the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt eight)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Germans and Italians had unveiled their new modern air force with the market in Guernica as its only target. The bombers dropped an unusual payload, splinter and incendiary bombs, a cocktail of shrapnel and flame personally selected by Richthofen for maximum destruction to buildings. As people fled, the fighters came in low and chased them down with heavy-caliber machine guns.

At 7:45 the planes disappeared, leaving the blackened forms of the few remaining walls silhouetted against the bursting flames, which glowed into the night sky.

The cratered streets were cluttered with the entrails of bombed out buildings—blackened bricks and twisted wires and pipes. In the rubble were the charred corpses of people, sheep, and oxen. The Basque government estimated that 1,645 people were killed in the three-hour attack. Guernica’s population was only 7,000, though between refugees and the market, there may have been another 3,000 people in town that afternoon. The only ones who had a chance to accurately count casualties were Franco’s troops, who occupied the town three days later. Records of what they found have never been released. At first they said it never happened. Later, they admitted to possibly two hundred casualties. But given the intensity of the attack and the population of the town, the number of dead must have been far higher than the 258 deaths in the much briefer bombing of Durango.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt seven)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

Of the twenty-one major-generals on active service in the Spanish military, Franco was one of only four who were not loyal to the Republic. A squeaky-voiced, insecure little man, forty-four years old, Franco had an ability to lead and inspire that is hard to explain. Perhaps it was his confidence, his almost naïve belief in his ability to prevail. Among his few admirable qualities, he had demonstrated great physical courage as a young officer in the endless Moroccan war. With a keen sense of the power of terror and little knowledge of modern warfare, he loved bayonet charges, because they were frightening. He was both ruthless and heartless, using fear as his favorite weapon. As a field officer, leading charges, mounted on a white horse, he was known for brutality both in Morocco and, in 1917, when he was in command of one of the units putting down a miners’ strike in Asturias.

Franco had cunning rather than analytic intelligence, and an instinct for self-preservation rather than an ideology. He was capable of the most dramatic reversals, if they served his needs, fawning over Hitler when he thought Germany would win and then becoming pro-American to save himself. Acutely sensitive to symbolism, he wore clothes that reflected complex alliances and fantasies. When in the north, he often wore the red beret of Carlism, with the black shirt of fascism, and sometimes added a white admiral’s jacket.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt six)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Spanish-American War, the Disaster, the Cuban War of Independence—it was a different war for different people. But only the United States won. Though the war’s boosters in America had promoted it as the war to rescue poor Cuba in its noble struggle against Spanish tyranny, once the new territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines were taken by military force, the United States had little interest in setting any of them free. In fact, the United States granted Puerto Rico and Cuba less self-government than the Spanish had offered. The new territories were, to the Americans, delicious war booty. Books with titles such as Our New Possessions excitedly introduced these prizes to the American public. Meanwhile, the Spanish public had to adapt to suddenly being without these places, the last of the empire that they had known for four centuries. Spain had lost the lands won by Columbus, Magellan, Elcano, and all the other great men reproduced in stone and bronze. The places with which they traded, the places to which a Spaniard went to seek a fortune or adventure, the places to go when things went wrong in Spain, the places that were Spain’s claim to being a world power, were gone.

This disaster produced the greatest flow of literature Spain had seen since the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century known in Spanish literature as the golden age. The new turn-of-the-century writers and artists were called “the generation of ’98,” a group who responded to El Desastre by seeking to analyze and redefine the newly diminished Spain. Through paintings, novels, poems, and essays, they searched for the essence of Spain in Castilian landscape, in the history of the golden age, in critical examinations of classic literature such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The pivotal question was: How can Spain undergo a regeneration?

