It is allowed that great abuses were committed by those in power during the long war in Cuba, which ended with the struggle in the United States and the final expulsion of Spain from the last of her American colonies, and it is common knowledge that the munitions, provisions, and all the supplies of the Army fell lamentably short of what was required. It may be imagined, therefore, that the survivors of these long years of warfare brought back stories of experiences little calculated to inspire their friends with confidence in the governing classes, who were responsible for such shortcomings. Fully to appreciate the difference between the sentiment of the Army to-day and what it was so late as 1901, when the defeated troops from the lost colonies came home with their tale of suffering, it is necessary to show what convictions have had to be changed and what prejudices overcome by Don Alfonso before he could win the place which he now holds in the affections of his soldiers.

I will only deal with the rank and file, whose loyalty is even of more importance to the nation than that of the officers. My own impression is that, after making all due allowance for differences in politics and traditions, the great majority of the Spanish officers to-day are staunch supporters of the Monarchy and the Constitution they have sworn to uphold. But beyond putting on record my private opinion, formed on the utterances of officers of all arms, I do not propose to deal with this side of the question.

It was natural that reminiscences of the Cuban and American Wars should be continually brought forward during the operations in Morocco, and that the popular expectation of the treatment the troops would there receive should be based on what took place in Cuba; and it was inevitable that the unlettered mass of the community, agitated as they were in the early days of the war by rumours of wholesale massacre and tales of thousands of dead and wounded, should have imagined that their friends and relatives were once more being sacrificed without mercy on the altar of political corruption. Not long ago I heard the following conversation among a party of working people who were entertaining a soldier at a tavern on the eve of his departure for Melilla.

“Poor fellow!” said a stout elderly matron, with a tear in her eye. “So young and so good-looking, to be killed by the Moors!”

“Don’t distress yourself, SeÑora,” said the lad, a slim, active young fellow. “I’m going to make mincemeat of at least eight before they kill me, and I shall be in no greater danger there than up at the mines of ——, where I was knocked to pieces by a landslide. Three months I’ve been in hospital, and it’s just like my luck to be called out to Melilla the moment I get out. I’m not afraid. If they kill me it can’t hurt more than that landslide did.”

“He’ll sing a different song when he gets out there,” remarked an elderly man gloomily. “I know how the soldiers are treated—not enough to eat, and that bad, no clothes, no beds, and no cartridges to put into their rifles when they go into action. I saw it with my own eyes in Cuba.”

I ventured to suggest that Melilla was nearer to the resources of Spain than Cuba, and that the general condition of military affairs had considerably improved of late years.

“Don’t you believe it!” said the old soldier. “The Government sold Cuba to put money into their own pockets, and they will do the same in Morocco. Do you know what happened to us one day in the Cuban War? We found ourselves attacked by the enemy, and we had nothing, nothing to fight with. There were no officers; the chiefs were in a safe place, spending the money they had robbed us of (for we got no pay), and the inferiors were hiding from the Cubanos wherever they could, behind us, to be out of the fighting. I assure you this is true. When the Cubanos came upon us we tried to load the guns, but many of the balls did not fit, and we had no wadding.[19] We tore up our white drawers and our shirts to make wadding, but what was the good? It was hopeless for us to fight. And seeing the enemy upon us and we helpless to defend ourselves, we went mad with rage and despair and turned on each other, not knowing what we were doing. It was all the fault of the Jesuits at home, who stole the money which the nation gave for the Army. And it will be the same thing now with this Maura and his Jesuits, you will see!”

“It is all quite true,” said another old man. “My son has often told me the same. He said they tied their officers to the gun-carriages in

his company more than once to prevent them from running away. They said: ‘If we, the common soldiers, are to be killed like flies, at least you, the officers, shall take your share.’”

With such traditions firmly embedded in the popular belief, it would not have been surprising had a real spirit of mutiny been shown on the calling out the reservists in July, 1909. But this was not the case.

