From May 1907 there had been six months’ respite; then the bombs began to go off again in December. Leading Catalan politicians had long since doubted the capacity of the police to protect their interests. In April 1907, the President of the Diputación Provincial de Barcelona, the prominent architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch, went to London, accompanied by the British Consul in Barcelona. He hired the head of the Scotland Yard CID, Charles Arrow, who took early retirement and signed a three-year contract to set up a secret parallel police force. Known as the Oficina de Investigación Criminal (OIC), it occupied lavishly appointed offices in the city. Arrow and his assistants were promised, but never received, huge salaries. Arrow was compared to Sherlock Holmes, but he was hampered from the first by his inability to speak either Catalan or Spanish. His outfit was undermined by rivalry among his backers and his local staff, and by opposition from the anarchists, republicans and Lerroux’s Radicals, as well as from Tressols, who laughed at the modern methods imported from London. According to the moderate anarchist Joan Peiró, Arrow was inhibited by discovering that some of the activities of the bombers were sponsored by members of the Catalan upper classes who wanted to foment hostility against the central government. Nevertheless, the creation of the OIC strengthened Ossorio’s determination to reform the police force. In a letter to Maura in March 1908, he described the city’s police services as ‘until recently a real dung heap’. He increased pay, improved training and, to the chagrin of Tressols, tried to eradicate the use of torture. Arrow was dismissed in August 1909.57
In mid-1907, a variety of Socialists led by Antoni Fabra i Rivas and anarchist groups led by Anselmo Lorenzo and Tomás Herreros united to form an apolitical trade union known as Solidaridad Obrera. This was succeeded in September 1911 by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). It was initially an umbrella organization that gathered together the whole spectrum of anarchism together with Socialists and Republicans. In the minority, the latter were soon repelled by anarchists’ view that strikes and industrial sabotage were the best weapons against bourgeois society. In consequence, the CNT was soon an exclusively anarcho-syndicalist organization.58 Before long it would be Spain’s largest union.
Juan de la Cierva, the cacique from Murcia who fixed elections for Antonio Maura. (The History Collection/Alamy)
4
Revolution and War: From the Tragic Week of 1909 to the Crisis of 1917–1918
The relatively brief honeymoon of Solidaritat Catalana came to an end in May 1909 when its essentially contradictory composition saw it divide and suffer defeat at the hands of Lerroux in local elections. The organization’s fate was sealed by the events that took place in Barcelona two months later in July. The popular violence and the church burnings seen during that critical week hardened the conservative instincts of the Lliga which in turn generated working-class support for Lerroux. The origins of the Semana Trágica lay in the working-class pacifism that had been deepened by the disaster of 1898. This rendered it even more difficult for Spain to follow the example of France, Britain, Germany and Italy in using imperialist adventures to divert attention from domestic social conflict. Few poor families had not suffered one or more of their menfolk being killed or disabled during the long years of colonial war in the Philippines and Cuba. The survivors had brought back gruesome accounts of their experiences which had provoked widespread hostility to the governing classes held responsible for the disasters. The belief that conscripts were merely the cannon fodder of political corruption was based on knowledge of how the army had been poorly fed, inadequately armed and badly led. Nevertheless, many army officers were eager for an enterprise that could compensate for the colonial humiliation of 1898. Spain’s consequent Moroccan entanglement was widely seen as being driven by the King and the owners of the iron mines, including, it was rumoured, the Jesuits.1
In the first week of July 1909, Rif tribesmen attacked the railway link from Melilla that was being built to facilitate commerce with what were wrongly believed to be important mineral deposits. The Minister of War in Maura’s government, General Arsenio Linares, under pressure from army officers close to Alfonso XIII, from the King himself and from investors in the mines, reluctantly sent an expeditionary force and claimed that this was merely ‘a policing operation’ with no intention of it being extended into a military aggression. The Cortes was closed to prevent awkward questions being asked. From 11 July, large numbers of reservists, mainly married men with children, were called up and embarked from Barcelona with no provision being made for the upkeep of their families. For the rich, it was possible to buy exemption via a procedure known as cash redemption for 1,500 pesetas, the equivalent of a year’s wages for a workman. It was a deeply unpopular privilege among those who could not afford to pay. The Socialist Party launched the slogan ‘Everyone or No One’ and there were waves of protest in the anarchist and republican press.2 In fact, the scale of evasion of military service can be deduced from the fact that before 1895 and after 1898 the device brought into the exchequer between 9 and 12 million pesetas annually. During the three years of the Cuban War, it brought in 40 million pesetas per year.3
With no time for adequate preparation of the expedition, the reservists were being sent to a probable death. They had no wish to die to further the interests of what they considered to be a corrupt oligarchy or to satisfy the desire of the army to erase the memory of 1898. In Barcelona, on Sunday 18 July 1909, as the conscripts were marched towards the port, a pacifist demonstration pressured the Maura government into announcing that no further embarkations would take place. Nevertheless, a republican press campaign instigated by Lerroux’s Radicals and the Catalan nationalists led by Antonio Rovira i Virgili kept anti-war sentiment at boiling point. The Radicals’ youth wing, the Jóvenes Bárbaros (young barbarians), were noisily militant in nightly demonstrations that the police could not control. Within two days, similar disturbances took place in Madrid and in other cities with railway stations from which conscripts were being transported to Barcelona. Meanwhile, a broad spectrum of Catalan politicians sent a telegram to Maura demanding that he put a stop to the war, and the Socialist Party planned a general strike. Maura refused point blank and tension was heightened by news that ten of the reservists who had taken part in the Sunday demonstration had been court-martialled and might be executed. The Socialist plans were seconded by the anarcho-syndicalists. The Civil Governor Ángel Ossorio y Gallardo refused to deploy the hated Civil Guard, a stance which brought him into conflict with Maura’s brutal Minister of the Interior, Juan de la Cierva, who believed that what was being planned was all-out revolution that must be crushed.4
On that same Sunday, Rif tribesmen intensified their resistance against the Spanish expeditionary force. Ill equipped and virtually untrained, the Spanish conscripts were subjected to constant harassment by an infinitely more skilful force. Over the course of the next week, anti-war sentiment spread within a population convinced that corrupt politicians were responsible for the deficient weaponry of the troops. The Spanish commander in Morocco, General José Marina Vega, successfully requested more reinforcements, but his troops were defeated on Tuesday, 27 July at the battle of Barranco del Lobo.5 On the previous day, a general strike had broken out in Barcelona and lasted until 1 August, seven days that came to be known as the tragic week (the Semana