View from the Bottom

There is a review of a memoir of the Spanish Civil War by Dan Kaufman in The Nation. The tragedy of that war was that 500,000 people died in a rebellion which put a fascist political party in power. Franco was a buddy of Hitler and Mussolini, but didn't actively participate in WWII, so his fascist Spain survived until 1978.

The memoir is entitled War Is Beautiful and was written by James Neugass, a volunteer ambulance driver during the conflict. The title is a slogan of the fascists, but there are moments in the memoir, touching moments, when the title is very real.

This bit caught my eye. It shows you that many of the people who died in this war had no real idea of what they were caught up in:

Conversant in Spanish and acquainted with Spain from his travels there before the war, Neugass is periodically able to slip out of his American skin and steal a local perspective of the conflict. During a short respite in Mezquita, a small town near the Aragon front, he is invited to join an impoverished family of twelve for dinner. "I was asked to eat," he writes. "When I looked at the size of the single earthenware jug in the fireplace, I answered that I had already had supper.... The mother lifted the crock from the fireplace and emptied a steaming mass of potatoes." The family insisted that Neugass share their food with them: thirteen people ate off a single plate. When they finished the potatoes, the meal was over.

After dinner, Neugass interviews the father of the family, a landless peasant. Neugass asks the man what political party he belongs to. "Soy revolutionario, como todos," he answers. Pressing the point, Neugass asks again to which party he belongs. "De los matafascistas.... I believe in the fascist-killer party," the man answers. "But which party is that?" Neugass asks. "That is every political party," the man replies. "What is communism?" Neugass asks, switching tactics. The man replies hesitatingly, "I don't know...significa, significa...tractors!... And the other parties also...communism, socialism, anarchism...it all means...machines for the land!"

The desperation of the peasant was typical of many who toiled at the bottom of Spain's semifeudal agricultural system. Much of the Spanish countryside was divided into enormous agricultural estates called latifundios, and the estate owners generally considered their workers to be almost indistinguishable from their other property.

The memoir sounds very interesting for the gritty detail it provides. And, it sounds like it is refreshingly non-ideological. Here's another bit that caught my eye:

Other volunteers, like Neugass, embraced a nonideological, though fierce, antifascism. Neugass describes a scene on the Córdoba front where a group of Lincoln soldiers were attacked at night and forced to withdraw to the next hill, leaving behind several wounded men. Before morning, as the Lincolns were approaching the hill, they saw large fires burning. The wounded Americans were being burned alive. "Not only were there no fascist wounded brought in that night," Neugass writes, "but no prisoners were taken."

Despite those brief moments, Neugass wasn't prone to vengeance. "I am a poor hater of people and a great hater of ideas," he writes. Toward the end of his service in Spain, he describes a moment that sheds light on the meaning of the title he gave his manuscript. In a relatively unscathed village near Segura de los Baños, the site of one of the Republic's last-ditch counter-offensives, Neugass manages to buy 250 extremely scarce eggs for the wounded men and the hospital staff. Besides the Republican wounded, the hospital had taken in an injured, delusional fascist prisoner whose hunger complicated the delicate question of distributing the eggs:

A great change came over the fascist this morning. Sana [a nurse] had soft-boiled a quantity of eggs for the patients. As she worked down the ward, carefully feeding liquid gold into the mouths of each man, I wondered what she would do when she got to the fascist. The sheet had come down from his face and he was for once quiet. The eyes of even the half-conscious were on him and on Sana. Would he be fed?... The fascist should be given an egg although the other wounded in the ward look at him as if he were the one who shot them, and perhaps he was.... With the entire ward looking at her, Sana held the fascist head-case in her arms and fed him two soft-boiled eggs. She is not Mary Magdalen and he is not Christ. If this is religion, then I am religious.

Wikipedia has an article on the Spanish Civil War which will help orient the reader unfamiliar with this struggle. In trying to be neutral and "factual", Wikipedia doesn't point out the oddity of the US, France, and the UK not backing the government. They viewed it as too leftist, so they let it fall. This simply strengthened Hitler and Mussolini. The policies of "the democracies" in the 1930s were atrocious. At least the Stalin-Hitler pact bought Stalin some time before an invasion. The West would have been better off confronting the fascists early when they were weak.