(3 of 4)
An extra loudspeaker was set up by Reds facing the fortress and connected to a microphone into which the Ambassador spoke at a safe distance: "ATTENTION ALCÁZAR! The Ambassador of the Republic of Chile, accredited to the Spanish Republic, wishes to speak to you! If you agree to this request signal with a white flag from the second balcony of the tower facing the Zocodover Square. Meanwhile the Government suspends hostilities. ATTENTION ALCÁZAR!" Five times the Ambassador thus adroitly asked the Commandant to show the white flag of surrender. Finally Alcázar cadets, who had been under siege for 54 days, replied with one shot at the squawking loudspeaker.
Three days later the Chilean was still appealing to the Alcázar without result. "If I succeed," he declared, "it will be the success not of the Ambassador of Chile alone, but of the entire Diplomatic Corps, which I have the honor to represent as Dean!" By this time nearly three weeks of Red mining and sapping had stowed away under the rocky base of the Alcázar not the "20 tons of TNT" but something like four tons of miscellaneous explosives equipped with electric detonators 200 feet long. In Madrid the Cabinet, dramatically convened, agreed with Premier Largo Caballero that they must take what they called "the terrible decision" to order the detonating buttons pressed. All citizens of Toledo were ordered to quit their homes lest they go up in the GRAND BLAST, advertised to kill every one of the 1,400 cadets and 400 women and children in the Alcázar.
Down next morning at 6:15 a. m. went the handles of the detonators and afternoon papers throughout the world shrieked such page-wide headlines as: COMMUNISTS BLOW UP ALCÁZAR! — NEARLY ALL DEFENDERS FEARED DEAD! An entire trainload of additional Red militia had arrived from Madrid to help the Toledo Militia swarm in over the ruins. To make the assault safer Red artillery poured a 15-minute barrage into the clouds of dust and smoke rising over the Alcázar. Then 1,500 militia led by four militia girls surged forward expecting merely to wade in White blood. As they neared Spain's West Point, suddenly and amazingly indomitable cadets poked the noses of machine guns from around splintered crags of the Alcázar, pressed the triggers and started a chug-chug of bullets most of which seemed to go low and catch the militia in the legs. As the Red charge broke and failed on the 59th day of the siege, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Barcelo, was carried off the field with a bullet in his leg, still crying with Spanish braggadocio: "Everything is going fine!" Explained one of his friends, Spanish Muralist Luis Quintanilla, Ernest Hemingway's good friend (TIME, Dec. 3, 1934), who has now become a militia major: "We cannot take a fortress like the Alcázar in five minutes!"