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FRANCO WAS beginning to evince signs of cultivating his public image, but he was genuinely popular with his men because of his methodical thoroughness and his insistence on always leading assaults himself. He was a keen advocate of the use of bayonet charges in order to demoralize the enemy. With his exploits well reported in the national press, he was being converted into a national hero, ‘the ace of the Legion’. The rotund and plain-speaking General José Sanjurjo, himself one of the heroes of the African campaign and Franco’s superior officer, said to him ‘you won’t be going to hospital as a result of shot fired by a Moor but because I’m going to knock you down with a stone the next time I see you on horseback in action’.¹

In June 1922, Sanjurjo recommended Franco for promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel for his role in the recapture of Nador. Because enquiries were still being held into the disaster of Annual, the request was turned down. Nevertheless, Millán Astray was promoted to full colonel and Sanjurjo himself to Major-General. Franco merely received the military medal and remained a Major. Outraged by civilian criticisms of the Army and by indications that the government was contemplating withdrawal from Morocco, Millán Astray made a number of injudicious speeches and was removed from command of the Legion on 13 November 1922. To his chagrin, Franco was not invited to take his place since, still a major, he was too junior. Command was given instead to Lieutenant-Colonel Rafael de Valenzuela of the Regulares. Having been passed over for command, Franco then left the Legion. For the man who had built it up from scratch with Millán, the prospect of being second-in-command to a newcomer must have seemed unacceptable.² He requested a mainland posting and was eventually sent back to the Regimiento del Príncipe in Oviedo.

To the dismay of most Army officers, the collapse at Annual reinforced the pacifism of the Left and diminished the public standing of both the Army and the King. Alfonso XIII was widely suspected of having encouraged Silvestre to make his rash advance.³ In August 1921, General José Picasso had been appointed to head an investigation into the defeat. The Picasso report led to the indictment of thirty-nine officers including Berenguer, who was obliged to resign as High Commissioner on 10 July 1922. Throughout the autumn of 1922, the Picasso report was the object of hostile scrutiny by a committe of the Cortes, known as the ‘Responsibilities Commission’, set up to examine political responsibilities for the disaster. The brilliant Socialist orator Indalecio Prieto denounced the corruption which had weakened the colonial Army and so ensured that Silvestre’s temerity would turn into overwhelming defeat. The Socialist deputy called for the closure of the military academies, the dissolution of the quartermasters corps and the expulsion from the Army of the senior officers in Africa. His speech was printed as a pamphlet and one hundred thousand copies were distributed free of charge.⁴

Berenguer had been replaced by General Ricardo Burguete, under whom Franco had served in Oviedo in 1917. Burguete as High Commissioner followed government orders to attempt to pacify the rebels by bribery rather than by military action. On 22 September 1922, he made a deal with the now obese and burnt-out El Raisuni whereby, in return for controlling the Jibala on behalf of Spain, he was given a free hand and a large sum of money. Since he was already under siege in his headquarters at Tazarut in the Jibala, El Raisuni’s power might have been squashed definitively had the Spaniards had the imagination and daring to occupy the centre of the Jibala. The policy of accommodation was a major error. Spanish troops were withdrawn from the territory of a man on the verge of defeat. He was enriched and his reputation and power inflated.

Burguete’s aim was to pacify the tribes in the west in order to have more freedom in his efforts to crush the altogether more dangerous Abd-el-Krim in the east. After first pursuing negotiations with him for the ransom of Spanish prisoners of war, Burguete passed to the offensive in the autumn. Burguete intended to use, as his forward base, the hill-top fortified position of Tizi Azza, to the south of Annual. However, before his attack could get under way, the Rif tribes struck at the beginning of November 1922. Safely ensconced in the slopes above the town, they fired down on the garrison causing two thousand casualties and obliging the Spaniards to dig in for the winter.⁵

The worsening situation in Morocco and the compromises pursued by Burguete may have convinced Franco that he was right to have left the Legion, whatever his reasons might have been. He was showered with honours as he passed through Madrid en route to Asturias. The King bestowed on him the Military Medal on 12 January 1923 and the honour of being named gentilhombre de cámara, one of an élite group of military courtiers.⁶ Franco was also the guest of honour at a dinner given by his admirers.

He was also the subject of an immensely flattering and revealing profile written by the Catalan novelist and journalist Juan Ferragut. It constitutes a portrait of Franco at the point when, with marriage around the corner, heroism was giving way to a more calculated ambition.^* In Ferragut’s profile, there can still be heard the tone of the eager man of action which would soon disappear from Franco’s repertoire. Nevertheless, the clichéd patriotism and romanticised heroism of many of his remarks suggest that the persona of the intrepid desert hero was not entirely natural and spontaneous. When asked why he had left Morocco, Franco replied ‘because we aren’t doing anything there anymore. There’s no shooting. The war has become a job like any other, except that it’s more exhausting. Now all we do is vegetate.’ There was a contrived element about Franco’s answers which suggested an intense consciousness of his public image. When Ferragut asked him if he liked action, the thirty year-old Major replied ‘yes … at least up to now. I believe that a soldier has two periods, one of war and one of study. I’ve done the first and now I want to study. War used to be more simple; all you needed was heart. But today it is more complicated; it is, perhaps, the most difficult science of them all’. Ferragut described him as boyish: ‘his sunburnt face, his black, brilliant eyes, his curly hair, a certain timidity in his speech and gestures and his quick and open smile make him seem like a child. When he is praised, Franco blushes like a girl who has been flattered.’ He brushes aside the praise, as befits a hero, ‘but I’ve done nothing really! The dangers are less than people think. It’s all a question of endurance’.

Asked about his most emotional memory of the war, he replied ‘I remember the day at Casabona, perhaps the hardest day of the war. That day we saw what the Legion was made of. The Moors were pressing strongly and we were fighting at twenty paces. We had a company and a half and we suffered one hundred casualties. Handfuls of men were falling, almost all wounded in the head or the stomach, yet our strength never wavered for a second. Even the wounded, dragging themselves along covered in blood, cried ‘¡Viva la Legión! Seeing them, so manly, so brave, I felt an emotion which choked me.’ Asked if he had ever felt fear, he smiled as if puzzled, and shyly replied ‘I don’t know. No one knows what courage and fear are. In a soldier, all this is summed up in something else: the concept of duty, of patriotism.’ The romantic note continued with references to the anxious vigils of his mother and bride-to-be. Ferragut asked him directly, ‘Are you in love, Franco?’ to which the affable interviewee replied ‘¡Hombre!, what do you think? I’m just off to Oviedo to get married.’⁷

On 21 March 1923, Franco arrived in Oviedo where his exploits ensured that he would be feted. At the beginning of June, local society turned out in force for a banquet at which he was presented with a gold key, the symbol of his recently acquired status as Gentilhombre de cámara, purchased for him after a local subscription. The King had still not granted the reglamentary permission for his wedding. Since this was a mere formality, the ceremony was being planned for June. However, while Carmen and Francisco were waiting to hear from the Palace, their plans suffered another reversal. Franco had gone to El Ferrol where he spent most of May with his family. In early June, Abd el Krim launched another attack on Tizi Azza, the key to the outreaches of the Melilla defence lines. If Tizi Azza fell, it would have been relatively easy for other Spanish positions to collapse in a domino effect. On 5 June 1923, the new commander of the Legion, Lieutenant-Colonel Valenzuela, was killed in a successful action aimed at breaking the siege.⁸

An emergency cabinet meeting three days later, on 8 June 1923, decided that the most suitable replacement for Valenzuela was Franco. The Minister of War, General Aizpuru, telegrammed to inform him that he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel with retrospective effect from 31 January 1922 and that the King had bestowed command of the Legion upon him. His marriage would have to be postponed again. The ambitious Carmen may have found consolation for the loss of her bridegroom in his promotion, the signs of royal patronage and the enormous local prestige that he thereby enjoyed, although, interviewed in 1928, she talked of her anxieties while he was away and of his principal defect being his love for Africa.⁹

Prior to leaving Spain, Franco was the guest of honour at banquets in both the Automobile Club in Oviedo and at the Hotel Palace in Madrid. One of the principal Asturian newspapers dedicated an entire front page to his promotion and his prowess, complete with extravagant tributes from General Antonio Losada, the military governor of Oviedo, from the Marqués de la Vega de Anzó and other local dignitaries.¹⁰ Interviewed on arrival at the Automobile Club banquet on the evening of Saturday 9 June, Franco showed himself to be the public’s ideal young hero, dashing, gallant and, above all, modest. He dismissed talk of special bravery and showed himself perplexed by all the fuss that was being made. Clearly conscious of the dash he was cutting, he interrupted the journalist’s attempted eulogy by saying ‘I just did what all the Legionaires did, we fought with a desire to win and we did win’. A discreet reminder of what he was leaving behind brought a delicate glimpse of emotion which Franco quickly put behind him. The journalist remarked sycophantically ‘how the brave Legionaires will rejoice at your appointment!’. Franco replied ‘Rejoice? Why? I’m an officer just like …’, only to be interrupted by a passing ex-Legionaire who said ‘say yes, that they will all rejoice, of course they will rejoice’. Like a hero of romantic fiction, Franco replied with a modest laugh, saying ‘Don’t go overboard. Yes, you’re right, the lads care for me a lot.’

