THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES
FASCISM, FREEDOM AND THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
GILES TREMLETT
Bloomsbury, 720pp, £30
The poet Louis Macneice called the International Brigades ‘a rag-tag army’, an accurate description for the thousands of foreign volunteers who fought for the democratic Spanish Republic against Franco’s Fascist insurgents. Tragically, their simple Socialist faith was betrayed by Stalin, who ordered his henchmen to rid the Republic’s forces of ‘heretics’ like the Anarchists rather than win the war against Franco. George Orwell, serving with a Trotskyist militia, was lucky to survive these purges. Many of his comrades didn’t. ‘This is an epic tale’, said the
Times’s Isambard Wilkinson, ‘and Giles Tremlett nails it with the decisiveness of a political commissar’s bullet to the back of a deserter’s head …. He has created an electrifying narrative that brings to life the idealism, suffering, chaos and paranoia of the most truly international army since the Crusades.’ In the Guardian, Paul Mason said a new history of the Brigades was long overdue. He thought Tremlett, a journalist based in Spain, was ‘at his best when telling the unvarnished stories of the individuals drawn to the republican cause, like the photographer Robert Capa, who arrives at the front only to be forced to change his trousers, “because my guts aren’t as brave as my camera”.’
In the Telegraph, Jonathan Meades congratulated Tremlett on ‘his tremendous feat of digging’. Then issued this warning: ‘Even the most pitiful prentice politician covertly admires dictators because they are successful in accruing power for power’s sake … We must send them on their way before they become fully self-crowned tyrants.’
‘Giles Tremlett has created an electrifying narrative’