente Uribe. There was no truth in the claim – it merely reflected what Casado had told Miaja earlier on the same day.11

In the wake of these anarchist initiatives, three senior figures of the libertarian movement of the centre-south zone were sent on a mission to try to secure a coordinated response of the CNT and FAI to the deteriorating military situation. Juan López Sánchez, who had been Minister of Commerce in the government of Largo Caballero, Manuel Amil, secretary of the CNT’s Federación Nacional del Transporte, and Eduardo Val Bescós, seen as the most powerful figure in the anarchist movement in Madrid, had left for Catalonia in the early morning of Sunday 5 February, ten days after the Francoist capture of Barcelona. Their purpose was to make contact with the CNT’s National Committee to discuss the situation after the expected loss of Catalonia. Their aircraft, unable to land in Catalonia, where Figueras was about to fall, took them to Toulouse. In contrast to the silent Val, the tall and brawny Manuel Amil was a loquacious raconteur. They were trapped in France for several days, visiting the consulates in Toulouse and Perpignan in search of the CNT’s National Committee before finding the CNT headquarters set up in Paris. What they learned and their subsequent reports would play a significant part in the anarchists’ participation in the Casado coup. Throughout the delegation’s sojourn in France, Val’s main contribution had been to mutter imprecations against Negrín.12

On 8 February, they took part in a meeting in Paris with senior members of the CNT, including Juan García Oliver, the head of the National Committee Mariano Vázquez and the minister Segundo Blanco. García Oliver said that it was necessary to remove Negrín and form a government to bring the war to an end. Val then shocked the group by declaring that he had proof that Negrín was not planning resistance but meant to end the war. He then persuaded them that it was not the moment to think in terms of surrendering. His optimistic view of the possibilities of lengthy resistance did not prevail. However, since the main objection to Negrín was, bizarrely, that he was defeatist, the group finally agreed that it was necessary to remove him and form a government capable of resisting long enough to achieve an acceptable peace settlement. The general consensus was that ‘the more resistance we are capable of mounting, the better the peace conditions we can secure’. Ignoring the military reality, Mariano Vázquez declared simplistically, ‘Whoever can strike hard is in a position to make themselves feared.’ They then had immense problems getting back to the centre-south zone, which they finally managed to do in the early hours of the morning of Monday 20 February.13

Underlying the anarchist initiatives was both a visceral anti-communism and a belief that Negrín was incapable of continuing the war effort. In fact, Negrín harboured vain hopes that, after the collapse of the Catalan front, it would be possible to secure the return to Spain both of the evacuated army and of the equipment that they had taken over the border. He had also believed that the supplies from friendly nations, especially the Soviet Union, that had accumulated in France could be delivered to the central-southern zone. Given his commitment to holding out until a peace settlement could be made that would secure the evacuation of those at risk, these hopes sustained his rhetorical commitment to the possibility of continuing the war. While the anarchists simply did not want to believe him, his rhetoric also exposed him to the criticism of many, most notably Azaña and Rojo.14

Just before the fall of Catalonia, the internationally famous journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt,

I find myself thinking about Negrín all the time. I suppose he will fly to Madrid when it is ended in Catalonia and carry on there. Negrín is a really great man, I believe (and he can’t stop being now), and it’s so strange and moving to think of that man who surely never wanted to be prime minister of anything being pushed by events and history into a position which he has heroically filled, doing better all the time, all the time being finer against greater odds. He used to be a brilliant gay lazy man with strong beliefs and perhaps too much sense of humour. He was it seems never afraid and loved his friends and his ideas about Spain and drinking and eating and just being alive. Now he has grown all the time until you get an impression he’s made of some special indestructible kind of stone: he has a twenty hour working day and in Spain you get the idea that he manages alone, that with his two hands every mornng he puts every single thing into place and brings order. Of course, he cannot hold a front. I hope he gets to Madrid. If they are going to be defeated, I still hope they don’t surrender.15

