Antony Beevor
LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA
902pp. Crítica. 9.90euros.
84 84326 65 9
THE BATTLE FOR SPAIN
The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
526pp. Orion. £25.
0 297 84832 1
At the end of another Spanish Civil War – the one usually called the War of the Spanish Succession, from 1701 to 1716 – Francesco Conti wrote an opera to console his master, the Emperor Charles VI, for the loss of the Spanish Crown. Don Quixote in Sierra Morena represents Spain as the kind of country a ruler could do without: a troublesome place full of fanatics and dimwits. At the close of the work – in the version I have seen – the hero is alone on stage, inside the iron bars of a cage, railing at the rest of the world and denouncing its insanity. It could be a metaphor for the next two-and-a-half centuries of Spanish history, when, according to the standard account, Spain was confined in paranoid isolation, puzzled, like so many stage madmen, at other peoples’ madness. The “Tibet of the West” excluded the Enlightenment, resisted the influence of the French Revolution, revived the Inquisition, spurned industrialization, postponed aggiornamento, practised mañanismo, perpetuated the siesta, maintained the mantilla, clung to clericalism, sniffed at science. Painters, poets and novelists spread a fantastic image of Spain, where swart Gypsies and heavily moustachioed bandidos inhabited Moorish ruins. The country became the only Western victim of Orientalism, as though historical accident had washed Spain up on the wrong shore of the Mediterranean. Africa, alternatively, “began at the Pyrenees”.
There was never really any truth in this picture. Spain has a typical Western European past, as far as such a thing exists, and continued to be a representative part of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, experiencing much the same conflicts and changes as everywhere else, with differences of rhythm, intensity and distribution. But the conviction that Spain’s was an extreme case of exceptionalism became a commonplace. I can still recall vividly the first lesson in Spanish history I ever had as an undergraduate in England. The year was 1969 and Hugh Trevor-Roper was the lecturer. “Just as Europe”, he began, “has never learned anything from Spain, so no significant intellectual movement of European origin has ever taken root in Spain.” I knew this sonorous aphorism was overstated, but the prevailing orthodoxy made the exceptions seem proof of the rule.
The Spanish Civil War was the biggest, most widely acknowledged exception. It never seemed merely Spanish – especially not to the British, for whom, if they were on the left wing of politics, it became a mythic part of their own story. No other event in the modern history of Spain became canonical in accounts of global or even of European history, because Spain’s apparent self-exclusion from the mainstream meant that everything else in Spanish experience could be classified as peculiarly Spanish. Even, for instance, in sensitive, wide-ranging, comparative studies about European imperial management overseas in the nineteenth century, there is never anything about Cuba – not even in Henk Wesseling’s wonderful recent volume The European Empires: The Continental powers and the overseas world 1815–1919. Despite brilliant work by David Ringrose, Leandro de los Prados Escosura and others, Spain still hardly gets a mention in most books on early industrialization.
“Liberal” is a word other languages borrowed from Spanish, yet even the most educated readers outside Spain still know virtually nothing about the Spanish contribution to the origins of liberalism. Spain was one of the first countries in the world to have a genuinely democratic franchise but you would never learn that from most general studies of the subject. Little reference is made to Spain even in connection with areas of nineteenth-century European experience in which Spain’s share is well known – such as Romanticism, urbanization, reforms in public health and criminal law, the rise of socialism and anarchism, and the conflicts of absolutists against constitutionalists or of centralizers against particularists. Yet with the Civil War, Spain re-entered European and global history, as the curtain-raiser to an era of global ideological conflict and the mise en scène of the most savage and conspicuous of Europe’s ideologically inspired conflicts. That, at least, was what the propaganda of both sides said and what many participants believed. The war made young poets abandon their bicycles in English lanes and “explode like bombs”. It inspired agenda-laden art that appealed across cultural and national boundaries to patrons’ political commitment. Contributions came from some of Russia’s best movie-makers, some of the most avant-garde studios of Paris, and an American Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Technically, the Spanish war anticipated the Second World War. Politically, it seemed to reflect global divisions, as rival forms of authoritarianism clawed at each other on the streets and in the field, like the crude monsters of the horror films popular at the time. Spain became, in the eyes of beholders, a laboratory of struggle between Fascism and Communism, totalitarianism and democracy. In retrospect, the significance of the war seems to have grown even wider since those days; no longer just a representative and prophetic place of its time, the Spain of 1936–9 has become a cockpit in which universal truths were tried. At the highest level of generalization, the war generates reflections on human values and boundless problems of morals and memories. Antony Beevor illustrates this fact in the last words of his new history:
The Spanish Civil War is, however, best remembered in entirely human terms: the clash of beliefs, the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of diplomats and ministers, the betrayal of ideals and political manoeuvres and, above all, bravery and self-sacrifice of those who fought on both sides. But history, which is never tidy, must always end with questions. Conclusions are much too convenient.
