Comrades! Portraits from the Spanish Civil War. By Paul Preston. HarperCollins. 396pp, £19.99 in the UK
Few conflicts have been refought so many times in so many books, and in so many bar-rooms, as the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston, the author of a valuable biography of Franco, is a distinguished contributor to the literary struggle to understand this most complex of quarrels. Judging by the passion which often blazes in the pages of Comrades! he would be able to hold his own in a public house dispute as well. Ironically, though one of his themes in this book is the neglected role of those who felt incapable of taking sides in the war, Preston himself can never quite repress his own strongly anti-fascist stance.
This may account for the relative failure of some of the opening portraits in Comrades! - those which deal with people committed to a dictatorship of the Right in Spain. Only the first of them, General Millan Astray, really leaps out of the pages and takes life, albeit as a political grotesque of almost incredible dimensions. This "glorioso mutilado", whose crazy bravery in battle cost him an arm and an eye, was the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion. He called his men the "bridegrooms of death" and led them with the terrible cry of "Long Live Death".
He used the same slogan in a famous debate with the great novelist, Miguel de Unamuno, after the civil war had already started. Unamuno is emblematic of those who belong to what Preston calls "the Third Spain". These were individuals who could neither identify with the quasi-revolutionary Republic nor with Franco's savage rebellion against it. They are the informed heart of this uneven but stimulating book.
With great courage, Unamuno had told an audience which included both Millan Astray and Franco's wife, that "our war is only an uncivil war . . . you will conquer [vencer] but you will not convince convencer], and it is necessary to convince, and that cannot be done by the hatred which has no place for compassion." The general, he declared prophetically, with his "necrophiliac" slogan, would like to create "a new Spain in his own image . . . a mutilated Spain". Apoplectic with rage, Millan Astray adapted his slogan on the spot to "Death to Intelligence", and so created a template for the intellectual climate of Franco's 40-year dictatorship.
In Preston's view, Millan Astray was "perhaps the individual who had most influence over the moral and ideological formation of Francisco Franco". The two men certainly shared an unshakeable commitment to military authoritarianism, but they shared little else. Franco had none of Millan Astray's extravagant lunacy of character. While the founder of the Legion took a personal, and apparently sexual, pleasure in slaughter, Franco signed sheafs of death warrants with cold detachment.
Preston portrays him as a much duller dictator than either Hitler or Mussolini, which may be part of the reason for his abiding success. A pragmatic manipulator of the venality and weakness of others, Franco himself always remained a curiously distant figure. "He never showed anything," was the inadvertently revealing comment made by his chaplain. For this reason, he makes a poor read and a weak subject here, where Preston wants to examine "the relationship between individuals and historical processes". The book only really works when he moves to some complex figures of the centre and the moderate left: Salvador de Madariaga, Julian Besteiro, Manuel Azana and Indalecio Prieto. It has been customary to paint the Civil War in black-and-white terms, and its leaders as unblinkingly committed to one side or the other. Preston shows convincingly, and movingly, that these men were consumed with doubt about the moral ambiguities of the Republican enterprise. Preston's concluding mini-biography, of La Pasionaria, the great Communist leader, is a tour de force in itself, but it is not convincingly yoked to the main theme of the book.
Azana and Prieto both served in the Republic's highest offices, but unlike La Pasionaria, they would both have recognised, at least in private, the grain of truth behind a jibe of de Madariaga's. The Republicans, said the fiercely independent-minded historian, "filled their mouths with democracy and liberty, but allowed neither to live". The intense personal and political strain of attempting to build a liberal democracy, between the twin tidal waves of revolutionary passion and Francoist hysteria, is precisely and sensitively drawn in these pages.
Prieto, who was tortured by well-founded pessimism, while energetically defending the Republic as Minister of National Defence, expressed the tragedy of the situation with great clarity in 1938, after so much blood had already been shed: "Perhaps, in Spain, we have not calmly compared ideologies to find out where they coincide, perhaps in the fundamentals, and measured the divergencies, which are probably secondary, with a view to finding out if these differences can be resolved only on the battlefield."
It was much too late for such sweet reason to prevail. As Preston points out, Prieto's proposal would not return to the Spanish agenda for another 40 years. And despite the remarkable achievements of Spanish democracy since then, it is by no means certain that the Spanish (and Basques, Catalans and Galicians) have really learned Unamuno's lesson, that it is better to convince than to conquer. But then, how many peoples have?