[26] The interdependence of the state and the army in Spain grew out of the resistance of traditional society to the onset of modernization: the army protected the ruling oligarchy from the demands of newly mobilized social groups; the politicians in turn respected the desire of the military middle class to avoid professional reforms damaging to vested interests. As a consequence, the Spanish army was only partly professionalized by the turn of the century. ⁽¹⁾ The military had been a career open to talents since the Napoleonic wars; by 1900 the officer corps was recruited primarily from the middle class and trained in military academies rather than in the regiments. Yet Spanish officers continued to resist essential aspects of professionalization such as selective promotions and rationalization of the military bureaucracy, because the underdeveloped Spanish economy offered them few other alternatives for employment. In addition, the army's institutional autonomy was limited by the determination of the politicians and the king to use promotions and appointments to reward the politically reliable and the well-connected. Military professionalization was thus sacrificed to the interests of the ruling elites and the middle-class clients who were the support of the Restoration system.
 
Military professionalization was a function of political modernization; as long as the politicians refused to broaden their base of support in the nation, military reform was impossible. The dilemma facing the politicians was that without military reform, the regime was permanently susceptible to a resurgence of praetorianism. The politicians dared not insist on reform without further antagonizing the already disaffected officer corps. Yet the unreformed army was the weak spot in a regime that was increasingly on the defensive after the turn of the century.
 
[27] The Structure of the Army
 
The basic defect of the Spanish army was the excessive number of officers. The problem was decades old: the top-heavy officer corps was a product of pronunciamiento politics, of the amnesty policy that had incorporated defeated Carlist officers into the regular army in 1839, of the civil wars of the 1830s and 1870s and the colonial wars throughout the century. After demobilization in 1899 reduced the standing army to eighty thousand, there was a ratio of one officer to fewer than four enlisted men; eight thousand officers were without assignment. ⁽²⁾ The financial burden these officers represented forestalled the modernization of the army's equipment and training, which were almost completely neglected. As one tough-minded (and unpopular) military reformer put it, "however we look at the problem, we shall see that the first task ought to be and must be one of pruning; and in order to prune, we need energy more than expertise. . . ." ⁽³⁾
 
But all proposals for more than a token reduction in personnel encountered the resistance of a bureaucratic middle class that had no other place to go. Rhetoric about the "priesthood of arms" notwithstanding, the average officer's career was his livelihood rather than his vocation. The army, like the state administration, was a haven for the traditional middle classes; to deprive them of the jobs that enabled them to starve to death with dignity was to alienate a sector of the population that, though not large, was essential to the political stability of the regime. Typical of the bureaucratic outlook of most officers was their constant refusal to comply with reductions unless they were duplicated in the civil administration. ⁽⁴⁾ While generally agreeing that reform was necessary, they invariably resisted cutbacks with the dismayed protest that one generation should not be forced to pay for the folly of previous ones. ⁽⁵⁾

Thus, personnel reductions, which required the prolonged implementation of a vigorous policy of academy closures, early retirements, and amortizations, were minimal because of the political risk involved in attacking vested interests. "Amortization" plans involved freezing promotions by eliminating vacancies at a given annual rate. In 1899 the rate had been set at 50 percent: for every two vacancies that occurred at a given rank, only one man was promoted. Because amortizations were designed to eliminate excessive numbers of officers at all ranks but the lowest, they were particularly unpopular among junior officers, who quickly discovered that the freeze had an "exponential" effect that slowed promotions to a snail's pace. (The promotion of one captain [28] required the previous promotion of two majors, four lieutenant colonels, and eight colonels.)
 
Spanish officers were accustomed to more rapid promotion than their French and German counterparts, at least at the lower ranks. It required only nine to twelve years for promotion from lieutenant to captain in the Spanish army; in the Prussian army, lieutenants spent sixteen to eighteen years in grade. ⁽⁶⁾ A Spanish Infantry officer usually reached major through seniority between the ages of thirty-eight and forty; a French officer, between forty and forty-nine. ⁽⁷⁾ At the higher ranks, however, Prussian officers spent less time in grade, since there were proportionately fewer of them. Higher ranking officers in the Spanish army were thus ultimately penalized for their early insistence on rapid promotion. Yet the impulse was understandable, for the large number of officers kept salaries, especially at the junior ranks, very low. ⁽⁸⁾ Even though amelioration was possible only if the officer corps was radically reduced, the 50 percent freeze of 1899 created so much discontent that General Valeriano Weyler lowered the amortization rate to 25 percent in 1902. At the same time, he prohibited all lieutenants from marrying unless they could demonstrate financial independence.
 
Significant reduction of the active list was also extremely difficult without a policy of forced retirement. In 1906 the reform-minded General Agustín Luque proposed lowering the retirement age for division generals from sixty-eight to sixty-five and for brigadiers from sixty-five to sixty-two, but he dropped the idea quickly when the senior hierarchy reacted vehemently. With the ¡Cu-Cut! incident still fresh in everyone's memory, confrontation did not seem advisable. Meanwhile, new officers continued to flow into the overcrowded corps from the military academies, which remained open at the insistence of the king and of career officers with eligible sons. In defense of the academies, it was argued that there was a shortage of lieutenants in all the corps. But that shortage, which was real enough, was of the army's own making; the ceaseless demands for rapid promotion continually depleted the lower ranks, ⁽⁹⁾ while the snobbism and professional insecurity of the academy-trained officers denied regular commissions to noncommissioned officers, who, like the troops they led, were usually of peasant origin. Rankers were promoted into a separate reserve list, which supplied lieutenants when shortages occurred without posing a threat to the career opportunities of the middle-class officers on the active list. By 1912 a surplus of academy-trained lieutenants forced General Luque to end all promotions into the reserve list, thereby eliminating one of the few avenues of social mobility for the lower [29] classes. ⁽¹⁰⁾ In any event, this measure did not affect the size of the active list, which included several thousand officers with no assignment at all.
 
To stave off more vigorous measures, some officers argued that there was not an excess of officers, but a deficit of troops. Indeed, the fourteen divisions, consolidated and reorganized in 1904, were sadly understrength because of budgetary constraints. Many regiments had only five hundred men divided into two battalions, with a third -- fully staffed with officers -- on paper only. With fourteen divisions and only eighty thousand troops, each division could count at most on fewer than six thousand men. Given the lack of money, the obvious solution was a reorganization of the army into a smaller number of divisions, but of course, this would have also reduced the number of active commands at a time when a large number of officers were already without a post.
 