The interview ended with Franco being asked about his plans, at which he gave another hint of the sacrifice he was having to make. He replied with a curious mixture of virile enthusiasm and self-regarding pomposity: ‘Plans? What happens will decide that. I repeat that I am a simple soldier who obeys orders. I will go to Morocco. I will see how things are. We will work hard and as soon as I can get some leave I will come back to Oviedo to … to do what I thought was virtually done, which for the moment duty prevents, taking precedence over any feelings, even those with roots deep in the soul. When the Patria calls, we have only rapid and concise response: ¡Presente!’¹¹ There is no doubt that this, and other interviews from this period, show an altogether more attractive figure than the one that Franco was later to become, in large measure as a consequence of the corrupting influence of constant adulation. The Minister of War and future President of the Second Republic, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, thought Franco’s near contemporary and rival, Manuel Goded, a more promising officer than Franco. However, he liked Franco’s air of modesty, ‘the loss of which when he became a general damaged him significantly’.¹²

Within a week of passing through Madrid, Franco had taken up his new command in Ceuta and was soon in the thick of the action. Shortly after Franco’s arrival in Africa, Abd el Krim followed up his attack on Tizi Azza with another on Tifaruin, a Spanish outpost near the River Kert to the west of Melilla. Nearly nine thousand men besieged Tifaruin and they were dislodged on 22 August by two banderas of the Legion under Franco’s command.¹³

Such was the accumulated military discontent about what was perceived as civilian betrayal of the Army in Morocco that since early in 1923 two groups of senior generals, one in Madrid and the other in Barcelona under Miguel Primo de Rivera, had been toying with the idea of a military coup.¹⁴ The incident which triggered it off took place on 23 August. There were a number of public disturbances in Málaga involving conscripts being embarked for Africa. Civilians were jostled and Army officers assaulted. Some of the recruits were merely drunk, others were Catalan and Basque nationalists making political protests. Order was finally restored by the Civil Guard. An NCO in the Engineering Corps (suboficial de ingenieros), José Ardoz, was killed and the crime was attributed to a gallego, Corporal Sánchez Barroso. Sánchez Barroso was immediately tried and sentenced to death. Since Annual, there had been a widespread public revulsion against the Moroccan enterprise and, in consequence, there was a huge outcry about the death sentence. On 28 August, Sánchez Barroso was given a royal pardon, at the request of the cabinet. The officer corps was outraged by the humiliation of the Málaga incidents, by the subsequent public rejection of their cause in Morocco and by what they saw as the slight involved in the pardon.¹⁵

On 13 September, the Falstaffian eccentric General Miguel Primo de Rivera launched his military coup supported by the garrisons of his own military region of Catalonia and by that of Aragón, under the control of his intimate friend General Sanjurjo. There is considerable debate about the King’s complicity in the coup. What is certain is that he acquiesced in the military demolition of the constitutional monarchy and happily embarked on a course of authoritarian rule. After six years of sporadic bloodshed and instability since 1917, and the fashionable ‘regenerationist’ calls for an ‘iron surgeon’, the Military Directory set up by Primo de Rivera met with only token resistance and, given widespread disillusion with the caciquista system, much benevolent expectation.¹⁶ Despite the mutual admiration which, at this stage of their careers, united Franco and Sanjurjo, neither Franco nor most of the officers of the Legion were particularly enthusiastic about the coup. They regarded most of the officers who supported Primo as primarily members of the Juntas de Defensa and therefore enemies of promotion by merit. In addition, they were fully aware of the belief of Primo himself that Spain should abandon her Moroccan protectorate.¹⁷ It is clear, however, that Franco had no objections in principle to the military taking political power, particularly as royal approval was quickly forthcoming. In any case, his mind was on other things – his new command and his impending marriage, for which royal permission had finally been granted on 2 July.¹⁸

The thirty year-old Francisco Franco was married to the twenty-one year-old María del Carmen Polo in the Church of San Juan el Real in Oviedo at midday on Monday 22 October 1923. His fame and popularity as a hero of the African war ensured that substantial crowds of well-wishers and casual onlookers would gather round the church and on the pavements of the streets traversed by the wedding party. By 10.30 a.m., the Church was full and the crowd had spilled out and packed the surrounding streets. The police had difficulty maintaining the flow of local traffic. As befitted his position as a gentilhombre de cámara, Franco’s padrino (best man) was Alfonso XIII, by the proxy of the military governor of Oviedo. General Losada took Carmen’s arm and they entered the Church under the royal canopy (palio). That honour, combined with Franco’s growing reputation, was reflected in the fact that his marriage was reported in the society pages not only of local newspapers but also of the national press. A bemedalled Franco wore the field uniform of the Legion. The ceremony was carried out by a military chaplain while the organ played Franco’s choice of military marches. On leaving the church, the couple were greeted by wild cheering and applause. The crowd followed the cars back to the Polo house and continued to cheer.¹⁹ The marriage constituted a major social occasion in Oviedo, the centre-piece of which was a spectacular wedding banquet.²⁰ Franco’s father, Nicolás Franco Salgado-Araujo, was not present. As might have been expected, it was to be a solidly enduring, if not a passionate, marriage.^* Five years later, Carmen would recall her wedding day, ‘I thought I was dreaming or reading a beautiful novel … about me’.²¹ Among the mountains of telegrams was a collective greeting from the married men of the Legion and another from a Legion battalion which welcomed Carmen as their new mother.²²

The social position of both bride and groom was reflected in the fact that those who signed the marriage certificate as witnesses included two local aristocrats, the Marqués de la Rodriga and the Marqués de la Vega de Anzó. The unctuous tone of local reporting not only gives an indication of the prestige that Franco already enjoyed but it also reflects the kind of adulation with which he was bombarded. ‘Yesterday, Oviedo enjoyed moments of intimate and longed-for satisfaction and of jubilant delight. It was the wedding of Franco, the brave and popular head of the Legion. If the desire of the couple to see their love blessed before the altar was great, the interest of the public was no less immense on seeing them happy with their dream of love come true. In this pure love, all of us who know Franco and Carmina have given something of their own hearts and have suffered with them their worries, their anguish, their justified impatience. From the King down to the last of the hero’s admirers there was a unanimous desire that this love, so beset by ill-luck, should have the divine sanction which would lead them to the supreme happiness.’²³ ‘The pause in the struggle of the brave Spanish warrior has had its triumphant apotheosis. Those polite and gallant phrases whispered by the noble soldier in the ear of his beautiful beloved have had the divine epilogue of their consecration.’²⁴ One journal in Madrid headed its commentary with the headline ‘The Wedding of an heroic Caudillo’ (warrior-leader).²⁵ This was one of the first ever public uses of the term Caudillo with respect to Franco. It can easily be imagined how such adulatory prose moulded Franco’s perception of his own importance.

By tradition, on marrying, a senior officer was required to ‘kiss the hands’ of the King. After a few days honeymoon spent at the Polo summer house, La Piniella near San Cucao de Llanera outside Oviedo, and prior to setting up home in Ceuta, the newly weds travelled to Madrid and called at the royal palace in late October. In 1963, the Queen recalled lunch with a silent and timid young officer.²⁶

In later years, Franco himself twice recounted the interview with the King to his cousin and also to George Hills. Franco alleged in these accounts that the King was anxious to know how the Army in Africa felt about the recent coup and the military situation in Morocco. Franco claimed to have told the King that the Army was doubtful about Primo because of his belief in the need to abandon the protectorate. When the King demonstrated an equally pessimistic inclination to pull out, Franco boldly replied with his opinion that the ‘rebels’ (the local inhabitants) could be defeated and the Spanish protectorate consolidated. He allegedly pointed out that, so far, Spanish operations had been piecemeal, pushing back the Moors from one small piece of ground after another, attempting to hold it, and to retake it after it had been recaptured. Rather than this endless drain on men and materials, Franco suggested an idea long favoured by Africanistas, a major attack on the headquarters of Abd el Krim in the region of the Beni Urriaquel tribe. The most direct route was by sea to the Bay of Alhucemas.

The King arranged for Franco to dine with General Primo de Rivera and tell him of his plan.²⁷ Primo was hardly likely to be sympathetic given both his long-standing conviction that Spain should withdraw from Morocco and his determination, as Dictator, to reduce military expenditure.²⁸ When he met Franco, Primo would almost certainly not have been surprised to hear that the young Lieutenant-Colonel shared the commitment of the Africanistas to remaining in Morocco. Franco had long since published his variant of the view that Spain’s Moroccan problem would be solved at Alhucemas, ‘the heart of anti-Spanish rebellion, the road to Fez, the short exit to the Mediterranean, and there is to be found the key to much propaganda which will end the day that we set foot on that coast.’²⁹ The idea of a landing at Alhucemas had been in the air for some years and the general staff had prepared detailed contingency plans in the event of the politicians giving the go-ahead. According to his own account, by the time Franco managed to put his case for a landing to the Dictator, it was in the early hours of the morning. The anything but abstemious Primo was somewhat merry, and Franco was convinced that he would never remember their conversation. Nevertheless, Primo suggested that he submit his scheme in written form.

In this subsequent version of events, Franco’s narrative is tailored to show that the plan for the Alhucemas landing was his own. That he should remember it as his own brainchild was entirely understandable after years of being told so by sycophants and given the fact that he did play a prominent role in putting the case against withdrawal from Morocco.³⁰ At the beginning of 1924, he had been one of the founders, along with General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, of a journal called Revista de Tropas Coloniales which advocated that Spain maintain its colonial presence in Africa. At the start of 1925, he would become head of its editorial board. Franco was to write more than forty articles for the journal. In one published in April 1924, entitled ‘passivity and inaction’, he argued that the weakness of Spanish policy, ‘the parody of a protectorate’, was encouraging rebellion among the indigenous tribes.³¹ It made a considerable impact.

