Ten Days during the Siege of the Alcázar
Selections from The Last Crusade: Spain: 1936 © 1996 by Warren Carroll
Purchase on Sophia Institute Press
September
Read on Internet Archive and Isidore (pp. 136–148)
Listen on Internet Archive with commentary (34:55–1:04:36)
[...]
At ten-thirty in the evening of the 8th Major Vicente Rojo, an officer serving the government of the Republic who had taught military history at the Alcázar Academy and so was personally known to Moscardó, hailed the Alcázar on a megaphone from the Plaza de Capuchinos on the opposite side of the fortress from the ruins of the Gobierno and the two wrecked towers. He asked for an hour's cease-fire at nine o'clock the following morning so that he might meet with Moscardó, After five minutes of consideration and consultation, Moscardó agreed.
“And do you guarantee my personal safety?” Rojo asked.
Moscardó’s inner fire blazed up. Did this man question his word of honor?
“We are gentlemen here,” he answered heatedly, “not like your Republican trash, You may have an hour.”
Largo Caballero had ordered Major Rojo to undertake these first negotiations with the defenders since the siege began, because the world-wide press attention now being given to the siege and the growing admiration for the magnificent courage of the defenders even among many supporters of the Republic made it desirable at least to try to get the women and children out before the mines were exploded in the tunnels and—as nearly everyone believed they would—totally destroyed the Alcázar. In the morning of the 9th Major Rojo presented terms in writing, signed by “the Defense Committee of Toledo,” but obviously authorized by the Communist premier: freedom for the women and children, trial by the “people's courts” for all the fighting men in the garrison. The wives and children at the Alcázar were literally to purchase their lives with the lives of their husbands and fathers, for at this point no reasonable man could doubt for moment what the verdict of the people's courts on its defenders a would be.
The dark eyes burned in Moscardó’s haggard face as he received this proposal.
“We are willing to let the Alcázar become a cemetery,” he said between his teeth, “but not a dung heap!”
Then he wrote out his official answer on a scrap of paper:
Concerning the conditions for the surrender of the Alcázar presented by the Committee, it gives me great pleasure to inform you that from the last soldier to the commander they reject said conditions, and will continue to defend the Alcázar and the dignity of Spain to the end.
Major Rojo felt a surge of sympathy and admiration for his ‘old comrade-in-arms rise up and grip his throat. When he entered, Moscardó had refused to shake his hand. Now he had turned his back on him and was walking toward the door of the office of the superintendent of the Academy where they had met. Suddenly Rojo cried out: “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Moscardó turned back, his expression unchanged, his voice unsoftened, utterly unyielding. He was a crusader who had lost his son, and watched the blood of a hundred martyred priests redden the cobblestones of Toledo, the city of saints and the Catholic kings.
“Yes,” he said, like steel on iron. “You can send us a priest. We want nothing else from you.” And he walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.
Some of the officers of the garrison now crowded around Rojo, whom most of them knew because he had taught there, trying to draw information from him about the plans of the besiegers and the prospects for relief. He told them little, but they sensed his sympathy, Finally one of them asked him to join them. Rojo cast down his eyes and did not answer immediately. He made no indignant repudiation of the suggestion, no declaration of loyalty to the Republic. Eventually he said: “If I did, this very night my wife and children in Madrid would be killed.”
He left his pouch full of fine tobacco for them, and as he was blindfolded preparatory to being led out, he suddenly cried “Viva España!” When he reached the outer gate and the blindfold was removed, his escorts saw that there were tears in his eyes. At the last moment before his departure, he bent over and murmured to Captain Alamén standing beside him: “For the love of God, keep hunting for the entrance to the mines!”
Inside, Moscardó was pacing a corridor, an aide at his side. For a long time he was silent; then he said: “I just can’t understand why a man of Major Rojo’s integrity did not remain with us.” The aide said nothing. Minutes later Moscardó burst out: “Do you think it would have been proper if I had shaken his hand? I wanted to do it, but I couldn’t.”
At the post office Rojo handed over to Major Luis Barceló, head of the Defense Committee, the scrap of paper containing Moscardó‘s defiant reply to the surrender terms. Barceló was a maximal revolutionary; he had been in charge of the execution of the Nationalist officers captured at the Carabanchel Barracks in Madrid in July, and at the end of the war was to fight his own commander, Colonel Sigismundo Casado, for days when ordered to surrender Madrid, until Casado captured and shot him Flushing with anger as he read Moscardó’s words, Barceló lunged for the nearest telephone. “Artillery batteries? Good This is Major Barceló. Fire night and day on the Alcázar! Erase it! Leave no stone larger than my little finger!”
At 10:45 in the morning the artillery fire resumed. At almost that very moment the wife of one of the soldiers of the garrison, named Valero, gave birth to her first child on a table in the electrician’s workshop in the north cellar. He was named Restituto Alcázar Valero, the Castle Restored.
