18 months of captivity. From Annual to Monte-Arruit 1921

Idioma original: Español

Year of publication: 1923

Valuation: Advisable

This book that we present to you today is, if not the only one, one of the few direct testimonies of the Annual Disaster. Framed in the Rif War, a conflict absolutely forgotten and cornered in national historiography, the Annual disaster was a painful defeat (more than 8,000 soldiers died) of the Spanish troops under the command of the Rif “rebels” led by Abdelkrim and represented a change in the strategy until then used by the Spanish army in the War and a modification in the perception that part of the people and the political class had of their friend Alfonso XIII.

The person who tells us about the disaster is Colonel Eduardo Pérez Ortiz, a witness and narrator of the defeat and subsequent captivity that he suffered along with hundreds of his companions. As a curiosity, Pérez Ortiz was mayor of Ceuta during the Second Republic. Maybe the man was a bit jinxed, I don’t know.

Focused more on the general exposition of the facts than on the personal interpretation or assessment of them, Pérez Ortiz’s text has a double face: that of a military chronicle and that of a chronicle of the confinement.

Marked, at least in its beginning, by a somewhat rigid and anachronistic style from which the author distances himself in later pages, the military chronicle seems somewhat confusing to me. After this initial confusion, the siege of Monte-Arruit raises the level of the text. Strokes of literary will begin to appear in the metaphors, the images become more successful and overcrowding, hunger, fears become more evident, etc. This paragraph serves as an example, in which it refers to two planes that drop aid to them and return to Melilla:

There they go to Melilla like a couple of frightened storks, and not surely because of the danger they were in, since they were always intrepid, but because of our plight.

The chronicle of the running of the bulls is, in my opinion, more interesting for the reader. To certain anthropological or psychological whims is added a greater plasticity of the text, a greater critical charge (always more veiled than explicit) and a greater “emotional involvement.”

Finally, what is striking in these times is the view that the “Moors” had on officers or the Spanish soldiers of 1920. And not so much because this view has changed or not (Koldo, shut up, they will summon you to the National Court tomorrow)but because today This politically incorrect language is surprising by our standards. Neither North Africans nor North Africans nor Arabs nor bagpipes: MOROS. Or, directly, indigenous people, brutes, beasts, gorillas, savages, etc. And to make matters worse, and with few exceptions, thieves, liars, hypocrites and cynics.