We Saw Spain Die [Hardcover]

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was the first war in Europe in which civilians became targets en masse. The war also inaugurated a new and more dangerous phase in newspaper reporting - because this was high velocity warfare and also because it was a conflict in which reporters were themselves seen as players not neutrals. All told, as many as a thousand foreign correspondents reported on the conflict in Spain across its near three-year duration and it is their experience, and, most particularly, the progressive political commitment and testimonial legacy of a core of charismatic and high profile war reporters, that is the focus of this riveting book.

Overall this study gives the reader a thought-provoking comparative overview of the nature of and conditions for war reporting in the opposing zones (see especially Part 1). Both sides understood that this was a new kind of war in which representation before a foreign audience would have crucial political effects. So in whichever zone they worked, correspondents had to negotiate censorship or attempt to evade it. Even so, the Republican press office came to accept that it had more to gain by a relatively open policy towards foreign correspondents. In contrast, the military authorities of the insurgent zone remained rigidly controlling and hostile to all except the most explicitly pro-rebel journalists.

In Parts 2 and 3 of his study Paul Preston offers a series of analytical portraits of a group of urbane, politically acute, intellectually powerful and eloquent correspondents - in the main North American and British - who came to a lifelong commitment to the Republican cause. Sometimes this was through their previous deep acquaintance with Spain, usually through their own progressive social and political ideas, but always through their own live and searing experience of the military rebels' war against the Republican population (in particular the siege of Madrid and the bombing of open cities and of escaping refugee columns). Above all Paul Preston demonstrates the link between that humane commitment and the correspondents' understanding of how the Republic's plight prefigured a broader continental fascist threat: this understood not only in geopolitical terms as expansionist conflict, but also as brutal civil war against civilians in the name of a `transcending' political order. The Spanish civil war was a war that could have changed the course of European and world history, had the leading constitutional democracies behaved differently. These correspondents all felt this instinctively at the time: `Oh old Europe, always busy with your petty games and great intrigues. God grant that all this blood should not choke you', Louis Delaprée, the embittered Catholic representative of France's conservative Paris-Soir, filed less than a month before he was killed when his Toulouse-bound plane was shot down.

The book's chief focus on Anglo-Saxon correspondents underscores Preston's central preoccupation: that for all their political lucidity and eloquence these correspondents could make not the slightest impact on the reckless indifference of the policy-making establishments in either Britain or the US, the former apparently blind to how the Axis dictators were using their intervention in Spain to change the international balance of power against Europe's old colonial powers, and the latter still deep in isolationism, for all of Roosevelt's personal ambivalence. Nevertheless Paul Preston's book brings to our attention the tremendous acuity of their war reporting: as the conscientious New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews remarked, their body of work was the `first draft of history... a journalist who writes truthfully what he sees and knows on a given day is writing for posterity.' Their gut instinct, reinforced by what they `saw and knew' has since been more than corroborated by the empirical investigations of professional historians.

The rebel generals who launched a coup against Spanish democracy in July 1936, owed the success of their rising to strategic military intervention by Hitler and Mussolini. Rapidly and massively escalated, this also guaranteed the rebels their final military victory in spring 1939. Crucial to its effect too was the British-led strategy of Non-Intervention that not only deprived the elected Republican government of its legal right to buy arms, but also systematically eroded its economic viability and political credibility over the near three years of sapping warfare.

In view of the scale and duration of the violence wrought by Francoism - a violence whose disfiguring afterlife still lingers today in Spain's politics and society - it is extraordinary that so many of the press reviews of Preston's book have seen fit to remark on the author's Republican preference and his criticism of Franco. Can one imagine any reviewer criticising a book's evident bias for Weimar democracy over Hitler? Or remarking on an author's ill-disguised antipathy for Stalin? One is moved to cite veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn's own exasperated put-down of `all that objectivity shit'. Franco, like Hitler and Stalin, waged a war against his own society; like them he too murdered and incarcerated huge numbers of his own nationals. Of the three, Francoism was the regime most directly born of a `hot' civil war. But its most remarkable peculiarity lies in the fact that it was for so long protected from the historical verdict by the politics of the Cold War.

