The Inventions of Don Fulano de Tal--Stopping a Train--"A Ver Fine
Blaggar"--The Legend of Santa Cruz--Dodging a
Warrant--Outlawed--Chased by Gendarmes--A Jack Sheppard Escape--The
Cura becomes Cabecilla--Sleeping with an Eye Open--Exploits and
Atrocities--Dilettante Carlists in London--The Combat of
Monreal--Ibarreta's Relics--A Tale for the Marines--The Carlists
Looking-up.
Every other day--every other hour, I might almost say--a new rumour was
born in Madrid. These rumours were usually figments, always
exaggerations. If one were to inquire into their origin Don Fulano de
Tal, the Man in the Street, was certain to have assisted as
_accoucheur_. Alas! truth in Spain is coyest of sparrows, and to be
caught must have not a grain but a whole bushel of salt shaken over its
tail. Don Carlos was always turning up somewhere like a bad shilling.
Were he to be where he was said to be, he must have been a supernatural
Don Carlos--must have inherited the seven-leagued boots of fairy tale,
as his brother had the invisible cloak, for he was here, there,
everywhere, and nowhere, at one and the same time. But wherever hovered
the Pretender, or the "heir presumptuous," as a Spanish acquaintance,
not well up in English as "she is spoke," persisted in calling him, or
whatever he may have been doing, there could be no doubt that some of
his followers were in the field and alarmingly active. On the 13th of
March, the capital was furious at the official news that communication
with France and the rest of Europe by the north had been cut. Vitoria
was the limit of Spain now; beyond it was the troublous No Man's Land,
where the legends of Manuel Santa Cruz and his desperadoes abounded. He
it was who had ripped up the rails near Tolosa, and waited for the
accident which was sure to occur when the first train travelling towards
the frontier would arrive. Four inoffensive passengers were hurled into
eternity. The excuse for the conduct of this minister of peace was that
these trains carried troops. If the railway company would pay him a
tribute and engage to carry no troops, Santa Cruz, who is accommodating,
would let them pass freely. The company was willing, for these
interruptions were killing the dividends, but the Government objected.
In common justice to the more intelligent members of the party this
soldier-priest disgraced, it should be admitted that they cursed him
loudly and deeply. His conduct was bringing his order into disrepute.
For instance, in Vitoria, near his own hunting-ground, when the Republic
was proclaimed, the Civil Governor dropped a hint that it would be
necessary to "exterminate the highwaymen of the black soutane." The
priests of the town got so frightened that they did not dare to show
themselves in the streets. But they were in no danger, though the
merciless Manuel was doing what he could to make the priests' garb
unpopular. A Carlist paper in Madrid, with some conscience left, had the
honesty to say Manuel was not a credit to his cloth, and that Don Carlos
did not approve of the many savage acts he had committed. Manuel sent
the editor a letter, with his compliments, promising to teach him better
manners than to speak ill of the absent when he came to Madrid! The
general anticipation, based on a fond hope, was that if Manuel ever did
come to Madrid, it would be strapped on a hurdle. But he had his
admirers, nevertheless. My friend, the Duke de Fitzpepper, swore in his
execrable execrating English that he was a "cottam ver fine blaggar--oh,
ye-es! _tous qu'il y avait de plus crâne, mon cher!_" From one of these
admirers who knew his family, I obtained an interesting epitome of his
career.
Santa Cruz was born at Elduayen in Guipúzcoa in 1842. An aged uncle gave
him some lessons in Latin, and placed him in an ecclesiastical seminary,
where he seems to have principally devoted himself to the practice of
athletic exercises. He came out in 1866 a clerk and a gymnasiarch rolled
in one, and was appointed to the pastoral charge of Hernialde, a cluster
of houses near Tolosa. He attended zealously to the duties of his
ministry, leading a simple, frugal life with his sister; but when
stories of the struggles of Zumalacárregui and Gonzales Moreno in the
previous Carlist war were recounted by the wide hearth, it was noticed
that the priest's eyes blazed like the faggots sputtering in
flame-spikes towards the chimney-top. He was a Monarchist of the Basque
stamp by race, by education, by conviction. He should have been a
warrior, not a preacher of the Gospel; but if the circumstances which
produce the man had not arisen, he might have vegetated and died in
obscurity in his mountain village. The circumstances arose in August,
1870. A revolt of the four provinces of Alava, Guipúzcoa, and Biscay
(the Basques or Vascongadas), and Navarre, was to take place in that
month. At the outset it was rendered abortive by the treachery of a
Colonel Escoda. It broke out on the 27th of August, and was suppressed
on the following day. Santa Cruz, whose opinions were well known to the
party, had been asked to watch over a depot of arms which had been
collected for the insurgents at Hernialde. His share in the plot was
betrayed, and one morning, as he was celebrating Divine Service, his
church was entered by a party of soldiers who waited at the foot of the
altar until he had finished the ceremony.
