A la recherche d'une cause perdue

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

It is one of the advantages of retiring from academic teaching that, though one is not nearly as free as one had hoped, one's conscience is easier about reading books which have no _im- mediate academic utility. So I am now filling in gaps in my historical education, and one of the most important gaps to be filled has been my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War.

Thanks to the enterprise of Penguin, I have been -able to buy in paperback a new edition of

Professor Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War, by far the best book on the subject among the few known to me. (Of course, for the under- standing of Spain, Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth is more remarkable, but it is a foun- dation and not a cathedral in the manner of Pro- fessor Thomas's book.)

I do not know who it was that described the Spanish war as 'the last Crusade.' Whoever it was was not seeing it in the now official Franco sense, for it is part of the Nationalist legend of the Spanish war that the defeat of the Re- public was a successful crusade or a renewal of the Reconquista, or, more plausibly, a renewal of the revolt of 1808 against Napoleon which began modern Spanish history. But this last crusade was the rallying of the left, and especi- ally of the intellectuals of the left, to the cause of the Spanish Republic in 1936.

About this rallying, as about most modern history, there is a great deal of unexamined legend. Very little attention had been given to

the Spanish Republic or its vicissitudes until the pronunciamiento which had indeed been ex-

pected by a good many people in the small groups who were seriously concerned with the fate of the Spanish Republic, whether their con- cern was caused by love or by hatred. But there was not much love of the Spanish Republic until it was attacked, for Spain seemed away off from the main preoccupations of the left. This would have been perfectly justified if. indeed, the left had been preoccupied with the most im- portant event of 1936, the unopposed occupa- tion of the Rhineland. But what the left was preoccupied with were the fallacious hopes fed

by the apparent success of the Front Pop:claire in France, and of its Spanish version, the return, not by a very impressive majority, of a Repub- lican majority in the elections of 1936.

The reasons for this sudden interest in Spain and sudden passionate commitment are fairly easy to understand if one lived at that time, but may seem very hard to understand today when the young know very little about the Spanish Civil War, except possibly that it was a war that their spiritual ancestors lost, naturally enough, as the censorious young think, considering what a general mess their spiritual ancestors made of everything. But the defeat of the revolt of the

Spanish officers, of the church, of the aristo- cracy, of the grande bourgeoisie seemed the most important cause in 1936 just because so many battles had already been lost. There was the total failure to foresee the triumph of Hitler. There were the repeated failures of the official Communist party, especially in Germany. There had been the illusions about Hitler which were so soon destroyed. There had been the immense traumatic shock to the Labour party of the treason of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. There had been a gallant attempt to make the Labour party a genuinely revolutionary party led by such a modern Saint-Just as Sir Stafford Cripps. There was a flourishing of illusions which was to reach its height among the supporters of the People's Convention in 1939- 40, including such deep political thinkers as the young Michael Redgrave. 'Now or never' was the battle-cry of the literary embattled left. They adopted the Spanish battle-cry of 'No pasaran!' La Pasionara was the new Joan of Arc, and with the limited success of the pro- nunciamiento of July 1936 it was quickly assumed that the Republic was saved and the Fascist tide driven back.

The courtiers of King Canute were very soon undeceived, and they were undeceived for a reason that Professor Thomas makes very plain, and which, I may say, I used to point out to my muddled colleagues. They were failing to re- cognise that the Spanish Civil War was above all Spanish. For some obscure reason, in my teens I had read up a great deal of Spanish his-

tory of the nineteenth century, a profoundly depressing subject. But at least I knew something of the Carlist wars.

Thus it was bad mannered, no doubt, but not irrelevant, to ask the most enthusiastic sup-

porters of the Republic (I was a pessimistic sup- porter of the Republic : i.e. pessimistic about its chances), had they ever heard of ZumalacAr-

regui, the great Carlist Basque leader? (Strictly speaking, he was from Navarre.) He died, fail- ing to capture Bilbao and thus save Spain from

Isabella II the 'too' Catholic. And I had the advantage of remembering Macaulay's essay on the War of the Succession in Spain in which he points out, with great sagacity, that war in Spain is always unlike war anywhere else.

And this is the point that Professor Thomas makes again and again. Repeatedly the Repub- lican armies and sometimes the Nationalist armies (apart from the Moors and men of the Foreign Legion) broke in a way which would

have shocked the regular armies of Europe, or so they optimistically thought at that time. On the other hand, tiny villages were defended with hardly any resources with the same spirit that Saragossa had been defended with in the War of Independence—which we call, in a rather in- sular way, the Peninsular War. But the war was not only very Spanish in its military eccentricity; it was very Spanish in its ferocity. Professor Thomas in his admirably critical, academic manner cuts down the claims and charges made by both sides: but when all allowances are made, this was one of the most savage wars in history.

It would be exaggerating to say that the Spanish Civil War was, in fact, a rehearsal for a recent film which shows British public school- boys burning down their school. Some of the Republican leaders seemed more anxious to punish their former schoolmasters, the Jesuits and others, than to deal with the basic social problems of Spain, or even to win the war. It was as if an Irish revolution (an impossible idea!) was led by people embittered by their education by the Christian Brothers, and there was a curious reluctance in the left to under- stand that a great many Catholics found it as hard to understand the massacres of priests, bishops, and nuns as Jews did to understand the activities of Hitler. Indeed, all things considered, it is surprising that so many Catholics, includ- ing English Jesuits, supported the Republic.

It is to be noted that I have devoted very little space to the numerous literary defenders of the Republic who went to the University City, shook their fists at Franco and his Moors, and came home to write fiction, fact, or poetry. Professor Thomas greatly admires the poetry that Mr W. H. Auden wrote in defence of the Republic, although he knows that Mr Auden was not very forthcoming about his own experiences on his brief visit to the war. He also tells us that a British communist leader asked a young literary enthusiast to be the Byron of the equivalent of the Greek War of Independence. There was a great deal of resemblance between the Phil- hellenes of 1820 and the defenders of the Spanish Republic. But there was no Byron, not only in the sense that there was no one of Byron's genius but, above all, because there was no Missolonghi figure among the mature literary fighters. The people who come best out of the Spanish Civil War are, in fact, the Spaniards on all sides, with all their ferocity and often irrele- vant courage. But, as I said and as Professor Thomas implies, it was to the end a Spanish event, and perhaps had no long-term impor- tance except forthe history of Spain.