Last Citadel

‘Because,’ Luis said, ‘you wanted me to be.’

An hour later, Ramon de Vega engaged his second bull, the final and the greatest of the six in that day’s corrida, and he was magnificent. He won the crowd again and was awarded two severed ears from the wonderfully dead bull. Circling the ring, Ramon held up the ears to the roaring crowd.

Luis walked behind him gathering off the ruffled dirt the tossed roses, wineskins, hats, cigars, and ladies’ fans.

The year was 1934. Luis intensified his apprenticeship under his father, learning all the passes, and perfecting his courage as a banderillero

. He would become the next generation of great matadors in the de Vega lineage. One day he came home and told his father his friends had come up with a nickname for him, The Dagger.

But around him, boiling about his family and the bullrings, across Barcelona and all of Spain, was civil unrest. The elected Republican government had for several years begun to unravel the ancient influences of the Church in Spain. Luis’s father despised the Republicans as socialists and middle-class reformers, handmaidens of the Communists. Ramon told Luis many times the government wanted to sweep away old Spain, a society built on Catholicism, monarchy, and the military, buttressed by birthright and honor. The Republicans wanted to reform the country into a little model of Russia, where there was fake equality among men, all were laborers, there were no peasants, no noblemen, and there was no God for anyone.

In Barcelona, a Republican bastion in Catalonia, Luis watched the violence grow. Priests were murdered - he saw a mob force a priest to lie on the ground with his arms spread in the shape of the cross before they chopped his arms off - nuns violated, and churches desecrated. Brawls spilled into the streets, it was the old and the new come to blows. Labor groups became vigilantes in what was known as the Red Terror, they rounded up suspected opponents and held midnight courts and dawn executions. Luis was kept away from the fights and the virulent politics by his father. But revolution was brewing. Even practicing his passes with the muleta and his thrusts with the dagger and the estoque, Luis saw the revolt coming.

In 1936, the Republican Catalonian governor shut down the bullrings, claiming the events were anti-Socialist. The energies of the people would be better spent building the new Spanish culture, not hewing to old, violent traditions. Ramon de Vega saw no hope for peace; a delirium was in Spain and it had to be thrashed out between the Soviet-backed Republicans and the unyielding supporters of old Spain, the Nationalists. He sent his son away from the bulls, into the Nationalist army, to serve in Spanish Morocco under his old friend, General Francisco Franco.

Within four months, the uprising in Spain erupted. Franco needed his army to come quickly from Morocco, and he got the help he needed from the German Fuhrer Hitler. Luis boarded a German airplane with the rest of Franco’s loyal army and headed over the Straits of Gibraltar for the mainland.

For the next three years, Luis Ruiz de Vega fought in the armored division. His tanks were supplied by the Nazis and the Italians. They were all lightly protected, creaky playthings and pitifully gunned. Mussolini sent his CV-35, Hitler his Panzer Mark Is. Neither could withstand a direct hit from the smallest anti-tank guns of the Republicans, and neither stood a chance against the fast Russian T-26s with their 45 mm guns. Luis learned to be sly in his tanks, to come from the flank and behind, to dodge the horns of the enemy, always relying on speed and cunning more than strength. He earned promotions to squad and platoon leader, then company commander, leading as many as a dozen tanks into battle.

In the three years of the Spanish Civil War, Luis became an ace, la Daga, destroying more than fifty Republican tanks in the battles for Madrid, Malaga, Bilbao, Segovia, and finally, his homeland, Catalonia. He fought alongside the German Condor Legion, and began his study of their language. Fighting on the side of the Republicans were English and French, and Luis hardened his heart against these nations for supporting the Communist enemy. Franco’s alliance with Hitler led Luis to follow the events outside Spain in greater Europe. In March of 1938, Nazi Germany stormed into Austria. In October, Germany captured Czechoslovakia. Luis had no real love for the creed of the Nazis - their fascism and its required dictator, this would not be right for Spain; his own land needed the Church and its older, perhaps more backward ways - but Hitler had been a good ally and his troops were superb. In March of ‘39, Madrid fell at last to the Nationalists and Generalissimo Franco assumed power to end the Civil War, reuniting the country. Luis went home to Barcelona and his father. He was convinced that the New Order in Spain was going to flow from Franco; he knew, too, the new face of greater Europe would be Hitler’s.

Luis told his father he’d made up his mind to remain in the military.

This was where fresh glory for the de Vega family would arise, not from the bulls. Surely Hitler would conquer Europe. How could he not? Who would stop him? The English and the French had not lifted a finger to hinder Germany’s expansions. Nor had the Americans. The Russians had been whipped with German help right there in Spain, for all to see. When the European war came, Luis intended to help the Germans. When that war was won, he would return to Barcelona a hero, a powerful man, a de Vega with a debt from Hitler himself. Luis stood before his father a decorated veteran, a man in every right. Ramon took his son into the courtyard, gripped the handles of the old bull-barrow and rushed at him. After a half hour, the matador laughed. ‘So, you’ve lost your skills as a banderillero.’

Ramon gave his blessing for Luis to stay a soldier.

Within five months of the Spanish Civil War’s end, Hitler invaded Poland. France and England declared war on Germany. Franco kept Spain neutral. Hitler came to Spain seeking repayment for the debt of blood won by his legions, his tanks and planes in Franco’s service during the Civil War.

But the Generalissimo refused even to let German troops march across Spain to attack the British garrison in Gibraltar. After their conference, Hitler was quoted as saying, ‘I’d rather have three or four teeth out than meet that man again.’ Luis agreed with Franco; Spain had suffered enough in the previous three years. Over a half-million Spaniards had died fighting or by the executions. War had gorged on Spain, it was time to feed elsewhere.

That place was to be Russia.

Franco paid his debt to Hitler in another manner. He raised the Blue Division, twenty thousand strong. Their colors were that of the Nationalist Falange Party, they wore red berets and dark blue shirts. By handing the Blue Division to Hitler, Franco averted the threat of Axis invasion across the Pyrenees. The Blue Division, like the soldiers in every army who go to battle on foreign soil, was made up of every kind of man, with every sort of reason. Many were fervid anti-Communists or pro-German. Some were adventurers, others were starving in Franco’s new Spain and joined for the food and clothes. Most were professional soldiers in the Spanish army and war was their craft. The youngest ones of these, like Luis, went to invade Russia to coat themselves in glory for their return to Spain, or to find death instead.

The Blue Division left Madrid in July 1941, for training in Germany Luis, because of his combat experience and ability to speak German, was made a captain. In October, the Blue Division was shipped across the Russian frontier.

Luis fought to the gates of Leningrad. His Latin troops were brave and loyal, but were treated badly by their German superiors. The Blue Division was given poor equipment and worse support in the field, and their strength ebbed. America entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s