Apart from their personal stake in the outcome, the concern of Spanish officers for a large national standing army developed in the context of the arms race in the years before World War I. Dominated by the concept of the "nation in arms," the major powers, led by Germany and France, strove to increase their standing armies through new conscription laws that drafted more young men for longer periods of time. As the expectation of war grew, so did the pressures for even larger armies. In 1914 Germany had 42,000 officers for 820,000 troops; before the passage of the three-year bill in 1913, France had 29,000 officers for 540,000 troops. ⁽¹¹⁾
 
In contrast, Spain in 1910 had nearly 16,000 officers on the active and paid reserve lists for slightly more than 80,000 troops. While her officer-troops ratio was two to three times greater than that in France and Germany, her army was only one-third the size, per capita, of theirs. Seized by the same fears and hopes that stimulated military expansion elsewhere, Spanish officers insisted that the standing army be doubled, with a reserve army of 800,000 ready in case of war.
 
This was the military background for the passage, on February 27, 1912, of the conscription law sponsored by the Liberal prime minister, José Canalejas, and his War Minister, General Luque. A reflection of the European concern for universal conscription, it was also a delayed and partial response to the protests of the Tragic Week of 1909. As a solution to the injustices of the previous system, the law of 1912 was only moderately successful. Nevertheless, it established an ideal definition of the army as the military instrument of a democratic state, and thus represented an official attempt to draw the army out of its moral [30] isolation from the rest of the nation. Its weaknesses, on the other hand, illustrated the ambivalence of the dynastic politicians -- even Canalejas -- toward the full implementation of democracy in Spain.
 
The greatest strength of the new law was its requirement that all males, except for physically exempt and hardship cases, receive some military training, after which they would remain eligible for mobilization for eighteen years. ⁽¹²⁾ But this democratic principle was abridged by a provision for "quota soldiers" released after five or ten months' training upon payment of a fee of two thousand or fifteen hundred pesetas. While on active duty, quota soldiers were expected to furnish their own equipment and maintenance. Opposed as undemocratic by Canalejas, the quota system was supported by the army hierarchy, who were fearful of the effect of a rapid influx of well-educated recruits upon troop discipline and military authority. ⁽¹³⁾ The system also received the support of most Cortes deputies, who argued that middle- and upper-class boys could not endure the rigors of barracks life, which of course remained unsanitary and antiquated as long as only the lower classes were affected. Undeniably, the quota amounted to a new redemption system for the privileged, who did not fail to take advantage of it. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Nevertheless, it represented an improvement over the old system, which had provided total immunity from both training and wartime mobilization.
 
The conscription law did not provide Spain with a large or well-trained instrument of national defense. Once again, the culprit was the top-heavy officer corps, whose salaries continued to devour the military budget. Many conscripts received only a few weeks' training before being sent home; there was, as usual, no money left for new equipment. The principal advantage of the law of 1912 accrued to the officer corps, whose underemployment was partially alleviated by the need for new recruitment and training centers. Furthermore, the compromises in the law of 1912 undermined the basic goals of universal conscription: democratic reform and efficient utilization of the nation's manpower for defense. Spain's army was still composed of the poorest and least fit among the general population. ⁽¹⁵⁾ In 1915 there were 6.3 deaths per thousand soldiers, the highest noncombatant death rate in Europe. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Fully one-third of the recruits were illiterate, compared to 4 percent in France and less than 1 percent in Germany. ⁽¹⁷⁾ In an age in which weaponry and maneuvers had become increasingly complex, the implications were alarming. So were the implications of an undemocratic conscription law in an age in which political equality was increasingly a prerequisite for political strength in the West.
 
[31 ] The Military Budget
 
The military budget measured the extent to which the dynastic politicians were held hostage by the army. Between 1905 and 1915 the military budget expanded, unrestrained, by 110 percent without any noticeable increase in military efficiency; indeed, the army's poor performance in Morocco in 1909 indicated little improvement since the disaster in Cuba at the turn of the century. Burgeoning expenditures provided critics of the regime with an easy target, but apathy, combined with fear of arousing military anger, led most deputies to avoid the entire subject of fiscal reform. Traditionally, the Cortes approved the military budget after little or no discussion. ⁽¹⁸⁾
 
The intricacies of the budget provided another obstacle to careful parliamentary analysis. Perhaps intentionally, total military expenditures were never consolidated into a global figure, which could be calculated only by adding widely separated line items: the army and navy budgets, the War Ministry totals in the Moroccan section, retirement allocations, the totals for Customs Police in the Development budget and for the Civil Guard in the Interior Ministry. Furthermore, for political reasons, the figures in the "primitive budget" presented for parliamentary approval never accurately reflected anticipated expenditures after 1908; each year the cost overruns, granted as "extraordinary" or "supplementary" credits by royal decree, were submitted to the Accounting Tribunal of the Cortes for post facto approval and funding. Since the overruns usually proved to be for normally foreseeable expenditures on troop maintenance and housing, the Tribunal, defending the appropriations powers of the Congress, often refused to recommend funding. The result was not a reduction of illegal cost overruns, which were simply tacked on to the mounting budgetary deficits, but the institutionalization of a flagrant violation of the constitution and of parliamentary rights.
 
To confuse critics of the military budget even further, published government statistics employed misleading indexes to mask growing expenditures. For example, the index year chosen for War Ministry budgets was 1911, the year before the creation of the Moroccan Protectorate and the division of the army budget into peninsular and African categories. Using this index, subsequent War Ministry budgets appeared to decline, while actual military expenditures in all categories rose, first gradually, then dramatically after the outbreak of the world war in 1914. In 1915 the War Ministry spent 228 million pesetas, approximately the amount spent in the index year 1911. But expenditures in Morocco in 1915 comprised another 144 million pesetas, for a total of [32] 372 million and a rise in the real index to 161. ⁽¹⁹⁾ When the figures for the navy were added in, about 445 million pesetas were spent on national defense and Morocco in 1915, or 18 percent of total government expenditures (nearly half of which were consumed by interest on the skyrocketing national debt). ⁽²⁰⁾ As a percentage of all expenditures except the debt, military costs represented 34 percent of the total, a much larger fraction than any other sector. Understandably, critics patient enough to ferret out the statistics were skeptical of the War Ministry's pleas for more money.
 