Of course, all wars, like all human dramas, can be made to illustrate universal themes. But an intriguing paradox underlies Beevor’s insights. Almost all the supposed peculiarities of Spanish history turn out, in the light of recent research, not to have been unusual at all.
Yet the Civil War, the one episode deemed widely or even universally representative seems – the more we learn about it – to have had little or nothing to do with broader movements in Europe and the world, or with other divisions and conflicts of its day. Rather, it looks increasingly like a uniquely Spanish event, rooted in quarrels peculiar to Spain, and unintelligible except in a strictly Spanish context. Foreigners who, at the time, saw it as their war, were deluded by propaganda – whether they were German or Italian “volunteers” against Bolshevism, or Catholic “crusaders” against atheism and secularism, or freedom-loving fighters against Fascism, or anti-Communist capitalists or anarchists, or anti-Stalinist Troskyists, or anti-Trotskyist Stalinists.
Ad hoc coalitions fought the war, drawn together by a mixture of accident and advantage, with little ideological consistency. Those on the side commonly called “national” included huge numbers of German and Italian “volunteers” and Moroccan recruits, attracted, like their modern counterparts – the Gastarbeiters and “illegals” who now swarm across the Strait – by rates of pay unattainable in Africa. So while the Nationalists proclaimed a “crusade” and reconquista, implicitly invoking bygone holy wars, the Republicans sang, with perhaps greater justification, their anthem, “We Are Fighting against Moors”. The money that paid for the “national” effort came, meanwhile, in large part, from US and other foreign investors. Meanwhile, if the Nationalists were not genuinely national, not all Republicans fought on the side called “Republican”. General Queipo de Llana, the loud-mouthed boss of wartime Seville, was actually a freemason – a member of an organization Franco loathed and clericalists decried – and ended his incendiary broadcasts with the cry, “Long live the Republic!”. My uncle Ramón was a Republican through and through, but fought on the same side as Franco because, he said, he “could not bear to rape a nun, burn a church or kill a priest”. No simple Left–Right cleavage divided the sides. Until the war stimulated recruitment, fortified identities, and demonized foes, there were virtually no Fascists and few Communists in Spain.
The Falange was a tiny organization and, though it aped Fascist rites, it had its own programme, more concerned with imposing family values and enforcing social uniformity than with enhancing the power of the State or celebrating the right of might. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, the historian who became President of the Republic in exile, was viscerally conservative, whereas some radical revolutionaries joined the Falange.
