Asturias, from Adrian: Book One

Sleeping… soothed by the lullaby of the chunk-chunk…clack-clack of steel wheels on steel tracks… then a whistle… awake… another town… another group of volunteers boarding… steam exploding from the pistons of the engine. Alesandro watched the eager new ones standing in the aisle… falling against each other as the train jerked to a start… then turned his attention to the changing Castilian landscape passing his window… images flashing by as the train wound its way towards Asturias; to another country on the far side of Spain. 

Alesandro was crammed into a seat on the wooden bench of the car, shoulder to shoulder, with young men… young or younger than he. Their voices were, from the start in Madrid, loud and boisterous… songs of the revolution… “A Las Barricades!” Bravado smothered fear and anticipation, driven by the cheers of crowds alongside the tracks waving red and black flags … the engine of fate tugged chugged their cars away from the station and from the safety of home.

 Some aboard were CNT labor unionists, veterans of street fighting , but most were volunteers: metropolitan boys with pink hands. The images on the posters were of men; masculine men with chiseled chins and muscled forearms, fists thrusted skyward over the barricades... men, not boys... boys who hoped to be greeted with cheers and welcomed by the rugged calloused hands of miners holding firm at the barricades of Gijón and Oviedo. The train left Madrid loaded up these untrained young and eager faces on railways controlled by the CNT armed by little more than the enthusiasm and the naivety of youth. Only a few had seen blood from more than a scratch before and were unprepared for what awaited them in the mining towns in and above Oviedo or Gijón on the Biscay coast. From Madrid the tracks crossed north through the heartland of Castile-Leon and into a region of rugged mountains, passing towns and stations that prominently posted the red and black flags of the Anarchist revolution. 

Next to Alesandro sat snoring the fledgling journalist, Marcel Fournier; his brother by adoption and Euskara blood.  Their bond was stronger than that of paternity, or patriotic zeal. Alesandro, orphaned at five, had been embraced and given a home near Biarritz by Marcel’s half-Basque father out of loyalty to the Otxoa family. Because of his secondary level education at the Lycée Militaire, Alesandro had an inkling of military experience and felt responsible for, and protective of, Marcel.

There is no irony greater than that the same cars packed with revolutionaries would turn back to Madrid as a symbolic act of co-operation with the Republic by the CNT that controlled the rails. These trains would then be loaded up with the troops of Colonel Yague and General Ochoa to deliver slaughter to the strikers. Veteran of combat, Moroccan troops, under orders of the Generals of the Republic in Madrid, Francisco Franco and Manuel Goded, were sent to quell the miners’ strike of Asturias. The storm clouds forming in the atmosphere of the Second Republic of Spain was dark with foreboding: a civil war that the life of Alesandro (Gotson) Otxoa would be entangled from his first taste of combat in October of 1934 until his imprisonment in Carabanchel in 1954.