In contrast, some months after the end of the war, Rojo produced a devastating criticism of Negrín:

It would appear that the view that we should continue a policy of resistance was imposed in the hope that it might provoke a change in the international situation. The same hope that had sustained our sacrifices but now without any basis. What do sacrifices matter! Resistance! A sublime formula for heroism when it is nurtured by hope and sustained by an ideal; but when the will that flies the banner of that ideal collapses and hope becomes a denial of reality, then resistance is no longer an heroic military battle-cry but an absurdity. What were we to resist with? Why were we going to resist? Two questions for which no one had a positive answer.

Rojo’s diatribe reflected the distress caused him by the plight of the exiles, but, safe in France, he failed to take into consideration the appalling consequences of a swift unconditional surrender. He followed up his comments on the futility of continued resistance with a disturbing rhetorical question:

Should I have embarked on an undertaking proposed in such a confusing manner? If it was true that the war in the central zone was going to be continued seriously, why were the stocks of food, raw materials and armaments accumulated in France sold off? This was too obvious and significant not to be disconcerting: on the one hand, the conflict was being wound up economically by the sale of these stocks; on the other hand the order to resist was given without the means to carry it out, even in terms of food. It was clear to me that I should not take part in or support from my technical post what was an incomprehensible action.16

It was certainly the case that Francisco Méndez Aspe had been ordered to shore up the Republic’s financial resources by selling material that was either in France or had been ordered but not yet delivered. This was part of Negrín’s plans to pay for the exiles in France and for the evacuation of Republicans. Clearly, it would have been difficult to do both that and mount a full-scale resistance. Effectively, Negrín seems to have been concentrating on the former while maintaining the fiction of resistance both to gain time and in the hope of securing concessions from Franco.17

Only with the greatest reluctance had Azaña agreed to take up residence in the Spanish Embassy in Paris, preferring to be further from the influence of Negrín’s Ambassador in France, Marcelino Pascua. He had arrived on 9 February and wasted little time in publicly expressing his support for British and French proposals for mediation, which effectively meant early surrender. His presence in France and its implication that there was no proper government in Spain were necessarily damaging to Negrín’s efforts to secure guarantees from Franco. As Negrín later repeated to Marcelino Pascua, he had expected Azaña to return to Spain once the members of the government were back in Madrid. To this end, after the first cabinet meeting on 13 February, the Foreign Minister Julio Álvarez del Vayo sent a telegram to Pascua instructing him to inform Azaña that the government required his presence in Spain. Azaña did not reply and, the next day, Álvarez del Vayo arrived in Paris to underline personally the urgency of the President’s return. Azaña merely listened and said that he would inform Negrín of his views. This he did the following day, disingenuously asking Negrín to give reasons why there should be any change to what had been agreed before he left Spain.18 Negrín was taken aback by Azaña’s continued prevarication and claimed that, at their meeting on 30 January in the presence of Martínez Barrio, it had been agreed that he would reside in Paris only until the cabinet needed him. In fact, at that meeting, the issue had not been resolved. Although Azaña had insisted that he would not return, Negrín had been confident that the overwhelming needs of the Republic would oblige him to relent. Negrín now reiterated the obvious reasons why the President’s absence was undermining the work of the government. Despite frequent prompts from Pascua, Azaña did not reply to Negrín’s message. He did, however, ask for financial help and was given 150,000 francs (the equivalent today of US$85,000 ).19

The situation faced by the refugees was appalling. Within days of Negrín leaving, the Consul in Perpignan, Antonio Zorita, was replaced. He had shown virtually no readiness to help the refugees. Indeed, his wife had tried to prevent Colonel Tagüeña and other senior military personnel from staying in the Consulate on the grounds that they upset the routine of the household. Both Tagüeña and Rafael Méndez were helped immensely by the feminist Margarita Nelken, who acted as Méndez’s liaison with the French authorities and gave Tagüeña and his comrades French currency with which to buy food. Álvarez del Vayo told Méndez that Negrín wanted him to replace Zorita as Consul.20 Many prominent officers, including General Sebastián Pozas, once commander of the Army of the East and most recently the military governor of Figueras, and Colonel Eleuterio Díaz Tendero Merchán, the head of personnel classification in the Ministry of Defence, chose to remain in France.21

