Spain from Within

by Rafael Shaw

In this connection the following passages from an article in the Correo Español are rather significant.

“In Barcelona ten Carlists sufficed to prevent the burning of a church, and put the mob to flight, so that they left in the hands of our friends the weapons they were carrying in pursuit of their vandalic designs” [an incident already referred to]. “And there are 100,000 brave men such as these in Spain.... We are prepared for all! all!! all!!!” (in crescendo capitals). “The fight, which inevitably had to come sooner or later, has now begun between Catholics and sectarians, between civilisation and barbarism, and we must not stop till we have destroyed them.”

It all reads like transpontine melodrama, and as such I at first regarded it. But when day after day announcements appeared that new Carlist clubs were being opened in one small town after another, when Señor Llorens returned from his second sojourn with the troops, loaded with plans, sketches, reports, and what not, relating to the campaign and the general condition of the Army there, and openly announced that he had obtained them for Don Jaime, and when, although the people were shouting songs of defiance to the Carlists and their “King,” the militant “Catholic Association of Social Defence” announced that it had increased its working class membership from 31,000 to 200,000, one began to wonder whether the Carlist “army” might be something more than comic opera.[16]

The stories related of secret arming and drilling in the churches at night are obviously not capable of verification by a layman and a foreigner,[17] but that the Jesuits in Barcelona were armed before the revolt began, and used their arms with skill, seems certain. A near relative of one of these warlike men of religion told me that they had twice driven back the mob by firing from their balconies, so it seems fair to assume that when the newspapers talked of the shooting down of the crowd by the Jesuits they had some ground for their statement. Civilians in Barcelona found in the possession of arms were arrested, even though they had not used them, but it does not appear that the Jesuits incurred any penalty for using their weapons on the mob.

One mysterious feature in the events of that week has never been cleared up, and possibly never will be.

On the first two days of the rioting there was fighting about the barricades which had been raised in many of the central streets, but the scarcity of firearms among the rioters was noticeable, a large number of them being without arms of any kind. Mainly, no doubt, in consequence of this, the struggle was practically over by the third day, after which there was no more street fighting, the troops occupied the city, and the attack on the Religious Orders, which might so easily have spread all over Spain, was at an end.

Yet, notwithstanding that the fighting was over, shooting from the roofs of the houses went on for two days more. No one ever saw those who fired: the shots came from invisible persons concealed behind the parapets and other sheltered positions. And, what was the more remarkable, whether the shooting was in working class districts, or, as was frequently the case, from houses in those quarters of the city where rich men live, the noise of the report and the bullets which were found were always the same. The “man on the roof” invariably used a Browning pistol, a weapon not easily procured by a poor artisan. Thirty, forty, fifty such shots would be fired in succession, the troops would hurry up to the roof from which the bullets came, find no one there, and see nothing suspicious, yet hear the rattle of the shots again as they returned to their duty in the street below. A civilian who ran up the stairs from the ground floor in one of the “haunted” houses told me that although several shots were fired as he ran, no one was to be seen above, except a young priest professedly on the same errand as his own.

It was said that among the many people arrested there was at least one priest. But nothing more was heard of him, and whether he was released as innocent, or allowed to disappear, was not revealed to the public.

No one has yet explained who organised the expensively-armed sharpshooters who displayed such remarkable skill in firing from an elevation without being caught in the act. The people believe that they were members of the clerical party whose object was to exasperate the troops against the rioters who were supposed to be firing at them, and thus to bring about a fight in which the whole town should be involved. Meanwhile Don Jaime was to convert the mêlée into an organised revolution against the established order of things, which should spread from Barcelona all over Cataluña, and from Cataluña throughout Spain. This, for what it is worth, is the popular explanation of one of the most mysterious features in the “anarchist” rising of July, 1909.

But the people go farther still. They attribute not only the incidents of July, but the whole of the political unrest in Cataluña to the underground activities of the Carlists and their allies the Ultramontanes. It is firmly believed by the unlettered peasantry, who read or listened to the accounts of the beginnings and endings of the “Red Week,” that the emissaries of the Pretender planned and carried out every incident that led up to the general strike with which the rioting began.