Authors: Preston Paul
The day before, the mayor of Badajoz, Madroñero, and the Socialist deputy Nicolás de Pablo, were handed over to the rebels. On Tuesday, 40 republican refugees were escorted to the Spanish frontier. Thirty-two were shot the next morning. Four hundred men, women and children were taken by cavalry escorts through the frontier post of Caia to the Spanish lines. Of these, close to 300 were executed.
Getting back in the car, we drove to Campo Maior, which is only seven kilometres (about four miles) from Badajoz on the Portuguese side. A talkative frontier policeman said: ‘Of course, we are handing them back. They are dangerous for us. We can’t have Reds in Portugal at such a moment.’
‘What about the right of asylum?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Badajoz asks extradition.’
‘There is no such thing as extradition for a political offense.’
‘It’s being done all up and down the frontier on orders of Lisbon,’ he said belligerently.
We cleared out. We drove back to Elvas. I met friends who are as much Portuguese and vice versa.
‘Do you want to go to Badajoz?’ they asked.
‘No,’ I said, ‘because the Portuguese say their frontier is closed and I would be hung up.’
I had another reason. The rebels do not like newspapermen who see both sides. But they offered to take me through and back again without complications. So we started. Suddenly we drove out of the lane on to a bridge that leads across the Guadiana River into the town where Wellington’s troops ran amok in the Peninsular wars, where now is just another tragedy.
Now we were in Spain. My friends were known. The extra person in the car (myself) passed unnoticed. We were not stopped.
We drove straight to the Plaza. Here are my notes: Cathedral is intact. No it isn’t. Driving around the side I see half a great square tower shot away.
‘The Reds had machine-guns there and our artillery was obliged to fire,’ my friends said.
Here yesterday there was a ceremonial, symbolical shooting. Seven leading Republicans of the Popular Front (Loyalists), shot with a band and everything before three thousand people. To prove that Rebel generals didn’t shoot only workers and peasants. There is no favouritism to be shown between the Popular Fronters.
We stopped at the corner of the narrow Calle de San Juan, too narrow for traffic. Through here fled the loyalist militiamen to take refuge in a Moorish fortress on a hill when the descendants of those who built it broke through the Trinidad gate. They were caught by Legionnaires coming up from the gate by the river and shot in batches on the street corners. Every other shop seemed to have been wrecked. The conquerors looted as they went. All this week in Badajoz, Portuguese have been buying watches and jewelry for practically nothing. Most shops belong to the Rightists. It is the war tax they pay for salvation, a Rebel officer told me grimly. The massive outlines of the Alcázar fortress showed at the end of the Calle de San Juan. There the town’s defenders, who sought refuge in the tower of ‘Espantaperros’ were smoked out and shot down.
We passed a big dry goods shop that seems to have been through an earthquake. ‘La Campana,’ my friends said. ‘It belonged to Don Mariano, a leading Azañista (follower of Manuel Azaña, President of Spain). It was sacked yesterday after Mariano was shot.’
We drove by the office of the Agrarian Reform, where in June I saw the Chief Agronomist, Jorge Montojo, distributing land, incurring naturally the hatred of the landowners and, because he was a technician following strictly bourgeois canons of law, the enmity of the Socialists, too. He had taken arms in defense of the Republic, and so –
Suddenly we saw two Phalanxists halt a strapping fellow in a workman’s blouse and hold him while a third pulled back his shirt, baring his right shoulder. The black and blue marks of a
rifle butt could be seen. Even after a week they showed. The report was unfavourable. To the bull ring with him.
We drove out along the walls to the ring in question. Its sandstone walls looked over the fertile valley of Guadiana. It is a fine ring of white plaster and red brick. I saw Juan Belmonte (bullfight idol) here once on the eve of the fight, on a night like this, when he came down to watch the bulls brought in. This night the fodder for tomorrow’s show was being brought in, too. Files of men, arms in the air.
They were young, mostly peasants in blue blouses, mechanics in jumpers. ‘The Reds.’ They are still being rounded up. At four o’clock in the morning they are turned out into the ring through the gate by which the initial parade of the bullfight enters. There machine guns awaited them.