There has been some controversy regarding the decision of General Rojo not to return to Spain. According to both Julián Zugazagoitia, now secretary of the Ministry of Defence, and Mariano Ansó, a Republican friend of Negrín who had been Minister of Justice in the first months of 1938, General Vicente Rojo and Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Jurado, the commander of the Army of Catalonia, refused to obey the instruction sent by Negrín on 14 February that they should return to the centre-south zone. When Pascua handed them the telegram, the two generals argued that the war was effectively over and that their duty was to look after the soldiers who were now refugees in France. They were not alone in their decision. The bulk of the officers of the command structure of the Armies of the East and of Catalonia, including Generals Pozas, Masquelet, Riquelme, Asensio, Gámir, Hernández Saravia and Perea, also decided that the war was lost and that they were under no obligation to continue the fight.22 It is probable that their decision was influenced both by the palpable defeatism of the high command of the navy and by events in the Balearic Islands. On the same day that the Republican Army had crossed the frontier into France, Menorca was also lost.

On 22 January, four days before leaving Barcelona, Negrín had faced the almost insuperable problem of finding a replacement for the head of the fleet, Luis González Ubieta. In general, most naval officers were right-wing, in most cases defeatist and, in some, actively sympathetic to the Francoist cause. The chosen successor, acting Rear Admiral Miguel Buiza Fernández-Palacios, was an exception to the general tendencies of the aristocratic officer corps. He was the black sheep of a rich right-wing family in Seville and a Republican who was popular with his men. His family and his fellow officers shunned him because of his marriage to Maravilla, a woman whose brother was a stoker and so considered to be of unacceptably inferior social class. The laconic and diffident Buiza was hardly a sea-going warrior and was far from fulfilling the needs of the Republican war effort, but Negrín had little choice. In January 1936, Buiza had been head of the personnel section within the naval general staff. His loyalty to the Republic was no more than geographic, having been based in Cartagena when the war started. Throughout the war, his role had been at best passive and at worst advantageous for the Francoist fleet, commanded as it was by many of his friends. He had protected Fifth Columnists among his officers and had long been suspected of defeatism. Despite Negrín’s doubts, Buiza was appointed three days before his forty-first birthday. In addition to being profoundly defeatist, he was deeply affected by a personal tragedy. On 26 January, as Franco’s forces entered Barcelona, his wife, suffering from post-natal depression, and convinced that her husband had been captured, committed suicide. Perhaps to help keep his mind off these circumstances, he accepted the new post, saying that he owed it to the rank-and-file crewmen.23 Given that so much depended on the loyalty and efficacy of the fleet, Buiza was hardly suitable as overall commander.

González Ubieta was transferred to take command of Menorca. In the days following, aircraft from Francoist-held Mallorca bombed the base at Mahón and dropped thousands of leaflets demanding surrender. This was the first part of a plan to seize Menorca hatched by Captain Fernando Sartorius, Conde de San Luís. Sartorius, the liaison officer between the Francoist air force and navy in Mallorca, arranged with Alan Hillgarth, London’s Consul in Palma de Mallorca, for a British cruiser, HMS Devonshire, to take him to Mahón. The ship would then provide a neutral base for a negotiation between Sartorius and González Ubieta. The ship’s captain Gerald Muirhead-Gould, like Hillgarth, had a pedigree in the Naval Intelligence Department, was a protégé of Winston Churchill and a Franco sympathizer. Arriving on 7 February, Muirhead-Gould persuaded González Ubieta to meet Sartorius, who threatened González Ubieta that, if he did not surrender, there would be a full-scale aerial bombardment of Mahón. González Ubieta refused and a full-scale pro-Franco rebellion broke out in Ciudadela on the night of 7 February.