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt five)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

Nothing so illustrates the romance of the Carlist cause as their hat, the Carlist trademark, a large red beret. The Carlists brought the beret into fashion in Europe, and it has never since gone out of style. Although the first known used of the word beret dates to a 1461 text in Landes, and through Gascognes and others in the region had worn this hat of unknown origin, there has been a long-standing association between Basques and berets. Jesuit novices wore a birette, and a bas-relief in Tolosa dated 1600 shows berets. The Carlists wore it in red, the color traditionally worn on Basque holidays, and made it their own. La Boina, “the beret,” was the name of a Carlist newspaper, and it was during the First Carlist War that the French began referring to the hat, as they still do, as le beret Basque. Since the First Carlist War, the hat not only has become a central symbol of Basqueness but has also gained international popularity and is generally associated with the political left. Argentine leftist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara saw no contradiction in using the image of the beret, because it is the hat of the underdog fighting the establishment.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt four)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The Carlists often seemed fanatically right-wing. They opposed an elected representative parliament as a foreign concept. They opposed universal male suffrage because it dismantled the privilege of rural landowners. Freedom of religion was objectionable because it diminished the power of the Catholic Church, and they were infuriated by the long overdue abolition of the Inquisition even though it had persecuted Basque peasants.

Freemasonry, a nonsectarian religious movement, was singled out by Carlists as a particularly odious enemy that, according to the bishop of Urgel, chaplain of the Carlist army, “has been robbing Europe and the new world of its beliefs and Christian morality.” Mystifyingly, Freemasons, by virtue of their lack of Church affiliation, have always been a target of denunciation, but especially in the nineteenth century. In the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party of 1827 was the first third party.

Though today Carlism seems extremist, in the volatile nineteenth century, Carlists were often seen as romantic figures. They were the underdogs, the brave and hardworking people of the countryside, fighting the powerful. Curiously, the great anti-cleric voice of the nineteenth-century industrial masses, Karl Marx, praised the Carlists and not the anti-Church Liberals: “The traditional Carlist has the genuinely mass national base of peasants, lower aristocracy and clergy, while the so-called Liberals derived their base from the military, the capitalists, latifundist artistocracy, and secular interests.”

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt three)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

The drink that Cortés brought back also quickly became popular in Spain, and when both Louis XIII and Louis XIV married Spanish princesses, their brides brought the drink to the French court. Louis XIV’s bride, María Theresa, the same bride who was served macaroons at her St.-Jean-de-Luz wedding, did little to dispel the belief that chocolate was a toxic and evil addiction. She could not stop drinking chocolate every day, and this was thought to be the reason that she lost all of her teeth.

the last book I ever read (The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky, excerpt two)

from The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky:

In the early years of Christianity, hermetism was a common phenomenon, not only in the Basque region but throughout northern Iberia. Devout men lived harsh, ascetic existences alone in mountain huts. In the year 800, one such hermit in the northwestern Galicia region of Iberia saw a shaft of brilliant light. Following this beam, he came upon a Roman cemetery. Under the shaft of light he found a small mausoleum concealed by overgrown vines, weeds, and shrubs. Since beams of celestial light don’t lead to just anyone’s grave, he concluded that this must have been the burial place of Saint James, Santiago, brother of John the Divine. The cemetery became known as Campus Stellae, the star field, and later Compostela.

According to legend, James, one of the first disciples chosen by Jesus, after the crucifixion went off to a distant land, sometimes specified as Iberia, to find converts. Having failed, he returned to Jerusalem, where he was beheaded by Herod, who refused to allow his burial. Christians gathered up his remains at night, placing them in a marble sepulchre, which they sent to sea aboard an unmanned boat. According to early Christian legend, the ship was guided by an angel to the kingdom of the Asturians, which is an area between Basqueland and Galicia.

The Church confirmed the hermit’s finding in Galicia and had a church built over the spot. As the legend grew, an outbreak of miracles and visions was reported from Compostela. Sometimes Saint James was portrayed as a pilgrim and sometimes as a Moor-slaying knight. It was the age of Moor slaying, and many of the miracles and legends had to do with the triumph of Christianity over Islam. Much evidence even suggests that the French had fabricated the legends about Santiago, or his body, going off to Galicia, because they wanted to rally Christendom to defend northern Spain. One legend from the time claimed that Charlemagne himself, the great anti-Moorish warrior who died in 814, had found the body of Santiago in Galicia.