Disasters of War, 1936-39

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (720 pp.)--Hugh Thomas--Harper ($8.50).

"Oh, old Europe," wrote a French correspondent in his diary, "God grant that all this blood does not choke you."

The time was 1938 and the place Madrid. By the numbers of the dead alone (600,000 on both sides), the Spanish Civil War might have been enough to choke Europe in a more civilized century; but it proved to be only an hors d'oeuvre for World War II. It was also a war in which the issues, decided and undecided, were stated with some clarity. It had its own political and moral ambiguities, but it lacked the elements of grand tragic farce of World War II, in which the West was forced into alliance with one monster (the Soviets) to beat another (fascism). As history, the Spanish War is barely a generation old; as an exemplary conflict, it is as contemporary as yesterday's Korea or today's Laos or the schism of the two Germanys.

Spain is still a no man's land of ideas, but a historian old enough (at 30) to be interested, and young enough not to have been personally committed, has now moved into the field. Hugh Thomas, whose background is Cambridge, the British Foreign Office and Sandhurst, has, by his own account, consulted nearly a thousand books in five great libraries and in five languages to lend weight to his massive reappraisal of Spain. He is the first historian to write as neither a partisan nor an embittered memoirist. His book is likely to be for some time the definitive precis of the records and the last tabulation of disks from the military cemeteries. Thomas' material and conclusions make it impossible to go on seeing the war in the simple terms in which it was debated by the generation that lived through it.

Madmen & Dreamers. Historian Thomas finds an anomaly in the fact that Spain, so backward, should have been the first major battleground of 20th century ideologies. But there is no anomaly, any more than it was anomalous that Russia, also on the periphery of modern Europe, should have been the theater of Marxist revolution. Neither state--of dukes and campesinos, or grand dukes and muzhiks --had made any real step toward the compromise between feudal past and industrial present that other European nations had made in the centuries since the Renaissance. Spain, like Russia, was ungovernable. At the onset of Franco's revolt against the Republican government, there were more than a million anarchists in Spain. In theory, anarchism is arguable, but in practice it is unworkable. In his total pacifism and good will to all, the anarchist becomes a murderer: Dostoevsky would have felt quite at home in Spain.

But apart from the madmen of the anarchist left, there were the dreamers of the right who had made no gesture towards the modern world since the Inquisition condemned slavery more than three centuries ago. Politics being the art of the possible, politics was impossible to the quixotic impossibilists of Spain--whether right or left.

Although Thomas is carefully neutral and steers clear of philosophical or general notions, he illuminates the quasi-religious nature of the whole struggle. In a sense, "the Church, which was to suffer so much in consequence, had paradoxically prepared the way" for revolution through its communalism and "its puritan hostility to competitive instinct.'' Adds Thomas: "The religious character of Spain also made converts to the new collectivism, as it had made the liberals more passionate, less ready to compromise, more obstinate than any other similar group in Europe."

Winner & Loser. Spain was only partly a "rehearsal" (as the familiar phrase has it) for World War II in which Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin experimented with military and political techniques. Actually, the only important military lesson--that mass civilian bombing does not break, but stiffens the morale of the surviving victims--had to be learned all over again in World War II. The political lessons, reaching well beyond World War II, were far more significant.

Stalin, the apparent international loser, showed the greatest enterprise; his agents were able to develop the techniques, so useful later in eastern Europe, by which a Communist minority can influence and finally take over a popular wartime regime. Also, he trained in the NKVD or the Spanish SIM, a corps of future Red quislings--Togliatti. Ulbricht, Malinovsky, Tito. Without endorsing Franco, many readers will draw the hard conclusion from Historian Thomas' documents that if the Madrid-Barcelona republic had beaten Franco, it would have been as a Communist or "people's" republic.