Yet the army was undeniably underequipped, poorly trained, and badly maintained; indeed, Spain was spending less on her army than other European countries in the years immediately preceding the war. If we calculate that the budget represented no more than 10 percent of national income, Spain was spending 3.4 percent of her national income on defense. In contrast, according to A. J. P. Taylor, in 1915 Germany was spending about 4.6 percent of its national income on defense; France, 4.8 percent; Great Britain, 3.4 percent; and Italy, 3.5 percent. ⁽²¹⁾ Even more significant, the 3.4 percent of Spain's national income totaled only 16 million pounds sterling, while Germany was spending 111 million pounds annually in 1914; Great Britain, 77; France, 57; and Italy, 22 million.
 
What aroused the critics of Spain's military establishment was not so much the amount spent, particularly in view of the world crisis, but the way in which it was allocated. The army was inefficient and antiquated because officers' salaries comprised 35 percent of the total army budget, over twice the percentage spent in France or Germany. ⁽²²⁾ In the "primitive budget" presented by the War Minister, General Luque, in June 1916, salaries and maintenance of military personnel (officers and enlisted men) ate up 63 percent of the proposed budget of 169 million pesetas, a figure that was deliberately underestimated. ⁽²³⁾ In Morocco, where the War Ministry consumed 101 million pesetas of the 117 million budgeted, 60 percent went to pay officers and troops. Neither budget included a breakdown of officer and troop allocations in order to disguise the fact that what was left after the officers were paid was not enough to retain most conscripts for more than a few weeks' training. In both budgets only relatively small sums were left over to pay for administrative costs, materiel, barracks, basic rations (bread and fodder), maneuvers, transport, hospitals, and other health services. At the same time, because of the large number of officers, each individual's share was small, and, at the lower ranks, admittedly inadequate under inflationary conditions.
 
[33] In 1916 the basic annual pay scale for officers was as follows:

 

Captain general	30,000 pesetas	Captain	3,500
Lieutenant general	25,000	First lieutenant	2,500
Division general	15,000	Second lieutenant	2,115
Brigadier general	10,000	Sergeant	1,300
Colonel	8,000	Subofficial	1,150
Lieutenant colonel	6,500	Brigade	1,080
Major	5,500

 

While the privileged senior hierarchy enjoyed a substantial salary, augmented by pay supplements, pensions, and other perquisites, ⁽²⁴⁾ the average officer, a captain in a provincial garrison far from the capital, had to struggle to make ends meet. Although mounted posts, undesirable assignments (like the Canary Islands and the Pyrenean garrisons), and longevity increased one's pay, ⁽²⁵⁾ most officers found it difficult to apply for frequent transfers since the army did not pay moving expenses. Then, too, a change of regiment often meant a change of uniform, particularly in the Cavalry Corps. ⁽²⁶⁾ In some of the older regiments, the trappings of the dress uniform included plumes, gold braid and buttons, expensive epaulets, and fancy swords. Uniforms were expensive enough in any case, since there was no standard fabric or cut, and fashionable tailors vied with one another in developing distinguishing details. Furthermore, without influence in the War Ministry a transfer was difficult to obtain, particularly to the African regiments, where salaries were 50 percent higher. ⁽²⁷⁾ All salaries, whether munificent or not, were subject to the "discount," an income tax on the salaries of all state employees, which ranged from 5 to 18 percent of basic pay. ⁽²⁸⁾ This represented a substantial reduction in the actual salary of officers at both ends of the scale, more than canceling any supplements in most cases and causing serious discontent among lower-ranking officers who found their salaries inadequate to begin with.
 

One avenue of economic relief was to relinquish one's army salary in order to earn a living in a civil post. As a "supernumerary" an officer could work full time at another career without losing his place on the active list. Often a small municipality would hire an officer as its mayor or police chief; there were other officers serving as civil governors in the provinces. ⁽²⁹⁾ Such an important post was beyond the reach of most officers, however.
 

In 1916, the average forty-year-old officer was probably still a captain on the edge of promotion to major, earning 3,500 pesetas a year [34] plus 600 pesetas for over ten years of service at the same rank, or 352 pesetas a month. Out of this he was taxed 14 pesetas, leaving 338. This was little enough for a bachelor, especially in Madrid, where rents were high, and nearly impossible for a married officer. And the average officer did marry, usually a young woman from respectable society in his garrison or hometown. But the dashing uniform, so elegant when new, became faded and threadbare with age; so apparently, did the life of an officer's wife. Here is a typical monthly budget for a captain, his wife, and two children in 1917:
 
 
 

Food	120 pesetas	Tobacco	12
Rent	60	Shoes	10
Schools	18	Four meals out	10
Tailor	15	Light	8
Laundry	15	Professional journals	5
Coal	12	Ironing	3

This left about 50 pesetas to cover the cost of family clothing, domestic help, entertainment and holidays, and medical expenses. ⁽³⁰⁾
 
This budget is interesting for the light it sheds on the value system of Spanish officers. Most expenditures involved keeping up appearances; officers were expected to live like gentlemen on the income of a lower-middle-class clerk. ⁽³¹⁾ The eternal obsession of the middle class with appearances was exaggerated even further in the army officer, who felt that the uniform conferred greater social dignity and respect and who worried that military discipline would suffer if officers were forced to live like their social inferiors. ⁽³²⁾ In addition, garrison life involved an extraordinary amount of fraternal socializing and gestures of goodwill in the form of testimonial banquets, plaques, and swords, all paid for with contributions from brother officers. In a world in which influence and favor were primary factors in promotion, no officer dared remain aloof from these gatherings.
 
The economic distress and social insecurity of the average officer do not seem to have been offset by a rich personal life. A glimpse of his preoccupations and amusements can be derived from the three leading military newspapers. Noncommissioned officers read Ejército y Armada, the least influential; regular officers divided their loyalties between El Ejército Español, the organ of Agustín Luque, the leading Liberal general, and La Correspondencia Militar, whose editor, Julio Amado, sympathized with discontented junior officers. By 1917 Amado was publishing five editions a day. In general, neither of the two leading dailies was remarkably informative or analytical, but their editorial [35] pages nevertheless provided a barometer by which to measure the climate of army opinion.
 
