We Saw Spain Die (66 page)

This conclusion was not apparently remarkable, scarcely went beyond the first chronicle sent to
The Times
by George Steer and was no more than had been regarded as axiomatic by the majority of Basques since 1937. However, the great French historian, Pierre Vilar, in his prologue to the book, pointed out the importance of what Southworth had achieved in returning to the event itself and removing layer after layer of untruth laid on by censorship, by diplomats serving vested interests and determined propagandists of Franco. In Vilar’s view, what gave Southworth’s work an importance far beyond the confines of the historiography of the Spanish Civil War was his determined quest for the truth, and his exposure of the way in which journalists, censors, propagandists and diplomats distorted history. In a terrain in which truth has always been the first casualty, the ‘passionate objectivity’ of Southworth rose up like a beacon and made it an object lesson in methodology. Southworth’s research was based on an astonishing array of sources in seven languages, amassed in many countries. On the advice of Pierre Vilar, the manuscript was presented in 1975 – successfully – as a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. He had already lectured in universities in Britain and France, but this was the beginning of a belated academic recognition of Southworth’s work in his own country. In the mid-1970s, he became Regents Professor at the University of California.

Herbert was never fully welcome in the US academic community, because of his inveterate subversiveness and his mischievous humour. He made no secret of his contempt for Washington’s policies in Latin America, which evoked for him the betrayal of the Spanish Republic. Every day, as an avid observer of what he considered to be the hypocrisy of political theatre, he devoured a stack of French and American
newspapers. Along with his political passion, he had a wonderful sense of the absurd and an irresistibly infectious laugh. He was particularly keen on multilingual puns, never ceasing to be tickled by the delivery to any restaurant table in Spain of a bottle of mineral water with its label
‘sin gas’.
I remember on one occasion at a conference in Germany, the assembled participants were led by the director of the host foundation to see a sumptuous carpet which, we were proudly told, had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. Herbert dropped to his knees and began shuffling around, peering closely at the pile. Herr Direktor asked with concern what the matter was and was completely nonplussed when Herbert replied in his slow Texan drawl: ‘I’m looking for the teeth marks!’ His demolition of the fake scholarship of others was often extremely amusing, most notably in his chapter entitled ‘Spanica Zwischen Todnu Gabriet’, in which he traced minutely how Francoist author after Francoist author cited a book they had never read (Peter Merin’s
Spanien zwischen Tod und Geburt (Spain between Life and Death)),
but merely mis-copied its title. He once asked me to ensure that his gravestone carried the epitaph ‘
HIS WRITINGS WERE NOT HOLY WRIT
/
BUT NEITHER WERE THEY WHOLLY SHIT
’. Despite his austere inquisitorial style, he was a rotund and jolly trencherman.

After the death of Franco, Herbert was regularly invited to give lectures at Spanish universities, where he was a major cult figure. His influence was seen in the work of a new generation of British and Spanish scholars. Southworth’s remorselessly forensic writings imposed new standards of seriousness on writing about the war. A pugnacious polemicist, he regularly took part in literary arguments, most notably with Burnett Bolloten and Hugh Thomas. Regarding his great Francoist opponent, Ricardo de la Cierva, he had already published a devastating demolition of his sloppy scholarship, ‘Los bibliófobos: Ricardo de la Cierva y sus colaboradores’.
²⁶
Herbert wrote to Jay: ‘People say I am destructive and ill-tempered and never say a good word about anybody, but somebody has to say who are the sons of bitches and the good guys. In the academic world, all is politeness and you scratch my back and turn around. I like to think of myself as a fresh current of air.’
²⁷
However, he ceased publishing for a time because he was working on his massive study of Guernica. As his letters revealed, he also faced severe
financial problems. In 1970, he saw that his outgoings on books dramatically exceeded income and he decided that he must sell the collection. It was sold to the University of California at San Diego as ‘The Southworth Collection’ and remains the world’s single most important library on the Spanish Civil War. With income from savings dwindling, he and Suzanne also had to sell the Château de Roche in 1978.

