THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALSUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 N 17CARDEDEU, Spain — Andreu
Canet turns 100 next month. And
his birth year, as it turned out, was
a curse.
Having been drafted into
Spain’s Republican army at 17, he
is now a rare survivor of a contin-
gent of about 27,000 soldiers
dubbed the “baby bottle conscrip-
tion.” They were all born in 1920
and called up by the Republican
government in 1938 to replenish
the army’s ranks as it prepared a
last-ditch attempt to stop Gen.
Francisco Franco from winning
the country’s civil war.
This July, as he has done every
year for the past three decades,
Mr. Canet made his annual jour-
ney to a peace monument built on
hilltops near the Ebro river — the
site of a major counterattack
launched by Republican troops in
July 1938. The already difficult pil-
grimage was made even harder
by the pandemic. And for the first
time, he said, he was the only one
who turned up on the day of the
commemoration.
“Perhaps I’m in fact the only
one left alive by now,” he said wist-
fully.
Mr. Canet’s story is just one
chapter in a civil war legacy that
Spain is still trying to come to
terms with.
In September, the government
led by Prime Minister Pedro
Sánchez presented a draft bill
aimed at reviving and extending a
2007 law to facilitate the opening
of more than 2,000 mass graves
across Spain and to identify the re-
mains of those inside. Most are be-
lieved to have died during or just
after the war, which took place
from 1936 to 1939.
The government also wants to
close down any venture or institu-
tion that glorifies Franco’s dicta-
torship, and to revamp the giant
underground mausoleum from
which his remains were exhumed
last year and transferred to a cem-
etery where his family already
had a crypt.
Looking back on the war, Mr.
Canet said he was utterly unpre-
pared for battle when he was
drafted at 17.
“We had to bring our own cloth-
ing and a blanket, and I fought in
my espadrilles because my family
was simply too poor to afford
shoes,” he recalled in a recent in-
terview in his apartment in Card-
edeu, about 25 miles northeast of
Barcelona. “We got zero training
and zero instructions about what
we would be doing, and I, of
course, had never seen the Ebro
until I was told to get across it.”
Their crossing of the river,
which slices across northwestern
Spain, enabled the Republicans to
regain some of the territory that
Franco had conquered. But under
heavy bombing by German and
Italian planes flown by his fascist
allies, the Republican advance
soon ground to a halt, and the
fighting turned into the war’s
longest and most deadly battle.
While historians have offered
different numbers, most estimate
a death toll of at least 20,000 sol-
diers from both sides during the
nearly four months that the battle
endured. Once the Republican
forces were pushed back across
the Ebro, Franco secured his vic-
tory, which then paved the way for
a dictatorship that lasted until his
death in 1975.
Mr. Canet, whose 100th birth-
day is Nov. 30, said he could still
vividly remember both the trench
warfare that followed the treach-
erous river crossing and the after-
math of the conflict. He spent the
first part of the postwar period in a
military hospital recovering from
typhoid, which he probably
caught while stationed on a rat-in-
fested islet in the middle of the
Ebro.
“The rats kept crawling over
my face when I was trying to
sleep,” he said.
He shunned any notion of hero-
ism and said that his military pro-
motion, eventually to the rank of
sergeant, reflected more a short-
age of officer candidates than his
own merits.
“When we captured our first
hill,” he recalled, “what I really re-
member is how tired and thirsty I
was, being even forced to drink
my own urine, and how little sense
of pride there was when so many
others had already died.”
He teared up when recalling the
cruelty of some of his command-
ers, who once threatened to shoot
him for falling asleep during a
night watch.
After surrendering to Franco’s
troops, Mr. Canet was conscripted
again — but this time into militaryservice in Franco’s army. His bat-
talion, based in the northern city
of Burgos, was filled with defeated
Republicans.
“The war had been horrible,”
Mr. Canet said, “but so then was
my military service under officers
who hated us, while suffering the
humiliation of marching through
villages where children spat at
our feet.”
And although Mr. Canet was the
only one who showed up for this
year’s commemoration, Víctor
Amela, a writer who recently pub-
lished a book about the conscrip-
tion, said the veteran was proba-bly not the only surviving mem-
ber of the “baby bottlers.” Mr.
Amela estimates that there are
about a dozen survivors left, most
of them living in the Catalonia re-
gion.
He said that the monument
near the Ebro, erected in 1989, had
been financed by former soldiers
and their families because “the
Spanish state has sadly refused to
look back and confront the legacy
of our civil war, let alone offer an
apology to a bunch of children
who were forced to fight in it.”
The “baby bottle” conscription
showed “the most miserable sideof a very ugly war,” Mr. Amela
said, as most of the enlisted teen-
agers came from poor families
without the personal connections
that allowed others to avoid the
draft. “I feel that it is a crime that a
government sent 17-year-olds to
an almost certain death, in full
knowledge of how superior
Franco was by this late stage of
the war.”
Once Mr. Canet finally returned
to civilian life in late 1943, he
worked in a factory that made
fountain pens and then set up his
own shop in the entrance hall of
one of Barcelona’s subway sta-tions, where he sold and repaired
pens, lighters and watches.
Until he grew more frail, Mr.
Canet said, he enjoyed visiting
schools to tell children about the
experiences of the “baby bottle
conscription” in hopes of keeping
the soldiers’ memory alive.
But he is unimpressed by the
government’s latest attempts to
set right the historical record of
the war.
“It just all feels too late,” he said.
“The current generation has no
idea what the war was really like,
and no government has actually
ever done anything for us.”‘Baby Bottle’ Conscript
Still Nurses Wounds
Grieving Youth Stolen by War in Spain
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMUEL ARANDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESClockwise from top, Andreu Canet, standing, looking at old photos with his son Andreu; trenches in the forest where heavy fighting
occurred during the Ebro battle; a photograph of Mr. Canet in dress uniform; and the Ebro river, the site of a major battle in 1938.By RAPHAEL MINDER.