THE ARMY, PAST AND PRESENT
It is allowed that great abuses were committed by those in power during
the long war in Cuba, which ended with the struggle in the United States
and the final expulsion of Spain from the last of her American colonies,
and it is common knowledge that the munitions, provisions, and all the
supplies of the Army fell lamentably short of what was required. It may
be imagined, therefore, that the survivors of these long years of
warfare brought back stories of experiences little calculated to inspire
their friends with confidence in the governing classes, who were
responsible for such shortcomings. Fully to appreciate the difference
between the sentiment of the Army to-day and what it was so late as
1901, when the defeated troops from the lost colonies came home with
their tale of suffering, it is necessary to show what convictions have
had to be changed and what prejudices overcome by Don Alfonso before he
could win the place which he now holds in the affections of his
soldiers.
I will only deal with the rank and file, whose loyalty is even of more
importance to the nation than that of the officers. My own impression is
that, after making all due allowance for differences in politics and
traditions, the great majority of the Spanish officers to-day are
staunch supporters of the Monarchy and the Constitution they have sworn
to uphold. But beyond putting on record my private opinion, formed on
the utterances of officers of all arms, I do not propose to deal with
this side of the question.
It was natural that reminiscences of the Cuban and American Wars should
be continually brought forward during the operations in Morocco, and
that the popular expectation of the treatment the troops would there
receive should be based on what took place in Cuba; and it was
inevitable that the unlettered mass of the community, agitated as they
were in the early days of the war by rumours of wholesale massacre and
tales of thousands of dead and wounded, should have imagined that their
friends and relatives were once more being sacrificed without mercy on
the altar of political corruption. Not long ago I heard the following
conversation among a party of working people who were entertaining a
soldier at a tavern on the eve of his departure for Melilla.
“Poor fellow!” said a stout elderly matron, with a tear in her eye. “So
young and so good-looking, to be killed by the Moors!”
“Don’t distress yourself, Señora,” said the lad, a slim, active young
fellow. “I’m going to make mincemeat of at least eight before they kill
me, and I shall be in no greater danger there than up at the mines
of ----, where I was knocked to pieces by a landslide. Three months I’ve
been in hospital, and it’s just like my luck to be called out to Melilla
the moment I get out. I’m not afraid. If they kill me it can’t hurt more
than that landslide did.”
“He’ll sing a different song when he gets out there,” remarked an
elderly man gloomily. “I know how the soldiers are treated--not enough
to eat, and that bad, no clothes, no beds, and no cartridges to put into
their rifles when they go into action. I saw it with my own eyes in
Cuba.”
I ventured to suggest that Melilla was nearer to the resources of Spain
than Cuba, and that the general condition of military affairs had
considerably improved of late years.
“Don’t you believe it!” said the old soldier. “The Government sold Cuba
to put money into their own pockets, and they will do the same in
Morocco. Do you know what happened to us one day in the Cuban War? We
found ourselves attacked by the enemy, and we had nothing, _nothing_ to
fight with. There were no officers; the chiefs were in a safe place,
spending the money they had robbed us of (for we got no pay), and the
inferiors were hiding from the Cubanos wherever they could, behind us,
to be out of the fighting. I assure you this is true. When the Cubanos
came upon us we tried to load the guns, but many of the balls did not
fit, and we had no wadding.[19] We tore up our white drawers and our
shirts to make wadding, but what was the good? It was hopeless for us to
fight. And seeing the enemy upon us and we helpless to defend ourselves,
we went mad with rage and despair and turned on each other, not knowing
what we were doing. It was all the fault of the Jesuits at home, who
stole the money which the nation gave for the Army. And it will be the
same thing now with this Maura and his Jesuits, you will see!”
“It is all quite true,” said another old man. “My son has often told me
the same. He said they tied their officers to the gun-carriages in
[Illustration: A FORT ON MOUNT GURUGÚ.
The War in Melilla.]
his company more than once to prevent them from running away. They said:
‘If we, the common soldiers, are to be killed like flies, at least you,
the officers, shall take your share.’”
With such traditions firmly embedded in the popular belief, it would not
have been surprising had a real spirit of mutiny been shown on the
calling out the reservists in July, 1909. But this was not the case.
