A Necessary Action by Per Wahlöö

gendarmes’ fire. When it was quite clear that the ammunition was not coming, or at any rate would be too late, the workers divided themselves up into three groups. The children and most of the women were taken away to a store-house, then the others shut themselves into the smelting works and the two barracks. Doors and windows were barricaded with stones. They had plenty of arms but only a few hundred cartridges.
    By half-past six, so many police and regular troops had arrived at the place that Colonel Ruiz considered himself in a position to attack. He urged the rebels
pro forma
to capitulate by shouting an ultimatum through a megaphone. The reply was a few scattered shots.
    The barracks were taken in turn. After fifteen minutes’ firing with grenade-throwers and automatic weapons, holes were breached in the walls and the first building attacked. The workers who had used up their ammunition defended themselves with pick-axes and iron spits and many of them were shot down.
    The screams and the knowledge that the women and children were in the hands of the attackers demoralized the men in the other barrack, and they surrendered with little resistance.
    In the smelting works were forty men and about twenty women, most of them young. This group held out the longest and were also in possession of most of the ammunition. The strike leaders were in charge and the red flag had been raised on the roof.
    It took almost two hours to take the smelting works, although it was continuously showered with grenades and automatic fire. A tank arrived finally and shot away the great iron doors and the walls round them. The assault was undertaken by a company of the civil guard, as the regular troops had begun to demonstratea marked lack of the will to fight. Many of the soldiers were Basques and Catalonians, and the firing had not always been exceptionally accurate. The civil guards showed good judgement and used mostly hand-grenades and tear-gas bombs. It took them only ten minutes to make the conditions in the smelting works unendurable and the strikers capitulated. Thirty-three men and fourteen young women came out of the building with their hands clasped behind their necks. Some were wounded and all were dirty, drenched with sweat, and exhausted. They had had no drinking-water for twelve hours. The women were wearing soot-covered overalls and most of them had tied red rags round their arms or waists. The rebellion had been crushed.
    Of the strikers, thirty-four men and seven women had been shot or blown to pieces. A further six men, who were accused of murder and mutiny, were executed immediately. Many were injured, three so seriously that they died within a few hours.
    A civil guard and five soldiers were killed, the latter in the hand-to-hand fighting in the first barrack. A few more were injured. In the guard-post, one gendarme had been shot dead and another injured.
    The regular troops were put to work burying the dead Asturians in a mass-grave, and then they were withdrawn.
    All roads were blocked within an area of ten kilometres.
    Reprisals were left to the gendarmes, who had experience of the circumstances in the place and a good eye for the younger Asturian women, some of whom possessed a kind of wild, abandoned beauty. Of the fourteen women who had taken part in the fighting, one was raped and smuggled away and one simply died. The rest were driven into the machine-room where the gendarmes tore off their overalls and burnt them between their legs with blow-lamps.
    Their screams were so prolonged and irritating that the windows of the mine office, which Colonel Ruiz and his staff were using as their headquarters, had to be closed.
    During the course of the day the strikers were transported in small groups to different prisons and transit camps. The workers who were to have fetched the ammunition waited in vain at the meeting place, all night and most of the day. Not until the afternoon were they discovered by a patrol and