THE TRAGEDY AND THE GLORY

...Thomas' work has been criticized by a number of Republican exiles, who have cited a series of minor errors and have been particularly disturbed by Thomas' copious use of Franquist sources in citing atrocities committed by the Republicans...

...Nothing is too slight to bear inclusion—it seems there were 3,000 men of Jewish origin in the International brigades, for example— without losing sight of the necessity of fitting all the facts into the broader depiction of the conflict...

...Against the actual power of the Soviet state, with its psychological emanations and its more mundane corruptive power, anti-Stalinists were at a permanent disadvantage...

...Insured in advance of aid from Mussolini, and later by Hitler, the Spanish rebels, led by Franco and his colleagues, emerged victorious in a crusade of restoration that has left Spanish workers and peasants as impoverished and bitter as they were when the revolt began...

...Thomas' tolerance falters somewhat, however, in dealing with the Anarchists whose leaders, with some exceptions, come off badly at his hands...

...The Spanish Civil War may well be the first work, written from a viewpoint sympathetic to the Republican side, which has made such wide use of Nationalist documents...

...The French accepted non-intervention reluctantly, the Americans, under Roosevelt and Hull, more avidly...

...The major support for the Republicans, six months after the opening of the war, came from the Soviet Union...

...Mussolini and Hitler, it was said, saw the Civil War as an opportunity to test their bombs and tanks for the greater struggle ahead...

...Despite non-intervention, armaments reached Spain, openly in the case of supplies from Italy and Germany, more circumspectly through France...

...Even when they marched with Communists to demand lifting of the embargo, or raised funds for medical supplies, the anti-Stalinists knew in their hearts that betrayal was in the making...

...These doubts, conscious or not, did not quell the passion that anti-Stalinists were prepared to pour into the Spanish cause...

...Even so comprehensive a volume cannot include everything, and it remains perhaps to add a word about the dedicated anti-Communist and his attitude toward the Spanish Civil War...

...What would Stalin, who had begun his massive purges in 1936, do in case of a Republican victory in Spain...

...Few commentators failed to note that the Legion of Moors had been called in to help save Christian Spain...

...He could condemn the pusillanimous attitude of the Western countries for their refusal to help the Republicans...

...It was against these meager reforms, instituted by popularly-elected governments, that right-wing forces, frightened by strikes and workers' demonstrations, revolted in 1936...

...ALL THIS is contained in Hugh Thomas' extraordinary The Spanish Civil War, written by a thirty-year old historian with the detachment of a modern scholar describing the Napoleonic campaigns...

...The tragedy and glory of the Spanish Republican cause belong to the anonymous Spanish worker and peasant...

...During the Spanish Civil War, the American anti-Communist had an opportunity to sample the anguish of Camus, albeit prematurely and vicariously...

...In the course of the Civil War, about 600,000 men, women and children were killed and soldiers on both sides showed reckless courage, anachronistic heroism, cowardice, and mindless cruelty...

...The faith they aroused was justified at the time—and by history—even as it was realized that totalitarians using the catch-phrases of democracy would besmirch that faith for the Spanish democrats and those who supported them...

...Thomas has undoubtedly been fascinated by the material contained in the thirty-five volume Historia de la Cruzada Espanola, published in Madrid between 1940 43...

...He could wholeheartedly identify with the socialist and democratic forces that gave the Spanish Civil War a revolutionary character...

...Driven by the maniacal Stalinist, Andre Marty, the NKVD and foreign Communists murdered Socialists, Trotskyists and Anarchists behind the lines...

...Great Britain, under the leadership of Baldwin and Chamberlain, arranged for the nonintervention agreements, fearful of the radicalism of the Republican forces, and transparently clever in hoping to divert the attention of Hitler from continental prizes...

...Stalin, as usual, played his cards close to his chest, permitting enough aid to keep the Republican forces in being, but not enough to deliver a decisive blow...

...On the establishment of the Republic in 1931 successive governments began to make slow, if belated, efforts to bring Spain into the mainstream of Europe by raising the living level of workers and peasants, by extending educational opportunities for the fifty per cent of the population who were illiterate, and by lossening the grip of the conservative Catholic Church...

...They were condemned for insisting that democracy and freedom were essential elements in socialism...

...Republican Spain was not denied the horror of a Soviet purge, although it was thousands of miles from Moscow...

...However strident in asserting his own belief in socialism, the anti-Stalinist had the nagging fear that the dynamics of the times were in the grasp of the Communists primarily because, as a cliche of the time had it, the Communists had the "real estate" — the Soviet Union...

...By 1936, when the Civil War began, the non-Stalinist, whatever his radical faith, was already on the way to the conviction that the Soviet system would take its place among the major tyrannies of history...

...But the Soviet role created a dilemma for the non-Communists...