In the summer of 1936 its barracks were practically empty,
because a short time before, the cadets living in the Alcázar had
been involved in a fracas in the Zocodover, and so Republican
leaders of the government, eager to find an excuse for disciplining
the army, which they did not trust, had banished the young army
men to another barracks some distance from Toledo. This meant
that the senior official remaining in the military area was a
fifty-eight-year-old colonel of infantry, José Moscardó e Iriarte,
heavy of face and heavier of bottom. He then held a job he loved,
director of the army’s physical education program, for his passion
was sports, especially soccer, and he was about to leave Spain to
serve as national representative at the Berlin Olympic games.
When his superiors launched their rebellion in Africa against
the Republicans, Colonel Moscardó summoned all military
personnel in the Toledo district, plus elements of the Guardia
Civil, into the Alcázar, and there, on July 21 assembled 1205
fighting men plus 555 noncombatants, among whom were 211
children. They had ammunition but little food; they did have
some horses, and when night fell on that first day they must have
felt that they would be in the Alcázar for a week at most. They
were to stay, at the point of starvation, for ten weeks.
Outnumbered, outgunned and under constant attack, with
only the determination of Colonel Moscardó to provide any kind
of military leadership, the defenders of the Alcázar hung on. The
Republicans made many sorties against the stout walls but quickly
learned that they would not be able to take the fortress by direct
assault. However, they had other devices and these were potent.
On July 23, the third day of the siege, according to the modern
Spanish legend, a Republican leader called Colonel Moscardó on
the telephone and told him he held his sixteen-year-old son
prisoner. He threatened to have him shot if Moscardó did not
surrender the Alcázar immediately.
Republican
: Do you perhaps think my statement is untrue? You
are now going to speak with your son.
Luis
: Papa!
Moscardó
: What’s happening, son?
Luis
: They say they’re going to shoot me if you don’t surrender.
Moscardó
: Then commend your soul to God, shout !Viva España!
and !Viva Cristo Rey!, and die like a hero.
Luis
: A very strong kiss, Papa.
Moscardó
: Goodbye, my son, a very strong kiss.
The Alcázar was not surrendered and later the boy was shot.
One who underwent the siege reported that it was this event that
steeled them to an acceptance of starvation and death, ‘Because
who could go to the colonel and complain about what the siege
was costing him when the colonel had given his son?’ Today on
the wall of the room where Moscardó held this phone
conversation hang translations of it in all important languages;
the English is a botch job and very un-Spanish, because someone
felt that Anglo-Saxons would not understand a father’s sending
his sixteen-year-old son a kiss. The English comes out like this:
Moscardó
: Then turn your thoughts to God, cry out, ‘Long Live
Spain,’ and die as a patriot.
Luis
: All my fondest love, father.
Moscardó
: All of mine to you.
(Facts concerning the Alcázar are so confused and open to
challenge that I have relied upon one principal source,
The Siege
by Cecil D. Eby [1965], which is in the main
of the Alcázar
pro-Franco. Many important data used by Eby have been
controverted by anti-Franco sources, often with good reason, as
in Herbert Rutledge Southworth’s
The Myth of the Crusade of
[1964], which cites many sources to prove that the famous
Franco
telephone conversation was either apocryphal or—if it did
happen—without the inflated significance it has been accorded.
The Moscardó son, who was sixteen at the time, is now living
happily in Madrid at Calle Castelló, 48. There was an older son
who was shot, but under much different circumstances.)
When the Republicans could not take the Alcázar either by
frontal assault or by pressure on Moscardó, they wheeled up heavy
artillery which fired point-blank into the fort, and when this failed
they summoned airplanes which dumped tons of bombs to knock
the old walls apart. The walls did collapse, but the men inside did
not, so the attackers resorted to a sensible device: they brought
miners down from the Asturias coal fields to dig a tunnel under
one of the towers. There they piled a vast charge of high explosive
and warned Moscardó that they were going to blow the Alcázar
to bits. They even summoned newsmen from Madrid to watch
the end of the siege. The explosion came at 0631 in the morning
of September 18, the sixtieth day, and true to prediction, it
annihilated the southwest tower in a blast that could be heard
forty miles away in Madrid. The Alcázar had fallen, and the news
was sent around the world.
But inside the building the stubborn old colonel recoiled from
the shock, assembled his assistants and through the smoke
inspected the damage. The tower was gone, the wall was breached,
but for the Republicans to take advantage of the blast they would
still have to climb the hill, cross the rubble and take the building
at bayonet point. Moscardó doubted that they were willing to pay
the price.
He was right. In the days that followed, the siege degenerated
into a bloody, ruthless struggle of many Republicans trying to
overcome a few Franco men holed up in the ruins. Day by day
artillery shells and airplane bombs proceeded with the destruction
of the walls until the Alcázar seemed a good two-thirds gone. The
patio was filled with rubble and the upper rooms were no more.
How the ruins, which appeared to offer no hiding places, could
hold out was a mystery.
Many of the defenders were killed in the fighting; others died
of causes relating to starvation. Among the greatest heroes were
the women, who not only helped the men but looked after the
children as well. And day after day Colonel Moscardó sent out
the radio report which would become the catchword of the siege,
‘Sin novedad en el Alcázar’ (Nothing new in the Alcázar, or, as
some translate it: All quiet in the Alcázar).
