The Battle for Spain
by Antony Beevor
526pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25
Like the bitter conflict in Iraq today, the Spanish civil war was pathologically vicious. Religious fanaticism, political separatism and foreign intervention inflamed the violence in both cases. But it was aggravated in Spain by other factors, notably virulent class hatred. Half the nation went to bed hungry each night and anarchists said that "the sins of the old corrupt system can only be washed away in blood". The affluent were no less ferocious. One Salamanca landowner boasted that on the opening day of the civil war he lined up all his labourers and shot six of them "pour encourager les autres".
The "Red Terror", which creamed the scum off the top (to paraphrase Stalin's ambassador), reminded some of barbarian massacres. Among the victims were 6,500 clergy and 280 nuns. And such was the hatred felt for the church, a medieval institution with an auto-da-fé mentality, that some priests were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Meanwhile Franco proved to be, as HG Wells said, every inch "a murderous little Christian gentleman". He approved a process of limpieza (cleansing) and altogether slaughtered some 200,000 people, four times as many as the Republicans. Nationalists cried "Long live death". The psychopathic General Queipo de Llano, who also encouraged rape, promised to hunt down Republicans without mercy and "if they're already dead, I shall kill them again".
So Antony Beevor's revised history of the civil war, which vividly anatomises a state and a society in the process of disintegration, is a tract for our times. It is also an odd volume. First published in 1982, it was regarded as a competent but not especially original account of the war. It told a chronological, nuts-and-bolts story that held the reader's attention. It was well illustrated - indeed, the first edition had more and better photographs than the present book. And it contained some telling anecdotes - manhunts conducted by Falangist aristocrats were known as reforma agraria because they finally gave the landless peasant a piece of ground for himself.
However, the first edition was overshadowed by Hugh Thomas's masterpiece, which had itself been recently revised and enlarged. Other works also eclipsed Beevor. There were classic novels by Hemingway, Malraux and Barea. There were brilliant documentaries by Orwell and Koestler. There were unbeatable first-hand records, ranging from Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth to Ronald Fraser's Blood of Spain. There were ground-breaking academic works by Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and others. In fact, the Spanish civil war, widely regarded at the time as the dress rehearsal for the second world war, had produced a vast palimpsest of historical writing. Unusually, too, as Beevor remarks, the losers have had the last word - which must trouble the shade of Franco, who professed himself (rather like Blair) "responsible only to God and to history".
Far from being intimidated by all this competition, Beevor has refashioned his book, more than two decades later, to take advantage of it. But he has not only stood on the shoulders of giants, he has conducted research in German and Russian archives to throw fresh light on the story. So although the present work replicates the structure and often echoes the language of its predecessor, it is more an improved recipe than a reheated dish. There are important additions. New characters appear, such as the Soviet General Smushkevich, who secretly commanded the entire Republican air force. Silent corrections are made, not least over statistics. Whereas Beevor first said that Queipo de Llano captured Seville with 300 men, he now says 4,000. Whereas he first said that 1,654 people were killed at Guernica, he now says between 200 and 300.
Above all, he has Beevorised the book, given it the richness of detail and the narrative drive that made Stalingrad such a success. By its very nature, though, this is not a battle book. Its author cannot consistently display his greatest strength, the depiction of exciting military set-pieces. Instead he has to spend inordinate amounts of time explaining the fiendish complexities of Spanish politics, typified by the alphabet soup of initials identifying the various factions, and setting the struggle in its international context. In fact he does this well, pointing out that American trucks, petrol and credit were as vital to Franco as Hitler's aircraft and Mussolini's tanks. He also shows how Britain's non-intervention policy assisted the fascist cause. This was a farrago of hypocrisy masterminded by Anthony Eden, who held exquisitely aloof from what the left regarded as a crusade for democracy and what he called "the war of the Spanish obsession".
Beevor is alert to the key role that propaganda played in the conflict. It operated at every level, from grotesque atrocity stories - La Pasionaria allegedly killed a monk with her teeth - to the organised mendacity whereby nationalists blamed the bombing of Guernica on Asturian dinamiteros. Posters, described as "soldiers of paper and ink", were ubiquitous - though when German International Brigaders put up the slogan "We Exalt Discipline" French recruits posted precautions against venereal disease. Truth was a fatal casualty. In order to sustain false claims made as fighting commenced, battles were often continued long after they were lost. Furthermore, the communists invariably blamed defeats on treachery instead of incompetence, let alone on Russian weapons so antique that one consignment was named "the battery of Catherine the Great".
The spread of Stalinist paranoia to Spain resulted in a hideous purge within the Republican ranks. Communists treated political allies, such as anarchists and "Trotskyites", as ideological foes, to be tortured, murdered or locked up in lunatic asylums. This internal convulsion did more to ensure Franco's victory than his own unimaginative generalship. But some suspected that he advanced so slowly in order to crush opposition as in an "olive oil press". Certainly one of his aides said that they had "to kill, to kill, and to kill" all reds, "to exterminate a third of the masculine population". Beevor aptly quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "A civil war is not a war but a sickness."
· Piers Brendon's books include The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s