Francoist reinforcements arrived from Palma, González Ubieta’s pleas for help from Miaja went unanswered and Muirhead-Gould pressed him to discuss surrender with San Luís. While awaiting a resolution, HMS Devonshire, anchored in the harbour of Mahón, was attacked by Italian aircraft. A deal was finally reached. On 9 February, around 300 Republican loyalists under the command of González Ubieta, 100 women and 50 children, and what Sartorius described as ‘some really repugnant types’, were taken to Marseilles. Menorca was of secondary importance in the war but the significance of what Sartorius and Muirhead-Gould achieved was that it sent a misleading message to the Republican officer corps that a bloodless surrender would be possible.24

The decision of Rojo not to return to Spain was deeply damaging to Negrín’s hopes of securing the full backing of the forces of the centre-south zone for his plan to use the threat of last-ditch resistance to help secure reasonable peace terms from Franco. In fact, Rojo’s stance was more disastrous even than it seemed at the time given that his most likely replacement, Manuel Matallana, was already working in favour of the rebel cause. According to Zugazagoitia, Rojo refused to return to Spain with the words, ‘The only reason for obeying the order to return is the duty of obedience but you surely realize that just because a superior officer orders us to jump out of a window we do not have to do so.’ He told Zugazagoitia and the Consul in Perpignan, Rafael Méndez Martínez, that ‘he was not prepared to preside over an even bigger disaster than the one in Catalonia’. When he was informed of this, Negrín had Méndez draw up a document, witnessed by Zugazagoitia, registering both his instructions to Rojo and Jurado and their reasons for disobeying them. Zugazagoitia was deeply shocked by Rojo’s comments. Although he could not believe that they reflected cowardice on his part, he later wondered if Rojo knew what was being planned by Casado and was passively complicit. For Togliatti, Rojo was simply a deserter.25

After the retreat into France, Uribe was commissioned by the PCE leadership to speak to Rojo and:

try to show him that his views were mistaken and to convince him of the need to continue the war, explaining the possibilities that we still had. I was also instructed to make him see his responsibilities which he should fulfil before going to the central zone with the Government. Our conversation lasted three hours. I could get nothing out of him. He was unshakeable in his judgement that, from a military point of view, the Republic could do nothing, the war was over and the best that could be done was to seek a way of ending it on the best possible terms. As far as he was concerned personally, he had made his decision on the basis of the military situation and nothing would make him change his mind. None of the arguments used in the conversation, including discipline and honour, had the slightest effect. Rojo had decided not to go the central zone and he did not go.26

The Republican Ambassador in Paris, Marcelino Pascua, sent telegrams to Negrín that were highly critical of Rojo. Even more critical comments were passed between Zugazagoitia and Pascua in their private correspondence. Recalling Rojo’s remarks about the limits of obedience, Zugazagoitia wrote: ‘the fact is the General’s statements were among the most shocking that I heard in the entire war’. He questioned Rojo’s role in the fall of Barcelona, asking why he had sacked General Hernández Saravia, who had arrived in the city with the intention of organizing a last-ditch resistance such as that which had saved Madrid in 1936. Above all, both Zugazagoitia and Pascua were outraged by the way in which, in his book ¡Alerta los pueblos! written immediately after the war, Rojo fudged the issue of his personal responsibility. In it, he denied that he had received orders to return to Spain. In fact, Negrín sent a telegram to Marcelino Pascua on 16 February instructing him to tell General Rojo and Colonel Jurado again that they must return to Spain. Pascua gave the telegram to Rojo. Similar telegrams were sent to the Republican consuls in Toulouse and Perpignan for delivery to him.27

