The day that we took Franco at his word

Quentin de la Bedoyere investigates why, under the editorship of his father, this newspaper dismissed the bombing of Guernica as Red propaganda
Guemica — April 26, 1937. The aerial bombing of a Basque city during the Spanish Civil War is fixed in our mind by Picasso's anguished picture. For many people it is the only emotional association they have with that war. just as my grandchildren remember the Great War through the poetry, and we may remember Agincourt through the swish of massed arrows in the Olivier film. Art does that. And, in Picasso's own words: "Art is a lie that makes us realise truth."
This was the first war of my life but, being two at the time, my memories are restricted to the family discussions of later years. And they did occur in the family because Michael de la Bedoyere, my father, was the young editor of The 'Catholic Herald when the newspaper, with its rapidly growing circulation, was becoming a significant voice in Catholic opinion. With his first-class degree in Modern Great, and adult study under the Jesuits, before teaching at an American university, he was better placed than most to evaluate the situation.
When I first saw the original of the picture I was surprised to find that it was in black and white, like an immense newspaper page. I could recognise the main symbols — Picasso had often used horse and bull in his themes — but I saw it as many aspects of agony, ironically pointed up by hopeless symbols of hope. While Picasso proclaimed it as a cry against the tyranny of military dictatorship, he denied the relevance of Thither explanation; it is our personal reaction which matters. Perhaps that finds its apotheosis in the story that the Bush Administration persuaded the United Nations to cover up its copy of Guernica while the invasion of Iraq was being discussed.
The Spanish Civil War lasted just short of two years and nine months, and — as is the habit with civil wars — it was characterised by the viciousness and brutality of fratricidal strife. The Republican government saw the Right-wing coup, which initiated the war, as a revolt against the democratic choice of the people. It was led by fascists who championed the cause of the landowners and the Church: an establishment alliance determined to crush freedom. Nationalists saw their coup as an imperative action required to bring order to an otherwise ungovernable society. They had come to the country's defence against a Communist and anarchical mob which was fortified by militant trade unionism, and united only by its hatred of the Right-wing and the Church. And, whichever side you were on, your brother, or your uncle, or your mother might have been on the other.
Without doubt, the Republican side held the romantic cards. This was mankind fighting for freedom against repression; and we see this in the International Brigades formed by idealists from Western countries and immortalised by Hemingway and Orwell. Many figures from the Left, from Bernard Shaw to Hewlett Johnson (the "Red Dean" of Canterbury), were supporters of Russian Communism and in denial concerning the great purges and genocides under Stalin. So it was hardly surprising that several thousand young intellectuals became what Lenin referred to as the "useful idiots". Michael de la Bedoyere may not have had special information on the conduct of the Communist revolution but he understood Marxism and its inherent toxic effect on Christianity first and the human race second. He was to be profoundly antiCommunist all his life.
The Republicans also received war materials from the Russians, at a price. Indeed, the Russians actively nudged the Left-wing factions in useful directions while keeping their heads down. The Nationalists benefited from foreign volunteers. too, but their most valued receipts came from the Germans and the Italians, who took advantage of their opportunity for exercising weapons of war — which would shortly be needed for a rather bigger conflict.
The Basque region borders the north coast of Spain and the far southwest of France. The Basques are fiercely independent and claim, with some credibility, to be the original Iberian race. Guernica, a town of 7,000 people in Vizcaya, not far from the Basque capital of Bilbao, had a quasi-sacred status because it contained an oak tree at the foot of which loyalty to Basque rights was regularly sworn. It lay some 10 miles behind the line where the Nationalist forces, under General Mola, the commander in the north, were attacking in the spring of 1937. The Basques, largely Catholic, were not Republican for ideological reasons but in pursuit of their independent status.
Aerial bombing had already been used — for instance in the abortive attack on Barcelona. And on March 31, 1937, Durango, 10 miles south of Guernica, had the questionable distinction of being the first undefended town in Europe to be bombed. More than 120 civilians were killed, including a priest who was elevat ing the Host:at Mass in the church of Santa Maria.
On the afternoon of April 26, 1943, German aircraft bombed Guernica with high explosives and incendiaries, followed by low-level machine gunning. Perhaps 1,000 people were killed, with many more injured. The centre of the town was tle•,troyed, but the sacred oak tree and the arms factory outside the town were untouched.
Or perhaps the town had been blown up by the Basques to create propaganda. Or perhaps the odd German bomb had fallen but the Basques capitalised on this by using dynamite. Or perhaps the Germans had aimed at the bridge but had mistaken the strength of the wind drift that had carried the bombs into the centre of the town. What happened seemed to depend more on the political stance of the reporter than on the facts, and it was not until 1970, and the release of official papers, that my bald description above was established as the basic truth. It appears that General Mola was not consulted and that Franco was furious; no similar use of undefended civilian bombing was to occur during that war.
The Catholic Herald of April 30 carried an uncompromising headline; "Whole British Press Falls for Bilbao Story." Taking Franco's denial at face value, and mindful of the false stories previously circulated by the Republicans, the Herald believed that the press had simply taken a propaganda handout, and had reported it as their own story. However, the eyewitness description given by the Times correspondent, George Steer, bore all the marks of a truthful account, and this was complemented by the two other British journalists who were there. Michael de la B6doyere, although believing him to be naive, published Fr Drinkwater's subsequent letter declaring his confidence in their credibility.
From the beginning Michael de la Bedoyere had resisted the automatic proNationalist response of much of the Catholic press. This, of course, had been triggered by the fierce secularist 'attacks on the Church accompanied by the torture, assassination and destruction of Catholic priests and their property. The Church in Spain was subject to a persecution unknown in Europe since Diocletian. And Franco was determined that it should be seen that way.
But Michael de la Bedoyere, who was inclined towards pacificism, believed that an armed revolt against a government with a democratic mandate required thoughtful justification in the light of the Church's established principles. He was aware that the two sides were, at least emotionally, bent on social genocide — and that, if the Republicans were the more undisciplined and cruel, the Nationalists were more thorough, comprehensive and bureaucratic. Moreover, he thought that the Church in Spain had, in its own overbearing ways, contributed to its own unpopularity.
Nevertheless, he was eventually, and not without reservations, to settle for Franco and the Nationalists. He had no time for Fascism, on either the German, Italian or Russian models, but he did believe that civil order trumped the theoretical desirability of democracy, and that only Franco was in a position to supply that for Spain and for the basic rights of the Church.
Michael de la Bedoyere would never have argued that the ends justified the means, but in fact Franco's authoritarian regime did settle the country and provide the conditions in which Spain could become a prosperous European nation. It is now a democratic, constitutional monarchy.
So does Picasso's picture bear out that "art is a lie that makes us realise truth"? For me, it does. The lie is that the Civil War was simply a crushing of a free people by totalitarian forces of repression. The truth is that the price of ideology or fanaticism — whether soundly based or not — is paid not by the ideologues but by the agony of ordinary people. By you and me.
The issues of Guernica, the Spanish Civil War, and its relationship to Catholicism can only be touched upon in such a short article. The writer is indebted to Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett's Ghosts of Spain and to Frederick HaleS article on Michael de la Bedoyere's reactions in The Chesterton Review, Vol C.D No 4, 2003. Any errors or opinions are to be attributed to Quentin de la Bedoyere, and not to these sources