Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 457

'...You try to take one apart only to find there are ten new lies to deal with the next day. You can't cope. You let things go, give up. There are so many people devoted to creating those lies that they become a tremendous force impossible to stop. That was my first experience of war, I wasn't used to it, but all wars are full of lies, they're a fundamental part of them, if not their principal ingredient. And the worst thing is that none are ever completely refuted. However many years pass, there are always people prepared to keep an old lie alive, and any lie will do, even the most improbable and most insane. No lie is ever entirely extinguished.'

Monsieur Pain - pg. 57

The news was about the war in Spain: the latest on the bombing raids, the shelling, and new weapons that we hadn't known in the Great War.

"The damned Germans are testing out their arsenal." said Raoul.

Count Julian - pg. 114

Alto de los Leones, the epic of the Alcazar, the siege of
Oviedo, the cruiser Baleares, the Red Jails, the
Civil War battlefields have forever disappeared from sight
behind a very urban decor of service stations, snack bars,
international banks, billboards, espresso places: feeble,
uninspired political ideas: indifferent, spineless, overcautious
attitudes: effete intellectualism

The Spanish Civil War - Closing

The military developments in Spain are numerous
and well recorded; but important aspects of the civilian
experience also need to be remembered. On the Republican
side these included the rapid advances in education and the
dramatic, though short-lived, change in the role of women.
The most radical social innovation was the development
of self-management in industry and agriculture. In fact, the
conflict is best remembered in human terms: the clash of beliefs,
the ferocity, the generosity and selfishness, the hypocrisy of
foreign diplomats and ministers, the betrayals and political
manoeuvres and above all, the bravery and self-sacrifice.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 279

The bitterness of the Spanish conflict created the greatest
impression abroad, and the stereotype assumptions of foreigners
were often strengthened by the male Spaniard's own
image of himself. 'I am not pretending', El Campesino later,
'that I was not guilty of ugly things myself, or that I never
caused needless sacrifice of human lives. I am a Spaniard.
We look upon life as tragic. We despise death.' But violence
is a distorted expression of fear. 'Eternal Spain' was terrified
of modern ideas, while the centre and the left feared the reaction
which they provoked. Much of the brutality can be explained by
the obligation which the Spaniard felt to repress his fear.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 269

The Soviet Union, which had claimed to be the Spanish
Republic's only true ally (while almost certainly making a
handsome profit on the gold deal), gave just five million
francs in refugee aid - not enough for one day's food. The
USSR, having effectively failed to take in the mass of the
International Brigade exiles it had called to arms, then
refused all Spanish refugees except for senior party cadres.
The rest were ordered to fend for themselves and return home.
'The fatherland of the oppressed' had spoken.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 266

Franco declared that 'the war is over, but the enemy is not dead.'

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 265

Everyone now went to church, but a truer level of devotion
can perhaps best be estimated by remembering that only 14
per cent of the population had fulfilled their basic Catholic duties
at Easter in 1936. After the civil was Cardinal Goma made the
surprising admission to Lord Templewood, the British ambassador,
that there had been no real religious revival in Spain. The defiant
cry of the philosopher Unamuno, that they would conquer but
not convince, must have angered the Nationalists more than
anything else.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 264

Despite a near doubling in the cost of living, worker's
wages were reduced by decree to the level of 1935. All
strikes had been outlawed by the Nationalists in July 1936,
on penalty of execution by firing squad. In the fields a
labourer knew only too well that if he protested at his
conditions he risked being accused of sedition. All the agrarian
reforms made under the Republic were abolished. Even the
land purchased before the war was handed back to the
original owners. The Nationalists, however, claimed a land
reform of their own. This consisted mainly of expropriating
the property of Republican sympathizers to give to their
own soldiers or to reward peasants who had backed Nationalist
landowners.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 251

A garde mobile, in a scene now famous, prised
open the fist of a refugee to make him drop the handful
of Spanish earth wich he had carried into exile. The
Republican diaspora had begun.

[Fall of Barcelona]

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 243

Comrades of the International Brigade, political reasons,
reasons of state, the welfare of that same cause for which
you offered your blood with boundless generosity, are sending
you back, some of you to your own countries, and others forced
exile. You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend.
You are the heroic example of democracy's solidarity and
universality. We shall not forget you, and, when the olive tree
of peace puts forth its leaves again, mingled with the
laurels of the Spanish Republic's victory - come back!