The military dailies were four pages long and cost five céntimos. In addition to news on military legislation, assignments, and promotions, they carried a page and a half of national and international news. Editorial comment was restricted to the lead article on the front page; parliamentary debates and social disturbances in Catalonia, usually given regular columns, were generally reported without comment. Entertainment, society, and the palace dominated the rest of the papers, together with the current crime passionel, reported in lurid detail. The last page of each paper carried a serialized novel and advertisements for tailors, cobblers, academies, watches, wines, and patent medicines. The professional journals -- one for each corps -- carried the technical articles that the daily press ignored, along with an occasional uplifting essay by a prestigious general and news about corps members. But to judge from the press, the average officer was interested primarily in his professional status and in social amusements.
 
Underemployment, limited professional opportunities, and inefficiency fostered boredom, frustration, and hypersensitivity to criticism, especially in the middle and lower ranks. In 1905 this discontent had erupted into open rebellion during the ¡Cu-Cut! affair. In the absence of meaningful professional lives, officers were more likely to turn their attention outward and to fix the blame for military inefficiency on the civilian politicians. Yet their own hostility to personnel reductions made them equally responsible for their plight.
 
Intercorps Rivalries
 
Despite the growth of a corporate outlook that isolated the military from the political and social life of the nation, the Spanish army was deeply divided. Military rhetoric stressed the moral cohesion of the armed forces, but corporate solidarity had its limits. The internal unity of the officer corps was diminished by competition and institutional rivalries. Driven by ambition and insufficient salaries, individual officers intrigued for promotion and a larger share of the military budget, while the various branches contended for social and professional preeminence. The danger was that these internal conflicts could easily disrupt the political stability of the regime, since officers tended to put the blame for their grievances on the "politicians." Professional satisfaction was therefore the key to the political quiescence of the army.
 
[36] The greatest gulf in the Spanish army lay between the academy-trained officers on the active list and the noncommissioned officers on the reserve list. The separate promotion lists were jealously guarded by the regular officers, for they successfully reduced the competition for state employment, traditionally the preserve of the Spanish middle class. Poorly paid, with few prospects for advancement, the NCOS tended to see themselves as an exploited subclass whose aspirations for a life of social dignity were thwarted by their superiors.
 
Equally significant, however, was the spiritual gulf that separated the facultative corps, or technical branches (the Artillery, the Engineers, and the Staff Corps), from the general corps (the Infantry and Cavalry). The privileged position of the technical branches -- especially the Artillery Corps -- and the ill-disguised resentment of the general branches were serious impediments to the stabilization and professionalization of the officer corps as a whole. ⁽³³⁾ The preeminence of the Artillery was primarily a product of its aristocratic composition. ⁽³⁴⁾ Elsewhere in Europe, the technical services had been the first to attract large numbers of middle-class officers. In Spain, however, the aristocratic purity of the Artillery Corps had been maintained by means of compulsory academy training, which had required proof of nobility until 1865, long after the abolition of this requirement in the other branches. ⁽³⁵⁾ This homogeneity was intensified by the small size of the Corps--a little over one-quarter the size of the Infantry.
 
The social purity of the Corps was further protected by the honor court, an ad hoc system that allowed officers of equal rank to expel their peers for dishonorable conduct -- immorality or financial misdeeds -- without attracting publicity. It was also useful in reinforcing the solidarity and homogeneity that were the pride of the Corps and the envy of the other branches. The honor court practice was extended to the other corps in 1890. As later events were to show, however, this institution, well adapted to the small, homogeneous Artillery Corps, was difficult to transplant to the larger branches.
 
The Artillery shared with the other technical branches -- the Engineers and the Staff Corps -- the distinction that extensive academy training conferred. Although by 1875 academy training was the rule for commissioned officers in all the branches, the extra two years the technical officers devoted to more sophisticated scientific training allowed them to claim a professional superiority that was gained partly at the expense of practice in the field. Staff officers, separately recruited and overly proud of their academy training, had neglected their mission as field advisers in favor of a narrow specialization in cartography. Unlike [37] their counterparts in the rest of Western Europe, they rejected the example of the Prussian General Staff and retained their status as a separate branch of the army. ⁽³⁶⁾
 
The most envied privilege of the Artillery Corps was the "closed scale" -- promotion on the basis of seniority alone, up through the rank of brigadier general. Until 1889 all the technical branches had maintained the closed scale, which immunized them from the favoritism that governed most promotions in the general branches. ⁽³⁷⁾ At the ranks above colonel, however, officers from the technical branches were represented in numbers far greater than their proportional strength in the officer corps as a whole, owing to the system of "dualism," which allowed them to receive merit promotions in the general corps, where the closed scale was not observed. In this fashion, the Artillery and the Staff Corps had wrested leadership in the army away from the faction-ridden Infantry in mid-century and had retained it throughout the Restoration. ⁽³⁸⁾ When jealous officers in the Infantry and Cavalry pointed out the discrepancy between the small size of the technical branches and the large number of generals drawn from those corps, their protests were dismissed as the "struggle of ignorance against knowledge." ⁽³⁹⁾ In reality, however, the technical branches had been favored for promotion into the senior hierarchy by the dynastic politicians, who liked their corporate spirit and political conservatism.
 
In 1889, under pressure from the Infantry and Cavalry, some of the privileges of the technical branches had been curtailed. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ To blunt the effects of favoritism, the seniority principle was extended to all peacetime promotions up through the rank of colonel in all branches. On the other hand, wartime merit promotions were allowed in all the branches, including the technical corps. Dualism was abolished. For promotion to the rank of general, a system of proportional selection was established to eliminate the imbalance between the technical and general corps. ⁽⁴¹⁾
 
The Artillery Corps was not so easily robbed of its privileges, however. The following year the Central Junta established by the Corps in 1888 to lobby for its interests persuaded the War Minister to allow officers to renounce wartime merit promotions in favor of a pensioned decoration. The closed scale -- in both peace and war -- thus was secured for any corps that could coerce all its members into refusing wartime merit promotions. In practice, only the Artillery and Engineers -- whose members had alternative sources of income -- were able to enforce a system of strict seniority promotion. ⁽⁴²⁾ The Infantry and Cavalry were too large and socially heterogeneous to maintain [38] internal controls. In the Staff Corps, the lure of wartime merit promotions, often based on favoritism, proved irresistible, and its morale was soon shattered by a flood of promotions. ⁽⁴³⁾
 
Even more demoralizing was the subtle attack on the special status of the Staff Corps by General José López Domínguez, Liberal Minister of War from 1892 to 1895. In 1893 graduates of a new Superior War College (the Escuela Superior de Guerra, or ESG) were given the option of becoming members of the Staff Corps or of returning to their corps of origin as diplomados. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ This might have represented the initial step in the evolution of the Corps into a modern, Prussian-style "service," but López Domínguez compromised his own decree by prohibiting diplomados from occupying Staff positions in the regiments. In other respects, however, the diplomados were a privileged group, ⁽⁴⁵⁾ and the option attracted officers torn between ambition and corps loyalty. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Since the diplomados represented potential replacements in the event of a dissolution of the Corps, Staff officers after 1893 lived in a state of near paranoia that was not totally unjustified.
 