Shortly after visiting the King, the newly wed Franco and his bride took up residence in Ceuta. The situation in Morocco seemed ominously quiet. In fact, by the spring of 1924, Abd el Krim’s power had grown enormously and he no longer recognized the authority of the Sultan. He was presenting himself as the figurehead of a vaguely nationalistic Berber movement and talking in terms of establishing an independent socialist state. Numerous tribes accepted his leadership and, under his self-bestowed title of ‘Emir of the Rif’, in 1924, he formally requested membership of the League of Nations.³² After the defeat of Annual, the Spanish counter-offensive had recaptured an area around Melilla. Apart from that, the Spanish foothold consisted only of the towns of Ceuta, Tetuán, Larache and Xauen. The local garrisons were confident that they could hold the territory but were seriously disturbed by rumours that they were about to receive orders to withdraw. Anticipating difficulties, the military commander of Ceuta, General Montero, during the fesival of the Pascua Militar on 5 January called upon the officers under his command to give their word that they would obey orders no matter what they were. Franco took the lead in pointing out that they could not be asked to obey orders that were contrary to military regulations.³³

Possibly alerted by these objections, Primo de Rivera finally decided to inspect the situation personally. In the meantime, Sanjurjo was sent to take over as commander of Melilla. Abd el Krim greeted him with an offensive on Sidi Mesaud only to be driven back by the Legion commanded by Franco. When the Dictator arrived in June 1924, he quickly grasped the essential absurdity of the Spanish military predicament. His inclination was to abandon the Protectorate on the grounds that to pacify it fully would be too expensive and to go on holding it on the basis of strings of waterless, indefensible blockhouses was ludicrous. For part of his tour, the Dictator insisted on being accompanied by Franco. At the time, the young Lieutenant-Colonel was deeply concerned about rumours that Primo had come to arrange a Spanish withdrawal. He had just tried to convince the High Commissioner, General Aizpuru, that the publication of orders to abandon the inland towns would provoke a major offensive by the forces of Abd el Krim. Franco had agreed with Lieutenant-Colonel Luis Pareja of the Regulares that, in the event of a withdrawal from Xauen, they would both apply for transfers to the mainland. In a letter to Pareja in July 1924, Franco declared that when the time came the bulk of his officers would do the same.³⁴

At one notorious dinner, in Ben Tieb on 19 July 1924, there was an incident involving the Legion and the Dictator which has become the basis of subsequent myth. This was the dinner at which, legend in the Legion would have it, Franco had arranged for the Dictator to be served a menu consisting entirely of eggs.³⁵ Huevos (eggs) being the Spanish slang for testicles, the machista symbolism was obvious: the visitor needed huevos and the Legion had plenty to spare. However, given Franco’s fanatical respect for discipline and his ambitious concern for his career, it is difficult to believe that he would so blatantly insult a senior officer and head of the government. In 1972, Franco denied that such a menu had been served.

At the dinner, Franco made a harsh but careful speech against abandonismo. What he said revealed his lifelong commitment to Spanish Morocco: ‘where we tread is Spanish soil, because it has been bought at the highest price and with the most precious coin: the Spanish blood shed here. We reject the idea of pulling back because we are convinced that Spain is in a position to dominate her zone.’ Primo responded with an equally strong speech explaining the logic behind plans for a withdrawal and a call for blind obedience. When a Colonel of Primo’s staff said ‘muy bien’ (hear, hear), the irascible and diminutive Major José Enrique Varela, unable to contain himself, shouted ‘muy mal’. Primo’s speech was interrupted by hissing and hostile remarks. Sanjurjo, who accompanied him, later told José Calvo Sotelo, the Dictator’s Minister of Finance, that he had kept his hand on the butt of his pistol throughout the speeches, fearing a tragic incident. When the Dictator finished he was greeted with total silence. Franco, ever careful, hastened to visit Primo immediately after the dinner to clarify his position. He said that if what had happened required punishment, he was prepared to resign. Primo made light of Franco’s part in the affair and permitted him to return later and again put his point of view about a landing in Alhucemas.³⁶ In his own 1972 version, he claimed, implausibly, to have given Primo de Rivera a dressing down. As a consequence, he said, Primo de Rivera promised to do nothing without consulting the ‘key officers’.³⁷

Shortly after the Ben Tieb dinner, the Dictator prepared an operation to fold up 400 positions and block-houses. As Franco and others had warned, the talk of withdrawal encouraged Abd el Krim and stimulated the desertion of large numbers of Moroccan troops from the Spanish ranks. Lieutenant-Colonel Pareja understood that this meant that the conditions agreed with Franco for their joint resignations had arrived. He presented his transfer request and was disgusted to discover that Franco had not kept his word. Franco, always cautious, particularly after his confrontation with Primo de Rivera, remained in his post.³⁸ Shortly after the return of Primo to Madrid, Abd el Krim attacked in force, cutting the Tangier-Tetuan road and threatening Tetuan. A communiqué was issued on 10 September 1924 announcing the evacuation of the zone. Anxiety about the consequences of the proposed withdrawal led a number of officers in Africa to toy with the idea of a coup against Primo. The ring-leader was Queipo de Llano, who claimed in 1930 that Franco had visited him on 21 September 1924 to ask him to lead a coup against the Dictator. In 1972, Franco did not deny that the conversation had taken place. However, as had happened in the case of his pact with Lieutenant-Colonel Pareja, nothing came of an uncharacteristically frank expression of discontent. Where military discipline was concerned, habitual caution always prevailed.³⁹

Franco and the Legion were thrown into service at the head of a column led by General Castro Girona which set off from Tetuan on 23 September in order to relieve the besieged garrison at Xauen, ‘the sacred city’, in the mountains. It took them until 2 October to fight the forty miles there. Over the next month, units from isolated positions drifted in until at the beginning of November there were ten thousand men in Xauen, many of them wounded, most of them exhausted. An evacuation was then undertaken. Primo won over much of the Army of Africa by assuming complete responsibility for whatever might happen, naming himself High Commissioner on 16 October. He returned to Morocco and set up his general staff in Tetuán. The evacuation of the Spanish, Jewish and friendly Arab inhabitants of Xauen was an awesome task. Children, women, and other civilians, the old and the sick, were packed into trucks. The immensely long and vulnerable column set off on 15 November. Moving slowly at night, their rear was covered by the Legion under Franco. Constantly harrassed by raiding tribesmen, and severely slowed down by rain storms which turned the tracks into impassable mud, it took four weeks to return to Tetuan where the survivors arrived on 13 December. It was a remarkable feat of dogged determination though nothing approaching the ‘magisterial military lesson’ perceived by Franco’s hagiographers.⁴⁰

Franco was deeply disappointed to be a party to the abandonment of any fragment of the territory in defence of which much of his life had been spent. He published an article on the tragedy of the withdrawal, based on his diary. Vividly and passionately written, it reflects the resignation and sadness of the day before the retreat.⁴¹ However, he was consoled by being awarded another Military Medal and by being promoted to full colonel on 7 February 1925 with effect from twelve months earlier, 31 January 1924. He was also allowed to keep the command of the Legion, although that post should have been held by a Lieutenant-Colonel. He was further consoled when Primo de Rivera in late 1924 changed his mind about abandoning Morocco. The Dictator decided sometime in late November or early December to pursue the Alhucemas landing and ordered that detailed plans be drawn up. In early 1925, Franco experimented with amphibious landing craft. It was during one of these exercises, on 30 March 1925, on board the Spanish coastal patrol vessel Arcila, that he was offered a plate of breakfast by a young naval lieutenant called Luis Carrero Blanco who would, from 1942 to 1973, be his closest collaborator. Franco refused the offer on the grounds that, since being wounded in El Biutz, he always went into action on an empty stomach.⁴²

In March 1925, on a visit to Morocco, General Primo de Rivera presented Franco with a letter from the King and a gold religious medal. The letter was fulsome: ‘Dear Franco, On visiting the [Virgin of the] Pilar in Zaragoza and hearing a prayer for the dead before the tomb of the leader of the Tercio, Rafael Valenzuela, gloriously killed at the head of his banderas, my prayers and my thoughts were for you all. The beautiful history that you are writing with your lives and your blood is a constant example of what can be done by men who reckon everything in terms of the fulfilment of their duty … you know how much you are loved and appreciated by your most affectionate friend who embraces you – Alfonso XIII.’⁴³

After entering Xauen, the triumphant Abd el Krim had celebrated his hegemony by capturing El Raisuni. He then made a colossal mistake. At precisely the moment that the French were moving into the noman’s-land between the two protectorates, his long-term ambition of creating a more or less socialist republic led him to try to overthrow the Sultan, who was the instrument of French colonial rule. Taking on the French, initially he defeated them. His advance skirmishers came within twenty miles of Fez. This led to an agreement in June 1925 between Primo de Rivera and the French commander in Africa, Philippe Pétain, for a combined operation. The plan was for a substantial French force of one hundred and sixty thousand colonial troops to attack from the south while seventy-five thousand Spanish soldiers moved down from the north. The Spanish contingent was to land at Alhucemas under the overall command of General Sanjurjo. Franco was in command of the first party of troops to go ashore and had responsibility for establishing a bridgehead.