Juan López, who was in France as part of the stranded CNT–FAI delegation, was in the Republican Consulate in Toulouse when he overheard a telephone conversation between the Consul and Rojo, who was in Perpignan. He heard the Consul say: ‘I have received a telegram from the prime minister instructing me to let you know that you must come here to Toulouse to arrange your return to Spain.’28 The publication of Zugazagoitia’s book with its account of Negrín’s call for Méndez to notarize the refusal of Rojo and Jurado to return to Spain ensured for him Rojo’s enduring resentment.29

In ¡Alerta los pueblos!, Rojo claimed that he and Negrín had parted amicably and that he had remained in France ‘to finish my task’. His vain hope had been to see the French implement promises to allow the refugee troops and their equipment to return to Spain. He went on to describe the calamitous situation of the thousands of Republican soldiers now in improvised, overcrowded and insanitary concentration camps on the beaches of southern France. The Republicans herded there lacked adequate shelter, food, clean water and basic medical provision. His distress at what he saw impelled him to write to Negrín on 12 February a bitter letter of complaint and protest. In it, he expressed his disgust that, while plans had been made for the evacuation of President Azaña, the President of the Cortes, the Basque and Catalan governments, parliamentary deputies and large numbers of functionaries, nothing had been done to plan for the evacuation of ordinary citizens. He was appalled by the camps, ‘where today hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees and tens of thousands of soldiers, including middle- and high-ranking officers, are perishing’. He was outraged by evidence that Republican functionaries were simply not doing their job – a point reiterated in many of the memoirs of the period.30

Rojo’s letter of 12 February reflected his obsession with the plight of the refugees in the camps and the way the French authorities pursued and humiliated those who had managed to avoid internment. He reproached Negrín for not having accepted his advice to surrender in Catalonia before the present situation arose. The letter underlined his refusal to return to Spain and his determination to continue working on behalf of the exiled troops: ‘I have not returned because I have no wish to be part of the second disaster to which the Government will almost certainly condemn our army and our people. I have stayed here believing that it is necessary that someone look out for the fate of our men. I was right to fear that we would be abandoned.’ He went on to make several demands of the Prime Minister. He began by asking that Negrín accept ‘the total and absolute renunciation of my post’. He went on to make suggestions that he believed would avoid a humanitarian catastrophe: that a government minister be sent to take charge of the refugee situation; that, in the interim, the Ambassador Marcelino Pascua be required to come to Perpignan; and that more funds be made available. Finally, he threatened that, if these demands were not met, he would deal directly with Franco to arrange the repatriation of the refugees and would publicize the situation, threatening to take ‘serious decisions if something was not done to improve the state of affairs’. He did not implement his threat, he said in the book, so as not to make things worse. The letter bore an olive branch for Negrín: ‘Perhaps among those whom I accuse of being responsible for this dereliction of duty, you are not the only exception because I am aware of your constant preoccupation, your sleepless nights, your integrity and I know how you have had to fight, along with a handful of ministers, against the insuperable fear that had invaded every level of the higher reaches of the State.’31

General Rojo wrote with some pride of the retreat: the army ‘had carried out a methodical withdrawal … it had held off the enemy, continuing to fight throughout, without letting the weakening of morale open the way to collective indiscipline or panic, without the demoralization spreading through its rearguard, and crossing into the neighbouring country in good order led by its officers’. The Minister of Culture in the Catalan Generalitat, Carles Pi Sunyer, wrote: ‘It is only fair to underline in honour of both Negrín and the army that it retreated in good order and with strict discipline without the epic grandeur of the withdrawal being stained by any explosion of vengeful violence.’32