Attempts to eliminate, or even to moderate, the intense intercorps rivalries were unsuccessful. The General Military Academy (the AGM), founded in 1882 by General Martínez Campos, was destroyed ten years later by General López Domínguez, an Artillerist who shared his Corps's antagonism to the concept of uniform training. A similar proposal in 1904 never left the planning stage. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Factional rivalries also undermined long-overdue administrative reforms like the creation of a General Staff, which was not established until 1904. Because it quickly became a sinecure for the friends of the War Minister, the General Staff lacked continuity. Furthermore, it chafed under its subservience to the cabinet and spent much of its time drawing invidious comparisons between the Spanish system and the absolute independence and authority of the German General Staff. This indifference to the distinction between making plans and making policy, and more tragically, to the importance of the principle of civil supremacy in a parliamentary regime, undermined the status of the General Staff, which in any event had neglected both defense plans and the special problems of colonial warfare while expanding its personnel to meet the constant demands for placement in the capital. By 1912 the chorus of denunciations, both civilian and military, was so loud that General Luque abolished it altogether. ⁽⁴⁸⁾
 
[39] Failure in Morocco
 
Limited professionalization not only increased military discontent, it also discouraged the development of military proficiency. Although there had been a brief surge of interest in technical questions during the 1880s, the majority of officers continued to display little enthusiasm for professional matters. The results were readily apparent in the colonial wars of the 1890s, where the principal cause of the Spanish defeat was administrative incompetence, poor training and equipment, and low morale. The debacle of 1898 should have been a goad to military reform, but the army blamed its poor performance on political neglect rather than professional incompetence. For their part, the politicians were too divided and defensive to risk alienating the army with proposals for reform.
 
As a consequence, the army was ill-prepared for the outbreak of war in Morocco in 1909. Nonetheless, in contrast to its earlier indifference to colonialism, the army now insisted on monopolizing all activity in the Spanish zone. By the end of 1913, despite the professed intentions of the Liberal prime minister, the Conde de Romanones, to "civilianize" the new Protectorate, the precedents for military domination were set. Although Moroccan expenditures were removed from the War Ministry budget into a section of their own, 101 million pesetas out of a total of 108 million budgeted were delegated to the War Ministry. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Furthermore, the implementing orders of 1913 failed to define clearly several cloudy issues that would frustrate plans for a "civil Protectorate." One point of ambiguity was the loosely defined division of authority and responsibility between the Ministries of State and War; ⁽⁵⁰⁾ another was the vague division of authority within the zone between the High Commissioner in Tetuan and the autonomous commanders general in Melilla, Ceuta, and Larache. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Coupled with the irresolute attitude of governments toward the commitment of Spanish forces and resources in Morocco, the ambiguities allowed military authorities to expand their local powers free from guidelines or supervision. In 1913 the Commander General of Larache, Colonel Manuel Fernández-Silvestre, ignored government policy and provoked a tribal leader, the Sharif Mawlay Ahmad al-Raysuni, into rebellion, making military operations unavoidable. The "Campaign of the Tetuan Road" dragged on for two years, unaffected by official government support for a pacification policy or by massive popular opposition to further military action, ⁽⁵²⁾ until military activity halted at the request of the French in August 1914. ⁽⁵³⁾
 
Military domination of the Protectorate need not have been unproductive [40]. In fact, the tendency of the politicians to define "political" and "military" policy as mutually exclusive was inconsistent with the realities of colonial occupation, which demanded the judicious application of both, as Marshall Hubert Lyautey was to prove in French Morocco between 1912 and 1925. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ But unfortunately most Spanish colonial officers saw their own mission as purely military, lacked sympathy with the political aspects of colonial occupation, and regarded "civilianization" efforts as trespasses on their autonomy. The result was a disaster: a civilian policy ineffectively supported and implemented by the Ministry of State in Madrid and resented by the Ministry of War; a military policy inappropriate to tribal warfare in Morocco and unmitigated by political considerations.
 
Although most of the army defended the Moroccan war, few officers showed an interest in either the theory or the practice of colonial warfare. The academies continued to prepare officers for wars they would never have to fight, while in Africa the tactics and strategy appropriate to classical European warfare were applied, with disastrous results. After the Tragic Week of 1909 vividly demonstrated the reluctance of Spanish conscripts to die in Morocco, the nucleus of a colonial army was created with the organization in 1911 of the Regulars, native shock troops led by Spanish officers. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ These officers soon became the elite of the colonial army, recognized for their competence, knowledge, and ambition. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ Generally, however, the quality of the leadership in the African army was low. Desirable assignments in the garrison towns were made on the basis of favoritism, while the unattractive hinterland posts were rotated among junior officers whose only goal was to return to the peninsula as soon as their compulsory two years were completed. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ The dedicated africanistas were overshadowed by an unedifying majority of opportunists and malcontents.
 
The army was no better prepared for the administration of the Spanish Protectorate, which it dominated at every level, even where civilian entities existed. Except in the largest cities, political action was carried out by unqualified junior officers assigned to the Native Police; the Office of Native Affairs, a civilian bureau, was largely ignored. In Melilla, the military held a majority of seats on the Junta de Arbitrios, or city council; throughout the zone, military courts possessed exclusive jurisdiction. In addition, the army protected and aided the civilian population in its economic exploitation of Morocco. In the eastern zone, the chief beneficiary of this collaboration was the Compañía Española de Colonización, whose secretary and largest shareholder was the son of the Commander General, Francisco Gómez Jordana. After Gómez Jordana became High Commissioner in 1915, the [41] "Colonizadora" was granted the contract to build the Ceuta-Tetuan railway. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ But corruption flourished at all ranks, especially in the Quartermaster Corps, where the opportunities for fraud and embezzlement were abundant. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Indeed, the garrison towns in Morocco attracted a number of sergeants and junior officers who lived comfortably -- and often scandalously -- on their hardship pay, business ventures, and graft.
 