-- La Pasionara

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 242

Chamberlain also felt that Munich had been a diplomatic
triumph. He was so pleased with his efforts that, just before
Mussolini and Ciano left Munich, he suggested 'the possibility
of a Conference of Four to solve the Spanish problem.' Evidently
he felt that the Spanish Republicans could be made to see reason
like the Czechs, and be persuaded to sacrifice themselves
in the cause of what he thought was European stability.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 230

The most likely explanation for Franco's decision not to launch
an immediate assault on Barcelona was pressure from his allies.
Hitler was nervous of British and French reactions after his
Austrian coup and he was not interested in the rapid defeat of the
Republic. Not long before, he had emphasized the need to divert
attention from his expansionist policies in central Europe: 'From
the German point of view we are not one hundred per cent
interested in a Franco victory. What does interest us is a prolongation
of the war in Spain, so that tension in the Mediterranean is increased.'
It has even been suggested, but not proved, that the German
government supplied the Republic with arms.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 211

Servicio de Investigacion Militar was later described
as 'the Russian syphilis' by the German writer, Gustav Regler,
who served in the International Brigades. This particular variety
of the disease can, of course, be ascribed to Russian carriers, but
one cannnot say that, if Orlov and his NKVD men had not come to
Spain, nothing of the sort would have happened. If Russian
communism appeared to its critics as Tsarism with a proletarian face,
then Spanish communism, with its power base in New Castile, seemed
to them to be growing into a Marxist variation of Phili II's integrated
state based on the army. The SIM resembled the Inquisition and
the commissars the church.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 204

Eventually, the League decided that if it 'cannot be made
to work in the near future, the members of the League will
consider ending the policy of non-intervention'. The Spanish
Republican representative asked for a more precise definition
of 'the near future'. The French foreign minister, Delbos,
hoped it meant not more than ten days, and the British representative
replied 'probably an earlier date than the Spanish delegate thinks'.
The near future had still not arrived 18 months later when Spanish
Republic ceased to exist.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 192

The Comintern's switch to the Popular Front, or 'Trojan
Horse', strategy in 1934 now appeared to have triumphed.
By flattering liberals and social democrats, while appealing
to their government instincts, the communists had reached
a position where they could destroy their enemies one at
a time (the 'salami tactic' as it was later called). The centrist
politicians' key role in helping to reoad 'the pistol of the state'
for the communists' use did no more than reserve then the last
place in the firing line.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 187

The most searching criticism of the CNT-FAI
leadership's decision to enter the government
came from the veteran French anarchist, Sebastian
Faure, who had invented the word 'libertarian'. He
insisted that, if it was right to discard opposition to
the concept of the state out of temporary necessity,
then it could not be a valid principle. There was,
of course, point to Faure's remark. The previous
autumn the anarchist leaders had refused to join the
government because 'the "worker-state" signals the
beginning of a new political slavery'. But when
they did finally join Largo's government, in November
1936, the anarchist press defended the decision in a
manner which suggested that black had suddenly become white.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 177

Simone Weil, who supported the anarchists, was distressed
by killings in eastern Spain. She was particularly affected
when a fifteen-year old Falangist prisoner was captured
on the Aragon front and shot after Durruti spent an hour
with the boy trying to persuade him to change his politics and
giving him until the next day to decide.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 173

On 1 July, 1973 Cardinal Goma issued an open letter to
'the Bishops of the whole World' calling for church support for
the Nationalist cause, a letter in which he stated, somewhat
defensively, that the war was 'not a crusade but a political
and social war with repercussions of a religious nature.' This
was in contrast to the statement of the Archbishop of Valencia
a month earlier that 'the war has been called by the Holy Heart
of Jesus and this Adorable Heart has given power to the arms of
Franco's soldiers.' In addition, the Bishop of Segovia had said that
the war was 'a hundred time more important and holy than the
Reconquista' and the Bishop pf Pamplona called it the
'loftiest crsade that the centuries have ever seen...a crusade in which
divine intervention on our side is evident.' Leaflets with photo-montages
of Christ flanked by General Mola and Franco were issued to
Nationalist troops.

The Spanish Civil War - pg. 145

(Their leader, Fal Conde, exaggerated when he described
Carlism as a movement guided from below, but it was a
uniquely populist form of royalism.) Their medieval crusading
faith made them fearless. Colonel Rada described his requetes
as men 'with faith in victory, with faith in God; one hand holding a
grenade, the other a rosary'.