Just before he entered France on 9 February, Negrín had said to the faithful group that accompanied him: ‘Let us hope that we achieve the same success with the second part of the task.’ The ‘first part’ was the evacuation of Catalonia; the ‘second part’ would be the evacuation of the centre-south zone. As Zugazagoitia commented, although Negrín’s public declarations spoke of resistance, ‘nobody knew better than he did how meaningless the slogan was’.33 In this regard, his arrangements to transfer the financial resources of the Republic to France were a crucial part of his plans for evacuation. Rojo’s accusation that no plans had been made was unjust, although it was certainly true that the scale and speed of the final debacle had not been, indeed could hardly have been, anticipated. After the defeat at the Ebro, Negrín had already begun to prepare for the likely Francoist triumph and the need to organize the evacuation, and subsequent support, of many thousands of Republicans. He had instructed the Minister of Finance, Francisco Méndez Aspe, and the most trusted officials of his Ministry, Jerónimo Bugeda, José Prat and Rafael Méndez, to draw up lists of the assets still in the hands of the government. He instructed Méndez Aspe to recover where possible the assets that the Republic had deposited in its offices in Czechoslovakia, the USA, Mexico, France and Britain to pay for arms, munitions, food, medical supplies and raw materials. His task included arranging for goods that had been bought but still not delivered to be converted into cash. Most of the jewels, gold and silver plate, stock and bond holdings of wealthy persons who had left Spain during the war, together with many art works belonging to the Church, had been confiscated by the Caja de Reparaciones and used to buy arms and supplies for the Republic. Since the autumn of 1938, truckloads of the remaining valuables had been brought to Figueras and nearby frontier towns.34

While still in Figueras, Negrín ordered that what remained should be packed and transported to France. He arranged with the French authorities that two sealed trucks laden with 110 boxes of these valuables be permitted to cross the frontier without examination by customs. The trucks went first to the Republican Embassy in Paris and then on to Le Havre where they would be loaded on to a vessel. This was a yacht, originally named Giralda, that had been bought by the Republican government via intermediaries from the former king Alfonso XIII and renamed Vita. In March, with the permission of the French Minister of the Interior Albert Sarrault, the Servicio de Evacuación de los Refugiados Españoles (SERE) was created in Paris, under the protection of the Mexican Embassy and the chairmanship of Pablo Azcárate. The valuables which were intended to constitute its funds were embarked for Mexico on the Vita on or about 10 March. There, in complicated circumstances, they fell into the hands of Indalecio Prieto. The subsequent fate of these funds would be a toxic issue within exile politics.35

Enrique Castro Delgado recounted a meeting with Rojo at this time. Allegedly, Rojo told him that Negrín had ordered him to return to Spain. When Castro asked him if he would go, Rojo replied: ‘No, there are hundreds of thousands of men here needing our help.’ When a shocked Castro asked if there were not also hundreds of thousands inside Spain who needed help, Rojo replied, ‘There’s nothing to be done there … it’s the inevitable death agony that will be followed by the terrible death of an era, the death of a regime, the death of the hope of millions of people.’36 So committed was Rojo to remaining in France that, in his book, he revealed his indignation that Tagüeña, Líster and the chief of his general staff, López Iglesias, the under-secretary of the Ministry of Defence, Colonel Antonio Cordón, the chief of the Republican air force Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros and other Communist officers and commissars had returned to Spain without seeking his permission.37

The armies defeated in Catalonia had a strong element of Communists and officers and men who had come through the militias. In contrast, the armies of the centre-south zone had a far higher proportion of career officers, a significant minority of whom were of doubtful loyalty to the Republic. Themselves often under surveillance, they had sought desk jobs behind the lines in training schools and the general staff. They had often provided money, safe-conducts and other documentation and protection for Francoist comrades who had refused to serve the Republic and were in hiding. Franco’s espionage services were especially interested in the beliefs of members of the Republican officer corps in order to ascertain whom among them they could use. As defeat followed defeat, the nostalgia of career officers for the pre-war army provided fertile soil for the recruiters of the Francoist Servicio de Información y Policia Militar (SIPM). These disgruntled professionals had long since felt a certain mistrust of, if not contempt for, the officers who had come through the militias. They harboured the vain hope that there could be a peace settlement arranged with Francoist officers with whom they had been educated in military academies and with whom they had served before 1936. Among the most typical of such officers, and one of the most powerful, was Segismundo Casado.38