Like the costly and ineffective military operations, the endemic corruption provided a convenient target for the opponents of the regime. In 1916 the Catalan Republican deputy, Marcelino Domingo, initiated a humiliating two-front campaign -- in the Cortes and the press -- that forced the War Ministry to undertake an investigation of improper business dealings among African army officers. While the investigation led to few convictions, the publicity surrounding its findings was damaging to the credibility of the War Ministry and to the integrity of the officer corps. ⁽⁶⁰⁾
 
While such attacks united the army in self-defense, in other ways the Moroccan war divided the officer corps. It also contributed to the growing political alienation of many officers. The privileged position and extra income enjoyed by favorites in the War Ministry and the palace, and the recognition and promotions extended to those in the elite units, were resented and envied by peninsular officers, who were nonetheless unwilling to volunteer for the grueling or risky assignments in the Native Police or the Regulars. Resentment of the African army appeared immediately after the 1909 campaign, when the War Minister, General Luque, dispensed wartime merit promotions with prodigality, particularly among well-connected Staff officers and the sons of prominent generals. In December 1909 La Correspondencia Militar, a daily read by middle-ranking officers, carried a series of articles critical of the War Minister and his promotions policy. The articles were signed by "Santiago Vallesoletano," a pseudonym for Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, a Cavalry captain who had played a prominent part in the ¡Cu-Cut! incident of 1905. On January 12, 1910, four hundred young Infantry and Cavalry officers met outside the offices of the newspaper with its editor, Major Julio Amado, to protest wartime promotions. ABC, a Conservative daily, summed up their position a few days later: "There are some 2,300 Infantry and Cavalry officers who do not want to be political and who reject any government policy that, along with favoritism, introduces hateful dualisms in the Army, and who consider as an attack on their only property -- their respective promotion lists -- promotions that are opposed to their vehement desire for promotion on the basis of strict seniority." ⁽⁶¹⁾
 
[42] The agitation soon subsided, but the same year Major Amado was elected as an "independent monarchist" to the Cortes, where he pressed for the abolition of wartime merit promotions, citing in support his own poll of opinion in the provincial garrisons. In December 1911, for reasons not totally clear, Amado resigned his commission, ostensibly because his previous receipt of a merit promotion compromised his efforts to abolish them. ⁽⁶²⁾ But owing to opposition from General Luque in the War Ministry and from the senior hierarchy, most of whom had been frequent beneficiaries of the existing promotions policy, Amado's dramatic campaign was a failure. The Moroccan war continued to yield a bountiful harvest of merit promotions for the well-connected, the ambitious, and the talented. ⁽⁶³⁾ It also yielded an equally abundant harvest of resentment in the peninsula. ⁽⁶⁴⁾
 
The mounting opposition to wartime merit promotions within the officer corps was another product of the overcrowded lists. The placeholder in any bureaucracy relies on sheer endurance to solve his financial insecurity. Any intervention in the ranks in favor of "merit" only damages his future interests. The only hope for the unambitious career officer lay in the rigid application of the seniority principle; it was this, more than undeniable abuses, that inspired his opposition to the prevailing system of battlefield merit promotions. Proposals to alter the selection procedures and to eliminate the abuses did not modify his opposition. No modern army, of course, promoted officers on the basis of seniority alone, since the policy guaranteed mediocrity in the leadership cadres. If the merit system was open to abuse, it also rewarded a few ambitious and daring officers who saw their only chance for rapid advancement in battlefield heroics. Some officers, particularly those in the technical corps, questioned a system of rewards that neglected less dazzling but more conscientious officers. Yet while this was a justifiable criticism, the application of strict seniority, which rewarded only longevity, was a remedy worse than the disease. The real problem was that for a large number of officers whose military vocation was slight, the principal defect of the seniority system was its major virtue.
 
By 1914 Spain's military establishment was in shambles, her officer corps divided and resentful, her troops badly equipped and maintained, her morale low. Social and economic change had disturbed the complacency of the dynastic parties, which lacked the cohesion or the vision to respond other than with force. As the army became increasingly identified with unpopular or repressive policies in the peninsula and in North Africa, the gap between it and the rest of the nation widened, and the possibility of effective military reform diminished. Since the abuses, the privileges, and inefficiency of the army were [43] daily visible, the army was the institution most frequently attacked by the critics of the regime. But in fact, the civil-military crisis of the opening decade of the twentieth century was only the most significant example of the general crisis affecting Spain, as her politicians struggled, unsuccessfully, to repair the shattered Restoration settlement.

1. For a good general discussion of military professionalization, see Bengt Abrahamsson, Military Professionalization and Political Power.

2. There were 24,000 officers in 1899, including 578 colonels and 499 generals. Eduardo Aunós Pérez, España en crisis (1874-1936), pp. 229-30; Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 87.

3. Comandante Beta, Apuntes para historiar tres años de reformas militares (1915-1917), pp. 38-39.

4. See the articles in CM on Feb. 24, 1917, and Aug. 24, 1916. During 1916, 1917, and 1918, this was an almost daily demand.

5. Even the General Staff, which was not always sensitive to grievances inthe lower ranks, sympathized with this view. See its report in 1905 in Beta, Reformas militares, pp. 174-75.

6. "La organización del ejército español mirada por un prusiano," 10:201.

7. Paul-Marie de La Gorce, The French Army, p. 49.

8. See the comparison between Spanish and French officers' salaries in CM, Nov. 29, 1919, p. I.

9. "Organización mirada por un prusiano," 10:198. Augusto Vivero in El Mundo, Jan. 18, 1918, p. 1, published the following figures for 1917:

Officers with rank above major per 100 lieutenants, by corps:

Engineers 149.8 Cavalry 105

Infantry 145.4 Artillery 101.2

10. For the reserve, see Antonio Sánchez Bravo, Apuntes para la historia de la escala de reserva del ejército.

11. La Gorce, The French Army, pp. 82-85.

12. The period of military obligation was distributed as follows: 3 years active duty (in practice, much less; to save money, half were released after a few weeks' training and the rest at the end of 2 years); 5 years in the first reserve; 6 years in the second reserve; and 4 years in the territorial reserve, or national guard.

