The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and The Spanish Civil War
by Giles Tremlett, Bloomsbury £30.00
 

TO AVOID constant reference to the book’s main map, readers of Giles Tremlett’s voluminous, blow-by-blow account of the contribution of the estimated 38,000 volunteers from over 60 countries who fought to defend Republican Spain from Franco’s fascist coup, should equip themselves with a large map of the country Auden described as “that fragment nipped off from Africa… soldered on to inventive Europe.”

Tremlett’s book could have benefitted from an introductory dramatis personae as in classical novels – War and Peace perhaps –to keep the reader in touch with the innumerable characters we meet, often confusingly sporting noms de guerre, in what has been described by a major historian of the period as “a magnificent narrative history.”

To be fair, military history is usually beset with communicating the confusing complexities of warfare. Here shifting fronts, a virtual Tower of Babel of languages, national cultures and factional political differences between communists, socialists and anarchists, coupled with the fact that most of the volunteers had little or no military training, posed a labyrinth to negotiate.