ABSTRACT
To the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 is familiar nowadays chiefly through the poetry of W.H.Auden, George Orwell’s classic war memoir Homage to Catalonia and, most of all perhaps, Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. This alone testifies to the passions that the war aroused among non-Spanish contemporaries, for many of whom its significance went well beyond Spain itself. Thousands of foreigners from all parts of the world were so concerned about events in Spain that they actually went there to fight in the war, many of them never to return. For most of these volunteers the war represented a kind of crusade against the greatest evil of the day: fascism, as represented by General Franco’s Nationalist rebels and their Italian and German allies. Helping the young Spanish Republic in its struggle for survival against these powerful enemies was, or seemed to be, a way of resisting the advance of a sinister creed and politicai system which threatened to engulf the whole of Europe. Not all foreigners sympathized with the Republic, however. A smaller number volunteered to assist the rebels, likewise out of a conviction that on Spanish soil a wider struggle was being fought out. For them too-and for the Nationalists themselves, who adopted the term officially-this was a crusade, but one on behalf of Chrisrianity against godless ‘Bolshevism’ as incarnate in the Republic’s left-wing allies and Soviet backers.