In an interview given to a representative of _Le Journal_ of Paris, in
November, 1909, by General Primo de Rivera, who was Minister of War
previous to the disasters of July, that officer threw some light on
Señor Maura’s conduct of military affairs, and explained why he had no
alternative but to retire from office, to be abused by the Clericalists
in power as “unpatriotic” for so doing. Here is a brief résumé of his
statement:
“From the moment I took office, foreseeing what was brewing at Melilla,
I began to fortify our positions in the Riff. Expecting that General
Marina would need reinforcements, I brought the regiments of the
Cazadores del Campo de Gibraltar up to their full strength, and put the
Orozco Division, in all three arms of the service, on a war footing. In
order to secure rapidity of transport, I contracted with the
Transatlantica Company to make the voyage in twenty-four hours, on only
four hours’ notice. When General Linares replaced me in the Ministry, he
thought fit to improvise all that was required, and this caused complete
disorganisation in the Army. He refused to call out the divisions which
I had held in readiness, and by drawing the troops from Cataluña not
only gave rise to the melancholy events of the “Red Week,” but rendered
it necessary to incorporate many reservists who had married and set up
homes in the belief that they were free from service, thus bringing
misery on thousands of previously contented families. And after all this
mismanagement it was necessary in the end to send the Orozco Division
which I had prepared so long before.”
At the time one heard on all sides the question: “Why does the
Government call out the reservists while the Orozco Division stands idle
at home?” to which there has never been any reply but that of the
people, who said: “The Government wants the war to go on because it
suits the Jesuits, who are making a fortune out of it.”
But notwithstanding the acute distress throughout the country, the
reports of an organised and widespread protest against the calling out
of the reserves, which flooded the foreign Press at the time, were
entirely unjustified and incorrect. Parents in Madrid wrote, full of
anxiety, to their children in provincial towns, saying: “What is all
this we hear about disturbances in your city? What is happening? What
have the reservists been doing?” While the children were writing with
equal urgency to ask what was amiss in the capital, that “such bad
things” were being said of the soldiers in Madrid. I know these reports
were spread, for I was asked to read aloud more than one such letter by
working people who could not read for themselves.
It was not long before the people discovered that they had been deceived
and vilified by some persons unknown, who were making it their business
to represent Spain as in the throes of a revolution, and it was then
that they became convinced that the rising in Cataluña, represented by
the Government as springing from a protest against the calling out of
the reserves, was in fact a Carlist plot, gone wrong so far as the
Carlists were concerned.
As one travelled about the country in 1909 it seemed as if every village
had sent one or more of its sons to Melilla. Yet, although their
families made sure that they were going straight to destruction, few
endeavours were made to evade the call to arms.
I heard one man, an artisan, say with a shrug of his shoulders that he
was going because he might as well be shot in action as shot for a
deserter at home, and I saw another fling himself flat on the platform
when the train came in, howling that “he was afraid of being killed and
didn’t want to go to the war.” The first was a professed republican; the
second, as the bystanders promptly informed me, was “drunk, as usual.”
Very likely there were other cases of the same kind, but they were
certainly exceptional. I made it my business to travel as much as I
could at that time, on purpose to observe the people, for, knowing the
Spanish peasant, I did not believe the tales current in the foreign
Press of his cowardly and mutinous conduct, and I wished to see for
myself how he behaved. I saw no such disgraceful exhibitions as were
described by English and French journalists.
The conversations that I overheard were very naïve: not at all the talk
of a rebellious people, notwithstanding the tales of suffering in Cuba
and in the Carlist wars which balked so large in the popular
imagination.
“My son! my son!” wailed one woman. “They will kill thee! I shall never
see thee again!”
“Hush, mother!” answered the young man. “Rest assured that if they do
kill me I shall have killed plenty of them first.”
“Why will they not let us women go too!” cried another mother. “We could
kill all the _Moras_ [female Moors] and then they would bring no more
little Moors into the world to be the ruin of Spain.”
It was curious to observe how the eternal race-hatred came out at the
very name of Moor--the tradition of the long contest between Christian
and Moslem. The Moors of Morocco cannot be held to have inflicted any
serious injury on the nation for many centuries past, yet such is the
force of ancient tradition among the peasantry that the very name of
_Moro_ calls forth the cry, “They are the ruin of Spain,” and if you ask
for an explanation you will be told that “The Moors are always pressing
upon us and trying to take our country from us.”