I had assumed that, as they had both entered their seventies, they would move to a modern house. Instead, they bought a medieval priory in the village of St Benoît du Sault, an intriguing but inconvenient house in which every room was on a different level and whose long and narrow stone spiral staircase led eventually to another bat-infested study. Inevitably, Herbert began to rebuild his collection and had started to write again. He enjoyed the friendship of the Pierre Vilar, of numerous Spanish scholars and of the venerable Dutch anarchist thinker, Arthur Lehning. They lived happily in St Benoît until Suzanne’s health broke down in 1994. Herbert nursed her devotedly until her death on 24 August 1996. He never recovered fully from that blow and, after a subsequent stroke, his health deteriorated dramatically. Nevertheless, although bed-ridden, with the devoted help of an English neighbour, Susan Mason-Walstra, he continued to work.

Initially, he had intended to revise
El mito de la Cruzada de Franco.
However, just as an earlier attempt had seen the research expand until it became his monumental book on Guernica, now something similar happened. The consequence was a two-fold final historiographical legacy. In 1996, he published a long analysis of the way that the ex-Trotskyist Julián Gorkín had, through his work for the Congress for Cultural Freedom and his falsification of the memoirs of Communist dissidents, distorted the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. The Welsh historian Burnett Bolloten was also the target of devastating criticisms. Bolloten had been a United Press correspondent during the war and was close to Constancia de la Mora. He had set out to write a history of the war which was initially pro-Negrinista, but he had become fiercely anti-Communist as a result of the assassination of Trotsky. His subsequent writings had been somewhat influenced by Gorkín, something mercilessly pilloried by Southworth.
²⁸
Then, only
three days before his death on 30 October 1999 in the hospital at Le Blanc, Indre, Herbert Southworth delivered the manuscript of his last book, a detailed analysis of two related elements of the military coup of 1936: the fabrication of a Communist plot to take over Spain in order to justify the coup and the influence on Franco himself of his relationship with the extreme rightist Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale.
²⁹
The book was a more fitting epitaph than that quoted above.

Y
ou are eternally right in saying that for the Spanish crimes the three great democracies must take full responsibility in history.’ Thus, on 7 August 1939, Josephus Daniels, under whom FDR had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War, wrote to Claude Bowers.
¹
For the duration of the Spanish Civil War, despite the reports of their own diplomats and of countless correspondents in Spain, the governments of Britain, France and the United States chose to ignore the fact that Hitler and Mussolini were sending unstinting help to the rebels and tilting the balance of international power against the democracies. Despite the fact that it was normal practice under international law to permit an established friendly government to purchase arms and supplies, all three governments denied this right to the Spanish Republic. Neither Anglo-French non-intervention nor the American ‘moral’ embargo and the subsequent extension of the 1935 Neutrality Act to encompass Spain were neutral in their consequences.
²
They damaged the cause of Spain’s legally elected government, limited the Republic’s capacity to defend itself and threw it into the arms of the Soviet Union.

The fact that Leon Blum frequently burst into tears when reminded that, if the Spanish Republic was crushed, France and the rest of Europe would be next, suggests that he was tortured by regrets about his policy, without needing the reminders of journalists such as Louis Delaprée.
³
There is no record of Neville Chamberlain ever expressing regret for his betrayal of the Spanish Republic, although it was a significant stepping stone on the way to his loss of power in June 1940. In contrast, when Claude Bowers went to report to Franklin D. Roosevelt on Franco’s victory, a crestfallen president told him: ‘We have made a mistake. You have been right all along.’
⁴
In 1944, the Assistant Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, recognized that ‘Of all our blind isolationist policies, the most disastrous was our attitude on the Spanish Civil War’, and ‘in
the long history of the foreign policy of the Roosevelt Administration, there has been, I think, no more cardinal error than the policy adopted during the civil war in Spain’.
⁵
At least Roosevelt felt regret, but it can have been as nothing in comparison with the bitterness felt by the many liberals and leftists in America and Europe who had watched the policy of the democratic powers strangle the Spanish Republic and hasten the triumph of fascism.

