“From the moment I took office, foreseeing what was brewing at Melilla, I began to fortify our positions in the Riff. Expecting that General Marina would need reinforcements, I brought the regiments of the Cazadores del Campo de Gibraltar up to their full strength, and put the Orozco Division, in all three arms of the service, on a war footing. In order to secure rapidity of transport, I contracted with the Transatlantica Company to make the voyage in twenty-four hours, on only four hours’ notice. When General Linares replaced me in the Ministry, he thought fit to improvise all that was required, and this caused complete disorganisation in the Army. He refused to call out the divisions which I had held in readiness, and by drawing the troops from Cataluña not only gave rise to the melancholy events of the “Red Week,” but rendered it necessary to incorporate many reservists who had married and set up homes in the belief that they were free from service, thus bringing misery on thousands of previously contented families. And after all this mismanagement it was necessary in the end to send the Orozco Division which I had prepared so long before.” At the time one heard on all sides the question: “Why does the Government call out the reservists while the Orozco Division stands idle at home?” to which there has never been any reply but that of the people, who said: “The Government wants the war to go on because it suits the Jesuits, who are making a fortune out of it.” But notwithstanding the acute distress throughout the country, the reports of an organised and widespread protest against the calling out of the reserves, which flooded the foreign Press at the time, were entirely unjustified and incorrect. Parents in Madrid wrote, full of anxiety, to their children in provincial towns, saying: “What is all this we hear about disturbances in your city? What is happening? What have the reservists been doing?” While the children were writing with equal urgency to ask what was amiss in the capital, that “such bad things” were being said of the soldiers in Madrid. I know these reports were spread, for I was asked to read aloud more than one such letter by working people who could not read for themselves. It was not long before the people discovered that they had been deceived and vilified by some persons unknown, who were making it their business to represent Spain as in the throes of a revolution, and it was then that they became convinced that the rising in Cataluña, represented by the Government as springing from a protest against the calling out of the reserves, was in fact a Carlist plot, gone wrong so far as the Carlists were concerned. As one travelled about the country in 1909 it seemed as if every village had sent one or more of its sons to Melilla. Yet, although their families made sure that they were going straight to destruction, few endeavours were made to evade the call to arms.