The Forging of a Rebel by Arturo Barea

Author:Arturo Barea [Arturo Barea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782274933
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

5. FAREWELL

MAJOR TABASCO CALLED ME to his room and gave me a batch of handwritten pages.

“Will you please type this for me, with as many copies as possible? It’s confidential stuff. The best thing would be to do it in the evenings.”

I copied long lists of “members” and “proposed members,” of motions and resolutions. It took me some time until I realized that Don José was something like the Secretary General of the Officers’ Juntas in Ceuta. A big meeting of all the Military Juntas of Spain was apparently planned for the second half of the year 1923 in Madrid, “pending unforseen events,” and Don José was to go there as a delegate. It would be easy to organize the conference during the summer leave period, and representatives of all arms, units, and military zones would meet:

“We cannot shut our eyes to the course events are taking in the country. We of the Armed Forces have the obligation to serve the Nation. The country must not go further along the present disastrous road. We are in the hands of revolutionaries. How else could it happen that a Parliament should attack the Supreme Chief of the Nation, or that one part of the country should intend to declare itself independent? It is our clear duty to cut short these developments.” And so on.

I had heard of the Juntas—what Spaniard could have failed to hear of them?—but I had never to my knowledge met any of their members. Eager to find out more, I asked the Major as ingenuously as I could:

“Are the Juntas run by the Government, then, Don José?”

“That would just about suit the Government! No, the Juntas are independent. They are the bedrock of the nation.”

I made a vacant, foolish face, and Don José laughed.

“You don’t know anything about what’s happening round you, I can see that. Now listen, my boy. Spain was on the brink of perdition once before, in 1917, during the Great War. The French and the English weren’t pleased with our neutrality and tried to embroil us in the war, by making friends with all the enemies of the country, the Anarchists, the Socialists, and the Republicans, and even with the Liberals. They managed to win over Romanones who was Premier then. The Socialists and the Anarchists organized a strike—but you must remember it, you weren’t as young as all that.”

“Of course I remember, sir. But the General Strike started because of the increase in prices, and because the people said that all the commodities were being sent abroad. The workers demanded a reduction in the price of bread, or an increase in their wages.”

“Pooh, that was only the pretext. The truth was that they wanted to make a revolution like the one that was just beginning in Russia then.”

“But—the Allies were against the Russian Revolution, sir!”

“You just don’t understand the whole story. The Allies turned against the Russian Revolution later, when the Russians refused to go on fighting for them. It served them right, too, because the revolution was manufactured by the English and the French themselves.

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