History: A newly revised study of the struggle against fascism during the Spanish Civil War
In October 1990, I was privileged to attend the unveiling of a plaque in Madrid to the memory of four young British and one Irish writer who, having joined the International Brigades, were killed in the early part of the Spanish Civil War during the Brunete and Jarama offensives. Their names were: John Cornford, Christopher Caudwell, Julian Bell, Ralph Fox, and Irishman, Charlie Donnelly. The poet Stephen Spender was largely behind the project. Bell, the beloved nephew of Virginia Woolf, is referred to again and again in Woolf's diaries of September to December 1938. And when the British government hastens to recognise the recently victorious Franco in early 1939, she writes: "Yesterday, Franco was recognised. And Julian killed for this."
The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) not only enacted a now classical struggle between the forces of fascism, aided and abetted by Hitler and Mussolini, and the claims of the Republican government's resistance to the Nationalist uprising. And this, notwithstanding the awful rift and carnage within the Republican side as articulated best by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, and indeed, more recently, by Ken Loach in his film Land and Freedom. The war also had a superstructural dimension of artistic involvement that is probably unparalleled in modern times. As Antony Beevor maintains in the book under review: "The Spanish Civil War engaged the commitment of artists and intellectuals on an unprecedented scale - the slaughter of the First World War had undermined the moral basis of art's detachment from politics, and made 'art for art's sake' seem a privileged impertinence".
In the Spanish war it seems that a concomitant artistic set of representations accompanies the struggle. Beevor lists the impressive catalogue of writers who actively supported the Republican cause on the ground and in their work. As the Republican cause languished, there is an awesome increase in the sense of foreboding and awareness of death. The literary inscription of war is extraordinarily prolific and rich in this Spain of the 1930s. Cornford, mentioned above, is eloquent in his poem A Letter from Aragon, written shortly before his death at the age of 21: "This is a quiet sector of a quiet front./ We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,/ but the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out."
The peerless historiographical accounts of the Spanish Civil War must surely be those of Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston, with Gerald Brenan's indispensable The Spanish Labyrinth providing the origins and historical contextualisation of the conflict. The new version of Beevor's book, first published in 1982, has been supplemented by documents finally emerging from Russian, German and other archives. The present version is condensed from the 2005 Spanish edition which ran to over 900 pages.
A disconcerting feature of this new edition is that endnote references seem to be given in almost all cases to Spanish editions, even if the sources are primarily English language. It is as though this book has been edited, and translated back into English with Spanish references left intact. For example, in the bibliography and notes, listings under, and references to, significant works by historians Raymond Carr, Gabriel Jackson, Stanley Payne, Paul Preston, Hugh Thomas and others are to the Spanish editions. Indeed Beevor pays fulsome homage to his Spanish publisher Gonazalo Pontón, without whom it appears this book would not have been written.
Beevor's book does take the reader through the harrowing stages of diminution of the Republic's area of governance, as Nationalist forces unremittingly cannibalise territory between the autumn of 1936 and the early spring of 1939. A detailed account of offensive and counter-offensive is provided up to, and including, the climactic Battle of the Ebro and final fall of Catalonia. What is well documented in this book is the series of betrayal and disingenuous acts of the Communist party, as it sought to stifle dissent within the Republican camp, and achieve hegemonic control of the struggle against Franco. The creation of the SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar) and its brutal interrogation methods under Soviet management, as well as the persecution of the Trotskyist POUM, constitute, as Orwell maintained, a black legend in this battle against the forces of Franco.
Beevor's harnessing of material from newly accessed German and Russian archives is always interesting. For example, the war diary of one Col Wolfram von Richthofen, contains telling details of the indiscriminate bombing of the town of Guernica, subsequently celebrated in Picasso's famous painting. The main strength of this book is that it refuses to idealise or to condemn in any facile way. Death in all its unheroic unloveliness is not eschewed in the descriptions of battle, whether at the Ebro, or in the streets of Barcelona or Madrid, or in the bombing of Guernica.
But it is for the act of treachery by governments such as the French and British that Beevor reserves his caustic judgements. He writes of how, even when the battle was up, and the French government faced a huge wave of refugees, "its first decision was to close the frontier and refuse the republican government's request to allow through 150,000 old people, women and children".
The moral turpitude of the victors in the war is reinforced again and again by Beevor. After his victory in 1939, Franco is described as "reading through the sentences of death when taking his coffee after a meal". For those who he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote "garrote y prensa" ("garroting and press coverage"). This fits well with the cry, earlier recounted by Beevor, of the founder of the Foreign Legion, Gen Millán Astray in a famously recorded moment at the University of Salamanca late in 1936: "Muera la inteligencia! Viva la muerte!" ("Death to the intelligentsia! Long live death!").
Hardly surprising, then, that such sentiments as these should have elicited a major international response by ordinary people to the death-dealing challenge of fascism in Spain, a response sadly not backed by democratic governments of the time. Perhaps WH Auden, from whose poem Beevor quotes, best epitomises the moment of the Spanish war, and maybe, all wars: "History to the defeated may say 'Alas', but cannot help or pardon."
Ciaran Cosgrove is Head of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin History
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 By Antony Beevor Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 526pp. £25