In an interview given to a representative of Le Journal of Paris, in November, 1909, by General Primo de Rivera, who was Minister of War previous to the disasters of July, that officer threw some light on SeÑor Maura’s conduct of military affairs, and explained why he had no alternative but to retire from office, to be abused by the Clericalists in power as “unpatriotic” for so doing. Here is a brief rÉsumÉ of his statement:

“From the moment I took office, foreseeing what was brewing at Melilla, I began to fortify our positions in the Riff. Expecting that General Marina would need reinforcements, I brought the regiments of the Cazadores del Campo de Gibraltar up to their full strength, and put the Orozco Division, in all three arms of the service, on a war footing. In order to secure rapidity of transport, I contracted with the Transatlantica Company to make the voyage in twenty-four hours, on only four hours’ notice. When General Linares replaced me in the Ministry, he thought fit to improvise all that was required, and this caused complete disorganisation in the Army. He refused to call out the divisions which I had held in readiness, and by drawing the troops from CataluÑa not only gave rise to the melancholy events of the “Red Week,” but rendered it necessary to incorporate many reservists who had married and set up homes in the belief that they were free from service, thus bringing misery on thousands of previously contented families. And after all this mismanagement it was necessary in the end to send the Orozco Division which I had prepared so long before.”

At the time one heard on all sides the question: “Why does the Government call out the reservists while the Orozco Division stands idle at home?” to which there has never been any reply but that of the people, who said: “The Government wants the war to go on because it suits the Jesuits, who are making a fortune out of it.”

But notwithstanding the acute distress throughout the country, the reports of an organised and widespread protest against the calling out of the reserves, which flooded the foreign Press at the time, were entirely unjustified and incorrect. Parents in Madrid wrote, full of anxiety, to their children in provincial towns, saying: “What is all this we hear about disturbances in your city? What is happening? What have the reservists been doing?” While the children were writing with equal urgency to ask what was amiss in the capital, that “such bad things” were being said of the soldiers in Madrid. I know these reports were spread, for I was asked to read aloud more than one such letter by working people who could not read for themselves.

It was not long before the people discovered that they had been deceived and vilified by some persons unknown, who were making it their business to represent Spain as in the throes of a revolution, and it was then that they became convinced that the rising in CataluÑa, represented by the Government as springing from a protest against the calling out of the reserves, was in fact a Carlist plot, gone wrong so far as the Carlists were concerned.

As one travelled about the country in 1909 it seemed as if every village had sent one or more of its sons to Melilla. Yet, although their families made sure that they were going straight to destruction, few endeavours were made to evade the call to arms.

I heard one man, an artisan, say with a shrug of his shoulders that he was going because he might as well be shot in action as shot for a deserter at home, and I saw another fling himself flat on the platform when the train came in, howling that “he was afraid of being killed and didn’t want to go to the war.” The first was a professed republican; the second, as the bystanders promptly informed me, was “drunk, as usual.”

Very likely there were other cases of the same kind, but they were certainly exceptional. I made it my business to travel as much as I could at that time, on purpose to observe the people, for, knowing the Spanish peasant, I did not believe the tales current in the foreign Press of his cowardly and mutinous conduct, and I wished to see for myself how he behaved. I saw no such disgraceful exhibitions as were described by English and French journalists.

The conversations that I overheard were very naÏve: not at all the talk of a rebellious people, notwithstanding the tales of suffering in Cuba and in the Carlist wars which balked so large in the popular imagination.

“My son! my son!” wailed one woman. “They will kill thee! I shall never see thee again!”

“Hush, mother!” answered the young man. “Rest assured that if they do kill me I shall have killed plenty of them first.”

“Why will they not let us women go too!” cried another mother. “We could kill all the Moras [female Moors] and then they would bring no more little Moors into the world to be the ruin of Spain.”

It was curious to observe how the eternal race-hatred came out at the very name of Moor—the tradition of the long contest between Christian and Moslem. The Moors of Morocco cannot be held to have inflicted any serious injury on the nation for many centuries past, yet such is the force of ancient tradition among the peasantry that the very name of Moro calls forth the cry, “They are the ruin of Spain,” and if you ask for an explanation you will be told that “The Moors are always pressing upon us and trying to take our country from us.”