The Basque nationalists who fought for the Republic were mostly clericalist conservatives: their left-wing and secularist allies in other provinces virtually abandoned them to defeat out of distaste for their politics. Many liberals sided with Franco, because in Spain the liberal tradition has always been centralizing, whereas devolutionist agendas span Right and Left. The unwieldy nature of the movement Franco had to meld into effectiveness glared in the absurdly sesquipedal name he gave it in an attempt to cover up the gaps: “National and Traditionalist Movement and of the Juntas of National-Syndicalist Organisations”. The leftist “front” of socialists, anarchists, strict Marxists and Stalinists who defended the Republic was so various that its own quarrels rent it and doomed it to disaster. The nearest thing to a clear-cut division between the sides coincided with the cleft between centralists, who fought for Franco, and devolutionists, who supported the Republic; but even this fact was complicated by differences between Basque, Galician and Catalan nationalisms and Navarrese particularism, which allied with the centralizers for reasons peculiar to Navarrese tradition. Some on the Left were as centralist as Franco. Beevor quotes the cry of the beleaguered Republican leader, Dr Negrín, “Spain is the only nation in Spain!”. Nor could the war be explained by the division of military against militias: almost half the armed services sided with the Republic. Both sides betrayed most of their own supporters. The socialists refused to fire “a bullet for Málaga” because they hated its anarchist defenders. Stalinists ended up running a bunker-Republic after proscribing and purging the Marxists and anarchists. “Aren’t we all socialists?”, asked Orwell during the Left’s internecine battles in Barcelona. It was like asking, “Aren’t we all Christians?” at the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
Franco ditched the traditionalists without whom he could not have won the war, and deceived the monarchists. I find it amazing that there are still liberal aristocrats of sentimentally monarchist persuasion in Spain, who – after sacrificing family members in the war and suffering horribly under the regime – still think Franco was on their side. The dictator mocked the “hispanic values” he claimed to defend by selling Spain out to trash capitalism and consumerism. I have never believed in the sincerity of his own conversion to Catholicism. “L’Espagne”, he seems to have thought, “vaut bien une messe.” Ultimately, of course, the war was unideological because most Spaniards were ideologically uncommitted: they were caught up in the bloodshed unawares, conscripted unwillingly, tempted into activism by opportunism, or terrorized into compliance with whichever side happened to control their home localities.
It was, however, the supposed international significance of the Spanish Civil War that first drew Antony Beevor to the subject. His first account appeared twenty-five years ago: essentially a military narrative, written with the lessons for the Second World War in mind. The updated version, which marks the seventieth anniversary of Franco’s so-called national uprising, is much more than an update. Except in the fluency of the writing, which is a constant joy of Beevor’s output, the magisterial handling of copious material, and the expertise the author displays in military history, the new book is so different that it could almost be mistaken for the work of a different writer. The Spanish version is the more complete, but the abridgement for an anglophone readership still contains much that is new.
Beevor seems to have read just about everything that has appeared in the period between the publications and to have taken almost all of it into account, though perhaps without doing justice to the many personal memoirs that have appeared, especially on the Nationalist side. Above all, he has used previously inaccessible documents from Russian archives in which he has done much pioneering work.
His account remains strongest as a narrative of military events. No other book on the same scale does such a good job in this connection. Here his argument is unchanged: the Republican command was incompetent from the moment when Franco was left to transfer his legions from Morocco, virtually unopposed, in support of the coup attempt of July 18, 1936. Political inhibitions made Republican military management even more ineffective. Russian “advisers” did not know how to work their own tanks. The Republic’s propaganda wing was a disastrous failure. Beevor shows that the Nationalists “concentrated their efforts on a select audience in Britain and the USA”. They were far better than their opponents at fabricating and placing atrocity stories. This ensured that the democracies stayed out of the war and that the flow of capital and informal aid to the Nationalists continued. So it was not so much that Franco won the war as that the Republic lost it. The top brass on the Nationalist side were not much superior to their opponents in generalship. Beevor takes careful account of the revisionism of Blanco Escolí, the great anatomizer of the myth of Franco as a great commander, and broadly accepts that the Generalísimo was feeble in the role, though