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Retreat to Morocco. Young Barea got a job as one of 60 unsalaried "apprentices" in a great foreign bank, the Credit Etranger (250,000,000 francs capital). At the end of the year he was one of three apprentices taken on as paid employes. The rest were fired and new boys who would work for nothing took their places. The bank's business, he soon decided, was to control or ruin other businesses. After a few years he exchanged one hopelessness for another and took service in the army in Morocco, building a road into the hostile territory of Abd-el-Krim. From top officers down, the army was as sick with graft as many of its members were with malaria and syphilis.
Barea saw honorable and intelligent Spanish officers trying to conduct war against the Moors. He also saw the disaster of Melilla in 1921, brought on when King Alfonso ordered the commanding general to make an insane attack. In the relief of Melilla, Barea slaved in a nightmare of stinking, mutilated dead. The Spanish Foreign Legion saved Melilla. Then and later Barea heard legionaries speak with awe of the cold and murderous courage of an officer named Francisco Franco. He also learned of a cynical doctrine held by some military careerists: it would never do to relieve Spain—either by complete success or withdrawal—of the mess and waste of the Moroccan adventure.
Hamstrung Republic. In the '303, out of the army and a prosperous consultant on industrial patents, Barea observed from the inside how German interests, especially I. G. Farbenindustrie, had sunk their hooks deep into Spain's economy. Meanwhile, the parties of the Left—Socialists, Anarchists and Communists— brawled among themselves. No republican government could get enough strength to put through reforms against the opposition of the caciques (bosses). Barea does a careful portrait of this ancient Spanish type in action—the landowner, moneylender and local boss who deliberately let the countryside starve to hamstring the republic.
The Popular Front victory in the 1936 elections was something neither the caciques nor the army—nor the new Fascist Falange—could stomach. An ominous summer of street fights and rumors ended with Francisco Franco's moment—the vast confusion and fury of the Rightist uprising. Then, in Madrid, Barea saw gangsters and whores put on the overalls of "Milicianos," saw Anarchists and Socialists murdering each other and supposed Rightists without trial. He joined tipsy mobs setting churches afire and saw streets ringing with snipers' shots. It was months before the Loyalist Government could control its defenders.
Barea's narrative of his first year in besieged Madrid mixes impressions of heroism with comedy, brutality with cowardice. He worked for the Loyalist Foreign Ministry, under shell fire in the Telephone Building, censoring the dispatches of foreign correspondents. He liked Herbert Matthews, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. Others seemed hateful to him, treating as a football game what he felt to be a tragic .agony. He survived it with the help of an Austrian woman whom he later married.