There was no effort at secrecy either in the planning or on the night of 7 September, when Spanish ships arrived in the bay with lights ablaze and the troops singing. As a result of poor reconnaissance, the landing took place on a beach where the landing craft hit shoals and sand-banks too far out for tanks to be disembarked. Moreover, the water was at a depth of over one and a half metres and many of the Legionaires could not swim. Their attack was awaited by rows of entrenched Moors who immediately began to fire. The naval officer in charge of the landing craft radioed the fleet where the High Command awaited news. In view of his signal, the vessels were ordered to withdraw. Franco decided that a retreat at that point would shatter the morale of his men and boost that of the Moorish defenders. Accordingly, he countermanded the order and told his bugler to sound the attack. His Legionaires jumped overboard, waded to the shore and succeeded in establishing the bridgehead. Franco was later called before his superiors to explain himself which he did by reference to military regulations which granted officers a degree of initiative under fire.⁴⁴

The entire operation was a condemnation of the appalling organization of the Spanish Army and poor planning by Sanjurjo. After the bridgehead was established there was insufficient food and ammunition to permit an advance. There was extremely poor ship-to-shore communication and very limited artillery support. Two weeks passed before the order was given to move beyond the bridgehead. Then the advance was subject to the mortar batteries placed by Abd el Krim. In part because of the tenacity of Franco himself, the Spanish attack continued. However, with the French moving up from the south, it was only a matter of time before Abd el Krim surrendered. On 26 May 1926, he gave himself up to the French authorities.⁴⁵ The resistance of the Rif and Jibala tribes collapsed.

Franco produced a vividly, if somewhat romantically, written diary of his participation in the landing, entitled Diario de Albucemas. It was published over four months from September to December 1925 in the Revista de Tropas Coloniales and again in 1970 in a version which he himself censored.⁴⁶ Referring to an attack on a hill which took place in the first hours after the landing, he wrote in 1925 ‘those defenders who are too tenacious are put to the knife’ changing it in 1970 to ‘those defenders who are too tenacious fell beneath our fire’. Even after editing the text in 1970, Franco left in phrases reminiscent of the adventure stories of his youth. Men were not shot but ‘scythed down by enemy lead’. ‘Fate has snatched away from us the flower of our officers. Our time has come. Tomorrow we will avenge them!’⁴⁷ Years later, he told his doctor that, during the Alhucemas campaign, a deserter from the Legion was brought in and, with no hesitation other than the time taken to confirm his identity, he ordered a firing squad to be formed and the man shot.⁴⁸

On 3 February 1926, Franco was promoted to Brigadier General, which made the front page of the newspapers in Galicia.⁴⁹ At the age of 33, he was the youngest general in Europe, and was finally obliged by his seniority to leave the Legion. On being promoted, Franco’s service record had the following added: ‘He is a positive national asset and surely the country and the Army will derive great benefit from making use of his remarkable aptitudes in higher positions’.⁵⁰ He was given command of the most important brigade in the Army, the First Brigade of the First Division in Madrid, composed of two aristocratic regiments, the Regimiento del Rey and the Regimiento de León^*.

On returning to Spain, Franco brought with him a political baggage acquired in Africa which he would carry through the rest of his life. In Morocco, Franco had come to associate government and administration with the endless intimidation of the ruled. There was an element too of the patronizing superiority which underlay much colonial government, the idea that the colonised were like children who needed a firm paternal hand. He would effortlessly transfer his colonial attitudes to domestic politics. Since the Spanish Left was pacifist and hostile to the great adventure in Morocco, associated in his mind with social disorder and regional separatism, he considered leftists to be as dire an enemy as rebellious tribesmen.⁵¹ He regarded the poisonous ideas of the Left as acts of mutiny to be eradicated by iron discipline which, when it came to governing an entire population, meant repression and terror. The paternal element would later be central to his own perception of his rule over Spain as a strong and benevolent father figure.

In Africa, Franco had also learned many of the strategems and devices which were to be his political hallmark after 1936. He had observed that political success came from a cunning game of divide and rule among the tribal chiefs. That is what the Sultan did; it was what the better Spanish High Commissioners aspired to do. At a lower level, local garrison commanders had to do something similar. Astute, greedy, envious and resentful chieftains were played off against one another in a shifting game of alliances, betrayals and lightning strikes. His assimilation of such skills would permit him to run rings around his political enemies, rivals and collaborators inside Spain from 1936 until well into the 1960s. Although he acquired such skills, he had never developed any serious interest in the Moroccans. Like most colonial officers, Franco did not learn more than a smattering of the language of those he fought and ruled. Later in life, he would also fail in his attempts to learn English. Absorbed in military matters, he could never muster much interest in other cultures and languages.⁵²

On the day on which his promotion to general was announced, Franco’s success had been somewhat overshadowed by the spectacular national newspaper coverage given to his brother Ramón. Major Ramón Franco was crossing the South Atlantic with Captain Julio Ruiz de Alda, one of the future founders of the Falange, in the Plus Ultra, a Dornier DoJ Wal flying boat.⁵³ The regime and the press was treating Ramón as a modern Christopher Columbus. A committee was set up in El Ferrol to organize various tributes to the two brothers, including the unveiling of a plaque on the wall of the house in which they had been born. It read ‘In this house were born the brothers Francisco and Ramón Franco Baamonde, valiant soldiers who, at the head of the Tercio of Africa and crossing the Atlantic in the seaplane ‘Plus Ultra’, carried out heroic deeds which constitute glorious pages of the nation’s history. The town of El Ferrol is honoured by such brilliant sons to whom it dedicates this tribute of admiration and affection.’⁵⁴

Franco took up his important post in Madrid in time to admire the achievements of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. What the officer corps perceived as regional separatism had been suppressed and labour unrest dramatically diminished. Anarchist and Communist unions had been suppressed while the Socialist union, the Unión General de Trabajadores, was given control of a newly created state arbitration machinery. The UGT became the semi-official trade union organization of the regime. A massive programme of infrastructural investment in roads and railways created a high degree of prosperity and near full employment. For an Army officer, particularly after the disorders of the period 1917 to 1923, it was a good time to be on active service. The constant criticism of the Army which officers associated with the parliamentary monarchy had been silenced. The triumph of Alhucemas had revived military popularity. It is little wonder that, like many Army officers and civilian rightists, Franco would come to look back on the six years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship as a golden age. He often commented during the 1930s that they were the only period of good government that Spain had enjoyed in modern times. In his view, Primo’s error was to have announced that he would hold power only for a short time until he had solved Spain’s problems. Franco said reprovingly to his Oviedo acquaintance, the monarchist, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez ‘that was a mistake; if you accept a command you have to take it as if it was going to be for the rest of your life’.⁵⁵

The Dictatorship was also a period in which Franco experienced further inflation of his ego. On the evening of 3 February 1926, his fellow cadets of the fourteenth intake (promoción no. 14) at the Academia de Infantería de Toledo met to pay homage to the first of their number to become a general. They presented him with a dress sword and a parchment with the following inscription: ‘When the passage through the world of the present generation is no more than a brief comment in the book of History, there will endure the memory of the sublime epic written by the Spanish Army in the development of the nation. And the glorious names of the most important caudillos will be raised on high, and above them all will be lifted triumphantly that of General Francisco Franco Bahamonde to reach the sublime heights achieved by other illustrious men of war, Leiva, Mondragón, Valdivia and Hernán Cortés. His comrades pay this tribute of admiration and affection to him in recognition of his patriotism, his intelligence and his bravery’.⁵⁶

In the course of the next few days, Franco would receive many telegrams from the local authorities of El Ferrol recounting the acts of homage mounted for his mother. On Sunday 7 February, bands played, firework displays were organized and ships in the bay sounded their horns. The town turned out to acclaim the historic flight by Ramón, who was still in Argentina, although Franco was not forgotten in the endless tributes made to Doña Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade. 12 February was declared a holiday in El Ferrol in honour of both brothers. The streets of the town were illuminated and a Te Deum was sung in the Church of San Julián to celebrate their achievements. The plaque was unveiled in the calle María. Messages of congratulation to Doña Pilar for both her sons arrived from the Alcaldes (mayors) of El Ferrol, the four provincial capitals of Galicia and from many towns across Spain.⁵⁷ On 10 February, a massive crowd turned out in the Plaza de Colón (Columbus) in Madrid to acclaim Ramón’s achievement. In part, the media coverage and public enthusiasm were orchestrated by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in order to profit in propaganda terms from the flight of the Plus Ultra.