The next evening at ten o'clock the besiegers of the Alcázar sent another message by megaphone to the defenders. Major Rojo had arranged to honor Colonel Moscardó’s one request. The next morning a priest would visit them as they had asked.
Canon Enrique Vézquez Camarasa was no ordinary priest. Formerly attached to the cathedral of Madrid (whence his title of “Canon”), his reputation as one of the most “progressive” clergymen in Spain had saved him from the fate of hundreds of his brother priests in the capital city. If he ever helped or interceded for any of them or expressed any regret for their fate, history has not recorded it. Approaching the Alcázar, where he was met by Major Barceló, he exchanged the revolutionary clenched-fist salute with the militia on the battle lines. His instructions were to take advantage of every possible opportunity to persuade the garrison to surrender.
At the Bisagra Gate of the fortress Canon Camarasa was met by Captain Sanz de Diego, who had been acting in the place of a priest for the garrison, since they had none. He had lost an eye to a shrapnel wound suffered while conducting a funeral service. He conveyed Colonel Moscardó’s word that Camarasa would not be harmed and would be allowed to leave within three hours. Then he blindfolded him and led him inside the building, where he took him roughly by the shoulders, shook him a little, and said, “Can you say Mass?” Frightened by the physical contact, Camarasa muttered, “All right, if you wish.” Sensing his fear, one of the men standing nearby said, with a twist of his lips, “Don't worry. It’s only that crowd out there that murders priests.” Since Camarasa had just been hailed by “that crowd out there,” that thrust struck home.
The defenders of the Alcázar of Toledo were not fools. They knew very well what kind of priest would be the only priest allowed by their besiegers to visit them. Some of them surely recalled—for Spaniards know their own extraordinary history vividly—how more than a thousand years before, King Pelayo, standing at Covadonga with his back literally to the wall, a giant rock wall hundreds of feet high, ruling a realm twenty miles by twenty facing an empire that stretched from his valley to the borders of China, was urged by a bishop named Oppas to surrender because his prospects were hopeless and he would “enjoy many benefits alongside the Moors,” and how Pelayo had answered him: “Our hope is in Christ! This little mountain will be the salvation of Spain.” Here was the new Bishop Oppas, and they intended to give him the same answer Pelayo had given Oppas. But it was not for this that they had brought a priest into their stronghold.
Camarasa was taken to meet Colonel Moscardó in his office, Major Rojo had known what manner of man he was dealing with; Camarasa did not. He began a monologue about the happy life in Madrid. Yes, it was true that all the churches were closed, but at least they were no longer being burned down. Priests loyal to the government were quite safe; why, his own house was protected by an anarchist guard! There was plenty of food and water.
The contempt Moscardó felt must have been almost tangible. But it was contempt for the man, combined—as only a true Catholic can combine it—with reverence for the office and the powers he held from Christ, despite collaborating with His enemies. Soon the crusader commander had had more than enough of Camarasa’s talk.
“Did you come prepared to confess us and celebrate Holy Mass?” Moscardó demanded. “That's all we want!”
Camarasa nodded dumbly.
At the southeast comer of the cellar an altar had been prepared, its platform covered with a rich carpet upon which the royal arms were stitched in purple and gold. The only light came from the dim and flickering animal-fat lamps. The homily was Camarasa’s opportunity. He expounded at length on the hopelessness of their struggle, In a few days, if they did not surrender, the Alcázar would be blown to bits, and all of them with it. God would judge the men who allowed this to happen as the murderers of the women and children who would die in the explosion.
He went on and on in this vein, Some of the women began to sob. Some of the men were shaken. He talked so long that he had no time to hear individual confessions, but could only give a general absolution. But he did finally say the Mass, baptized Restituto Alcázar Valero, and brought Holy Communion to the seriously wounded lying in the infirmary.
Then he went again to Moscardó’s office, asking to speak with him privately. He pressed the argument that he was sacrificing the women and children to his own stubbornness and vanity, Even if he would not surrender himself, he should let the women and children go. Surely they wanted to!
“No, señor.” Moscardó said. Then, his voice rising as Camarasa went on: “No, señor. No, señor!”
Unable to penetrate the crusader's armor, Camarasa now began implying that he was keeping the women and children in the Alcázar by force. Moscardó called in Carmen Romero de Salamanca, daughter of one of his principal officers and wife of a Civil Guard lieutenant of the garrison, and told her this priest was saying that the women of the Alcázar were being held there against their will. All the fire of the mothers and wives of the men who fought 722 years to reconquer Spain from the infidel was in her answer:
Held here? That's a lie! I have talked with every woman in the Alcázar and all of them think as I do. Either we will leave here free, with our men and children, or else we will die with them in the ruins!
