About this time all sorts of reports were spread, calculated to alarm the country and prejudice it against the Monarchy. The story of the mutiny and execution of soldiers on their arrival at the front I have already mentioned. The details of this varied with each telling: sometimes two men were shot, sometimes nine, often a whole battalion, once several of them. The immediate preparation of accommodation was called for for the thousands of sick and wounded, who could not be received in the already overflowing hospitals. Real sacrifices were made by the poor to help in these preparations, for every one wished to do his share for the sufferers; and when at length it became clear that no wounded were coming, at any rate at that time, and that the demands made on the public sympathy—for the moment at least—were a sham, much indignation was naturally aroused. These alarmist reports circulated with great rapidity, even in remote villages where no one received newspapers. The people had no hesitation in attributing them to the parish priests, “who have their own ways of spreading what Jesuits wish them to make known,” and tales of all sorts of horrors for which they had been held responsible in the past began to be raked up and repeated as happenings of the moment. One such tale was of a walled-up nun found in a convent in Barcelona during the July riots. I took some trouble to track this story, and finally convinced myself that it was merely an echo from the past—a tale of the Inquisition or of some monastic crime. But it formed another instance of the hold that tradition has on the Spanish peasant, and of the way in which it is combined with the events of the day to pile up the indictment against the Religious Orders.
I asked some of my middle-class acquaintances on one occasion where was to be found the “army” of Don Jaime, which I had seen mentioned in the report of a Carlist meeting. One of them laughed and said it existed only in the region of comic opera, but another proceeded to explain with conviction that the Pretender had a strong following in Cataluña and the Basque Provinces and a good many adherents in Andalusia, and expatiated at length on the benefits the nation would derive from the autocracy and the abolition of popular rights, which he seemed to think would bring about a social millennium.
And while he was speaking I mentally recalled the commentary of one of the people, to whom I had read aloud Don Jaime’s manifesto, asking whether he would welcome the advent of the “Legitimist Monarch” in Spain.
“Don Jaime? I? I would like to burn him and then blow his ashes to the winds, and so would all my friends, both men and women. What dealings do we desire with the seed of Don Carlos? There is no poor man in Spain who liked Don Carlos or wishes ever to see his son.”
A Basque friend of mine, a highly educated man, whose position as a large employer of labour enables him to judge fairly of the political leanings of the people, made the following remark to me one day:
“The Carlists,” he said, “may think they have the Basque Provinces with them, but they are completely mistaken. The working classes of my country have no more desire for civil war than those of any other part of Spain.”
This gentleman is not a man who would use illicit means to influence the votes of his dependants, and his opinion may be taken as representing the true state of public opinion in his district. On the other hand, he said that among his wealthy clients there was no attempt to disguise the desire for a dynastic change: the portrait of Don Jaime hangs in a place of honour in many of the great houses which he visits in the course of his business, and the general devotion of this class to Carlism is open and avowed.
“But,” he said, “what can be done by a party which is all head and no body? The army of Don Jaime may be well supplied with would-be officers and with all the munitions of war, but they have no troops behind them, in the Basque Provinces or anywhere else.”
His description of the Carlist “army” reminded me of the famous raid of the Fhairshon:
“For he did resolve to extirpate the vipers
With four and twenty men and five and thirty pipers.”