13. See Conde de Romanones, El ejército y la política, p. 51, and Pío Suárez Inclán, El problema del reclutamiento en España, p. 155.

14. The number of quota soldiers rose from 6,599 in 1912 to 16,242 in 1920. Romanones, Ejército y política, p. 143.

15. After being drafted, 35 or 40 percent of the conscripts were dismissed as unfit for service. Romanones, Ejército y política, p. 150. In part, this was the result of corruption in the local recruitment centers. Caciques intervened to obtain physical exemptions for the sons of their clients, while the less fit and the less favored filled the local quotas. Joaquín Romero Maura, "El caciquismo," p. 31.

16. Memorial de Infantería 10 (1917): 284-85.

17. CM, Feb. 26, 1916, p. 1. Literacy statistics vary according to source and method of calculation. Official government statistics for 1916 indicate that 36.6 percent of the conscripts could neither read nor write. Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, Dirección General del Instituto Geográfico y Estadístico, Anuario estadístico de España (1917), p. 374.

18. According to Romanones, Ejército y política, p. 65, only 26 sessions in the Congress were devoted to discussion of the military budget between 1906 and 1917. An examination of the indexes of the debates for these years confirms that there was generally little discussion of the military budget.

19. Anuario estadístico (1917), p. 385; (1919), p. 219; Ministerio de Trabajo, Comercio e Industria, Dirección General de Estadística, Anuario estadístico de España (1921), p. 217.

20. Ibid. (1917), p. 290.

21. A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918, p. xxix.

22. Payne, Politics and the Military, p. 88.

23. Actual expenditures in 1917 would total 244 million pesetas.

24. Appointment to the major politico-military and technical posts carried pay supplements of up to 5,000 pesetas a year, ostensibly to maintain the "dignity of the office." The handful of officers who wore the Cross of Military Merit, the Cross of María Cristina, and the Laurel Wreath of Saint Ferdinand, received pensions of up to 10,000 pesetas a year, according to their rank. See Eduardo San Martín Losada, Sueldos, haberes y gratificaciones del personal del ejército

25. Up to the rank of lieutenant colonel, officers received an annual supplement of from 480 to 900 pesetas after 10 years in grade. The Cross of Saint Hermenegild, awarded for longevity of service, carried an optional pension of 600 to 2,000 pesetas a year.

26. I am grateful to Captain Alfonso de Carlos Peña of the Servicio Histórico Militar for pointing this out to me.

27. See the letter of Lieutenant Colonel Francisco de Artiñano in Los sucesos de agosto ante el parlamento, pp. 321-24.

28. El Liberal, Oct. 13, 1917, p. 1.

29. I am grateful to Colonel Ramón Salas Larrazábal for this information.

30. CM, May 26, 1917, p. 1.

31. A civil servant of equivalent rank in the Finance Ministry earned 3,500 to 4,000 pesetas a year; a bank clerk with 20 years of service, about 3,700. See Ministerio de Hacienda, Presupuestos generales del Estado para el año económico de 1917, and Wenceslao Fernández-Flórez, Impresiones de un hombre de buena fé, 2:35.

32. The social sensitivity of the officer corps is illustrated by these typical complaints in La Correspondencia Militar in 1916:

"The living problem for the officer corps is complicated especially by the lack of lodgings suitable to the dignity with which an officer should live. . . . In this we are truly more democratic than the most advanced republics, and we allow our subalterns to live and eat in houses frequented by social classes that, if they are their equals or superiors in salary, are their inferiors by virtue of their rank in society" (CM, July 28, 1916, p. 1).

"The social situation of the officer obliges him to travel in second class, at least, and to transport his family in the same class. . . . The luster of the uniform does not allow him to wear a forty-peseta suit and travel in cheap trains without running the danger of meeting one of his subordinates, to the detriment of military discipline" (CM, Aug. 18, 1916, p. 1).

33. See the observations of Emilio Mola Vidal in Obras completas, p. 971.

34. For the Artillery Corps, the standard work is Jorge Vigón Suerodíaz, Historia de la artillería española.

35. Proof of nobility in the Infantry had first been abolished ¡n 1811 and disappeared definitively in 1836. Proof of racial purity and legitimacy was demanded of all academy-trained officers until 1865. Santiago Otero Enríquez, La nobleza en el ejército, p. 16.

36. For a brief history of the Staff Corps, see Julio Busquets Bragulat, El militar de carrera en España, pp. 229-36. For contemporary evaluations of the Corps, see Tomás Peire, Una política militar expuesta ante las Cortes Constituyentes, pp. 27-35; Capitán Equis, El problema militar en España; Comandante Beta, Reformas militares; and Pío Suárez Inclán, Organización del cuerpo de estado mayor, 1810-1910. See also Miguel Alonso Baquer, Aportación militar a la cartografía española en la historia contemporánea, p. 187. This doctoral dissertation offers a general analysis of the controversial role of the Staff Corps in the nineteenth-century Spanish army. Created in 1811, the Corps had originally been used by both Progressives and Moderados to provide a check on independent-minded field commanders. In 1851 Narváez had ordered that cadets at the War College be recruited from the civilian population, instead of from the regiments or from the other academies. Beginning in 1886, Staff officers were recruited from the General Military Academy.

37. For example, between 1843 and 1847, aides-de-camp had received 50 percent of all promotions awarded in the Infantry and Cavalry, even though they comprised only 1 percent of all officers in those corps. Vigón, Artillería, 2:279, n. 113.

38. In 1868 Staff officers had comprised only 6.7 percent of the generals in the Spanish army. By 1884 this percentage had risen to 14.6 percent. In contrast, the percentage of generals of Infantry origin had fallen from 58.8 to 43.2. See Daniel Richard Headrick, "The Spanish Army, 1868-1898," p. 129. See also Alonso Baquer, Cartografía, pp. 137-40.

39. Busquets, Militar de carrera, p. 231.

40. The reform initiative came from General Manuel Cassola y Fernández, who was appointed War Minister in the Sagasta cabinet in 1887. Cassola was unsuccessful in securing passage of his controversial reform bill in the Cortes, but some of its features were incorporated into the Ley Constitutiva del Ejército of July 19, 1889. See Fernando-María Puell de la Villa, "Las reformas militares del general Cassola."

