Begun in mid-December 1937, the battle was a damaging blow to the Nationalists, distracting Franco from his prolonged attempt to encircle and capture Madrid. In high mountain country, surrounded by bleak rocky peaks and ravines, the ancient walled city of Teruel lay at the end of the Nationalist salient whose railway line Hemingway had helped sabotage. The city itself had been the site of the kind of atrocities that took place whenever the Nationalists captured new territory and flaunted their power. In one case, 13 people judged subversive, including a twenty-year-old woman and the director of a teacher training college—teachers were always suspect—were shot in Teruel’s central square, after which people danced to band music in the victims’ blood.
The local bishop, Anselmo Polanco, objected—but only to the dancing. Otherwise, he was a fierce backer of the Nationalist cause and apparently gave permission for Franco’s troops to shoot two of his priests considered too friendly to the Republic. In August, from the balcony of his palace he had reviewed a parade by a battalion of Foreign Legionnaires who passed by carrying the noses, ears, and other body parts of murdered Republican prisoners speared on their bayonets. As an object of public humiliation, one prisoner had been left alive and forced to parade carrying a heavy load and wearing an ox’s yoke, as if he were a pack animal.
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