Abstract
Hemingway, Orwell, Gellhorn, Capa – all legendary chroniclers of the short but extraordinarily bloody Spanish civil war in the 1930s. But there's another name to add to that pantheon: Buckley. Who? Decent, self-deprecating, brave and now forgotten Mr Henry Buckley from Manchester: “I am naturally a nervous person,” this shy, sandy-haired man once confessed with a wry smile. Nevertheless, his tiresomely boastful friend Hemingway, who so gloried in the smell of blood in the afternoon, described Henry as “a lion of courage, though a very slight, even frail, creature … with jittery nerves”.
Buckley, working as a freelance for The Daily Telegraph in Spain, had seemed a rather lucky war reporter. He overcame his “jittery nerves” to chronicle, with great courage and diligence, the bloody twists and turns and murderous anarchy of that three-year long war. A sniper shot him in the throat, but much to his surprise he didn't die; nor was he accidently slain by any of the illiterate peasants fighting Franco's army with nothing but their own blazing courage and their ancient guns – which few of them knew how to use and which, as a result, sometimes managed to blow off their own faces.
He also escaped being eviscerated when a Fascist bomb landed on his Madrid hotel during a meagre lunch of roast donkey (although he later had to remove from his boots bits of intestine which had exploded from a less fortunate individual). But in 1940 Buckley's luck ran out. Copies of his long, detailed eyewitness account of the war were stored in an east London warehouse when a German bomb destroyed the building and Buckley's book with it. A few review copies had been sent out but, to all intents and purposes, it had vanished. Seventy years later, it has been found and republished; perhaps Buckley's reputation will, rather belatedly, now reap its overdue reward.
In the literary stakes, his forgotten masterpiece will never rival Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. It is too disorganised (much like the war itself), sometimes too verbose and, unless you are a dedicated student of early 20th century Spanish political movements, the plethora of acronyms can prove rather baffling. Buckley was a great war reporter, but even the greatest of reporters occasionally need the services of a good sub.
It was obvious to him from the start that this civil war was not some inconsequentially nasty little local melodrama. Unlike many at the time, he recognised that Spain in the thirties was a Petri dish teeming with the toxic political organisms that would soon tear all Europe apart. Mussolini and Hitler were Franco's ruthless sponsors, and Stalin's brand of Communism subverted the Spanish socialists. It was all a dress rehearsal for what was to come, including the first use of air power to slaughter civilians, thus establishing a precedent which has been enthusiastically taken up ever since … in the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East, et al.
Young Henry had arrived in Spain a devout Roman Catholic. The strictures of his faith, he noted ruefully, had rendered him “a rather crotchety and thin-blooded virgin”. The fiercely intolerant Spanish Catholicism, which matched the fiercely unforgiving landscape, was not at all to his mild, gentle, hand-wringing English taste: “Much as I disliked the mob violence and the burning of churches, I felt the people in Spain who professed most loudly the Catholic faith were the most to blame for the existence of illiterate masses and a threadbare national economy.” He even, for a while, stopped going to Mass.
When he arrived in Spain in 1929, six and a half years before the outbreak of civil war, he was repelled by what he saw through the train window: “Nothing had prepared me for the grim aspect of the Castilian uplands in November, for the shabbiness and poverty of the peasants, for the smell of rancid olive oil at wayside stations. I felt bitterly disillusioned.”
Most northern Europeans like himself had been seduced by poetry and songs into believing in a romanticised notion of Spain as a land full of “love affairs apparently permanently afoot in orange groves, to the soft strumming of guitars”. He pointed out that as Spanish orange trees are low, bushy affairs full of twigs which get in your eyes, they are “singularly unsuited to flirtation … Nor in nine years in Spain did I ever hear a guitar played in an orange grove”.
Part of that northern romanticism about Spain inspired hundreds of idealistic young left-wing intellectuals to dash to Spain to help its peasantry fight Franco's well-armoured Fascists. (Jessica Mitford eloped with what she called her “running away money” to join in the war with her second cousin Esmond Romilly; thanks to their aristocratic connections the pair were soon rescued from the consequences of their impetuosity, with no harm done to themselves, or indeed to the Spanish Fascists.)
Many such intellectual adventurers eventually became deeply disillusioned by the anarchic, incompetent and fratricidal behaviour of so many of the socialists they'd come to help. Buckley's religious faith recovered, but not his faith in the wisdom of the British and French governments who refused to intervene to stop the slaughter. They were much more alarmed by the threat of Bolshevism than of Fascism, just as today Western governments are much more alarmed by jihadist Islamism than of the bog-standard authoritarianism of the Assad variety.
In the thirties, the British establishment typically saw the conflict through a class prism. Spain was controlled by the army, landowners and the church: the British elite felt it had more in common with that trio of vested interests than with a backward peasantry in a feudal society who couldn't, were they to succeed, really be trusted to preserve inherited property rights; Fascists on the other hand were very good at enforcing discipline on the lower orders.
Every war produces floods of refugees who are, on the whole, regarded as embarrassing, expensive, destabilising nuisances by neighbouring countries. Buckley was enraged by the lack of interest in alleviating the misery of the thousands of Spanish refugees who had escaped across the border into France. An average of 60 men, women and children were dying from cold and starvation every day on the Spanish/French border, but the “international community,” according to an angry Buckley, was much more emotionally and financially involved in the rescue of artworks from the Prado.
Throughout this often moving book, Buckley never talks of his own tears, but one suspects that after the war, whenever he saw one of the Prado treasures, he felt a visceral disgust at the way the “civilised world” so often values Great Art above any number of easily disposable human beings. After all, there are always masses more of the latter, lining up for slaughter; whereas a Velazquez, a Titian, an El Greco. Buckley made it quite clear where his priorities lay.