41. R.D. of Oct. 17, 1889.

42. From 1891 on, graduating Artillery cadets were required to sign the following pledge:

The artillerists who sign this album want to conserve in the Corps and transmit by example to those who will later serve in it, the traditional spirit of honor, union, and fellowship that they received from their forerunners and that led to the glory and prestige that the Corps enjoys, both for the well-being of the Fatherland and the honor of its members.

And whereas the closed scale is the indispensable condition for the attainment of such exalted goals, they resolve to maintain it among themselves, offering on their honor to renounce (in a legal manner) any promotion within the Corps or to a generalship assigned to it, that is not awarded on the basis of seniority. [Vigón, Artillería, 2:134-35, 236].

43. The first Staff officer to accept a wartime merit promotion was Major Juan Picasso González, who won the Laurel Wreath of Saint Ferdinand (the highest decoration in the army) and a promotion in 1893. Picasso later acquired prominence as the author of the Expediente Picasso. For the subsequent deluge of Staff Corps promotions, see Marcelino Domingo in La Lucha, June 17, 1917, p.l.

44. R.D. of Feb. 8, 1893, discussed in Busquets, Militar de carrera, pp. 123-25.

45. Some diplomado privileges were purely symbolic, but others were material: a 20 percent salary increase and preference in promotion to general and in appointments to the academies, foreign missions, and aides-de-camp. Capitán Equis, Problema militar, pp. 136-37.

46. Some of the brightest young officers became diplomados, including Alberto Castro Girona, Santiago González-Tablas, José Millán-Astray, Angel Rodríguez del Barrio, Vicente Rojo, Leopoldo Ruíz Trillo, and Andrés Saliquet.

47. The Colegio General Militar was created on paper by a royal decree of July 12, 1904.

48. Capitán Equis, Problema militar, pp. 51-55. For the defects of the General Staff, see also Comandante Beta,Reformas militares.

49. Anuario estadístico (1922-23), pp. 237-39.

50. A royal decree of February 27, 1913, outlined the organization of the Protectorate without clarifying the respective jurisdictions of the two ministries. The Ministry of State was assigned "all of the affairs of the zone of influence that are not related to the organization and functioning of the military and naval forces," a definition that proved to depend on the War Ministry and its subordinates. The quiet but bitter struggle between the two ministries blurred the source of ultimate authority in the zone and forestalled the creation of a civilian Protectorate. In 1915 Manuel González Hontoria, a career diplomat with a long-standing interest in Morocco, denounced this dualism in an essay entitled El Protectorado francés en Marruecos y sus enseñanzas para la acción española. In 1919 Joaquín Sánchez de Toca resigned the presidency of the Liga Africanista Española for the same reason.

51. A royal order signed by the Minister of State on April 24, 1913, gave the High Commissioner authority over "the direction of the Spanish action in the totality of the zone," and over "all consular and military authorities . . . without losing sight of the fact that the peculiarities of the various territories into which the zone is divided will require different procedures in each." This order, while recognizing the heterogeneity of the zone and the absence of easy communication between regions, sanctioned the de facto autonomy of the commanders general, and thus undermined the goal of a centrally controlled civil Protectorate. Three weeks after the order was signed, the High Commissioner, General Alfau, wrote Romanones to complain of this anomaly. RA, legajo 98, no. 131.

52. For popular opposition to the war, see Conde de Romanones, Obras completas, 3:299-300; RA, leg. 53, no. 27 and leg. 98, no. 131.

53. In 1915 General Silvestre's outspoken contempt for pacification inspired his subordinates to assassinate one of al-Raysuni's agents. The government demanded the resignations of Silvestre and the High Commissioner, General José Marina, whose replacement, General Francisco Gómez Jordana, quickly signed a pact with al-Raysuni (on September 25, 1915) that guaranteed peace in the western sector until the end of the war. Silvestre's reward was appointment as head of the Military Household. On the relations between al-Raysuni and Silvestre, see particularly Victor Ruíz Albéniz, Ecce homo, pp. 55-76; Rafael López Rienda, Frente al fracaso, pp. 1-159; David S. Woolman, Rebels in the Rif, pp. 51-54; and Payne, Politics and the Military, pp. 116-21. See also the letter from the High Commissioner, General Alfau, to Romanones on May 22, 1915, in RA, leg. 98, no. 131.

54. See Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco.

55. R.O. of July 1, 1911. See Emilio Mola, "Los primeros Regulares," Revista de Tropas Coloniales, June 1924, no page

56. The Regulars, envied and resented by other officers, were accused of receiving fraudulent merit promotions. In fact, they saw most of the military action in the zone and seem to have earned most of their promotions legitimately. Ambitious young officers without connections, like Emilio Mola and Francisco Franco, recognized the opportunity and seized it. For an early complaint against the Regulars, see the letter to Maura's secretary, Prudencio Rovira, from his brother, an officer, in 1912, in MA, legajo 91.

57. R.O. of Apr. 28, 1914.

58. España, Aug. 17, 1916, pp. 4-5.

59. Corruption is discussed in Rafael López Rienda, El escándalo del millón de Larache. See also a report from the War Ministry in 1922, "Sobre abono de la administración militar de Marruecos," in RA, leg. 28, no. 17; the personal experiences of Arturo Barea in Africa in La forja de un rebelde, pp. 254-59; and the files of Marcelino Domingo in DNSD, Madrid: Sección Político-Social, carpeta 2202.

60. For Domingo's denunciations, see DSC (Dec. 12, 1916), 9:3757-61. The findings of the Ministry's investigations were read aloud by him in the Congress on November 20, 1918. See ibid., 2:3159-63. In the interim, the War Ministry had issued two royal orders prohibiting officers from all business activities except property ownership. R.O. of Mar. 12, 1917, and July 28, 1917.

61. ABC, Jan. 15, 1910, quoted in CM, Jan. 15, 1910, p. 1.

62. DSC (Dec. 20, 1911), 17:6050.

63. According to one general, 236,718 wartime merit promotions and decorations were awarded between 1909 and 1917. Jorge Vigón Suerodíaz, "Breves notas para la historia de las juntas de defensa y de la dictadura," p. 6.

64. One officer confided to Maura's secretary, Rovira, in July 1913: "All officers of good faith believe that one solution, or at least part of one--a practical measure--would be the suppression of campaign promotions. There would be fewer military actions, and casualties would decrease. The current acts of arms in many cases lean toward the flashy and the glorification of their directors" (MA, leg. 91).