Time and Tide, 5 February 1938
It goes without saying that everyone who writes of the Spanish War writes as a partisan. What is perhaps less obvious is that, because of the huge discords that have shaken and threatened to split the Government side, every pro-Government writer is really involved in several distinct controversies. He is writing for the Government, but he is also (though he generally pretends otherwise) writing against the Communists, or the Trotskyists, or the Anarchists, or what-not. Mr. Steer’s book is no exception to the general rule, but he carries a different set of prejudices from the majority of pro-Government writers, because he happens to have seen the war not in eastern Spain but in the Basque country.
In a way the problems here were simpler. The Basques were Catholic and Conservative, the left-wing organizations were weak even in the large towns (as Mr. Steer says, ‘there was no socéial revolution in Bilbao’), and what the Basques chiefly wanted was regional autonomy, which they were likelier to get from the Popular Front Government than from Franco. Mr. Steer writes entirely from the Basque standpoint, and he has, very strongly, the curious English characteristic of being unable to praise one race without damning another. Being pro-Basque, he finds it necessary to be anti-Spanish, i.e., to some extent anti-Government as well as anti-Franco. As a result his book is so full of gibes at the Asturians and other non-Basque loyalists as to make one doubtful of his reliability as a witness – a pity, for he has had opportunities that were shared by very few Englishmen.
His book is sub-titled ‘A Field Study of Modern War’, but as a matter of fact it is not at all clear how much he has seen with his own eyes and how much he is repeating from hearsay. Nearly every incident is described as though by an eye-witness, but it is obviously impossible that Mr. Steer can have been in all places at once. However, there is one very important and much-disputed event upon which he speaks with undoubted authority – the bombing of Guernica (or Gernika). He was in the immediate neighbourhood at the time of the aeroplane raids, and his account leaves no doubt that the little town was not‘burnt by Red militiamen’ but systematically destroyed from the air, out of sheer, wanton brutality. Guernica was not even of much importance as a military objective. And the most horrible thought of all is that this blotting-out of an open town was simply the correct and logical use of a modern weapon. For it is precisely to slaughter and terrify the civilian population – not to destroy entrenchments, which are very difficult to hit from the air – that bombing aeroplanes exist. The photographs in this book are very good. All photo graphs in books on the Spanish war have a certain similarity, but these have much more character in them than most.
Mr. Arthur Koestler,1 a News Chronicle correspondent, stayed in Maálaga when the Republican troops had departed – a bold thing to do, for he had already published a book containing some very unfriendly remarks about General Queipo de Llano.2 He was thrown into jail by the rebels, and suffered what must have been the fate of literally tens of thousands of political prisoners in Spain. That is to say, he was condemned to death without trial and then kept in prison for months, much of the time in solitary confinement, listening at his keyhole night after night for the roar of rifle-fire as his fellow prisoners were shot in batches of six or a dozen. As usual – for it really does seem to be quite usual – he knew that he was under sentence of death without knowing with any certainty what he was accused of.
The prison part of the book is written mainly in the form of a diary. It is of the greatest psychological interest – probably one of the most honest and unusual documents that have been produced by the Spanish war. The earlier part is more ordinary and in places even looks rather as though it had been ‘edited’ for the benefit of the Left Book Club. Even more than Mr. Steer’s, this book lays bare the central evil of modern war – the fact that, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘he who fights against dragons becomes a dragon himself’.3
Mr. Koestler says:
I can no longer pretend to be objective… Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his nerves, his heart, his stomach – and then pretends to be objective, is a liar. If those who have at their command printing machines and printer’s ink for the expression of their opinions, remain neutral and objective in the face of such bestiality, then Europe is lost.
I quite agree. You cannot be objective about an aerial torpedo. And the horror we feel of these things has led to this conclusion: if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother. The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no one has suggested a practicable way out.
1. Arthur Koestler (1905–83), novelist and political and scientific writer, born in Hungary. He was a lifelong friend of Orwell’s. See Orwell’s essay on Koestler, September 1944 (2548), and the cumulative index in CW. XX.
2. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Serra (1875–1951), Nationalist, who, on 18 July 1936 in Seville, when commander of carabineers, ‘carried out an outstanding coup de main and took Seville for Franco. From the radio station he made a ‘notorious series of harangues. In a voice seasoned by many years’ consumption of sherry, he declared that Spain was saved and that the rabble who resisted the rising would be shot like dogs’ (Thomas, 221, 223). In his most famous broadcast, he said, ‘tonight I shall take a sherry and tomorrow I shall take Maálaga’ (520). In 1947, though now an avowed republican, he accepted a marquisate from Franco (948).
3. Nietzsche, Jenseitsvon Gut undBöse (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886), ch. 4, no. 146.