A further report added that ‘the International Brigades are considered to be a foreign body, a band of intruders…by the vast majority of political leaders, soldiers, civil servants and political parties in republican Spain’. Meanwhile, the foreign volunteers felt ‘that they have been treated like a foreign legion ready to be sacrificed’, because they were always selected for the most dangerous attacks, and saw it as ‘a concerted effort to annihilate and sacrifice the international contingents’. Some International Brigades had been at the front ‘for 150 consecutive days’. In XIII International Brigade, Captain Roehr ‘committed suicide in battle because he could no longer accept the responsibility of demanding renewed effort from his exhausted men, and at the same time felt he did not have the right to demand rest for his men from his superiors’.42
Another report to Voroshilov, passed on to Stalin, noted ‘a pessimistic mood and the lack of confidence in victory (the latter has especially strengthened since the operation at Brunete)’. Many Brigaders felt cheated. They had volunteered for six months and were not being allowed home.43 Most striking of all was the fact that the International Brigades had established their own ‘concentration camp’, called Camp Lukács. No less than 4,000 men were sent to this camp in the course of three months from 1 August.44
Although the ‘active war-policy’ of Negrín’s government had not started auspiciously, the new prime minister hoped that his cabinet’s moderate and disciplined image would succeed in persuading Western governments to change their policy towards Spain. He managed to impress Eden and Churchill, but the former had scarcely six months left before his resignation in protest at Chamberlain’s policy, while the latter remained ‘in the wilderness’ until after the end of the war.
The British government had continued to keep France in the noninterventionist camp by working on its fear of isolation in the face of Hitler. The Non-Intervention Committee, with eight countries participating, had approved on 8 March a new control plan to observe Spanish land and sea frontiers, and control the flow of arms and volunteers. Naval patrols were to watch the Spanish shores, with the Germans and Italians taking responsibility for the Mediterranean coastline.1
The diplomatic charade of non-intervention received a severe shock on 23 March 1937, when Count Grandi, the Italian ambassador, openly admitted to the Non-intervention Committee that there were Italian forces in Spain and asserted that none of them would be withdrawn until the war was won.2 Even so German and Italian intervention continued to be ‘unrecognized’. The only practical step taken had been a measure on foreign enlistments, which meant that each of the signatories passed laws preventing private citizens from volunteering. This, of course, would stop those trying to join the International Brigades, while the Axis powers’ contribution of military units was ignored. In addition, the only effective control on importing war material proved to be the Pyrenean frontier, so again only the Republic suffered. Yet even this did not satisfy the nationalists. In Salamanca, Virginia Cowles encountered a great sense of bitterness against the British government, based on the firm belief that non-intervention was ‘a communist plot to weaken Franco by excluding foreign aid’.3
The isolationism of the United States helped the nationalists, who were aided by many influential sympathizers in Washington. Roosevelt’s government had tacitly upheld the non-intervention policy from the beginning. Then, in January 1937, when aircraft were to be shipped to Spain by the Vimalert company of New Jersey, Congress introduced legislation to prevent it. The vote in both houses was overwhelmingly in favour of the ban, but a technical error in the Senate gave the Vimalert company time to load the aircraft and aero engines on the
