The Battle for Spain - Antony Beevor

Antony Beevor is a proper historian. I read his book on the Spanish Civil War while researching for my Asturias novel.
 
The Battle for Spain chronicles the pre-conditions, fighting and aftermath of the Civil War with admirable clarity.
 
The main points regarding the conflict are well known. The left went too far in its libertarianism and Catholic conservatism was never going to permit it, legitimately elected government or not. Subsequently, the right was merciless in its repression.
 
Some of the incidents that stayed with me:
 
The complete inability of opposing sides to countenance compromise
Thanks to the progressive reforms of the new Republic, women voted for the first time in the elections in 1933. That many voted of them for the centre-right infuriated the socialists led by Largo Caballero, whose newspaper declared: “Harmony? No! Class War! Hatred of the Criminal Bourgeoisie to the Death!” They urged an insurrection against the government “with all the characteristics of civil war” whose success would depend on violence.
 
Months later, in October 1934, the war did start, to all extents and purposes, with the uprising at Covadonga in Asturias, where it was put down by Franco, who allowed his Moors and legionnaires to loot, rape and execute.
 
The betrayal of the Republican cause by the Communists
who only ever sought the advantage of their Party. This division and treachery, which contributed to the defeat of the legitimate Republican government, is depicted in Orwell’s “A Homage to Catalonia” and also Ken Leach’s film “Tierra y Libertad” [Land and Freedom]. I saw the film with Spanish friends in Madrid when it came out in 1995. It was the first time I have ever been in a cinema where people stood up and applauded afterwards. One of my friends said: “It takes a foreigner, an outsider, to make a film like this.” Sixty years later, he was saying, in a democratic Spain, the war and the dictatorship it led to was still too emotive a subject for the Spanish to come to terms with. The wound was still too deep and angry.
 
As early as 17 July 1935, the Communist Party was denouncing their Anarchist comrades in arms as fascists. On the Left, voices of reason went unheard and the Communists “ruthless rejection of sentimentality” set the stage for the conflict.
 
The zeal for savagery of the Spanish Catholic Church
No sooner does the Right lose the election in 1936 than the Church talks of “a Judaeo-Masonic world conspiracy” and “a war to the finish.” The village committees that condemned Republican sympathizers to execution would regularly include the local priest.
 
The butchery of the Spanish Civil War
“There was practically no village in La Rioja which did not have inhabitants buried in the mass grave of La Barranca.”
In Córdoba, 10,000 were killed: a tenth of the population.
 
Guernica
Beevor’s account of the German bombing is particularly chilling. Franco’s GHQ, of course, attributed the obliteration to the “the Reds” burning the town down. Misinformation is nothing new.
 
The interminable mercilessness of the Nationalists
There were terrible acts on both sides. But if the “Red Terror” was a spasm that gave way after an initial slaughter, notoriously of priests, the “White Terror” was an ideological cleansing of all who thought differently, insisted on by Franco and enforced long after the war had been won. Franco, who strikes me always as a hideously mediocre personality, did not believe in reconciliation. If Stalin and Beria had their Gulag in the USSR, Franco’s obsession with suppression was equal to theirs, and he put as many opponents into his prison camps as he could find. Those who were not like him were a gangrene in the body politic to be cut out, a sickness to be eradicated utterly. The Bishop of Vic called for “a scalpel to drain the pus from Spain’s entrails.”
 
The señoritos
After the war, the “cleaning up” of defenceless opponents by Falangists was also carried out by young, educated gentlemen from respectable families. “The young señoritos, often aided by the sisters and girlfriends, organized themselves into mobile squads, using their parents’ touring cars.” These types are still prevalent in Spanish society today. We call them pijos.
 
Franco
I am always struck by Franco’s mediocrity as a person.
 
The betrayal by the democratic West
The post-war abandonment of the legitimate Republican government by France and the UK was predictably shameful. Pétain praised Franco as “the cleanest sword in the western world” and was appointed French ambassador to Spain. The British Navy failed to evacuate refugees by ship and Prime Minister Chamberlain misled the Commons on Franco’s intentions concerning reprisals.
 
In 1945, Spanish Republican exiles fighting for the Allies would be among the first to enter and liberate Paris. In Spain, the resistance movement keeping up the fight against Franco, naively hoped and believed that the Allies would now proceed to march south to free them from their own fascist dictatorship. We, of course, let them down.
 
These Spanish maquis will be the subject of my next post.