After that, there was nothing more to be said. Moscardó coldly ordered Camarasa escorted out.
Two weeks later, Canon Vazquez Camarasa left Spain forever and showed up in France, where he told a newspaper reporter that he had played no part in “Spanish politics.” Six months later, in Paris, he wrote an article stating that his proposal to Moscardó to evacuate the women and children from the Alcázar was entirely his own idea. (Since Largo Caballero was known to have been trying hard to get the women and children out, this self-serving declaration was, to say the least, open to serious doubt.) Camarasa also said he admired the heroism of the defenders of the Alcázar. He survived the war in Nazi-occupied France and died in 1946, despised by both sides—the ancient fate of traitors.
But he had said the only Mass celebrated in the Alcázar of Toledo during all the days of its siege, and that is what men remembered. For many years, so long as General Franco lived and ruled, the site was marked by a plaque in the cellar corner where the Mass was said, reading: “Here the Divine King visited our heroes."
On September 13 the Chilean ambassador obtained permission from the government to make a last attempt to persuade the defenders of the Alcázar to surrender. After five hours of argument he induced Major Barceló and his “Defense Committee” to guarantee the lives of all the garrison if they surrendered for whatever their reluctant promise was worth. It did not matter, because Colonel Moscardó refused to receive the ambassador, believing that any further peace negotiations at this critical moment would break the morale of the garrison, shaken by the steady approach of the tunnels which they had no way to stop.
The next day the two tunnels reached the walls of the Alcázar, and the sounds of the miners could be heard by everyone beneath the cellar floor; no longer did Lieutenant Barber need his stethoscope. Moscardó moved everything away from this part of the cellar, strung barbed wire around it, and set up a small chapel with a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the edge of the wire. Outside the militia chanted, over and over: “Send out the women: it will soon be too late! Send out the women: it will soon be too late!"
On the 15th a four-hour bombardment of the Alcázar produced a long vertical split in the east wall, Five of the garrison were killed and four wounded, bringing its total casualties to more than forty killed and over 200 wounded. During the bombardment the defenders could clearly hear the miners enlarging the tunnels below them. Lieutenant Barber tried to make a countermine, but his men were too debilitated by the poor food and lack of sleep for nearly two months to be able to make significant progress into the hard rock with no miners’ explosive charges available. Through the day of the 16th small detonations. continued in one of the mines, but none were heard from the other, causing Lieutenant Barber to conclude that it had been completed. About noon Nationalist bombers struck the city, showing the defenders they were not forgotten. That night, under the shadow of the impending detonation of the mines, Lieutenant Fernando Barrientos deserted. He was the only officer to desert the Alcázar during the siege. It did him no good. A militia patrol in the city picked him up, “tried” him on the spot, and shot him.
By sundown September 17 all sounds of movement and activity under the Alcázar had ceased. The mines were ready, each of the two tunnels packed at its head with two and a half tons of TNT. Newsmen from all over the world, encouraged to come by Largo Caballero’s government, had gathered to see the explosion which would bring down the battered fortress. Major Barceló, fearing that a large part of the city might be damaged when the Alcázar was destroyed, was trying to evacuate all the remaining inhabitants, but many refused to go. Two attack columns were designated to strike the Alcézar ten minutes after the explosion and overwhelm any surviving defenders.
It was still summer on the high plains of Castile, and the night was warm, especially in the cellars of the Alcazar into which the day's heat had penetrated through the gaping holes left by the constant shellfire. In his windowless room in the center, Colonel Moscardé bent over his daily log of the siege, barely able to see it by the faint flickering light of the little lamp fed only by the stinking fat of the horse they had killed that day for meat. Moscardó’s tall gaunt bearded figure could have sat for one of the world-famous portraits of Toledo’s supreme artist, El Greco, with his strange elongated faces and forms. The guttering light threw the shadow of Moscardó’s head and shoulders on the wall like some dying giant.
He was totally alone, The Alcázar was deathly silent. Beneath his feet, five tons of high explosive waited for detonation.
Moscardó had finished his entry in the log. His pen hovered over the paper, and he lowered it to write one last sentence.
“All things possible having been done, we now commend ourselves to God.” It was what he had told his son Luis to do in the face of certain death. Under the words he drew a thick black line.
“Having done all, to stand!” St. Paul had written to the Ephesians.
Eight hundred and thirty years before the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo in 1936, Raymond of Toulouse, the supreme crusader, who led his men to Jerusalem when all others had given up, and took the holy city for Christ his Lord and King by storm in the year 1099, had suffered mortal wounds when a burning roof fell on him in Castle Pilgrim which he had built, under siege by the Muslims. Presuming he reached the Heaven he sought, perhaps Raymond of Toulouse asked God that night for the lives of José Moscardó and his crusaders.
