Franco. Paul Preston
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the early hours of the morning of 29 June 1916, with high losses being recorded, Franco was part of the leading company of the Segundo Tabor (second battalion) of Regulares which was heading the advance. When the company commander was badly wounded, Franco assumed command. With men dropping all around him, he broke through the enemy encirclement and played a significant role in the fall of El Biutz. However, he was shot in the stomach. Normally, in Africa, abdominal wounds were fatal. That night’s report referred to Captain Franco’s ‘incomparable bravery, gift for command and energy deployed in combat’. The tone of the report implied that his death was inevitable. He was carried to a first aid post at a place called Cudia Federico. The medical officer staunched the bleeding and refused for two weeks to send him the six miles by stretcher to the casualty clearing station outside Ceuta. He believed that for the wounded man to be moved would kill him and the delay saved Franco’s life. By 15 July, Franco had recovered sufficiently to be transferred to the military hospital in Ceuta. There an X-ray showed that the bullet had not hit any vital organ. A fraction of an inch in any direction and he would have died.53
In a war which, during his time in Africa, claimed the lives of nearly one thousand officers and sixteen thousand soldiers, it was to be Franco’s only serious wound. His luck gave rise to many later anecdotes about his daring. It also led his Moorish troops to believe that he was blessed with baraka, the mystical quality of divine protection which kept him invulnerable. Their belief seems to have infected him with his lifelong conviction that he had enjoyed the benevolent glance of providence. He later said somewhat portentously ‘I have seen death walk by my side many times, but fortunately, she did not know me’.54 The location of the wound was also the basis of speculation about Franco’s apparent lack of interest in sexual matters. What little medical evidence is available does not support any such interpretation. Moreover, long before receiving the wound, Franco had refrained from participating in the sexual adventures of his comrades in his time as a cadet in the Academy and in subsequent postings in both mainland Spain and in Africa.55 His distaste for his father’s behaviour is sufficient to account for the extreme propriety of his sex life.
The High Commissioner in Morocco, General Francisco Gómez Jordana, father of the future foreign minister, recommended Franco for promotion to major again ‘por méritos de guerra’ and the procedure also began for him to be awarded Spain’s highest award for bravery, the Gran Cruz Laureada de San Fernando. Both proposals were opposed by the Ministry of War. The military advisers of the Ministry cited the twenty-three year-old Franco’s age for denying the promotion. Franco reacted fiercely and appealed against the decision, seeking the support of the High Commissioner for a petition (recurso reglamentario) to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, King Alfonso XIII. In the face of such determination, the King granted the appeal and on 28 February 1917, Franco was promoted to Major with effect from 29 June 1916. He had taken exactly six years to rise from second lieutenant to major. Along the way, he had gained the reputation at the palace of being the officer who with the greatest cheek asked for help or made complaints about his career.56 The nomination for the Laureada was turned down on 15 June 1918. It is a reasonable assumption that, having gained his promotion by going above the heads of the Ministerial advisers, Franco’s case was not reviewed with any great sympathy.57
There can be little doubt that, at the time, Franco preferred the promotion to the medal.* The contrast between the natural timidity of the young second lieutenant who had arrived in Africa five years earlier and the determined drive to gain promotion holds an important clue to his psychology. Franco’s petition to Alfonso XIII revealed unfettered ambition. His bravery under fire was a means to the same end. The courage of the young soldier, like the cold authoritarianism of the dictator later on, may be interpreted as different manifestations of public personae which both protected him from any sense of inadequacy and provided ways of fulfilling his ambition. Franco left ample written evidence that he was not satisfied with the reality of his own life, most notably in his novel Raza. It is difficult not to suspect that Franco invented his own persona as the hero of the desert almost as deliberately as he did that of his hero José Churruca in Raza.
Promoted to major, Franco was obliged to return to mainland Spain since there were no vacant positions for officers of that rank in Morocco. He was posted instead to Oviedo in the spring of 1917 in command of a battalion of the Regimiento de Infantería del Príncipe. In Oviedo, he lived in the Hotel Paris where he became friends with a university student, Joaquín Arrarás, who would be his first biographer twenty years later. A year later, he was joined by his two companions Pacón and Camilo Alonso Vega. Despite his rank, his reputation for bravery and his brutal experiences in the Moroccan inferno, Franco’s adolescent appearance and his diminutive size led to him being known locally as ‘el comandantín’ (the little major).58 Always reserved and never gregarious, he can hardly have enjoyed the routine of garrison life in Oviedo. The rainy climate and green hills of Asturias may have reminded him of his native Galicia but now the call of Africa was more powerful than that of home. As Arrarás put it, he had ‘the poison of Africa in his veins’.59
In the daily colonial skirmishes, Franco had come to be admired and successful yet few of his comrades knew him. He was never to allow himself to become close to anyone, perhaps for fear of revealing his essential insecurity. Nevertheless, he had forged professional and even personal links which would remain a central part of his life. He had become an Africanista, one of those officers who believed that, in their commitment to fighting to conquer Morocco, they alone were concerned with the fate of the Patria. The esprit de corps consequent on shared hardship and daily risk developed into a shared contempt both for professional politicians and the pacifist left-wing masses whom the Africanistas regarded as obstacles to the successful execution of their patriotic duty. Life in a mainland posting also signified a drastic slowing down of the promotion process. Moreover, his high rank relative to his age must have made him the target of some resentment. In Morocco, for all his youth and his lack of social skills, he was recognized as a brave and competent soldier to be trusted under fire. In Oviedo, among officers who were twice his age but still only majors or captains, or generals who saw in him only a dangerous climber, he was not popular and was driven in on himself.60
He was put in charge of the instruction of oficiales de complemento (auxiliary officers) which permitted him to establish relations with some important local families in the closed society of Oviedo. In the late summer of 1917, at a village fair (romería), he met an attractive local girl, María del Carmen Polo y Martínez Valdés, the daughter of a rich local family, albeit not as illustrious as it once had been. At the time, the slender dark-eyed Carmen was a fifteen year-old school-girl at the convent of Las Salesas. Franco wanted them ‘to walk out together’ but she refused on the grounds that, being a soldier, he could disappear as quickly as he had appeared. She also thought fifteen was too young for a steady relationship. Nevertheless, when she returned to the convent in the autumn of 1917, he wrote to her, although his letters were intercepted by the nuns and handed over to her family. With the imperturbable optimism and determination which characterized his professional behaviour, he began a dogged siege. Carmen, her school friends, and even the nuns, were thrilled to note that the famous Major now began to be a daily attender at 7 a.m. mass. He could catch a glimpse of her through a wrought-iron grill.61 The willowy and elegant Carmen Polo carried herself with a certain aristocratic hauteur. The deeply conservative Franco felt a near reverence for the aristocracy and admired his fiancée’s family and their way of life.62
The incipient romance with the young Army officer of modest family, even more modest prospects and a