When it seemed that one more push from the Republicans
must wipe out the defenders, word came that a column of General
Franco’s troops had reached Talavera de la Reina and would
shortly arrive to lift the siege. A race between Franco’s oncoming
troops and the Republican besiegers then developed, with odds
in favor of the latter, but the iron-willed men in the Alcázar held
out against all pressures, and on September 28, the seventieth day
of the siege, when the defenders had become matchsticks through
hunger, General Franco’s troops arrived. The first contingent to
enter the Alcázar was a unit of black Moors from Africa. Their
ancestors had been thrown out of this city in 1085. Now, 851
years later, they were returning. It was then that the dreadful
reprisals began.
The newsmen who accompanied Franco’s forces into the city
were eager to make of Colonel Moscardó, now a general, the hero
of new Spain, but they found him a stolid, unimaginative old man
whose main concern was still soccer. The awful realization dawned
on them that when Moscardó had said, ‘nothing new in the
Alcázar,’ he had not been uttering a heroic statement but the
simple truth as he saw it. His job, as senior officer present, had
been to hold the command he found himself with, and he had
done so.
The somewhat doddering old fellow was a source of
embarrassment to the Franco government, for he was
unquestionably the salient hero of the war, but when he was
assigned to a military command commensurate with his fame,
he fumbled it and continued to send in reports: ‘Nothing new at
the front.’ Finally, with the coming of world peace, the perfect
job was found for him: he put on his general’s uniform and as
Conde del Alcázar de Toledo, represented Spain at the London
Olympic Games of 1948 and the Helsinki ones of 1952. That he
enjoyed.
I wanted to see what the Alcázar was like, so on a warm
September day I left the Zocodover and walked down into the
valley where the Republicans had had the command post for
shelling the fort. Above me loomed the Alcázar, newly rebuilt but
as brutal and ugly as ever, and I shuddered at the thought of being
a soldier required to scramble up that hill and assault that fort.
Later, when I had climbed to the plaza at the east end of the
building, I saw the grandiloquent monument erected to the men
of the Alcázar, and for a strange moment I thought I was in
another century. Victory, whose garments flowed behind her
wings, held aloft a golden sword while two women knelt in
grieving position. Behind Victory stood two well-carved friezes
in white marble featuring workers and women mourners. On the
front of the monument was carved the word Faith, represented
by a man with shield and sword; on the right Valor, a blindfolded
woman holding a cross; and on the left Sacrifice, a man offering
a lamb. On the back I saw a good pietà in which a shrouded
woman bent over a fallen man, while far away on either end rose
three tall metal shafts topped by the fasces, the eagle and a third
symbol I could not decipher: it looked like a large cross with
studded edges.
Leading up to the monument were flights of stairs, balustrades,
promenades and landscaped areas much like Hadrian’s villa at
Tivoli, but juvenile delinquents or cryptic Republicans, as the
case might be, had gone about toppling the ornaments which
graced the approach, so that the whole had a sense of a crumbling
Roman forum. All was noble; all was very nineteenth century; all
yearned for the past.
Inside the Alcázar, I caught many glimpses of the Spanish army
at work, for set into the walls were tablets whose words evoked
past glories:
THE XXI GRADUATING CLASS OF INFANTRY
1914-1917
ON ITS GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY
TO THE DEFENDERS OF THE ALCAZAR
1964
In one corner a white plaque read: ‘Here on September 11, 1936,
was celebrated the only Holy Mass of the Siege, Catholics! This
corner is land sanctified by the visit of the Divine King. To our
heroes.’ Another shield read: ‘To those who endured the siege by
the Communist hordes and converted this Alcázar into a symbol
of the unity and independence of the nation.’ But the most telling
item was something I had seen on my earliest visit, when the gaunt
old fortress was still in ruins. It was a magazine and a most
unlikely one.
The Illustrated London News
for January 24, 1914.
Colonel Moscardó had found it in the Alcázar library and had
used it to help barricade his windows from Republican bullets.
It was opened to a complicated story: ‘Sold by Rumour. A Fine
and Famous Holbein Portrait.’ The painting was shown in a small
photograph, ‘Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex,’ owned by the
Earl of Caledon and rumored to have been sold by him for
$150,000, a charge which he denied. A bullet had passed through
the earl’s head and nine others had splattered the page.
The best thing about the Alcázar has always been the cloistered
central courtyard, not because the cloisters are attractive, for they
are heavy and lack gracia, but because the area was spacious and
did contain a famous statue of Carlos V in military uniform. The
base carried two quotations uttered by the emperor on the eve of
a crucial invasion of Africa, and these had become the slogans of
the Franco forces who defended the building: ‘I shall enter Tunis
as conqueror or remain dead in Africa.’ And: ‘If in the battle you
see me and my flag go down, rescue first the flag.’
As I stood in the Alcázar with this statue of Carlos, I reflected
upon the years I have spent studying this emperor and his works.
For me he has always been a central fact of Spain and one of the
figures of world history who best repay study. When I was a young
professor I used to daydream about what I would do if placed in
charge of a college whose only responsibility was to provide a
selected group of students the best possible education without
regard to outside pressures from alumni, large contributors, the
sports editors of the nearby metropolis or the general
damn-foolishness of American life. Like any sensible man I would
naturally sponsor only a general humanities program, reserving
training courses like law, medicine, engineering or business for
university specialization which would come later. My students
would direct themselves to language, literature, science,
philosophy, the fine arts and history, secure in the knowledge
that if they mastered those subjects they would later be in a
position to control such social functions as medicine,
manufacturing, constructing, teaching and governing. In other
words, I would stress with my students the widest possible
exploration plus the most intensive analysis of two or three specific
unities.