The adulation was largely directed at Ramón, but there is no reason to believe that Franco was resentful at seeing the black sheep of the family suddenly converted into a national hero. The adulation of his brother as a twentieth century Christopher Columbus may, however, have inspired Franco’s later efforts to present himself as a modern-day El Cid. Franco always had an intense loyalty to his family and, over the years, was to use his own position to help and protect Ramón from the consequences of his wilder actions. In any case, his own triumphs and popularity were sufficient in frequency and intensity for him not to need to feel envy. At Easter 1926, during the Corpus Christi procession at Madrid’s San Jerónimo Church, he commanded the troops which lined the streets and escorted the host. As the legendary hero of Africa, he was the object of the admiring attention of the upper class Madrileños who made up the congregation.⁵⁸ In the late summer of 1927, Franco accompanied the King and Queen on an official visit to Africa during which new colours were given to the Legion at their headquarters in Dar Riffien.⁵⁹

On 14 September 1926, Franco’s first and only child María del Carmen was born in Oviedo where Carmen had gone to be with her dying father.⁶⁰ The new arrival was to become the focus of his emotional life. Years later, he was to say ‘when Carmen was born, I thought that I would go mad with joy. I would have liked to have had more children but it was not to be’.⁶¹ There have been insistent rumours that Carmen was not really Francisco’s daughter but was adopted, and that the father may have been his promiscuous brother Ramón. There is no evidence to support this theory, which seems to have arisen entirely from the fact that there are no known photographs of Carmen Polo noticeably pregnant and from Ramón’s notorious sexual adventurism.⁶² Franco’s sister, Pilar, went out of her way in her memoirs to make a point of saying that she saw Carmen Polo pregnant although her dates are wrong by two years.⁶³

The posting to Madrid began a period in which Franco had plenty of spare time. Rather than make the lives of his colonels a misery by frequent surprise inspections, he left them to get on with running their own barracks, a pattern that he would later follow with his ministers. He rented an apartment on the elegant Castellana avenue and enjoyed a busy social life. He regularly met military friends from Africa and the Toledo Academy at the regular social gatherings or tertulias of the upper-class club, La Gran Peña, and in the cafés of Alcalá and the Gran Via. He was relatively close to Millán Astray, Emilio Mola, Luis Orgaz, José Enrique Varela and Juan Yagüe.⁶⁴ While living in Madrid, he acquired a passion for cinema and became a member of the tertulia of the politician and writer Natalio Rivas, a member of the Liberal Party.⁶⁵ At Rivas’s invitation, he appeared along with Millán Astray in a film entitled La Malcasada made by the director Gómez Hidalgo in Rivas’s house. Franco’s small part was as an Army officer recently returned from the African wars.⁶⁶

At this stage of his life, as later, Franco had little interest in day-to-day politics. None the less, he began to think that ultimately he might play a political role of some kind. The popular acclaim which he had received after Alhucemas, the rapidity of his promotions, and the company which he now kept in Madrid, all pushed him to take for granted his own importance as a national figure. As he put it in retrospect ‘I was, as a result of my age and my prestige, called to render the highest services to the nation’. The Army’s apparent political success under Primo de Rivera may also have increased his tendency to dream of higher things for himself. He claimed later that, in preparation for his transcendental tasks, and taking advantage of the fact that his command in Madrid left him with very little to do, he began to read books on contemporary Spanish history and political economy.⁶⁷ How much reading he did is impossible to say; his books were lost in Madrid in 1936 when his flat was ransacked by anarchists. Certainly, neither his speeches nor his own writings indicate any significant insight into history or economics.

Given his propensity to chat, he probably talked rather than read about economics. As he claimed later, he started at this time ‘with some frequency to visit the manager of the Banco de Bilbao, where Carmen had a few savings (unos ahorrillos)’. The banker in question was affable and intelligent and stimulated in Franco an interest in economics. Franco also discussed contemporary political issues with his immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. It is likely that such café conversations with friends, the bulk of whom were Africanistas like himself, can only have cemented his prejudices. Nevertheless, in later life he was to place enormous value on these conversations.⁶⁸

His reading and his tertulias boosted Franco’s confidence in his own opinions to an inordinate degree. While on holiday in Gijón in 1929, he bumped into General Primo de Rivera on the beach. The ministers of Primo’s government were spending a few days together away from Madrid and the Dictator invited Franco to lunch with them – a mark of considerable favour by Primo towards the young general. His self-esteem duly inflated, Franco found himself seated next to José Calvo Sotelo, the brilliant Finance Minister, who was in the midst of trying to defend the value of the peseta against the consequences of a massive balance of payments deficit, a bad harvest and the first signs of the great Depression. Franco assured an intensely irritated Calvo Sotelo that there was no point in using Spain’s gold and foreign currency reserves to support the value of the peseta and that the money so used would be better spent on industrial investment. The reasoning by which Franco reached the interpretation he put before the Minister revealed a simple cunning: he based his argument on the belief that there need be no link between the exchange rate of a currency and the nation’s gold and foreign reserves provided their value were kept secret.⁶⁹

The economic difficulties discussed at this lunch were not the only problems besetting the Dictatorship. The military was deeply divided and some sections of the Army were turning against the regime. Franco was paradoxically to be the beneficiary of one of the most serious errors made by the Dictator in this regard. Primo de Rivera was anxious to reform the antiquated structures of the Spanish Army and in particular to slim down the inflated officer corps. His ideal was a small professional Army but, as a result of the reversal of his original policy of abandonismo in Morocco, it had grown significantly in size and cost in the mid-1920s. By 1930, the officer corps would be reduced in size by only about 10 per cent and the Army as a whole by more than 25 per cent, at an inordinately high price in terms of internal military discontent. Large sums were spent on efforts at modernization although the final increase in the number of mechanized units was immensely disappointing.⁷⁰

The relative failure of Primo’s technical reforms was overshadowed by the legacy of one bitterly divisive issue. Most publicity was generated, and most damage caused in terms of morale, by the Dictator’s efforts to eradicate the divisions between the artillery and the infantry over promotions. To a large extent, this was the question which had given birth to the Juntas de Defensa in 1917. Divisions between the infantry, and particularly the Africanistas, on the one hand, and the artillery and the engineers on the other arose from the fact that it was much more difficult for an engineer or the commander of an artillery battery to gain promotion by merit than for an infantry officer leading charges against the Moors. To underline their discontent with a promotion system which favoured the colonial infantry, the Artillery corps had sworn in 1901 to accept no promotions which were not granted on grounds of strict seniority and to seek instead other rewards or decorations.

Although on coming to power Primo de Rivera had been thought within the Army to be more sympathetic to the artillery position, he seems to have changed his mind as a result of his contacts with the infantry officer corps in Morocco before and during the Alhucemas operation.⁷¹ By decrees of 21 October 1925 and 30 January 1926, he introduced greater flexibility into the promotion system. This gave him the freedom to promote brave or capable officers but it was also perceived as opening a Pandora’s box of favouritism. There was already tension when, in a typically precipitate manner, on 9 June 1926, the Dictator issued a decree specifically obliging the artillery to accept the principle of promotions by merit. Those who had accepted medals instead of promotions were now deemed retrospectively to have been promoted. Hostility within the mainland officer corps to a whole range of tactless encroachments on military sensibilities by the Dictator was already leading to contacts between some officers and the liberal opposition to the regime. It came to a head in a feeble attempt at a coup known as the Sanjuanada on 24 June 1926.⁷² In August, the imposition of promotions upon the artillery provoked a near mutiny by artillery officers who confined themselves to their barracks. In Pamplona, shots were fired by infantrymen sent to put an end to one such ‘strike’ of artillerymen. The Director of the Artillery Academy of Segovia was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment, for refusing to hand over the Academy.⁷³ Throughout the issue, Franco was careful not to get involved. He, more than anyone in the entire armed forces, had reason to be grateful to the system of promotions by merit.

Primo de Rivera won, but at the cost of dividing the Army and of undermining its loyalty to the King. His policy on promotions was to provide much of the cause for the grievances which lay behind some officers moving in the direction of the Republican movement. Thus, when the time came, some sectors of the Army would be ready to stand aside and permit first Primo’s own demise and then the coming of the Second Republic in April 1931.⁷⁴ Broadly speaking, the Africanistas remained committed to the Dictatorship and thereafter were to be bitterly hostile to the democratic Republic which followed it in 1931.⁷⁵ Indeed, the fault lines of the divisions created in the 1920s would run right through to the Civil War in 1936. Many of those who moved into opposition against Primo would be favoured by the subsequent Republican regime. In contrast, the Africanistas, including Franco, would see their previously privileged position dismantled.

The artillery/infantry, juntero/Africanista, issue had an immediate and direct impact on Franco’s life. In 1926, the Dictator was convinced that part of the promotions problem derived from the fact that there were separate academies for the officers of the four major corps, the infantry in Toledo, the artillery in Segovia, the cavalry in Valladolid and the engineers in Guadalajara. He concluded that Spain needed a single General Military Academy and decided to revive the Academia General Militar which had existed briefly during its so-called ‘first epoch’ between 1882 and 1893.⁷⁶ By this time, and particularly after Alhucemas, Primo had developed a great liking for Franco. He told Calvo Sotelo that Franco was ‘a formidable chap, and he has an enormous future not only because of his purely military abilities but also because of his intellectual ones’.⁷⁷ The Dictator was clearly grooming Franco for an important post. He sent him to the École Militaire de St Cyr, then directed by Philippe Pétain, in order to examine its structure. On 20 February 1927, Alfonso XIII approved a plan for a similar Spanish academy, and on 14 March 1927 Franco was made a member of a commission to prepare the way for it. By Royal Decree of 4 January 1928, he was appointed its first director. He expressed a preference for it to be sited at El Escorial but the Dictator insisted that it be in Zaragoza. Years later, Franco was alleged to have said that, if the Academy had been located at El Escorial instead of 350 kilometres from the capital, the fall of the monarchy in 1931 could have been avoided.⁷⁸

In moving to the Academia General Militar, Franco was leaving behind him the kind of soldiering in which he made his reputation. Never again would he lead units of assault troops in the field. It was a major change, which taken with his marriage in 1923 and the birth of his daughter in 1926, would affect him profoundly. Until 1926, Franco was an heroic field soldier, an outstanding column commander, fearless if not reckless. Henceforth, as befitted his changing sense of his public persona, he would take ever fewer risks. In Morocco, he had been a ruthless disciplinarian, an abstemious and isolated individual with few friends.⁷⁹ After his return to the Peninsula, he seems to have relaxed slightly, although he was always to remain obsessed with the primacy of unquestioning obedience and discipline. He became readier to turn a blind eye to laziness or incompetence in his subordinates, getting the best out of willing collaborators by manipulation and rewards. He became a relatively convivial frequenter of clubs and cafés where he would take an aperitif and give rein to his inclination to chat, recounting anecdotes and reminiscences among a group of military friends.⁸⁰