"In the name of the law, follow me," said the officer in command; "I
have a warrant for your arrest from Madrid."
"Very well," said the Cura; "but surely you will allow me to breakfast
first, unless they ordered you to take me captive on an empty stomach."
This was murmured in a tone so dulcet and injured that the officer
hastened to assure the clergyman that he might breakfast, and
accompanied him to the presbytery.
"Sin ceremonia," said the Cura, "will you condescend to share my meal?"
"Thanks, very much."
The priest entered the house; the soldiers waited outside, and argued
that it was an infernal shame and a piece of tyranny on the part of Prim
and the rest to have ordered such a harmless, nice man to be clapped
into gaol. Presently a peasant with a basket of fruit on his head came
out of the house. The soldiers waited long. They waited in vain. The
peasant and the priest were one and the same.
For two years Santa Cruz wandered in the mountains and in France, was
"on his keeping," as they say in Munster, but was finally arrested and
interned at Nantes, by the French authorities. A characteristic story
was related of his arrest. He was stopped on the bridge between St. Jean
de Luz and Cibour by two gendarmes.
"Your papers?" demanded one.
"My papers! Wait till I look for them," answered Santa Cruz, not in the
least disconcerted.
He fumbled in his pockets, turned them inside out, tapped the lining of
his clothes, searched high and low, pretending to be very much
astonished that he could not discover the document; and, suddenly, while
the gendarmes, thrown off their guard, were speaking to one another,
made a spring sideways, and was off like a bolt from a bow, the agents
of authority pounding after him in their clumsy jack-boots. The chase
lasted an hour, to the intense amusement of all the idlers of the town;
but a peasant, not grasping the true state of affairs, clutched the
panting Santa Cruz and held him until the arrival of the gendarmes.
In 1872, when Don Carlos again made appeal to arms, Santa Cruz succeeded
in evading notice, and crossing the frontier, attached himself as
chaplain to the band of Recondo. The Pretendiente himself entered by the
pass of Vera, but was surprised at Oroquieta, in Navarre, by General
Moriones, who defeated him on the 4th of May, and withered his hopes for
that time. The convention of Amorovieta followed, arms were given up by
thousands, and the factions, or partidas, dispersed to their homes.
Santa Cruz returned to France. After a week's interval he re-entered
Spain, and joined a body of the insurgents who still ranged the hills in
Guipúzcoa. One day he missed his companions in a forced march, and fell
into an ambuscade.
"I am Santa Cruz," he said to the soldiers, unquailingly, "do what you
will with me."
He was pinioned and led to the nearest village.
The commandant of the detachment, one Urdanpilleta, went up to his
prisoner and said to him, with an inexcusable pettiness of sarcasm:
"My good lad, you are out of luck. In a few hours you are safe to be
shot."
"All right. We shall see about that," stoically answered Santa Cruz.
The priest was led into a large two-storied house, and thrust into a
room near the garret, there to enter on his preparation for death. There
was a bed in the room, and from the sheets on that bed Santa Cruz made
the rosary on which to tell his litany, which was not one for the dying.
He tore them up, twisted them, tied them together, and letting himself
out of the window as far as his improvised rope would go, dropped into
the arms of a couple of friends beneath. Before the alarm could be given
he was up to his neck in a marsh, where his head was concealed by a rank
growth of rushes. After an enforced bath of twelve hours he sought
refuge with a wood-cutter, who helped him to pass over by night into
France. The tale of his escape added to his fame. He was no longer a
cura, he was a cabecilla--a born leader in partisan warfare. The
Carlists still kept the field in Catalonia, but in the north-west all
was apparently over. Order reigned as in Warsaw. Nevertheless, it was
felt that a spark would rekindle a conflagration. Santa Cruz was the
spark.
