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

In fact, almost 80 per cent of the volunteers from Great Britain were manual workers who either left their jobs or had been unemployed.

Photographs of them show scrubbed faces with self-conscious expressions, short hair, cloth caps clutched in hand and Sunday suits with boots. Some of them were glad to escape the apathy of unemployment, others had already been fighting Mosley’s fascists in street battles, as their French equivalents had fought Action Française and the Croix de Feu.

But most had little notion of what warfare really meant. Slightly over half of them were Communist Party members. Jason Gurney of the British battalion described the drawing power of the Party in the 1930s: ‘Its real genius was to provide a world where lost and lonely people could feel important.’ Interminable, deeply serious meetings at branch level gave members a feeling of being involved in ‘the march of History’.⁸ Yet all the time they were made eager to have the responsibility and effort of original thought taken from them. Slogans in ‘pidgin agit-prop’, as Victor Serge termed it, became an inwardly soothing mantra despite the outward protest.

George Orwell later attacked the left’s intellectual dishonesty in the apparently effortless switch from pacifism to ‘romantic warmongering’: ‘Here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the “glory” of war, atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. The same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotskyist-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated.’⁹

In their own countries some young middle-class idealists were ill at ease with workers and perhaps wary of the way their earnest social potholing could risk derision. Like Marx before them, they had often despaired of England’s ‘bourgeois’ proletariat. The Spanish proletariat, on the other hand, had never respected or aped their social superiors. Even in the eighteenth century foreign travellers were amazed at the cavalier way Spanish servants and labourers treated their aristocracy. Also, the fact that the Andalucian peasant had never been crushed by the seizure of the common land or contained by religion meant that the Spanish working class could be romanticized in a way which their own working class seemed to thwart. Consequently, the Spanish conflict offered Anglo-Saxon intellectuals a breath of pure and uncloseted emotion in comparison to the suffocating complacency at home. Middle-class guilt feelings and an urge to sublimate a privileged identity in the mass struggle made many of these intellectuals ideal recruits for communist authority.

There were, perhaps, many volunteers who went to Spain partly in search of excitement, but the selflessness of the International Brigaders’ motives cannot be doubted. They saw fascism as an international threat, and the Brigades appeared to offer the best way of fighting it. Spain was seen as the battleground which would decide the future. This belief was maintained long afterwards, so that even to this day there are those who argue that a republican victory would have prevented the Second World War.

Paris was the marshalling yard for volunteers of all nationalities. The secret networks directed them there from eastern, central and southeastern Europe. From the north, British workers without passports crossed the channel on excursion tickets. On arrival at the Gare du Nord, left-wing taxi drivers drove them to the reception centres in the 9th Arrondissement. Almost every day, young men, brown paper parcels under their arms, could be seen waiting for the Perpignan train at the Gare d’Austerlitz, conspicuously trying to look inconspicuous.

Once safely on the train, they would fraternize with those whose glances they had just been avoiding so studiously. Wine was passed round, food shared and the ‘Internationale’ sung endlessly. The two principal routes were either to Marseilles, where they were smuggled on to ships for Barcelona or Valencia, or else to Perpignan and then over the Pyrenees at night. Some anarchists, who still controlled the Pyrenean frontier, wanted to turn them back. Their argument was that weapons were needed, not men, but their main fear was that a communist-controlled ‘Foreign Legion’ was being built up to crush them later.¹⁰ In the fields peasants straightened up to watch the young foreigners pass, singing, in their trains or lorries. The reaction to them was warmest in the towns, where most of the population, especially the children, cheered them and gave the clenched-fist salute. In Barcelona the welcome was unstinted despite the misgivings of the libertarian movement.