One pathetic yet humorous incident was related by the Infanta DoÑa Paz (aunt to Don Alfonso) in a letter which she wrote to the Press about this time, exhorting her fellow-countrywomen to have patience and be of good courage. Describing her experiences of the patriotism of the men and the devotion of the women, she told how a poor mother, learning that her son was ordered to report himself for service, followed him from village to village, as he pursued his avocation of pedlar, carrying his regimental trousers, which had been put away in the family clothes-chest. When she found him at last, there was barely time for him to catch the appointed train, and the two hurried together to the station with the trousers flapping like a flag as they ran.

The sons of mothers like these do not shirk their duty when called upon to fight for their country. I believe that if the whole truth were told, we should find that no one was more indignant at the protest supposed to have been initiated by the working classes of Barcelona than the reservists whose grievances were its ostensible object.

Fresh from an exceptionally rough crossing, weak with sea-sickness, rusty in their drill after three years of home life, the reservists who sailed from Barcelona found themselves led straight from the ship on to the field of battle. This I had from a naval officer on the man-of-war that took them out.

“If they had been veterans,” he said, “such a situation would have been trying to them, and they were only raw fellows who hardly remembered the words of command. And yet I tell you they behaved with such courage and

discipline that I felt proud to be among them. I was sorry and ashamed to see those sea-sick boys ordered into action, but now I am glad to remember what I saw my compatriots do that day.”

The naval officer spoke of an incident in the early days of the war, before the foreign correspondents had reached the scene of action. But for some time the censors, both at the front and in Madrid, had made it impossible for the truth about the campaign to be told; and England, at any rate, was for several weeks allowed to remain under the impression that the Spanish rank and file were a cowardly lot, driven into action at the point of their officers’ swords. That impression was corrected as time went on, and it is, I believe, now generally admitted that the Spanish troops do not lack courage.

In Spain the conscripts join at the age of eighteen, and serve three years with the colours, when they are drafted into the first reserve. But those who can afford it may buy exemption from service for 1,500 pesetas (say £60), and from this source the Government makes an income estimated in the Budget for 1909 at pesetas 12,800,000 (about £512,000). Naturally the well-to-do always buy themselves out, as do also a certain number of the more prosperous of the working classes in the industrial towns. SeÑor Maura’s Government, not long before they went out, suddenly made an order calling on all those who had already bought their exemption to pay another 500 pesetas or join the colours at once, a proceeding which, differing as it does in no respect from highway robbery, naturally caused a good deal of indignation. No one likes to be called on to pay a second time over for what he has already bought; and in the case of the workmen, who generally secure themselves against service by means of one of the numerous insurance companies formed ad hoc, the premiums they had already paid were of course thrown away, and few indeed of them could produce 500 pesetas at a moment’s notice.

A scheme is on foot for doing away with the present unjust system, and making service compulsory on all alike. It provides for six months’ instead of three years’ service with the colours, the term to be extended, in the case of the illiterate, until they can read and write.

This scheme obtained from the first the support of the whole Liberal, Radical, and Republican Press, but the opposition of the Clericalists must always be counted on in Spain, and the proposals most obviously beneficial to the nation are usually those which meet with the strongest opposition. Another popular clause in the scheme affects the officers, whose pay is small. At present the officers live where they can: they have no mess, and their quarters in barracks are so much the reverse of luxurious that a lieutenant in a smart regiment apologised for not asking me to visit him there, as he, knowing our English customs, would have liked to do, because, said he, “it is not fit for an Englishman to see.”

It is now proposed, in order to reduce the cost of living in the Army, that quarters and a mess shall be provided for the officers in barracks. Most Spanish officers have to live on their pay, and even a captain in the cavalry only gets about £140 a year. On the other hand, their social expenses are very small, subscription dances, dinners, sports, and the numerous calls on the purse of a British officer being unknown in Spain.