Nonetheless a farce for being the most spectacular siege of the entire Spanish Civil War, the bloody and infernal affair of the Toledo Alcázar boomed and belched and banged last week toward an end thoroughly Spanish, thoroughly heroic. The Alcázar is the West Point of Spain. The farce began on July 21 when the Red radio of Madrid announced that Commandant José Moscardó and his 1,400 soldiers and spruce Spanish cadets had surrendered to 10,000 peasants under radical General Riquelmo. This broadcast was a midriff laugh to all Spanish officers who know the stuff of which their West Pointers are made. With a rabble overrunning the town of Toledo, some 400 middle class women and children sought shelter with the cadets in the Alcázar, an ancient fortress-castle with walls six feet thick built on one of the most commanding and impregnable piles of mountainous rock in Spain.
On July 30 the commander of Toledo's new Red workers militia, one Comrade Daniel Ovalle, admitted that the Whites still held the Alcázar, asked whether he should shell it. On Aug. 4 tentatively and one by one at intervals Reds popped 60 4-in. shells at the Alcázar without result, telephoned into the fortress to tell Commandant Moscardó: "We warn you heavier shells will come." On Aug. 11 cadets shot a cavalry mount for meat and mobsters standing at a safe distance shrieked at the military academy: "You fools! Why don't you surrender?"
The Portuguese, sympathetic with Spain's Whites, kept broadcasting to the Alcázar cadets from Lisbon: "The world is breathless before your heroism! If you can hold out you can have full revenge on your tormentors. Moroccan troops have instructions not to leave a soul alive in Toledo! They are within nine miles of the city butchering Marxist villagers." This false claim made mirth for the Reds who also guffawed when White Seville broadcast on Aug. 31 the lie that White "Colonel Yague is at the gates of Toledo!"
On Sept. 1 Toledo mobsters under orders from Madrid broke ground for subterranean mining of the Alcázar and talked of blowing it up with "20 tons of TNT." On Sept. 3 a lieutenant of the Red Militia, apparently in his cups and wearing a gaudy bathrobe, staggered toward the Alcázar shouting that he wanted to rescue a Red comrade who had fallen wounded just outside its walls. "All right!" called an Alcázar cadet, "Come and rescue him, so long as you leave us his gun." This bargain the bathrobed rescuer scrupulously kept. On Sept. 5 the calibre of Red guns picking at the Alcázar was up to six inches, but its six-foot walls stood firm. Next day a White plane flew over the fortress, dropped large packages of foodstuffs. Red batteries finally splintered to bits an ornate door frame of the Alcázar known as "The Portal of the Blood of Christ."