After the first night the blood was supposed to be palm deep on the far side of the lane. I don’t doubt it. Eighteen hundred men – there were women, too – were mowed down there in some twelve hours. There is more blood than you would think in eighteen hundred bodies.
In a bullfight when the beast or some unlucky horse bleeds copiously, ‘wise monkeys’ come along and scatter fresh sand. Yet on hot afternoons you smell blood. It is all very invigorating. We were stopped at the main gate of the plaza, my friends talking to Phalanxists. It was a hot night. There was a smell. I can’t describe and won’t describe it. The ‘wise monkeys’ will have a lot of work to do to make this ring presentable for a ceremonial slaughter bullfight. As for me, no more bullfights – ever.
We came to the Trinidad gate through these once invulnerable fortifications. The moon shone through. A week ago a battalion of 280 legionnaires stormed in. Twenty-two live to tell the tale of how they strode over their dead, and, with hand grenades and knives, silenced those two murderous machine guns. Where were the government planes? That is one of the mysteries. It makes one quake for Madrid.
We drove back to town past the republic’s fine new school and sanitary institute. The men who built these are dead, shot as ‘Reds’ because they sought to defend them.
We passed a corner.
‘Until yesterday there was a pool blackened with blood here,’ said my friends. ‘All the loyal military were shot here and their bodies left for days as an example.’
They were told to come out, so they rushed out of the house to greet the conquerors and were shot down and their houses looted. The Moors played no favorites.
Back at the Plaza. During the executions here Mario Pires went off his head. He had tried to save a pretty fifteen year old girl caught with a rifle in her hands. The Moor was adamant. Mario saw her shot. Now he is under medical care at Lisbon.
I know there are horrors on the other side aplenty. Almendra Lejo, Rightist, was crucified, drenched with gasoline, and burned alive. I know people who saw charred bodies. I know that. I know hundreds and even thousands of innocent persons died at the hands of revengeful masses. But I know who it was who rose to ‘save Spain’ and so aroused the masses to a defense that is as savage as it is valiant.
Anyway, I am reporting Badajoz. Here a dozen or more rightists were executed every day during the siege. But – back in Elvas in the casino I asked diplomatically: ‘When the Reds burned the jail, how many died?’
‘But they didn’t burn the jail.’ I had read in the Lisbon and Seville papers that they had.
‘No, the brothers Plá prevented it.’
I knew Luis and Carlos Plá, rich young men of good family, who had the best garage in southwestern Spain. They were Socialists because they said the Socialist Party was the only instrument which could break the power of Spain’s feudal masters.
‘They harangued the crowd that wanted to burn the three hundred Rightists in the jail just before the Moors entered, saying they were going to die in defence of our Republic, but they were not assassins. They themselves opened the doors to let these people escape.’
‘What happened to the Plás?’
‘Shot.’
‘Why?’
No answer.
There is no answer. All these people could have been allowed to escape to Portugal three miles away, but they weren’t.
I heard Gen. Queipo de Llano announcing on the radio that Barcarrota had been taken and that ‘rigorous justice’ was dispensed with the Reds there. I know Barcarrota. I asked the peasants there in June if, now that they were given land, they would not be capitalist.
‘No,’ indignantly.
‘Why?’
‘Because we only get enough for our own use, not enough to be able to exploit others.’
‘But it’s yours.’
‘Of course.’
‘What do you want from the republic now?’
‘Money for seed. And schools.’
I thought then, ‘God help anybody who tries to prevent this.’
I was wrong. Or was I? At the casino here, which is frequented mostly by landowners and rich merchants, I ventured to inquire what the situation was before the rebellion.
‘Terrible. The peasants were getting 12 pesetas for a 7 hour day, and nobody could pay it.’
That is true. It was more than the land could stand. But they had been getting from 2 to 3 pesetas from sunup to sundown before. Twenty Spaniards with red and yellow ribbons in their buttonholes sat around the casino and from the fact that they were here I assumed that they did not feel Franco had yet made Spain quite safe.
On the moon-drenched streets there was a smell of jasmine, but I had another smell in my nostrils. Sweet, too horribly sweet.
On the foothill in the white Plaza by a fountain, a youth leaning against the wall with his feet crossed was playing his guitar and a soft tenor sang a melting Portuguese love song.