Accordingly, such officers in the centre-south zone had no desire to see the return of Líster, Modesto and other Communist commanders who were committed to continuing the fight. These commanders, after doing what they could to improve the conditions of their men, returned to Spain over the next few days. Tagüeña states that he, Líster, Francisco Romero Marín and several other officers from the Army of the Ebro returned on 19 February. There is some confusion over the date of this flight – in two books of memoirs, Líster dated it both five and six days earlier on 13 and 14 February. However, they coincide in lamenting that numerous leading figures of the Communist Party, including Antonio Mije, Francisco Antón, Santiago Álvarez and Santiago Carrillo, did not return on the grounds that the PCE did not want them exposed to danger. Líster recalled that the thirty-three-seat aircraft in which he had travelled had twenty empty seats. Hidalgo de Cisneros told Burnett Bolloten, a United Press correspondent who, by his own account, was a Communist sympathizer at the time, that the last six aircraft that flew from France to Republican Spain were ‘nearly empty’.39 That Negrín had his doubts about those who would or wouldn’t return was reported later by Francisco Romero Marín, who had returned with Hidalgo de Cisneros. When they entered Negrín’s office in the Presidencia building in the Castellana, the Prime Minister exclaimed: ‘Here come another group of lunatics.’40

Cordón met Rojo on 18 February in Perpignan. The new Spanish Consul Rafael Méndez informed them that he had received a cable from Negrín ordering all senior officers and officials of the Ministry of Defence to return to the central zone. A visibly annoyed Rojo said: ‘Well, I will not regard myself as having received that order until the Minister of Defence gives it to me personally.’ Méndez told him to do what he liked and remarked that he thought that soldiers did not need to receive orders to rejoin the army in time of war. Rojo replied that he knew better than anyone where his duty lay and that he was fully occupied in attending to those who were arriving in France and in trying to organize the matériel brought by the army into France. When Méndez replied that there were people doing that already, Rojo walked away without a word. Three days later, Cordón had dinner at the Toulouse railway station with Rojo and Jurado. Equipped with splendid new leather luggage, the two men were on their way to Paris to seek more money at the Embassy for their work with the exiled officers. They had already spent the 4.5 million francs originally given them for this purpose. When Cordón asked if they planned to return to Spain, Rojo again stated that he had not received a direct order to do so and that, in any case, he would go only if he could do something concrete by way of negotiating peace. Cordón reminded them that orders had been issued for their return and that, if they didn’t obey, measures would be taken against them. Jurado replied threateningly that, in such a case, they might make damaging revelations – presumably a reference to the failures of the Republican authorities to prepare for the evacuation and subsequent care of the refugees. Rojo would later make the implausible claim in his book that he had been preparing to return when the Casado coup intervened and made it impossible.41

In fact, Rojo’s absence from Negrín’s side was to contribute substantially to the success of the Casado coup. As Vicente Uribe, wrote in his memoir of the period:

It saw the Government lose a valuable collaborator who would have been immensely useful because of his reputation, and the influence that he wielded over the career officers and the subversives who were already plotting received a major boost from Rojo’s desertion. They knew all about his views and his refusal. Rojo himself had made sure to let them know. In any case, it was evident that he had not accompanied the Government back to Spain. In contrast, the Communist officers had returned to what remained of Republican territory to do their duty.42

