The Victors Write History, the Vanquished Literature: Myth, Distortion and Truth in the XV Brigade

Abstract

The present article attempts to expose and debunk some myths of the participation of the English-speaking volunteers in the XV International Brigade that have frequently been overlooked. Our assumptions are based on a wide range of archival and well documented sources. From the very beginning there were many elements that merged together to offer all kinds of exaggerations, legends and self-aggrandizing images. Journal reports, scholarly articles, posters, poems and symbols have been exploited with the purpose of turning a very harsh reality into an idealized, over-fantasized experience. Ernest Hemingway (a war correspondent) was perhaps the most conspicuous case, and Esmond Romilly and John Sommerfield (both fighting in the defence of Madrid) were the first to give a romantic vision of their war experiences. In contrast, George Orwell, Laurie Lee, Jason Gurney, William Herrick or Alvah Bessie are examples of volunteers who denounce the lack of organization, the scarce military training they received or even the excessive, in their opinion, control by their officers on their daily lives.

Notes

¹George Orwell, ‘As I Please’, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), III, 109.

²George Orwell, ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, The New English Weekly, 29 July 1937, pp. 307–08.

³Quoted in Antonio R. Celada, Manuel González de la Aleja, Daniel Pastor García, Los Brigadistas de habla inglesa y la Guerra Civil española (Salamanca: Editorial Ambos Mundos, 2006), 35.

⁴Quoted in Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Cause. The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968) 87.

⁵Quoted in Weintraub, The Last Great Cause, 9.

⁶Stephen Spender, ‘Heroes in Spain’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 May 1937, 714–15 (p. 715).

⁷ Spanish Civil War Verse, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 100.

⁸In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell's obsession (see Chapters IV and XII) with killing a fascist is widely known. He uses the word ‘fascist’ hundreds of times in the book and always with negative, clumsy and brutal connotations, ignoring that the ‘fascist’ whom he wanted to kill and who was accidentally on the other side could have been a labourer, a shepherd or an olive farmer […] a wage-earner for whose dignity he was in fact fighting.

⁹Ricardo de la Cierva, Historia ilustrada de la Guerra Civil, 2 vols (Barcelona: Ediciones Danue, 1970); Ramón Salas Larrazábal, Historia del Ejército Popular de la República, 4 vols (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1973), Vol. II; José Manuel Martínez Bande, Brigadas Internacionales (Barcelona: Luis de Caralt, 1972).

¹⁰Andreu Castells, Las Brigadas Internacionales en la guerra de España (Barcelona: Ariel, 1974), 383.

¹¹Remi Skoutelsky, Novedad en el frente (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006), 457.

¹²Arthur Landis, The Abraham Lincoln Brigade (New York: The Citadel Press, 1967).

¹³Peter Carroll, The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1994).

¹⁴Tim Buck, ‘Soldiers of Democracy’, The Marxist Quarterly, 18 (1966), 11–31; Michael Petrou, Renegades. Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Torfaen: Warren & Pell Publishing, 2008).

¹⁵Antonio R. Celada, Manuel González and Daniel Pastor, Los Internacionales. English-Speaking Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (Pontypool: Warren & Pell Publishing, 2009), 23–25, Listing I. In our listing we have included soldiers, doctors and nurses. The figure preceded by a + sign in parenthesis refers to those volunteers with dual citizenship. This is a very important point since many names have been listed doubly. No accurate listings can be produced without taking this into consideration. For example, many Irish volunteers are duplicated in American, British and Canadian listings.

¹⁶See Celada, González and Pastor, Los Internacionales, Chapter 1.

¹⁷Adolfo Lizón Gadea, Brigadas Internacionales en España (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1940), 13.

¹⁸Michael W. Jackson, Fallen Sparrows: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994), 87.

¹⁹In Verle B. Johnston, Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State U. P., 1967), 93.

²⁰Walter Gregory, The Shallow Grave: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986), 35.

²¹ Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War, ed. Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), 24.

²²John Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), 27.

²³Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain, 151.

²⁴Esmond Romilly, Boadilla (London: Hamish Halmilton, 1937), 162.

²⁵Romilly, Boadilla, 188.

²⁷Sommerfield, Volunteer in Spain, 150.

²⁶In Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Journey to the Front. Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), 381.

²⁸Bernard Knox, ‘Premature Antifascist’, The Antioch Review, 57:2 (1999), 133–49 (p. 143).

²⁹Ernest Hemingway, ‘On the American Dead in Spain’, New Masses, 30 (1939), 3.

³¹Gurney, Crusade in Spain, 76.

³⁰Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 13.

³²Gurney, Crusade in Spain, 67.

³³Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (San Francisco: Chandler and Sharp Publishers, 1975 [1^st ed. New York: Scribner's, 1939]), 83–84.

³⁴Bessie, Men in Battle, 151, 153, 202.

³⁵Bessie, Men in Battle, 304.