Hell and Good Company
The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Celebrated historian Richard Rhodes explores the Spanish Civil War through the stories of the reporters, writers, artists and doctorswho witnessed it
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) engaged an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, to name only a few. The idealism of the cause - defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war - and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia.
Paralleling the outpouring of writing and art, the war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology. So many different countries participated directly or indirectly in the war that Time magazine called it the 'Little World War'; Spain served in those years as a proving ground for the devastating technologies of World War II, and for the entire 20th century.
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Historian Rhodes (who won a Pulitzer Prize for 1986's The Making of the Atomic Bomb) combines numerous memoirs to provide a ground-level view of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The struggle between Republicans and Franco-led Nationalists was brutal: "fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco's hundred thousand vindictive executions." Rhodes follows the fighting, showing that the Republicans were doomed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy's intervention on Franco's side, which led to the carpet bombing of Guernica (inspiring Picasso's painting) and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Britain and France kept their distance, and the U.S.S.R. withdrew its support for the Republicans toward the war's end. Rhodes profiles medical volunteers and writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Andr Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exup ry, and New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews. Aside from some medical innovations, such as new concepts of battlefield triage, Rhodes never specifies how the war changed the world, but he does offer a vivid look at how the desperate struggle appeared to participants.