Hidalgo de Cisneros stayed on for several days vainly negotiating with the French authorities for his men to fly back to Spain in their own aircraft. At the Paris Embassy, he met both Rojo and Enrique Jurado. Azaña asked for all three to meet him and explain the military situation in the wake of the fall of Catalonia. All three gave bleak reports, of which the most pessimistic was that by Jurado. When Azaña asked them to put their thoughts in writing, Hidalgo suspected that the President was simply looking for a justification for his resignation. After consulting with the Ambassador, Marcelino Pascua, Hidalgo refused, stating that such a report should come from the Minister of Defence, that is to say Negrín. Rojo and Jurado used the same excuse. Azaña was greatly displeased. When Hidalgo returned to Madrid, he recounted this to a furious Negrín, who immediately sent a telegram to Azaña saying that he would hold him responsible for the consequences of behaviour that he regarded as tantamount to treachery. In fact, Rojo had already given Azaña a deeply gloomy oral assessment of the situation which almost certainly reinforced the President’s already firm determination not to return to Spain. Indeed, Azaña would later claim that this was the case.43 Negrín was understandably annoyed and so Rojo wrote a letter to him explaining that he had been virtually ambushed by Azaña during what he had assumed would be merely a formal visit in accordance with protocol. Along with his letter, Rojo enclosed a detailed report on the economic, human and military reasons why continued resistance in the centre-south zone was futile. It seems that he was unaware of the extent to which the rhetoric of resistance was a ploy by Negrín to enhance his diplomacy. Before receiving the letter, Negrín sent, via Marcelino Pascua, a firm instruction to Rojo to make reports to Azaña only via the Minister of Defence, that is to say, Negrín himself. Rojo then wrote another letter reiterating that he had fallen into a trap set by Azaña. The letter also contained a detailed report on the condition of the refugees. Rojo sent copies of these various reports to Matallana, which meant that their gloomy conclusions were known both to other members of Casado’s conspiracy and, of course, to the Francoist SIPM.44

Rojo subsequently claimed that he had stayed on in France because his orders were to remain and do everything possible to ameliorate the situation of the thousands of Republican soldiers now in exile. It is true that he distributed funds to officers for them to buy food, but he also ignored the multiple orders from Negrín to return.45 Rojo declared later that ‘there was no shortage of heavy hints that I should also return’. This was an utterly disingenuous reference to explicit instructions issued by Negrín, not to mention the conversations recounted in their memoirs by Cordón, Tagüeña and Zugazagoitia.46

According to Martínez Barrio, the President of the Cortes, who saw Azaña every day in the Paris Embassy, the text of the telegram sent to the President by Negrín in mid-February was cold, formal and rather threatening. Azaña, who regarded the war as effectively over, had reacted furiously: ‘A fine programme he’s offering me! To enter Madrid, accompanied by Negrín and Uribe, with Pasionaria and Pepe Díaz on the running board of the car.’ (José Díaz was secretary-general of the PCE.) Martínez Barrio pointed out to Azaña that, if he refused to accept Negrín’s insistence that he return to Spain, it was his constitutional duty either to resign as President or else to appoint a new prime minister. Had Azaña resigned then, Martínez Barrio felt that, as his automatic successor, he could have helped Negrín seek a reasonable peace. As it was, Azaña was sunk in lethargy and did not respond. Some days later, Negrín sent another ‘even ruder and more humiliating’ telegram ‘in the name of the Spanish people’ accusing the President of failing in his constitutional duty and demanding his immediate return. Azaña replied on 25 February denying that his absence from Spain had in any way weakened the government or encouraged any of the Great Powers to hasten their recognition of Franco. Before Negrín could reply, Azaña had left the Embassy. He attended a concert at the Opéra Comique with Cipriano Rivas; returning to the Embassy merely to collect their luggage, the two men left together for the Gare de Lyon. Their departure eagerly recorded by an army of journalists and photographers, they took the night train to Collonges-sous-Salève near the Swiss border. As Azaña had done on previous occasions in his political career, he fled from the pressures besetting him, and his flight would be severely damaging to the Republic.47 The Minister of Justice, Ramón González Peña, declared that Azaña’s behaviour was high treason. Negrín even toyed with the unrealistic idea of having Azaña put on trial.48