The Adelphi, December 1939
How many millions of people in Spain and elsewhere are now looking back on the Spanish war and asking themselves what the devil it was all about? The thing had begun to seem meaningless even before the European kaleidoscope had twisted itself into its new pattern, and practically every foreigner who was involved seems to have brought away the impression of having been mixed up in a nightmare. Some months ago I was talking to a British soldier who was coming home from Gibraltar on a Japanese liner. A year earlier he had deserted from the Gibraltar garrison and with great difficulty made his way round to Valencia to join the Spanish Government forces. He had no sooner got there than he was arrested as a spy, flung into prison and forgotten about for six months. Then the British consul managed to extricate him and ship him back to Gibraltar, where he received another six months for desertion. This might almost be an allegorical history of the Spanish war.
Mrs. Johnstone’s book, sequel to an earlier one, deals with the last eighteen months of the war, the period during which the Spanish Government’s cause was becoming more and more obviously hopeless. She and her husband kept a hotel at Tossa on the Catalan coast, which became a rendezvous for journalists and visiting literary men, besides insufferable ‘politicals’ of all colours. Starting off with the comic-opera conditions which still prevailed in 1937, the book becomes increasingly a story of food-shortage and tobacco-shortage, air-raids, spy-mania and refugee children, and ends with the terrible retreat into France and the stench and misery of the concentration camps round Perpignan. Much of the atmosphere will be horribly familiar to anyone who was in Spain at any period of the war. The sense of never having quite enough to eat, the muddle, the inefficiency, the inability to understand what is happening, the feeling that everything is fading away into a sort of mist of fear, suspicion, red tape and obscure political jealousies – it is all there, with plenty of crude physical adventure into the bargain. Mrs. Johnstone’s picture of the concentration camps on the French-Spanish border is dreadful enough, but there is one observation that she makes and which ought to be underlined, and that is that the French Government is the only one that has actually done anything appreciable for the refugees from Fascist countries. Whereas the British Government made a grant of £12,000 for the Spanish refugees, their keep at the beginning was costing the French Government £17,000 a day, and presumably is not costing much less even now. It is worth remembering that at any time during the past ten years close on 10 per cent of the population of France has consisted of foreigners, quite largely political refugees. After all, there is something to be said for ‘bourgeois’ democracy.
This book gives a valuable picture of the retreat and will no doubt help to stop up some historical gaps, but it does not seem to me a very good book, as a book. Why is it that autobiographical journalism of this type always has to be so chirpily facetious? As soon as I glanced into the book and saw the style in which it was written I began looking for the dog. Books of this kind almost always have a comic dog which is a great filler-up of paragraph-ends; however, the part is filled by Mrs. Johnstone’s husband. The probability is that if a really good book is ever written about the Spanish war it will be by a Spaniard, and probably not a ‘politically conscious’ one. Good war books are nearly always written from the angle of a victim, which is just what the average man is in relation to war. What vitiated the outlook of most of the foreigners in Spain, and especially the English and Americans, was the knowledge at the back of their minds that they would probably succeed in escaping from Spain in the end. Moreover, if they had gone there deliberately to take part, they knew what the war was about, or thought they did. But what did it mean to the great mass of the Spanish people? We simply do not know as yet. Looking back on casual contacts with peasants, shopkeepers, street-hawkers, even militiamen, I now suspect that great numbers of these people had no feelings about the war whatever, except a wish that it were over. Mrs. Johnstone’s picture of the stolid inhabitants of the little seaport town of Tossa half-consciously confirms this. One question that is still not satisfactorily answered is why the war went on so long. After the beginning of 1938 it was obvious to anyone with any military knowledge that the Government could not win, and even by the summer of 1937 the odds were in Franco’s favour. Did the mass of the Spanish people really feel that even the atrocious sufferings of the later part of the war were preferable to surrender – or did they continue to fight at least partly because the whole of left-wing opinion from Moscow to New York was driving them on? Perhaps we shall know the answer when we begin to hear what the war looked like to Spanish conscripts and non-combatants, and not merely to foreign volunteers.