"If I had only thirty men at my back, I'd lift the flag again," Santa
Cruz was overheard to boast.
The thirty men presented themselves; and, on the 1st of December, 1872,
the irrepressible priest, now surnamed the Peter the Hermit of Carlism,
recrossed the frontier. Six days afterwards he stopped the mail train a
few miles outside San Sebastian, and Madrid learned with stupor that the
Carlist insurrection had flared up anew.
"That was virtually the knell of the Savoy dynasty," said my informant,
"and Santa Cruz it was who tolled the knell."
This notable individuality must have the rare magnetic power of
compelling men to follow and believe in him, and of winning over their
fidelity. His band of thirty has now swelled to five hundred, as devoted
as ever were the Highlanders of Preston and Falkirk. He believes in his
star; and he does not believe in carrying on hostilities with kid-gloves
on his hands. Vitriol is more in his line than rose-water. I should very
much like to meet Santa Cruz. He is said to be as agile as Mina, a
wonderful walker, and to share all the fatigues and privations of his
followers. He accomplished an almost incredible journey across the
craggy hills and ravines, from Tafalla in Navarre to the confines of
Biscay, in sixteen hours. At sunset, when the halt is called, and the
provisions are distributed, the guerrilleros assemble round their chief,
who resumes for a time the character of the Cura of Hernialde. Evening
devotions are repeated, and prayers are offered for his Majesty King
Charles VII., the Much-Desired; for Spain and her rescue from the
monster of anarchy; for the dead, and for those who are next to die on
the "campo de honor." The devotions ended, the priest again becomes the
partisan-chief, and praises or blames his soldiers; and then the guards
are set, and the guerrilleros, wrapped in their blankets, take a final
pull at the wine-skin, and sink to rest upon the heather. Long after the
band has been shrouded in mist lethargic, the figure of Santa Cruz may
be seen looming against a rock, upright but for the head, which is
supported by a huge gnarled staff. In his hand he grasps a key. When the
benumbed or listless fingers part and release that key four times,
Santa Cruz gives the rousing signal, the guerrilleros start to their
feet, and the line of march is again taken up.
Is it not all delightfully romantic? If the late Miss Jane Porter, who
wrote that prized book of truant youth, "The Scottish Chiefs," were only
to have encountered this pretty man, she would have swooned with the joy
of authorship. Had Harrison Ainsworth but dreamed of such unconventional
possibilities, he would never have debased his intellect to the
glorification of a vulgar prison-breaker like Jack Sheppard. But the
only craftsman of the pen who could have risen to the height of the
theme was he who wove the gold-shot tale of "Paul Clifford."
The latest news we hear of the Carlist priest is that a woman was shot
by his orders at Escoriaza.[A] On second thought I am not so sure that I
should very much like to meet Santa Cruz. And at this very period,
while the shrieks of a fusilladed female were ringing in the air, a
fussy committee of dilettante Carlists, sitting in London, protested
that the sacred cause of legitimacy was advancing by lawful, chivalric,
and immaculate means only! From the snug security of their back-parlour
they wrote letters to the papers denying the "wanton" destruction of
railway-stations by the Carlists. The flames were still undulating over
the station of Santa Olla, between Burgos and Pancorbo, while the ink
was wet on that inspired refutation! There are factories of falsehood
elsewhere than in Spain.
A cabecilla had warned the station-masters in Guipúzcoa that all
railway-servants who durst perform their work would be shot, and that
all trains which had the hardihood to move would be given over to the
flames; and Lizárraga, an ex-field-officer of the regular army, had
calmly notified to the alcaldes of the province that he would fine them
what would be the equivalent of a hundred pounds sterling with us the
first time they failed to advise him of the movements of troops, and
that he would stick them up against a wall and put a bullet through
their heads for the second offence. Passports through the Carlist lines,
formally drawn up, sealed, and signed, were for sale for ten duros
(about two pounds sterling) in bureaux transparently dissembled, and met
with ready purchasers. The article was cheap, if only as a curiosity.
