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

Republican propaganda was often little different from its nationalist counterpart.¹² Both sides seized upon isolated incidents to make general points. The republicans spread horror stories of Moorish regulares chopping off the hands of children who clenched their fists, in case they were making the left-wing salute. They also recounted secular miracles, like the nationalist bombs which did not go off because they contained messages of solidarity from foreign workers instead of explosive. There were undoubtedly cases of sabotage by munitions workers, but the exaggeration of republican propaganda developed such addiction to misplaced hope that it became a major liability. Colonel Casado argued with justification that it was a major contribution to the republican defeat. Once the government had excited wild optimism over an offensive, it became virtually impossible to admit failure and this led to the loss of vast quantities of men and matériel in the defence of useless gains.

The major problem of the republican government was the need to provide two incompatible versions of events simultaneously. The account for external consumption was designed to convince the French, British and United States governments that the Republic was a liberal property-owning democracy, while domestic communiqués tried to persuade the workers that they were still defending a social revolution. Censorship came under A

´ lvarez del Vayo’s control. The aide responsible for English-speaking journalists stated that he ‘was instructed not to send out one word about this revolution in the economic system of loyalist Spain, nor are any correspondents in Valencia permitted to write freely of the revolution that has taken place’.¹³

The Spanish Civil War engaged the commitment of artists and intellectuals on an unprecedented scale, the overwhelming majority of them on the side of the Republic. The conflict had the fascination of an epic drama involving the basic forces of humanity. Yet they did not just adopt the role of passionate observers. The slaughter of the First World War had undermined the moral basis of art’s detachment from politics and made ‘art for art’s sake’ seem a privileged impertinence. Socialist realism took this to its logical extreme by subordinating all forms of expression to the cause of the proletariat. The support given by intellectuals to the republican cause was usually moral rather than practical, although a few writers, including André Malraux, George Orwell and John Cornford, fought, and others like Hemingway, John Dos Passos, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Herbert Read, Georges Bernanos, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard spent varying amounts of time in Spain. Malraux’s novel, L’Espoir, was regarded by many as the great novel of the Spanish Republic’s resistance, but it would not be long before this great political opportunist became a ferocious anti-communist.

No organization could match the intellectual mobilization for which the Communist Party aimed. In the 1930s the Communist Party succeeded in attracting to its cause many writers, particularly poets, who included Miguel Hernández and Rafael Alberti, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, Hugh MacDiarmid and Pablo Neruda. The most famous writer to support the Republic, and lend his weight to the campaign which the communists organized so effectively, was Ernest Hemingway. Nevertheless, the two sides to his character are of great interest when seen against the conflict of political forces within republican Spain. Hemingway was an individualist who believed in discipline for everybody else. He supported communist broadsides against the anarchists, but backed their methods only because he thought them necessary to win the war. ‘I like the communists when they’re soldiers,’ he remarked to a friend in 1938. ‘When they’re priests, I hate them.’ The communists did not realize, when they accorded him such special attention, that his deep and genuine hatred of fascism did not mean that he admired them out of any political conviction. Even so, the brutal way in which Hemingway informed Dos Passos of the communists’ secret execution of José Robles (Dos Passos’s great friend) ended their association. Hemingway found fault with Dos Passos for supporting the anarchists and for not being ‘regular enough in his attitude towards the commissars’.¹⁴