At 6:18 in the morning all firing on the Alcázar stopped. Everyone inside and outside it knew what that meant. The next thirteen minutes crawled by on leaden feet.
At 6:31 the mine on the southwest side of the Alcázar exploded with a thunderous roar heard in Madrid, forty miles away. The southwest tower, a hundred feet high, rose up toward the sky like a rocket, then crashed to earth in a gigantic stone avalanche. A nearby truck was hurled five hundred feet into the air; its engine tore loose from the truck body and fell through the roof of a house half a mile away. The whole city of Toledo disappeared from view in an enormous rolling cloud of black smoke.
At 6:45 the main attack column headed by 600 picked Assault Guards charged from Zocodover Square shouting, “We've killed the dogs! At them!” Where the long-defended walls had been, they found great mounds and masses of rubble. Looking for ways through them, sure of their victory, suddenly they heard a totally unexpected sound ahead of them: the high clear notes of a bugle.
The fifteen-year-old trumpeter of the Alcázar was sounding the call to arms.
Within, the shock and the deafening roar must have been, for the first minute or two, totally paralyzing. But then, in every part of the cellars where the defenders had stayed that terrible night, they opened their eyes, looked around them, and saw that they were still alive—and so were almost all of their compañeros and even a newcomer, a baby girl delivered immediately after the explosion, and named Josefa del Milagro (Josefa of the miracle). The enormous adamantine crag upon which Toledo is built had proved tougher than anyone had imagined, confining the effects of the explosion to the area immediately above the mine. (A later count showed that only five of the garrison died in the explosion—and the second mine, in the northeast quadrant, never did go off.) First scattered, then growing to a crescendo, came shouts of “Viva Cristo Rey!”
The officers, knowing an attack must come quickly, ordered the bugler to blow and sent the men to their posts—or to where their posts had been, since no one yet knew what was left outside. Rushing through the courtyard, some of the defenders stopped in shock and horror at the sight of what appeared to be two severed heads in the middle of it. But they were not severed; they belonged to Teresa Gonzalez the meat dresser and her husband, buried up to their necks in rubble but miraculously only slightly injured. Teresa cried out heroically to them, “Don’t bother with me! The Reds are attacking!” And so the defenders ran past her to their posts.
Below, in the cellars, next to the smoking crater where the mine had exploded, several of the women hurried to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary which Colonel Moscardó had put there. Her statue had been blown over, but was only slightly chipped. They knelt in prayer to thank her for their deliverance. Soon Moscardó himself joined them there.
Above, the revolutionary assault force, still struggling to penetrate the piles of rubble, saw the defenders appear above them, sighting and firing their rifles with deadly accuracy, hurling grenades down the jumbled slope of stone. Amazed by their survival, the attackers hesitated and fell back, waiting for reinforcements, while the defenders swiftly began building barricades (nothing was easier, with rock fragments everywhere) to cover the openings in the rubble. When a tank emerged from behind the Santa Cruz Museum, rumbled across Zocodover Square, and smashed the iron gate of the Alcázar, knocking over a truck beyond loaded with stones, the defenders responded with one of their few bombs. The tank was undamaged, but its startled crew backed it away; in any case it was not clear that there was room for it to get through the rubble.
Meanwhile the other column of attackers was ambushed by three defenders with a machine gun and stopped in its tracks. But a group of about a dozen men found a blind spot, entered the Alcázar on the second floor from outside, and opened fire on the defenders below, raising a red banner on a girder. The effects of the explosion had left the defenders no access to the second floor; but if they could not somehow dislodge these men from their apparently impregnable position, the Alcázar was doomed.
Lieutenant Benito Gómez Olivares, commanding in the room below, took charge. Its ceiling, which was the floor of the second storey, had several large holes in it due to shellfire and the mine explosion, but they were 25 feet above him; the longest ladders in the Alcázar were barely half that length. Gómez Olivares lashed sets of two ladders together, set them against several of the holes, and led his men in climbing them, the ladders (never designed for such use) twisting and bending under their weight. But they stayed up; Gómez Olivares and his men emerged shooting on the second floor, killed all but two of the attackers, and tore down the red flag from the girder.
It was 10:20 in the morning of September 18, and the Alcázar of Toledo still held out.
In their fury the besiegers fired 272 shells during the rest of that day, the most of any day in the siege. The cannonade continued on into the night. Moscardó and Lieutenant Barber surveyed the damage: the explosion had been concentrated in one place and most of the fall of stones had been in the west, away from the interior. There was little damage underground outside the area directly over the end of the tunnel which Moscardó had enclosed in barbed wire, That night the defenders were served a special festive meal, luxurious for them, of rice, beans, and sausage. It was much cooler; there was a touch of autumn in the air.
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