At Badajoz in June boys still sang beneath balconies. It will be a long time before they do again.
Suddenly through the square shot a car with a red and yellow flag. We halted. Our drummers came to meet us.
‘They are searching the hotel.’
‘For whom?’
‘Don’t know.’
We shall go away, as soon as it is light. People who ask questions are not popular near this frontier, if it can be called a frontier.
25
Jay might have hoped to gain a Pulitzer for such an important article but his boss Colonel McCormick, the owner of the
Chicago Daily Tribune,
refused to submit it. In fact, this and other articles convinced the Colonel that Jay was too left-wing and in October 1936, he would dismiss him along with other liberal members of the paper’s foreign staff.
26
The article had outraged the American Catholic hierarchy, which was trying to present Franco and the rebels as saintly crusaders. Accordingly, Jay was attacked on the grounds that he was not actually present during the massacre. What is clear from a close reading of the article is that Jay was driven into and around Badajoz, at very considerable risk, by his Portuguese friends. He appears to have remained more or less hidden in the car for most of the time, listening to the conversations of his friends with their local acquaintances. The chronicle was assembled from what he read in the Portuguese press, from what he saw and heard while in Badajoz and from what both his Portuguese friends and Spanish refugees told him in Elvas, between his arrival on 23 August and beginning to write the article in the early hours of the morning of the 25th.
A man who was to make a business out of impugning Jay’s credibility, Father Joseph F. Thorning, of Mount St Mary’s College, claimed that the massacre was no more than a ‘stupid story’. In a pamphlet, he wrote: ‘The story of Mr Jay Allen may be disregarded inasmuch as he himself acknowledges that he arrived eight days later.’ Thorning, on the other hand, had no difficulty in believing the statement, ‘I went thoroughly into that question and satisfied myself that no Red who surrendered at Badajos
[sic]
was shot’, from Francis McCullagh, who was in the town ten weeks after the bodies had been removed.
27
Jay’s
account gives plenty of details that he did know about, what he saw in Portugal with the terrified refugees, the bodies in the cemetery, interviews with Francoists. What he had to say is, in any case, sustained by the other great eye-witnesses, Mario Neves, who wrote on 15 August of the scenes of desolation and dread that he had witnessed, and Mario Pires, who was so traumatized by what he saw that he had to be admitted to the San José mental clinic in Lisbon. Jay’s account is also substantiated by subsequent scholarship.
28
Herbert Southworth commented on errors in the printed despatch on the Badajoz massacre:
It was originally sent from a cable office in Tangier. At one place it reads, as published: ‘I know there are horrors on the other side aplenty. Almendra Lejo, rightist, was crucified, drenched with gasoline and burned alive.’ Jay Allen obviously cabled something like the following: ‘
ALMENDRALEJO RIGHTIST CRUCIFIED...
’ which should have been decoded from the cablese as follows: ‘A rightist of Almendralejo [Andalusian town] was crucified.’ […] Any news report, technically transmitted by telegraph, telephone, radio, and so on, has a built-in possibility for errors, and this fact should be taken into consideration when judging news dispatches as historical sources.
29
On 10 September, Gerald Brenan accompanied Jay to Lisbon to investigate rumours of a mutiny and to gather material on the way in which the Spanish rebels were being supplied through Portugal. By 13 September, they were back in Tangier and Jay was immediately flying to Gibraltar and then Madrid. On 16 September 1936, he reached the capital and spent the evening with Lester Ziffren, recounting tales of the plight of foreign correspondents in the rebel-held south. He later met up with Louis Fischer and told him about what he had seen in Badajoz. Fischer recalled: ‘We visited Badajoz together last April on an automobile trip through Spain to study Azaña’s agrarian reform.’ Jay told him that when he had entered the bullring, he saw ‘the arena covered with a layer, seven inches thick, of black hardened human blood. Every home in this small town mourned a member or relative. The
population, he states, looked grim and sullen. It looked no one in the eye.’ Jay brought news that, after the columns of Yagüe had moved on to Madrid, the cleaning-up operations to the south of Badajoz had started in earnest and taken their toll of the small town of Barcarrota, ‘where we attended a Socialist meeting in April’.
30