One pathetic yet humorous incident was related by the Infanta Doña Paz
(aunt to Don Alfonso) in a letter which she wrote to the Press about
this time, exhorting her fellow-countrywomen to have patience and be of
good courage. Describing her experiences of the patriotism of the men
and the devotion of the women, she told how a poor mother, learning that
her son was ordered to report himself for service, followed him from
village to village, as he pursued his avocation of pedlar, carrying his
regimental trousers, which had been put away in the family
clothes-chest. When she found him at last, there was barely time for him
to catch the appointed train, and the two hurried together to the
station with the trousers flapping like a flag as they ran.
The sons of mothers like these do not shirk their duty when called upon
to fight for their country. I believe that if the whole truth were told,
we should find that no one was more indignant at the protest supposed to
have been initiated by the working classes of Barcelona than the
reservists whose grievances were its ostensible object.
Fresh from an exceptionally rough crossing, weak with sea-sickness,
rusty in their drill after three years of home life, the reservists who
sailed from Barcelona found themselves led straight from the ship on to
the field of battle. This I had from a naval officer on the man-of-war
that took them out.
“If they had been veterans,” he said, “such a situation would have been
trying to them, and they were only raw fellows who hardly remembered the
words of command. And yet I tell you they behaved with such courage and
[Illustration: A RESERVIST At THE FRONT.
[To face page 208.]
discipline that I felt proud to be among them. I was sorry and ashamed
to see those sea-sick boys ordered into action, but now I am glad to
remember what I saw my compatriots do that day.”
The naval officer spoke of an incident in the early days of the war,
before the foreign correspondents had reached the scene of action. But
for some time the censors, both at the front and in Madrid, had made it
impossible for the truth about the campaign to be told; and England, at
any rate, was for several weeks allowed to remain under the impression
that the Spanish rank and file were a cowardly lot, driven into action
at the point of their officers’ swords. That impression was corrected as
time went on, and it is, I believe, now generally admitted that the
Spanish troops do not lack courage.
In Spain the conscripts join at the age of eighteen, and serve three
years with the colours, when they are drafted into the first reserve.
But those who can afford it may buy exemption from service for 1,500
pesetas (say £60), and from this source the Government makes an income
estimated in the Budget for 1909 at pesetas 12,800,000 (about £512,000).
Naturally the well-to-do always buy themselves out, as do also a certain
number of the more prosperous of the working classes in the industrial
towns. Señor Maura’s Government, not long before they went out, suddenly
made an order calling on all those who had already bought their
exemption to pay another 500 pesetas or join the colours at once, a
proceeding which, differing as it does in no respect from highway
robbery, naturally caused a good deal of indignation. No one likes to be
called on to pay a second time over for what he has already bought; and
in the case of the workmen, who generally secure themselves against
service by means of one of the numerous insurance companies formed _ad
hoc_, the premiums they had already paid were of course thrown away, and
few indeed of them could produce 500 pesetas at a moment’s notice.
A scheme is on foot for doing away with the present unjust system, and
making service compulsory on all alike. It provides for six months’
instead of three years’ service with the colours, the term to be
extended, in the case of the illiterate, until they can read and write.
This scheme obtained from the first the support of the whole Liberal,
Radical, and Republican Press, but the opposition of the Clericalists
must always be counted on in Spain, and the proposals most obviously
beneficial to the nation are usually those which meet with the
strongest opposition. Another popular clause in the scheme affects the
officers, whose pay is small. At present the officers live where they
can: they have no mess, and their quarters in barracks are so much the
reverse of luxurious that a lieutenant in a smart regiment apologised
for not asking me to visit him there, as he, knowing our English
customs, would have liked to do, because, said he, “it is not fit for an
Englishman to see.”
It is now proposed, in order to reduce the cost of living in the Army,
that quarters and a mess shall be provided for the officers in barracks.
Most Spanish officers have to live on their pay, and even a captain in
the cavalry only gets about £140 a year. On the other hand, their social
expenses are very small, subscription dances, dinners, sports, and the
numerous calls on the purse of a British officer being unknown in
Spain.
THE POLICE