The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

It is difficult to ascertain how much Hemingway was influenced by the privileged information he received from senior party cadres and Soviet advisers. Being taken seriously by experts distorted his vision. It made him prepared to sign moral blank cheques on behalf of the Republic: hence his absurd statements that ‘Brihuega will take its place in military history with the other decisive battles of the world’, and that the Republic was ‘licking the rebels’, as if the fight were almost between Yankees and Southern slave owners. The American civil war haunts his major work, For Whom the Bell Tolls. This novel, written just after the Republic’s defeat, reveals both a lingering admiration for communist professionals and yet also the author’s own selfish libertarianism. Its hero, Robert Jordan, one of Hemingway’s self-images, asks, ‘Was there ever a people whose leaders were as truly their enemies as this one?’

A number of other writers were to have their idealism undermined far more by the events they witnessed. Simone Weil, who supported the anarchists, was distressed by killings in eastern Spain. She was particularly affected when a fifteen-year-old Falangist prisoner from Pina was captured on the Aragón front and shot after Durruti spent an hour with the boy trying to persuade him to change his politics and giving him until the next day to decide. Stephen Spender, who wrote Poems from Spain, was shaken by the executions in the International Brigades and left the Communist Party soon afterwards. Auden, who had written an enthusiastic description of the social revolution at the end of 1936, returned from Spain, after hoping to serve with an ambulance unit, saying little and evidently disillusioned. He nevertheless wrote his long poem ‘Spain 1937’, with its famous line–‘But today the struggle’–in less than a month and donated the proceeds to Medical Aid for Spain. Yet Orwell’s subsequent criticism of the work helped turn him against his own creation.

Not all writers were pro-republican. The nationalists had the support of Charles Maurras, Paul Claudel, Robert Brasillach, Henri Massis and Drieu La Rochelle, as well as the South African Roy Campbell, who wrote a 5,000-verse epic poem, violently racist, which was entitled Flowering Rifle. Evelyn Waugh, having said that he would support Franco if he were a Spaniard, then emphasized, ‘I am not a Fascist, nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice is imminent.’ Ezra Pound replied that ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes’ and Hilaire Belloc, a supporter of the nationalists, had already described the struggle as ‘a trial of strength between Jewish Communism and our traditional Christian civilization’. Yet the majority of those questioned for Nancy Cunard’s ‘Writers Take Sides’ declared their opposition to Franco in varying forms. Samuel Beckett replied, ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’ In the United States, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck simply declared their hatred for fascism, while others qualified their position by supporting a particular faction on the republican side. Aldous Huxley specified his opposition to communism and sympathy for anarchism (which led Nancy Cunard, a fellow traveller, to mark him down as a neutral).¹⁵ Other supporters of the CNT-FAI included John Dos Passos, B. Traven and Herbert Read.

While the Republic won the propaganda battle, greatly helped by Comintern efforts, the communists were winning the conflict on the left. The bolshevik coup in Russia had given them the unique position of ‘controlling the only beacon of revolutionary hope’ in the world. Bertrand Russell remarked that any resistance or objection ‘was condemned as treachery to the cause of the proletariat. Anarchist and syndicalist criticisms were forgotten or ignored, and by exalting State Socialism, it became possible to retain the faith that one great country had realized the aspirations of the pioneers.’¹⁶ The triangular nature of the civil war in Spain could, in fact, be said to echo the Kronstadt rising against the bolshevik dictatorship in 1921. Three years later, when Emma Goldman condemned the communist regime vehemently at a dinner of 250 left-wing intellectuals, held to welcome her to London, Bertrand Russell was the only person to support her. The rest sat in shocked and embarrassed silence. Yet even Russell wrote soon afterwards that he was ‘not prepared to advocate any alternative government in Russia’.