As well as a reminder of the political prescience of his foreign correspondents, Paul Preston's study resonantly evokes their no less compelling emotional commitment. This commitment has been a significant historical phenomenon in its own right too since 1936. What many of the front-rank foreign correspondents went on sharing with International Brigade veterans and medical volunteers from across Europe and the Americas - was a feeling of being burned by `Spain', but never being the same for sure, and not being able to fit again, anywhere, ever - another kind of exile, to add to the territorial and political one endured by Spanish Republicans.

Paul Preston is that rare creature: a serious historian who can write page-turning books that bring to life the personalities involved in great events. He achieved this in biographies of Franco and King Juan Carlos and in his 'Doves of War' portraits of four female protagonists in the Spanish Civil War. In 'We Saw Spain Die' he turns his attention to the foreign correspondents of that same war that aroused such raw emotions for a whole generation.

What is striking about so many of the writers who covered the war is the way that they so passionately identified with the cause of the Spanish Republic. Notions of impartiality went out the window when they witnessed the desperate attempts by Spanish people to resist the rebellion launched by General Franco with backing from Hitler and Mussolini. And the Republic's eventual defeat was a deeply-felt blow from which some of them barely recovered. Josephine Herbst later wrote: "In the most real sense my most vital life did indeed end with Spain. Nothing so vital, either in my personal life or in the life of the world, has ever come again."

Preston's narrative conveys the passions and commitment to the cause felt by these journalists. Their deep sense of frustration with the policy of non-intervention being pursued by the Western democracies, which effectively doomed the Republic, was compounded by the indifferent or politically hostile reception - and emasculation - that their despatches often received in the newsrooms of London, Paris, New York and Chicago.

The Spanish war attracted several famous journalists and writers of the day, along with many others who made their name covering the conflict. The roll call includes Claud Cockburn, Geoffrey Cox, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Herbert Southworth and George Steer. 'We Saw Spain Die' vividly recounts their experiences in Spain, complete with political intrigues, spy plots and love affairs.

Preston's riveting book is an essential read not just for those of us wanting to know more about the Spanish Civil War. There is much of interest here too for anyone with questions to ask about how the news media report wars in today's world of sanitised spin and embedded correspondents.

Paul Preston is probably the historian who has devoted most scholarly attention to the Spanish Civil War. In his work, he has long been fighting in words the war that the Republic lost on the battlefield. One of best things about his work is that he has never pretended to be scientifically objective or, as the feminist would say, he doesn't write from the perspective of "the eye of God" (who believes in that?). He writes with an even hand, honesty and carefully researched material. The characters and the key scenes which he recreates to illuminate his stories are carefully chosen both to add life to the narrative but also to underline the ethical issues.

He has written the biography of a democratic King, Juan Carlos I, and also about the Triumph of Democracy in Spain. But through all his research he has mainly focused on the multifarious aspects of the same tragic period in the history of Spain in which democracy and so many lives were destroyed. His work illustrates this period through different perspectives, and diverse experiences and voices. Military winners or Republican losers, aristocratic or working class nurses, idealists and pragmatists (from both sides) have peopled the saga made up by these books, a saga that relates one of the most terrible wounds suffered by European democracy.

Foreign Correspondents, as intelligent witnesses, compose the last set and the last perspective in this long lasting (and hopefully unfinished) kaleidoscopic gallery. With his always perceptive eye for the human dimension, Preston has filled his book with engaging portraits and masterfully described situations of daily life under fire, capturing the entire kaleidoscope of danger and love, of fear and escapism. But mainly he has captured the growing feeling of a personal conscience in those who came to Spain. Moving from impotence to commitment, between censorship and propaganda, these men and women made a cause of their story. Many of them warned the world outside about was what going to happen next. But their clairvoyant warnings were not heard.

Based on massive research, this book is absorbing and fascinating. It is another masterpiece in the huge jigsaw that Paul Preston has long been building on the Spanish Civil War. Sadly, it confirms that, at the end of the day, as the spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma said long ago: `de todas las historias de la historia, la más triste es la de España porque termina mal' (of all the stories in history, the saddest of them all is that of Spain because it ends badly). Unfortunately that can not be changed. But memory must be kept. And Preston's book is a valuable reminder. A posthumous loudspeaker for all those non listened voices.