Memories of an Historic Struggle

...Married for 29 years, a father and grandfather, contemptuous of his family and of France ("this woman's country of people who speak and act like man-cones"), he leaves without a word, even to his wife, and trudges over the Pyrenees poorly clothed, a scant 50 francs in his pocket...

...I never for a moment doubted that these authors were seeking truth...

...The Distant Drum joins those accounts whose quest is for truth...

...Hugh Thomas offers a 15-page history of the fighting that dazzles with its objectivity and erudition, and gives the book its fulcrum as well...

...Day's peasant is so sensitive about his dignity and honor (the famous pundonor) that when they are challenged by a band of Gypsy youths in Granada—his last stop prior to reaching his native village—he commits murder, thus stupidly revealing himself...

...During this arduous trek, the reader is treated to a tourist's glimpse of modem Spain, several battlefields of the Civil War (the Ebro, Teruel, Belchite, where El Lobo had seen action), a few flashbacks of the battles themselves, one moving view of poverty in a peasant village, and a recital of the evils that have overtaken the nation: turismo, high-rise buildings and plumbing...

...Willi, it must be remembered, was the wizard of agitprop for the Comintern at the time, and his epigoni, Left and Right, conscious and unconscious, swarm the earth...

...It is true that Spanish peasants are justly celebrated for their dignity and honor...

...Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the mass of Spanish Civil War books published over the last four decades...

...but also with respect for the competence with which Franco led his armies and unified the disparate political forces backing him...

...To this company we can now admit The Distant Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War...

...the emotion that he sat down to write this book with is washed out before it reaches the reader...

...He sets forth a journal kept of his visit to Republican Spain, then forth-rightly proceeds to criticize its naivete...

...He will now be buried in the Spanish earth...

...The war is portrayed as it was: horrifying...

...Reviewed by William Herrick Member, Lincoln Brigade...

...The final essay is Toynbee's...

...I don't think he does...

...The reader, as Toynbee cautions in his Introduction, therefore "finds no homogeneity of attitude or emotion...

...Sebastian's painful hegira over the Pyrenees and difficult journey to his town hardly seemed worth this ending...

...These people know their history well—how quickly the violent shedding of one drop of blood can lead to an over-Whelming flood—and their knowledge today permeates each word they utter...

...For regardless of how hard one tries to correct the angle of vision, adjust for the curvature of the earth, one keeps arriving at a personal perspective...

...they realize that who was objectively in the right and who in the wrong may never be known...

...The author has done his research well...

...Those contributors who fought for the Republic as soldiers in the International Brigades left their country as Communists and returned to Britain disillusioned with the party and the Spanish government's military ability, yet filled with admiration for the people in their fight for freedom...

...Douglas Day would have done much better if he had invented his own...

...And one could only hope the readers of those volumes would know the difference between history and propaganda, or melodrama put to the service of propaganda...

...author, "Hermanos...

...Finally on home ground, he contrives to have himself killed by the Guardia Civil...

...Golcz" Everpresent during Spain's first democratic election campaign in over 40 years was the Spanish Civil War—pressing its bloody weight on the consciousness, and no doubt the unconscious, of all intelligent citizens...

...I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Journey of the Wolf, a first novel by Douglas Day, recipient of The National Book Award for his biography of Malcolm Lowry...

...Brian Crozier, not a participant in the war (save emotionally on the side of the Republic) disagrees and states, without reservations, that precisely because Franco won Hitler finally lost, since Franco alone could and did talk the Fiihrer out of using Spain as the road to Gibraltar, a move that would have opened Africa and its hoard of natural resources to a full onslaught of Nazi arms...

...If a scholar were to gather all that has been written on the struggle in one room, it would have to be immense, with books stretching wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling...

...As a reading of the book will reveal, courage, idealism and fervor are never a monopoly of any side to a war, battle, liberation struggle?call it what you will...

...They include Arturo Barea's The Forging of a Rebel...

...Alfred Lent, a German volunteer who fought for Franco, is the single nonjBriton represented...

...Those who fought with Franco similarly came away with admiration for the Spaniards...

...those who have toiled the arid soil to scratch out a living for their families, fought off tyrants, pestilence, and civil wars, and survived, deserve that reputation...

...Claude Cockburn, first a correspondent for the London Daily Worker, later a soldier at the front with the International Brigades, still holds, with reservations, that if Franco had lost, Spain would have been the tomb of Fascism, as the slogan of the time had it...

...But Journey of the Wolf is a novel, its hero supposedly a unique human being, and before we can give him our respect, he must earn it...

...The 13 contributors to this fine collection, except for historian Hugh Thomas, either fought in the Civil War on one or the other side, or were present at some point during the conflict...

...Not even Hemingway could always do with that style as he wished, and he, after all, invented it...

...There have been, however, some outstanding works on the event, enough to cover a small shelf...

...In the shadows I can see Willi Muen-zenberg laugh with pride...

...Each of the pieces is written simply and directly, with no false heroics...

...8.95...

...They merely recount what they remember, felt, believed...

...World War II, finally settling down when the fighting stopped...

...Philip Toynbee has edited, written a short introduction and provided an essay of his own, "Journal of a Naive Revolutionary"?performing all three tasks superbly...

...Crozier maintains, too, that Guernica was destroyed by the scorched earth policy of the Basque defenders (a method previously used in Irun) and not by the Nationalist or German air forces...

...All seem to "agree on little more than the fact that a war did actually take place, in Spain and at that time...

...One selection is a letter by a British International Briga-der killed at the front...

...Unfortunately, he uses what has come to be called Hemingway Spanish-English too neatly, and too meticulously...

...There is no trace here of a tendentious journey into the quagmire of lies undertaken by men who have much to hide or whose guilt feelings are so profound, they must blindly espouse the One Just Cause...

...Thus among human beings whose thinking doesn't require the ballast of gush and pap, and who attempt to reach rational observations and conclusions, it is the quest that counts most...

...He had fought for the Republic in the Civil War as a boy, earned the sobriquet El Lobo for his wiliness and capacity to kill unemotionally, and escaped to France at the war's end...

...Stanley G. Payne's The Spanish Revolution, perhaps the finest...

...Once back in his native land, he makes his way south across the torturous terrain to Andalucia, aided by lifts in cars, a cattle truck and a cart, all driven by people who treat him rather generously, though he has only contempt for them: They are not as closed-mouthed as he...

...Neither is truth...

...Indeed, every move made by the responsible parties of the Left, Center and Right since Franco's death has been carried out with those strife-torn days in mind...

...Hugh Thomas' The Spanish Civil War, the best-known along with George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia...

...There he joined the Maquis during...

...To read Toynbee's reflections on his political past and present followed by Lillian Hellman's on her political past and present (in Scoundrel Time) is the best way I know to learn to differentiate between intellectual honesty and mendacious self-applause...

...and Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit...

...The story concerns Sebastian Rosales, an andaluz who decides to return home after living in southern France for some 34 years...

...For me it was the most moving and brilliant piece in a brilliant book...