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The Spanish Civil War meant so many different things to so many different people (indeed at one time it could almost have been said to mean all things to all men), that one could not fail to admire the courage of anyone who undertakes to write its history, as Mr Hugh Thomas has now done. For some the war was a crusade in which Christ the King in person rode into battle, though on a tank, not a charger. For others it was a tragedy in which poor and ignorant men fought and died in vain for an unattainable ideal of human dignity and freedom. There were some for whom the war was an interesting laboratory experiment for testing the latest techniques of mechanized warfare or political infiltration; others for whom it was merely a nuisance which hindered them in their task of appeasing dictators. There were men who, in the name of the Virgin, murdered women and children, sure that She would approve; others who inaugurated a new era of love and justice by massacring their neighbours, being confident that this was the best way to start. Poets became soldiers in it; soldiers found that they were poets. Six hundred thousand men died in it, on Mr Thomas’s conservative estimate; if one adds to the dead the exiles, the casualties were over a million.

     And the end of it all? One thinks of the death of Antonio Machado in the sand dunes of the atrocious French internment camp at Cerbère, as described in The Owl of Minerva by Gustav Regler, once Political Commissar to the International Brigade. ‘And somewhere in the night, sick and tired, ill-used by the murderers of his republic, lay the Republic’s greatest poet, watched over by the Senegalese, ill-used Africans.

     ‘“It doesn’t make sense,” said Matthews, and started his car again.

     ‘“No, it doesn’t make sense,” I repeated.’

     Anyone who wishes to write a history of the Civil War must try to find a sense in it and it must be confessed that it is not an easy task. Perhaps the first and essential requirement is to penetrate to the sober and verifiable facts which lie behind so much passion and so much poetry, so much heroism and so much propaganda; the historian of such a subject must exercise a self-restraint only equal to that which he has the right to expect of his readers.

     In this first task of the historian Mr Thomas has admirably succeeded; his book is a remarkably cool, detached narrative of events which were both the cause and the result of ungovernable passions. Atrocities on one side are balanced against atrocities on the other, legends and propaganda are put to the test of evidence, the facts of intervention by Germany and Italy are measured against those of intervention by the Soviet Union and both against the contemptible, yet perhaps inevitable, policy of non-intervention practised by Great Britain and France and, in another form but even more consistently, by the United States. Where one might have expected tragedy, one finds a neatly audited balance sheet, and one can only admire the thoroughness with which Mr Thomas has tried to verily every item in it, and for the extent and variety of the sources he has made use of; both for the student and the general reader his bibliography will be of the greatest value.

     The military operations of the war are particularly well described, and Mr Thomas’s clear and lucid narrative gains greatly from the number and clarity of the maps with which it is illustrated. His account makes one realize above all what an immense advantage was conferred on General Franco by the complete subordination of politics to military necessity in the Nationalist Zone. From this point of view, if from no other, Nationalist strategy was a model of how to conduct military operations.

     The Republic, on the other hand, was consistently crippled by internal dissensions; it fought a better disciplined, better equipped and better organized enemy with one hand tied behind its back, and Mr Thomas emphasizes that the immense growth of Communist influence was very largely the result of their insistence that political differences must be suppressed, if necessary by violence or fraud, in the interests of winning the war. The only criticism one would like to make of Mr Thomas’s narrative of events is that he has a maddening tendency to tell us not only what we need to know but what we do not need to know. It is of little help to understanding the Civil War, or indeed anything else, to be told, for instance, that Brian Howard was a genius manqué and is ‘often regarded as the original of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited’, or that Stephen Spender went to Spain to save a friend from the death penalty. The Spanish Civil War is a very long book, with a formidable array of footnotes; it could with advantage have been much shorter if Mr Thomas could have restrained his passion for irrelevance and the kind of faits divers that might adorn a literary gossip column.

     This is, however, only a minor criticism, given the real merits of Mr Thomas’s book. A more serious one, I think, is that he gives an inadequate account of the social processes of which the war was the result and of their development during the war itself. For it was, after all, not only a war but a civil war, and it was part of the military weakness of the Republicans that, while fighting a war, they were at the same time trying to make a revolution, or rather a number of revolutions, for their form varied from region to region according to which of the Republican parties was predominant there. Partly this explains the determination of both sides to fight the war to a finish; during the course of the war itself, in the face of appalling difficulties, the Republic tried to create, especially through its educational policies, the institutions which for the Nationalists were a death blow to the traditional Spain they were pledged to defend. The Republic, for all its weaknesses, dissensions, cruelties and excesses, was the product of the last great outburst of revolutionary idealism in European politics, and that is why foreigners as well as Spaniards thought it worth while fighting and dying to defend or destroy it.

     Mr Thomas neglects this aspect of the war and for that reason his book misses the tragic element which gave the war its unique character; deprived of this, even its evils seem somehow to be diminished. He tends to see the decisive factor in the war in the diabolic ingenuity with which the European Powers calculated the degree, scope and timing of their intervention to ensure that the war should continue to the last possible moment; but though foreign intervention (of which non-intervention was only another version) may have decided the course of the war and its eventual outcome, it was the conflicting passions, hopes and idealisms of Spaniards which made them the victims of such policies. Indeed, except for a small minority, their divisions were so complete that they left no alternative between complete victory or complete defeat, and in the effort to achieve the one or avert the other, Spaniards almost lost their character as Spaniards, if that were ever possible, and became the living and bleeding representatives of cruel abstractions:

‘All changed, changed utterly,
A terrible beauty is born.’

     In the end, if one wants to find a sense in the Civil War, it is in the hearts of Spaniards that one must find it, and in the processes by which the hearts of the best of them were broken. It is the tragic sense that is missing from Mr Thomas’s book; perhaps this is inevitable because it may still be too soon to see the tragedy clear and whole. In the meanwhile we should be grateful to Mr Thomas for having given us so detailed, so impartial, and so well documented a narrative.