Through their despatches, the correspondents, and in the case of Jay Allen, Louis Fischer and George Steer, through their campaigning activities, had tried to bring this home. Thanks in large part to the correspondents, millions of people who knew little about Spain came to feel in their hearts that the Spanish Republic’s struggle for survival was somehow their struggle. The work of the correspondents and their letters to his wife Eleanor had an impact on President Roosevelt’s thinking about the threat of fascism. In turn, the fact that he placed electoral interests before wider moral issues had an impact on them. It contributed to Jay Allen’s plunge into depression and Louis Fischer’s turn to Gandhian pacifism. Herbert Matthews wrote bitterly that Roosevelt was ‘too intelligent and experienced to fool himself about the moral issues involved’ and that his ‘overriding consideration was not what was right or wrong, but what was best for the United States and, incidentally, for himself and the Democratic party’.
⁶

The Spanish Republic was a defensive bulwark against the threat of fascist aggression. But its appeal was not just negative. In the grey and cynical world of the depression years, the cultural and educational achievements of the Spanish Republic seemed to be an exciting experiment. However, for most of the correspondents, the most important element of their support for the Republic was the fight to defend democracy against the advance of fascism. To their disappointments in Spain were added vilification at home from those who believed that Franco was conducting a crusade in defence of true religion against Bolshevik bestiality. The consequence was what F. Jay Taylor called ‘one of this generation’s most impassioned political and religious controversies’. Indeed, so intensely conflictive was the polemic provoked within the United States that the British Consul in New York reported in February 1938 that the city was ‘almost assuming the likeness of a
miniature Spain’.
⁷
Nearly thirty-five years after the defeat of the Republic, Herbert Matthews declared: ‘No event in the outside world, before or since, aroused Americans in time to such religious controversy and such burning emotions.’
⁸

Yet despite vilification, defeat and the bitter frustration of witnessing the culpable negligence of the democracies, almost all those who supported the cause of the Spanish Republic carried for the rest of their lives the conviction that they had participated in a struggle that mattered. It was a feeling shared even by George Orwell, whose memoir of his brief time in Spain has given much succour to those who wish to claim, whether from the far Left or the far Right, that the defeat of the Spanish Republic was somehow more the responsibility of Stalin than of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini or Neville Chamberlain. On leaving Spain, Orwell stayed for three days in the French fishing port of Banyuls. He and his wife ‘thought, talked, dreamed incessantly of Spain’. Although bitter about what he had seen as a foot soldier with the semi-Trotskyist POUM, Orwell claimed to feel neither disillusionment nor cynicism: ‘Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.’
⁹

As late as the mid-1980s, Alfred Kazin could still view the war in Spain as ‘the wound that will not heal’. In words that could have been uttered by Jay Allen or Louis Fischer or Mikhail Koltsov or George Steer or Henry Buckley or Herbert Southworth, Kazin wrote:

Spain is not my country, the Spanish Civil War, like what followed, was
my war.
In the course of it I lost friends. I lost hope that Hitler could be stopped before the Second World War. I lost whatever tolerance for communists was left in me after the Moscow purge trials. Nevertheless, the destroyers of the Spanish Republic would always be my enemies.
¹⁰

However, no one has summed up better the meaning of the Spanish war for so many of the writers and journalists who witnessed the heroic struggle of the Republic than Josephine Herbst. In February 1966, Josie went to see the Spanish Civil War documentary
Mourir à Madrid,
by the French director Frédéric Rossif. She wrote that night to some friends:

I wouldn’t have wanted anyone I knew to be seated near me, not unless they too had gone through the same experience. I not only felt as if I were dying but that I had died. And afterward, I sat in the lobby for a good while, trying to pull myself together, smoking, and the whole scene outside, and on the street when I got there, seemed completely unreal. I couldn’t connect with anything or feel that it meant anything, somewhat in the same way that I had felt when I got down from the plane in Toulouse after I flew out of Barcelona and had expected to enjoy ordering a real lunch for a change and instead sat sobbing over an omelet – all I could bear to try to eat – and wine – and looking at people calmly passing by as if I had entered into a nightmare where the ‘real’ world had suddenly been wiped off with a sponge and vanished forever. And actually, sitting in the lobby, smoking, it came to me that in the most real sense my most vital life did indeed end with Spain. Nothing so vital, either in my personal life or in the life of the world, has ever come again. And in a deep sense, it has all been a shadow picture for years and years. In Toulouse, though the war had not yet ended, I knew it would end and with defeat. And that nothing was going to stop World War II. Nothing. And most of the time since then has been lived on buried treasure of earlier years, on a kind of bounty I could still take nourishment from.
¹¹