Until the late 1920s, he showed few signs of being the archetypal gallego, slow, cunning and opaque, of his later years. He was a man of action, obsessed with his military career and little else. His early military writings are relatively straightforward and decently written, with some sensitivity to people and places. He was, of course, reserved, and predisposed by his military experience, and particularly by Africa, to certain political ideas, hostile to the Left and to regional autonomy movements. If he did read about politics, economics and recent history, it was probably more to confirm his prejudices than in search of enlightenment. From this time, a convoluted style and a pomposity of tone begins to be discernible in his speeches. In part, family responsibilities account for a greater caution but the more potent motive for his self-regard was a perception of his potential political importance. He was the object of public adulation in certain circles and had had plenty of indications that he was the general with the most brilliant prospects.⁸¹ He was showered with promotions, honours and plum postings. The talk of his being the youngest general in Europe cannot have failed to have affected him, as must the idea of providence watching over him, an idea particularly dear to his wife. To her influence in this respect must be added that of his near inseparable cousin, Pacón, now a major, who had become his ADC in the late summer of 1926.⁸²

At the end of May 1929 there appeared in the magazine Estampa, in the section called ‘The woman in the home of famous men’, a rare interview with Carmen Polo and her husband. Conducted by Luis Franco de Espés, the Barón de Mora, a fervent admirer of Franco, the interview was as much concerned with ‘the famous man’ as with ‘the woman in the home’. Asked if he was satisfied to be what he was, Franco replied sententiously ‘I am satisfied to have served my fatherland to the full’. The Barón asked him what he would have liked to be if not a soldier to which he replied ‘architect or naval officer. However, aged fourteen I entered the Infantry Academy in Toledo against the will of my father.’ This was the first time that Franco had indicated any paternal opposition to his joining the military academy. There is no reason why his father should have opposed the move and, if he had done, there can be little doubt that he would have imposed his will. Apparently, Franco was trying to put distance between his beloved military career and his hated father.

‘All this’, he said, ‘is only with regard to my profession because my real inclination has always been towards painting’. On lamenting that he had no time to practice any particular genre, Carmen interrupted to point out that he painted rag dolls for their daughter, ‘Nenuca’. Then, the interview turned to the ‘the beautiful companion of the general, hiding the supreme delicacy of her figure behind a subtle dress of black crêpe’. Blushing, she recounted how she and her husband had fallen in love at a romería (country fair) and how he had pursued her doggedly thereafter. Playing the role of the faithful hand-maiden to the great man, she revealed her husband’s major defects to be that ‘he likes Africa too much and he studies books which I don’t understand’. Turning back to Franco, the Barón de Mora asked him about the three greatest moments of his life to which he responded with ‘the day that the Spanish Army landed at Alhucemas, the moment of reading that Ramón had reached Pernambuco and the day we got married’. The fact that the birth of his daughter Carmen did not figure in the list suggests that he was more anxious to project an image of patriotism untrammelled by ‘unmanly’ emotions. He was then asked about his greatest ambition which he revealed as being ‘that Spain should become as great again as she was once before.’ Asked if he was political, Franco replied firmly ‘I am a soldier’ and declared that his most fervent desire was ‘to pass unnoticed. I am very grateful for certain demonstrations of popularity but you can imagine how annoying it is to feel that you’re often being looked at and talked about’. Carmen listed her greatest love as music and her greatest dislike as ‘the Moors’. She had few happy memories of her time as an Army wife in Morocco spent consoling widows.⁸³

Franco had arrived in Zaragoza on 1 December 1927 to supervise the building and installation of the new institution. The first entrance examinations were held in June 1928. On 5 October of that year, with the new buildings still unfinished, the Academy opened for its first intake in a nearby barracks. The new Director’s speech on opening the Academy reflected the philosophy that he had learned from his mother. Its theme was ‘he who suffers overcomes’.⁸⁴ He also instructed the cadets to follow the ‘ten commandments’ or ‘decálogo’ which he had compiled on the basis of a similar ‘decálogo’ elaborated for the Legion by Millán Astray. Expressed in the most sententious terms, the commandments were: 1) Make great love for the Fatherland and fidelity to the King manifest in every act of your life; 2) Let a great military spirit be reflected in your vocation and your discipline; 3) Link to your pure chivalry a constant jealous concern for your reputation; 4) Be faithful in the fulfilment of your duties, being scrupulous in everything that you do; 5) Never grumble, nor tolerate others doing so; 6) Make yourself loved by those of lower rank and highly regarded by your superiors; 7) Volunteer for every sacrifice at times of greatest risk and difficulty; 8) Feel a noble comradeship, sacrificing yourself for your comrades and taking delight in their successes, prizes and progress; 9) Love responsibility and be decisive; 10) Be brave and self-denying.⁸⁵

The generation educated under Franco’s close supervision at the Academia General Militar de Zaragoza, in its so-called second epoch between 1928 and 1931, was to receive significantly more practical training than had hitherto been the practice in the Toledo infantry academy. Franco insisted that no textbooks be used and that all classes be based on the practical experiences of the instructors.⁸⁶ Skill in the use and care of weapons was insisted upon. The horsemanship of the graduates was of a high standard. Franco himself would direct from horseback the toughest manoeuvres. However, the central stress, derived from the decálogo, was on ‘moral’ values: patriotism, loyalty to the King, military discipline, sacrifice, bravery.⁸⁷ The idea that ‘moral’ values could triumph over superior numbers or technology was one of the constant refrains of Franco’s military thought. Reflecting the Director’s own experiences in the primitive Moroccan war, the level of tactical and technological education at Zaragoza was not highly advanced and considerable effort went into denouncing democratic politics.

During the Civil War, officers who had trained at the Academy under Franco remembered him as a martinet who had laid traps for unwary cadets. In the streets of Zaragoza, he would pretend to be looking in shop windows to catch those who tried to get past without saluting their Director. As they went on, they would be called back by Franco’s soft, high, feared, voice. Remembering the nightly activities of his own contemporaries at Toledo, he insisted that all cadets carry at least one condom while walking in the city. Occasionally, he would stop them in the street and demand to see their protective equipment. There were strict penalties for those unable to produce it.⁸⁸ In his farewell speech to the Academy in 1931, he listed among the great patriotic achievements of his time in the post the elimination of venereal disease among the cadets through ‘vigilance and prophylaxis’.⁸⁹ His pride in that achievement was reflected when, in 1936, he boasted to his English teacher that he had ‘put down vice ruthlessly’ among the cadets at Zaragoza.^*90

Franco’s period at the Academy was viewed in retrospect as a triumph by Africanistas and other right-wing Army officers and a disaster by liberal and left-wing officers. His brother Ramón wrote to him to complain of the ‘troglodytic education’ imparted there. For the distinguished Africanista, General Emilio Mola, in contrast, it was the peak of excellence.⁹¹ The Academy’s regulations demanded that the teaching staff be chosen on the basis of méritos de guerra, irrespective of the subject being taught. Accordingly, the teaching staff was dominated by Africanista friends of Franco, most of whom had been brutalized by their experiences in a pitiless colonial war and were noted more for their ideological rigidity than for their intellectual attainments. Of 79 teachers, 34 were infantrymen and 11 from the Legion. The assistant director of the Academy was Colonel Miguel Campins, a good friend and comrade in arms from Africa who had been with him at the battle of Alhucemas. A highly competent professional, Campins elaborated the training programme at the Academy.⁹² The other senior members of staff included Emilio Esteban-Infantes, later to be involved in the attempted Sanjurjo coup of 1932; Bartolomé Barba-Hernández, who was to be, on the eve of the Civil War, leader of the conspiratorial organization Unión Militar Española; and Franco’s lifelong close friend Camilo Alonso Vega, later to be a dour Minister of the Interior. Virtually without exception, the Academy’s teachers were to play prominent roles in the military uprising of 1936. With such men on the staff, the Academy concentrated on inculcating the ruthless arrogance of the Foreign Legion, the idea that the Army was the supreme arbiter of the nation’s political destiny and a sense of discipline and blind obedience. A high proportion of the officers who passed through the Academy were later to be involved in the Falange. An even higher proportion fought on the Nationalist side during the Civil War.⁹³

During his period at the head of the Military Academy, Franco developed the dejar hacer (turning a blind eye) style of delegation which was to be taken to extremes when he was Head of State. Those of the teaching staff who did not pull their weight were not punished but nor were they favoured. Those who had an enthusiasm or a speciality were allowed full initiative in that area – the instructor who liked football delegated to coach the team, the one who liked gardening given control of the Academy gardens, the amateur photographer put in charge of the dark room. Of the lazy or incompetent, Franco would simply comment ‘A Fulano, no le veo la gracia’ (I don’t see what So-and-So has going for him) but would never reprimand those who did not pull their weight (arrimar el hombro – a favourite phrase of Franco’s).

