felo

90 years ago today, Madrid awoke to find the government had fled as the battle for the city began in the Civil War. Before the Int. Brigades' arrival, it was workers' militias who held the line. 400 hairdressers with 150 rifles were left to hold their positions at the Casa de Campo lake against Franco's professional and brutal army. As Almudena Grandes wrote: "It was November 6, 1936, and Madrid was alone, left to its own devices with its children, with its fate as a lost city - condemned, abandoned to its fate... Whe next day came, the bakers didn’t bake bread, the bricklayers didn’t lay bricks, the teachers didn’t open the schools, and the barbers didn’t shave anyone. Not even themselves, because even before dawn they were already at their posts in the Casa de Campo. They were barbers and hairdressers, not soldiers, but [Franco's] regular troops couldn’t make them retreat a single inch - not even at the cost of half of them being slaughtered. It was November 7, 1936, and Madrid smiled with lead in its belly. They were bakers, bricklayers, teachers, barbers, and two days earlier, most of them didn’t even know how to fire a rifle. But if they hadn’t exercised their heroic and sovereign will, the 8th would never have dawned for the International Brigades to march down Calle Atocha, and the reinforcements of the 9th and the 10th would never have arrived."