Here is the textual copy of an announcement in _La Esperanza_, a
recognised and tolerated Carlist organ of Madrid:
"The direction of the Northern Railway Company having failed to observe
the neutrality ordered respecting the conveyance of troops and stores of
war, the Carlists, we are assured, cut the line yesterday at four points
in the province of Guipúzcoa."
The Republic that permitted a newspaper published under its nose thus to
talk of rebels against its authority "ordering" the railway companies
not to convey troops was not arbitrary, to my thinking. But Spain is an
enigma. An English Government would hardly permit a journal to speak of
the operations of a Fenian band in the same terms.
There could be no concealment of the fact that the adherents of Charles
VII., king _in nubibus_, were making headway.
On the 9th of March a combat was fought at Monreal, a village on the
slope of a hill to the south-east of Pampeluna, between the factions of
Dorregaray, Ollo, Perula, and others, and the regulars under Nouvilas,
the General who had set out from the capital with such a grandiloquent
farewell speech. Pampeluna is distant sixteen hours by rail. The account
of the combat, the most important since Oroquieta, was published in the
official journal four days afterwards.
In the interval the Carlist papers at Madrid had been singing hosannas
over an alleged victory of their friends, and boasting that the
Republican General had lost his artillery. The Republican Government did
not suppress those papers. As a matter of course, Nouvilas claimed the
victory for himself. Victories are always claimed by both sides in this
civil struggle. To get near truth one must read the narratives for and
against, compare and balance them, and by jealous analysis of evidence
it is possible one may light, in a haphazard way, on something vaguely
resembling what actually happened.
The report of Nouvilas is before me as I write. He estimated the enemy
at 2,500 infantry and 200 cavalry. His own force, consisting of a
battalion of the Chasseurs of Porto Rico, two companies of the
Guadalajara infantry, a section of mountain artillery (two guns, I take
it), a couple of sections of the Hussars of Pavia, and one of the
Lancers of Numancia, made up a total of about 600 foot and 80 horse. The
combat lasted through two hours of darkness, and Nouvilas, although
bragging that he dislodged the Carlists, has to admit that he was unable
to follow up his success. Reason: his troops had marched eight leagues
without food or rest! A league is 4,565 English yards; multiply that by
eight, and I think it will be suspected that the tale of Nouvilas was
intended for the amphibious branch of the service. He confesses to a
loss of one superior officer (Colonel Don Manuel Ibarreta, of the Staff
Corps), and five rank and file killed, three officers and fifty-three
wounded, six _contused_, and four missing.
An anecdote casts a lurid light of disclosure on the discipline of this
victorious column. The Staff Corps have a museum at Madrid, and were
anxious to procure some relics of their comrade who had "died gloriously
while holding a hazardous position with singular courage." All they
could get was his cap and sash. His boots were pulled off, his pockets
rifled, and every little article he possessed, to his English lever
watch, was appropriated--doubtless by soldiers who were desirous of
souvenirs of so gallant a gentleman.
Certain inferences were to be drawn from the report of Nouvilas. The
Carlist position was admirably chosen, the leaders took proper
precautions against surprise, and the men fought with dogged pluck. They
must have been badly equipped, since they left behind them firearms of
every description. They are armed anyhow; some carry fowling-pieces,
some blunderbusses, and some fight with sticks and stones, as the return
of those six soldiers contused establishes. The General had
breechloaders and mountain howitzers; hussars and cuirassiers supported
his infantry; and yet these rebels of the hills held their own for two
hours!
Even on his own showing the victory of the Republican commander was
poor, and dearly purchased. At one time he admits he was encircled by
the enemy, and had to unsheath in self-defence. He reports four men
missing--that means captured; and, though having routed his foes, he can
only point to thirteen prisoners and two dead horses! The Carlists fled
"precipitately," but they appear to have had leisure to carry off their
wounded with the exception of sixteen. Reference to Carlists supposed to
be wounded, coupled with the silence about those supposed to be dead, is
remarkable. Were there none killed? General Nouvilas, instead of going
forward next day, returned to Pampeluna to indite a despatch in which he
directly commends his own four sons, and indirectly praises himself. He
has been laid up with sore throat since, and has been unable to resume
his prosecution of the dislodged and dispersed enemy. I begin to think
these Carlists, as my landlord at Beasain predicted, "will give more
trouble."