Franco’s arrival in Zaragoza provoked considerable popular attention. The Academy, the Director and his senior staff became a major focus of local social life and Franco indulged his penchant for socializing and for interminable late-night after-dinner tertulias with military friends and minor aristocrats. Encouraged by Doña Carmen, he began to mix with the dominant families of the local establishment. It perhaps reflected Franco’s own small-town and lower middle class origins that he always preferred provincial social life, in Oviedo, Ceuta or Zaragoza, to that of Madrid.⁹⁴ Even so, contemporary photographs of Franco in evening dress or lounge suit show him significantly less at ease than when in uniform. He was happier hunting. Far from his African exertions, he turned increasingly to hunting for exercise, pleasure and, it may be supposed, as an outlet for his aggression.

It was during his period in Zaragoza that Franco began to intensify his anti-Communist and authoritarian ideas. Shortly before leaving Madrid for Zaragoza, he had been given, along with several other young officers, a subscription to a journal of anti-Comintern affairs from Geneva, the Bulletin de L’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale. The Entente, founded by the Swiss rightist Théodore Aubert and the White Russian emigré Georges Lodygensky, was vehemently anti-Bolshevik and praised the achievements of fascism and military dictatorships as bulwarks against Communism. An emissary from the Entente, Colonel Odier, visited Madrid and arranged with General Primo de Rivera for several subscriptions to be purchased by the Ministry of War and to be distributed to a few key officers.⁹⁵ It clinched what was to be a lifelong obsession with anti-Communism. It also played its part in the transition of Franco from the adventurous soldier of the 1920s to the suspicious and conservative general of the 1930s. Receiving the bulletin uninterruptedly until 1936, he came to see the Communist threat everywhere and to believe that the entire Spanish Left was wittingly or unwittingly working in the interests of the Comintern. In 1965, Franco revealed to both Brian Crozier and George Hills the influence that the Entente had had over him. He told Hills that the Entente had alerted him to the need to be ready for the flank attack from the invisible (Communist) enemy. Indeed, he left Crozier with the impression that his acquaintance with its work was an event in his life equal in importance in its impact on him to the birth of Nenuca.⁹⁶

Another influence in Franco’s life was initiated as a result of an invitation in the spring of 1929 to the German Army’s General Infantry Academy in Dresden. He was thrilled by the organization and discipline of the German Army. On his return, he made it clear to his cousin Pacón that he had been especially impressed by the Academy’s cult of reverence for the regiments which had achieved the great German military triumphs of the recent past. He was particularly sympathetic to German efforts to break free of the shackles of the Versailles Treaty.⁹⁷ It was the beginning of a love affair which would intensify during the Civil War, reach its peak in 1940, and not begin to die until 1945.

The Dictatorship fell on 30 January 1930. The bluff Primo de Rivera had ruled by a form of personal improvisation which had ensured that he would bear the blame for the regime’s failures. By 1930, there was barely a section of Spanish society which he had not estranged. He had offended Catalan industrialists both by his anti-Catalanism and because of the rise in raw material prices in the wake of the collapse in value of the peseta. He had outraged landowners by trying to introduce paternalist labour legislation for land-workers. The Socialist Unión General Trabajadores had supported him as long as public works projects had kept up levels of employment. With the coming of the slump, many Socialists had allied with the banned anarcho-syndicalist union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, in opposition. Most damagingly, the divisions in the Army provoked by Primo’s promotions policy were instrumental in the Captains-General and the King withdrawing support for the regime. Unlike most twentieth century dictators, Primo withdrew quietly once he had recognised that his support had disappeared. He went into exile in Paris where he died on 16 March 1930. A return to the pre-1923 constitutional system was impossible, not least because the King could no longer count on the loyalty of the old monarchist political élite which he had so irresponsibly abandoned in favour of Primo. Alfonso XIII was forced to seek another general. His choice of General Dámaso Berenguer, irrevocably associated with the disaster of Annual, infuriated the Left. For nearly a year, Berenguer’s mild dictatorship, the so-called Dictablanda, would flounder along in search of formula for a return to the constitutional monarchy. A combination of working class agitation fuelled by the economic depression, military sedition provoked by Primo’s policies, and republican conspiracy ensured Berenguer’s eventual failure.

The fall of the Dictator disappointed Franco but little more: he was oblivious to the implicit threat to the monarchy itself. Among Franco’s staff, the artillerymen and engineers were understandably pleased by Primo’s demise. However, Franco ensured that the demise of Primo would provoke no public clashes in the Academy between junteros and Africanistas by imposing an iron ban on speaking about politics.⁹⁸ By withdrawing his confidence from Primo, the King also lost the loyalty of General Sanjurjo, now Director-General of the Civil Guard. Franco did not blame the King for the fall of the Dictatorship. In any case, he was the object of special attention, not to say flattery, from Alfonso XIII. On 4 June 1929, in a solemn ceremony in the Madrid Retiro, the King had personally presented him with the Medalla Militar which he had won in 1925.⁹⁹ On 5 June 1930, Alfonso XIII visited the Academy and three days later Franco took the entire body of cadets to the capital to take part in the swearing of the flag by the Madrid garrison. Led by Franco on a prancing horse, they headed the parade, to the wild applause of those present. On the following day, the cadets took the guard at the Royal Palace and Franco appeared on the balcony with the King. The crowd on that day included several hundred members of the Juventud Monárquica (monarchist youth), who would soon form the élite of the conservative extreme right during the Republic.¹⁰⁰

Accordingly, it was a cause of the greatest embarrassment to Franco that his brother Ramón had moved into the orbit of the republican opposition to the regime. From the later part of 1929, their relations became very strained. Franco had been annoyed and embarrassed in July 1924 when Ramón had married Carmen Díaz Guisasola without seeking the King’s permission.¹⁰¹ The breach between his brother and the King had been forgotten in the wake of his Atlantic crossing in 1926. However, Ramón’s ever more frantic efforts to repeat that success had ended in disgrace. The reasons for his fall from grace were complex. In the summer of 1929, to boost the domestic aircraft industry, the Spanish government agreed to sponsor an attempt by Ramón to cross the North Atlantic in a Dornier Super Wal flying boat built under licence in Spain. Because of doubts about the reliability of the Spanish aeroplane, Ramón used a German-built one bought in Italy, fraudulently switching the registration markings. The flight was a disaster: the aircraft was blown off course near the Azores, and it and the crew were lost for days and only found at the end of June after a massive and immensely costly search involving the Spanish, British and Italian navies.¹⁰² When he was found, there was widespread rejoicing and a tearful General Franco was publicly embraced by an equally lacrimose General Primo de Rivera.¹⁰³ Franco led a massive demonstration to the British Embassy in Madrid to express thanks for the role of the Royal Navy.¹⁰⁴ It then emerged that the planes had been switched and rumours began to circulate that Ramón had been promised a fabulous sum of money if he broke the world seaplane distance record flying a German aircraft. Colonel Alfredo Kindelán, the head of Military Aviation, was furious and had Ramón expelled from the Air Force on 31 July 1929. Thereafter, he moved rapidly to the left, became a freemason and got involved in anarcho-syndicalist conspiracies aimed at bringing down the monarchy.¹⁰⁵

After this disgrace, Ramón’s relations with his brother were virtually non-existent and were reduced to letters; patronizing, sententious, though ultimately kindly ones from Franco, mischievously disrespectful ones from Ramón. On 8 April 1930, Franco wrote a long letter to Ramón revealing of his loyalty both to his family and to the established order. In an effort to head off his brother’s demise, Franco warned him that his activities within the Army, inciting garrisons and officers to rebel, were known to the authorities. Regarding the Berenguer regime as entirely legal, Franco was worried that his brother was risking the loss of his prestige and his good name. He appealed to him to think of ‘the great sorrow that such things cause Mamá, a sorrow which the rest of us share’ and ended fondly, ‘Your brother loves and embraces you, Paco’.¹⁰⁶

Its tone of tolerant restraint is remarkable given that, in Francisco’s eyes, Ramón’s behaviour would not only bring dishonour on the family but also possibly impede his own chances of advancement. There is also a typical readiness to attribute the lowest motives to Ramón’s revolutionary friends while assuming that Ramón himself is free of such baseness. The letter also revealed a political naïvety in Franco’s suggestion that the dictatorship of General Berenguer was more legal than that of Primo de Rivera. Ramón was not slow to comment on that in his reply on 12 April. Ramón was shocked by what he called his brother’s ‘healthy advice’ and ‘vain bourgeois counsels’ and invited him to step down from his ‘little general’s throne’. He also took the opportunity to comment that the education being given the cadets in Zaragoza would ensure that they would be bad citizens.¹⁰⁷

Engrossed in his work at the Zaragoza military academy, Franco paid little attention to the rising tide of political agitation in 1930 except in so far as it involved his brother. The anti-monarchical movement was growing with labour unrest intensifying by the day. A broad front of Socialists, middle class Republicans, Basque and Catalan regionalists and renegade monarchists who, repelled by the mistakes of the King, had become conservative republicans, joined together in mid-August 1930. United by the so-called Pact of San Sebastián, they established a provisional government-in-waiting which began to plot the downfall of the monarchy.¹⁰⁸ Ramón Franco was an important element in the republican conspiracies. In late 1930, watched by agents of the Dirección General de Seguridad, he was travelling around Spain liaising with other conspirators, trying to buy arms and organizing the making of bombs.¹⁰⁹ General Emilio Mola, now Director-General de Seguridad, had taken the decision to arrest him but, as an admirer of his heroic exploits and as a friend of Franco, he decided to give Ramón a last chance to avoid the consequences of his activities. Mola asked Franco to try to persuade his brother to desist. Although he agreed to try, Franco showed no optimism that he might succeed but he was immensely faithful to the family and still felt a protective loyalty towards his madcap brother. He visited Madrid and they dined together on 10 October but Ramón remained committed to the planned republican rising. Mola then had Ramón brought in for questioning on the evening of 11 October and detained in military prison on the following morning. Mola again called Franco in and informed him of the charges against his brother which included bomb-making, gun-smuggling and involvement in the attempted murder of a monarchist aviator, the Duque de Esmera. Franco and Mola hoped to use these charges to frighten Ramón into abandoning his revolutionary activities: Franco visited his brother in his cell and recited them to him. This merely provoked him into escaping from prison on 25 November. Thereafter, he took part, with General Queipo de Llano, in the revolutionary movement of mid-December 1930. Both Ramón’s escape and his participation in the events of December would cause Franco intense chagrin both as an officer and as a monarchist.¹¹⁰

Having failed in his efforts to make his brother see sense, Francisco returned hastily to Zaragoza where he had to receive the visit of a French delegation led by André Maginot. On 19 October, Maginot presented Franco with the Légion d’Honneur for his part in the Alhucemas landing. On his return to France, he declared that the Zaragoza Academy was the most modern of its kind in the world.¹¹¹ Maginot’s ideas of modernity had yet to be put to the test by the armies of the Third Reich.

