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form of land reform programme needed to be implemented urgently, but few governments remained in place long enough to tackle the problem. 9
     
    Although the politicians in Madrid managed to maintain a certain status quo for most of the time, in July 1921 a far deeper crisis developed when the Spanish army in Morocco suffered a most ignominious defeat. A division commanded by General Silvestre was ambushed at Annual on 20 July 1921 by Moroccan tribesmen under Abd-el-Krim. For reasons of personal vanity, King Alfonso was said to have wanted an outstanding victory to announce on the feast of St James (the Spanish army’s patron saint) and that he had gone behind the minister of war’s back to encourage Silvestre in this venture.
    The Annual expedition was a classic example of military incompetence: 10,000 soldiers were killed, 4,000 were taken prisoner and Silvestre committed suicide. A week later another major position was lost, another 7,000 soldiers were massacred and all the officers were led away in chains. The reaction throughout Spain was so bitter that the government was forced to set up a commission of inquiry. The king was severely censured in its findings, but shortly before the report was due to be published the new captain-general of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, made a pronunciamiento on 13 September, appointing himself dictator with Alfonso remaining as head of state. The other generals gave him tacit support to prevent this public condemnation of the army and the king.
    General Primo de Rivera immediately declared a state of war throughout the country to halt any unrest or protests in their tracks. Yet he was not a typical dictator of that inter-war period. He was in a way an Andalucian version of those hard-living, hard-riding squires of Regency England. As a young officer he had been sickened by corrupt practices within the army, such as the selling of the soldiers’ food and equipment. But he also had that fatal military attitude to politics: all would be well if everyone could be united in a single party, rather like the army itself. He subsequently set up his own organization, the Unión Patriótica, but it never stood a chance of gaining mass support. Primo also had a completely arbitrary approach to justice, trying often to play Solomon with a sense of humour, which fell flat. But there was comparatively little police state brutality under his dictatorship.
    Primo’s assumption of power was welcomed at first by industrialists and accepted by the liberal middle classes, who felt that nothing could be worse than the recent years of chaos and bloodshed. They hoped that the dictator, even though a member of the aristocracy, might be able to implement agrarian reforms which no landowning government would consider. But although Primo sympathized with the peasants in a patriarchal fashion, any serious attempt to tackle the agrarian problem would have required measures that were too radical for him and unthinkable for those on whom he depended.
    He did, however, attempt to end the industrial warfare in Catalonia. Workers’ organizations had to be involved, he decided, and the employers controlled. The centralist socialists were the obvious choice for him, and he brought the secretary of the UGT, Francisco Largo Caballero, into his government as a councillor of state, to set up industrial arbitration boards. This idea of working with Primo’s administration was firmly opposed by the other main socialist leader, Indalecio Prieto. The anarchists also accused Largo Caballero of shameless opportunism when their organizations and publications were banned.
    The Catalan employers, meanwhile, having welcomed Primo’s arrival in power, now hated his control over their methods of dealing with union leaders. Primo also took a spiteful pleasure in attacking their nationalism through attempts to suppress Catalan language and culture. Like all patriarchs, he was convinced of his own good intentions. He made grand