he perhaps underestimates the extent to which the torturous pace of Franco’s conquests was politically prolonged: the victors needed time to “cleanse” conquered territory of their enemies as they went. The difference between the sides was not, according to Beevor, the superior professionalism or equipment of the Nationalists – the battles the Republican militias won proves that – but the inexorable logic of the international situation, which left the Republic effectively friendless, and ultimately starved of supplies. The foreign loan-troops and war matériel, which made up for the Nationalist forces’ deficiencies, “did not”, according to Beevor, “win the war”, but did prevent a Republican victory. The longer the fighting lasted, the more certain Nationalist victory became: Franco piled up weapons and loans, while the gold and silver of the Bank of Spain vanished, the Republican tanks ran out of fuel, and the rations for the defenders of Barcelona dwindled to about four ounces of pulses a day. In one respect, Beevor recognizes that foreigners miscast themselves as part of a war in which they were really intruders. For this was not a crisis of democracy. As Beevor points out, the Left started the war with shaky democratic credentials and rapidly forfeited even those. In a counter-factual passage Beevor imagines what might have happened had a democracy emerged. But there was no chance of such an outcome. A Republican victory after a long war would have turned Spain into a Stalinist satellite, perhaps prolonging dictatorship until the collapse of the Soviet empire. A quick Republican victory would have provoked another civil war: not against the Right, which would have been proscribed, emasculated and pacified – as Franco did with his old enemies – but between the warring sects and cults among which the Left was divided. The only point at which Beevor’s critical judgement seems less than perfect is in his discussion of the purges each side inflicted on the other: he tends to see the Left as more rationally selective in persecution than the Right. “Rarely”, he claims, “was an honest grocer molested or a priest who buried rich and poor alike.” That, I fear, is a romanticization.
The proof that the war was a peculiarly Spanish affair is that it baffled every foreigner who arrived, expecting to fight on a local front of an internationally familiar conflict. Stalin – we now know – sold weapons to both sides. Goering was implicated in clandestine and exploitative arms deals with Republicans. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini had much fellow-feeling for Franco, whom they supported partly to give their armies and aircraft an airing. By locating the war in its European and global context, Beevor misses an opportunity to stress the introspective Spanishness of the conflict. But he does a good job of exploding one of the traditional myths of Spanish exceptionalism.
There was no peculiarly Spanish way of making war. It was not quixotism that made militiamen scorn trenches: they had no tools to dig them. The violence and cruelties of the conflict were not the result of Spanish passions but of the universal demon of the battlefield: “fear in disguise”. People killed not out of a fatalistic Spanish indifference to death, but because of the hateful old wisdom: the dead do not fight back.
Ultimately wars become whatever myth makes them out to be: what people believe generates consequences and becomes a kind of truth. Thousands of foreign volunteers poured into Spain thinking that they were taking part in the defence of the international working class, “uniting the human race”. About 17,000 died. At least 5,000 Spaniards died as volunteers for Hitler in Russia, thinking they were continuing an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Though the experiences on both sides were disillusioning, many participants and onlookers forged new sympathies and realized that the real global struggle would not be of Left against Right, but of democracy versus the rest. The Spanish Civil War was not genuinely a prelude or part of either struggle, but erroneous interpretations had briefly fused it with both by confusing it with them. When the Second World War ended, it hardly seemed worth the Allies’ while to take on Franco. As the Cold War iced over the world, Spain was increasingly irrelevant. Briefly, until the 1960s, when the normal pattern of Spanish history resumed, and the country began to resemble the rest of Europe more closely, Spain really was as “different” as the the tourism-promotion posters said. So it gradually became possible to escape from the hindsight of the World War era and to see the Civil War as a peculiarly Spanish tragedy. Now we are in a new phase of the historiography of the conflict, dominated by a new kind of literature in Spain, in which the children and grandchildren of the victims of the war undertake journeys through memory in search of the dead. In this post-ideological world, Antony Beevor wisely deflects reflection away from the contexts both of Spanish exceptionalism and global Götterdämmerung, to draw human lessons. By applying the technique of the Annals of Confucius – recounting horrors in an unimpassioned tone – he has produced a moving masterpiece of the indictment of war.