In November, Franco was approached by an emissary from the most prominent figure of the San Sebastián coalition, the grand old man of Spanish republicanism, the wily and cynical Alejandro Lerroux. He was invited to join in the Republican conspiracies along with so many other officers including his brother. According to Lerroux, Franco refused point blank but then insinuated, at a later meeting, that he would rebel against the constituted power but only if the Patria were in danger of being overwhelmed by anarchy.¹¹² Despite warnings from his cousin Pacón and the attitude of his brother, Franco was so far distanced from day-to-day politics that he was convinced that the monarchy was in no danger.¹¹³

The revolutionary plot in which Ramón was implicated aimed to bring the San Sebastián provisional government to power. One of its ramifications was to be a rebellion by the garrison of the tiny Pyrenean mountain town of Jaca in the province of Huesca. Anticipating what was supposed to be a nationally co-ordinated action, the Jaca rebellion was precipitated on 12 December. Its leaders, Captains Fermín Galán, Angel García Hernández and Salvador Sediles, hoped to march south from Jaca and spark off a pro-Republican movement in the garrisons of Huesca, Zaragoza and Lérida.¹¹⁴ Along the road to Huesca, Galán’s column was challenged by a small group of soldiers led by the military governor of Huesca, General Manuel Lasheras, who was wounded in the clash. When the news of the actions of the Jaca rebels reached Madrid in the early hours of the morning of 13 December, the government declared martial law in the entire Aragonese military region. A sporadic general strike broke out in Zaragoza. Franco put the Academy in a state of readiness and armed the cadets. The Captain-General of the Aragonese military region, General Fernández de Heredia, put together a large column and sent them to Huesca, half way between Zaragoza and Jaca. In case the rebels should have left Huesca already and headed south, he ordered Franco to use his cadets to hold the Huesca-Zaragoza road. In the event, it was not necessary. Galán’s cold, wet and hungry column was stopped at Cillas, three kilometres from Huesca, and the Jaca revolt was put down.¹¹⁵

Galán and García Hernández were seen as being the two ringleaders and were shot after summary courts martial on 14 December.¹¹⁶ As far as Franco was concerned, their punishment was entirely appropriate since they were mutineers. He was perhaps fortunate that he did not have to make similar considerations about his brother, who was heavily involved in the central action of the plot in the capital. On 15 December, Ramón had flown over the royal Palacio de Oriente in Madrid, planning to bomb it but, in the event, seeing civilians strolling in the gardens, had merely dropped leaflets calling for a general strike. He had then fled to Portugal and then on to Paris.¹¹⁷ Franco did not vacillate in his condemnation of the revolutionary events of mid-December, but his sense of family solidarity prevented him applying the same standards to his brother. Hours after Ramón’s flight over the Palacio Real, another aircraft flew over Madrid and dropped leaflets directed at the city’s inhabitants denouncing Ramón as a ‘bastard apparently drunk on your blood’. Franco was so incensed on behalf of his mother (if not his brother) that he left Zaragoza for Madrid where he demanded explanations from Berenguer, the Head of the Government, General Federico Berenguer, the Captain-General of Madrid and Mola, the Director-General of Security, all of whom assured him that the flight and the pamphlets had no official status.¹¹⁸

On 21 December, Franco sent another letter to Ramón. Not surprisingly, in the light of the scandal that Ramón’s activities had occasioned, the distress of their mother and the fact that he was in danger of being shot, the letter is deeply sorrowful. Despite the gulf between their political views, Francisco showed compassionate concern for ‘My beloved and unfortunate brother’ and enclosed two thousand pesetas. He ended sanctimoniously ‘May you break away from the vice-ridden ambience in which you have lived for the last two years, in which the hatred and the passion of the people who surround you deceive you in your chimeras. May your forced exile from our Patria calm your spirit and lift you above all passions and egoisms. May you rebuild your life far from these sterile struggles which fill Spain with misfortunes. And may you find well-being and peace in your path. These are the wishes of your brother who embraces you.’ The money which accompanied the letter was a substantial sum at the time. Grateful as Ramón was for his brother’s help, he was repelled by his reactionary notions and surprised by his lack of awareness of the tide of popular feeling.¹¹⁹

If Franco had any doubts about the legitimacy of the executions of Galán and García Hernández, they would have been resolved on 26 December when General Lasheras died from an infection and uraemia which may have been related to the wound that he had received when trying to stop Galán. Franco attended his funeral.¹²⁰ The public outcry about the execution of Galán and García Hernández damaged the monarchy in a way that the Jaca revolt itself had failed to do. As the two executed rebels were being turned into martyrs, to the outrage of many senior military figures including Franco, the Liberals in the government withdrew their support and General Berenguer was obliged to resign on 14 February.¹²¹ After an abortive attempt by the Conservative politician José Sánchez Guerra to form a government with the support of the imprisoned Republican leaders, Berenguer was finally replaced as prime minister on 17 February by Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar. He did, however, continue in the cabinet as Minister for the Army.¹²²

Since the Jaca rebellion of Galán and García Hernández had taken place within the military region of Aragón, Franco was appointed a member of the tribunal which was to court martial Captain Salvador Sediles and other officers and men who had been involved. It took place between 13 and 16 March when the campaign for the municipal elections of 12 April had already begun. There was no more potent subject during that campaign than that of the executions of Galán and García Hernández. Admiral Aznar declared in advance of the verdicts in the supplementary court martial that he was of a mind to ask the King for clemency whatever the sentences. Franco, however, declared: ‘it is necessary that military crimes committed by soldiers be judged by soldiers who are accustomed to command’, within which category he clearly included a readiness to punish indiscipline by death. In the event, there was one more death sentence, for Captain Sediles, five life sentences and other lesser sentences, all of which were commuted.¹²³

In the municipal elections of 12 April 1931, Franco voted for the monarchist candidacy in Zaragoza.¹²⁴ The results would go against Alfonso XIII, provoke his withdrawal from Spain and open the way to the establishment of the Second Republic. For Franco, the deeply conservative monarchist and royal favourite, it would be a severe shock. To the ambitious young general, it would seem to be the end of a meteoric rise. That fact, taken with Franco’s prominence in the military uprising of 1936, has led the Caudillo’s hagiographers to portray him as working towards that glorious denouement from the very first. This was far from being the case. Franco had still to undergo many experiences before he became an implacable enemy of the Republic.

Ironically, in early 1931, there was an event in Franco’s personal life which was to reveal its full significance only in 1936. In 1929, the Director of the Military Academy had met a brilliant lawyer, Ramón Serrano Suñer, who was working in Zaragoza as a member of the élite legal corps of Abogados del Estado (State lawyers) and they had become friends. Serrano Suñer often lunched or dined with the Franco family.¹²⁵ As a result, Serrano Suñer came to know Doña Carmen’s beautiful younger sister, Zita. In February 1931, Serrano Suñer married her, then aged nineteen, in Oviedo. The groom’s witness was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the Dictator and future founder of the Falange, the bride’s Francisco Franco.¹²⁶ The marriage clinched the close relationship between Serrano Suñer and Franco out of which would be forged the Caudillo’s National-Syndicalist State. The wedding ceremony also provided the occasion for a historic first meeting for the eventual dictator and fascist leader whose names were to be tied together for forty years after 1936. At the time, none of the three could have had any idea of the imminent political cataclysm which would link their fates.

^* Ferragut had written the fictionalised Memorias de un legionario and had been rumoured to have ghost-written Franco’s Diario de una bandera, although the article made a great point of the interview being their first meeting.

^* In later life, particularly after Franco gained power, the relationship seemed more formal than spontaneously affectionate. Pacón commented that Franco seemed morose and inhibited in the company of Doña Carmen.

^* At the time, each military region of Spain had two divisions, each composed of two brigades. However, given the shortage of recruits, in practice only the first brigade of each Captaincy General was at operational strength. (Suárez Fernández, Franco, I, pp. 187, 191.)

^* It would be an abiding obsession. On a visit to the Zaragoza Military Academy in 1942, he told one of the staff that an additional bed should be put in rooms that had two ‘to avoid marriages’ – Baón, La cara humana, p. 117.