There have been any number of good books on the Spanish Civil War, but the depictions which continue to affect us are the contemporary accounts: Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Picasso’s Guernica, André Malraux’s Man’s Hope, the poetry of Federico García Lorca, Arthur Koestler’s blistering account in The God That Failed, the idealistic poetry of John Cornford, the groundbreaking photojournalism of the young Robert Capa. This was a cosmopolitan crowd for such a local conflagration, but it almost immediately became clear that this civil war was a dress rehearsal for the World War that was brewing, with Russia and Germany fighting by proxy, trying out their devastating new arsenals on the unfortunate Spanish.

To earnest anti-fascists, the lines seemed clearly drawn, and thousands of volunteers arrived from elsewhere in Europe and from North America, eager to fight fascism either in the various Spanish militias that had been drawn up or in the newly created International Brigades. We now know, thanks to Orwell, Koestler, and others, the degree to which the Loyalist campaign was being directed from Moscow, and that the effort was not so much anti-fascist as pro-Russian—a fact that would become all too obvious with the Nazi–Soviet pact a couple of years later.

In 1936 Madrid was overrun with the idealists and opportunists of two continents, eager to join the fray—journalists, diplomats, and novelists as well as eager volunteers. The city also was crawling with