Franco, on the other hand, as the apparent international winner, gained only limited victory. During the war, the slogans of his lunatic fringe--"Long Live Death!" and "Down with Intelligence!" --made him sound as crazy as the anarchists. But he eventually made himself the master of his own extremists. His regime today, clerical and authoritarian, lacks the more demonic and dynamic features of fascism. Yet in the long run, there is no doubt that Franco lost the propaganda war; even today, there are those who see the Civil War in simple terms as a battle between democracy and fascism, good and evil. "The Spanish War," says Historian Thomas with detached irony, "appeared as a 'just war.' as civil wars do to intellectuals, since they lack the apparent vulgarity of national conflicts . . . It looked, at least at first, when all the parties of the Left seemed to be cooperating, as the great moment of hope for an entire generation." In short, it was the greatest coup in the history of the whole united-front swindle, which persistently sought to identify democracy with Communism.

Slogans & Doublethink. Spain's bloody ground became a moral gymnasium for all the liberals of the West; theirs is by now a depressing record of human illusion and disillusion. On the level of national policy, the story is equally dismal --the impotence of the League of Nations, the nonintervention policy of Britain and France and the arms Embargo Act in the U.S. leaving the door open for intervention by Stalin and the Axis. Historian Thomas' sober judgment is that German-Italian intervention may have just barely tipped the scales in Franco's favor; Stalin could have won it for the Republicans, had he wanted to, but his policy was to prolong the conflict rather than win it at the price of involvement in a general war.

With similar cynicism, and almost simultaneously, Stalin and Hitler decided to cut their losses and count their gains. Author Thomas' reckoning is fascinating. On the face of it, the Axis won, but gained little for its investment (500 million reichsmarks and 16,000 Germans; the equivalent of -L-80 million sterling and 50,000 men from Italy). Later, Hitler could never induce Franco to give him houseroom in World War II. And on the face of it, Stalin was the loser on his investment of -L-88 million sterling. But Stalin got a great hunk of Spain's gold reserve, and--in addition to the preparation for future political maneuvers--Stalin achieved his greatest triumphs of Communist propaganda, doublethink in action. "War for Peace" was his gimmick. It was not in vain that George Orwell fought in Spain. He served with the POUM, a Trotskyite outfit marked for liquidation, was wounded in battle--and thus lived to write 1984, in which "War Is Peace."

Torture & Betrayal. A must for the general reader in the West today is Thomas' account of the international brigades and the hallucinatory propaganda that surrounded them. Sixty thousand young Europeans (mostly French, but 2,800 Americans and 2,000 British were among them) fought in the international brigades or otherwise served the Republican cause. Their battalions bore honored national names--"Abraham Lincoln," "Masaryk" or "Garibaldi." They may or may not (Thomas is unsure) have saved Madrid's civilians-in-arms from Franco's 20,000-man besieging army, but whatever their effectiveness in battle, the brigades were an international showpiece. Also, except for the Communists among them, who presumably knew what they were doing, they were all betrayed by Moscow; the volunteers discovered, mostly too late, that they were conscripts in a Communist task force with the most loathsome rearechelon apparatus in the history of warfare--with political commissars, kangaroo courts, execution squads and torture cells. The international brigades so provided a fair percentage of the number (more than 7,000) killed in the civil war behind the lines. In this figure, Thomas credits the Loyalists with being twice as bloodthirsty as the fascists.

It is still heartbreaking to read of the butchered--or merely disenchanted--talents who served an ignoble cause for noble motives. Here again is the sorry drama of betrayed idealism, told piecemeal before but never in such cool, meticulous detail. To Andre Malraux, who flew in combat, the Republican cause was man's hope. Wystan Auden, who drove an ambulance, melted his prosody,

Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom

As the ambulance and the sandbag . . .

The generation for whom Madrid was the heart is long dead, or should at least appear among the psychological casualties. There came others to say later that the cause in Spain was

A pans asinorum and a Bridge of Sighs,

A Styx crossed by a long pontoon of lies . . .

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