It is the savour of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.
- Stephen Spender "Ultima Ratio Regum"
Fighting in Spain was still often remembered in a romantic light, despite the physical hardships endured. This atmosphere of romance is most evident in the description of friendships within the army, impressions of the Spanish people and stories of sexual encounters. Homosexuality and homoeroticism were evident at the front where men lived almost exclusively among men which encouraged intense relationships. Some men describe their comrades in highly emotional terms and in those cases male friendship is a vital part of being on the front. These emotions were still seen in heroic terms as they had been in World War One and the familiarity of the cult of comradely love made it an easy theme for volunteers to write about. Where sexuality related to women it could not be so easily incorporated into the accounts men wrote of the War. Women were considered part of a calmer and gentler world, away from the front, and often represented the peace and relaxation of leave. There was almost no role for them in the stories written about the war and where there is it is within bordering spaces such as hospitals and cities. Women were a way to forget the war, even though nurses and other women near the front were often just as involved as men. Men still conceptualized the War as being fought between men, even though they knew women were involved, and reproduced many traditional attitudes when it came to personal and emotional relationships.
The male world of the army was very similar to the one in which most public school boys had spent their youth. Within both the close relationships between men helped the institution to function by building a sense of loyalty to one's peers. These rituals of male bonding which public school boys experienced throughout their school days were designed to produce a certain kind of individual man and the future network of powerful men. Those public school boys who became radicals subverted the intentions of the power structure of which their educational experiences had been a part. The ties which were meant assist in the governing and policing of Britain were instead used to undermine many conservative institutions. These all-male worlds in which most upper and middle class boys grew up and often inhabited for most of their lives had paradoxical effects. There was always a tension in all-male institutions between rugged masculinity and homoeroticism. This element could usually be accommodated within the power structure, although fear of homosexuality affected institutions and ideas in Britain in other ways. Paul Fussell points out the similarities between war and school and how sex often fulfilled the same purpose as an antidote against terror and loneliness. Again some of these ideas were sentimentalized in images of men in the Spanish Civil war when they were portrayed as intense, committed communities of men. The army relied on certain kinds of emotional bonds both within companies and between superiors and their troops in order to bond the army together. It was almost always loyalty to one's fellow soldiers which motivated army members to fight in war, especially in World War One, where the reasons for the fighting remained complicated and remote.
Expression of love for companions and a sense of solidarity with them are an omnipresent feature of writings from World War One. Such sentiments appear less frequently in accounts of the Spanish Civil War, although they are still an important part of the ways many men remembered their experiences. Many of these feelings were sentimentalized and it is possible that the atrocities of that War did change some ideas about the romanticization of emotion during war. Few men consciously believed that their experiences in Spain would have the main function of putting their manhood to the test as volunteers had believed in 1914. Writings by men who went to Spain reflect the distance between them and their Spanish comrades, as well as their comrades in the International Brigades despite the feelings of community solidarity. Orwell's comments that "at the front everyone stole," must go some distance to dispel the myth of the brotherhood of soldiers. There were increasing ideas about the professionalism of war and the soldiers most vaunted and valued were those who meticulous and emotionless about the realities of fighting. The officers of the International Brigades who had positions of considerable authority tended to write more about the business end of war, describing and analyzing battles as well as the day to day living conditions of the troops. Romantic sentiments were just as likely to be manifested in the way the cause was described, and in idealization of the Spanish working people as in the inter-personal relationships of military units. The more emotional men among the volunteers were still very much concerned with human feelings and the difficulty of adapting to being in such a foreign situation.
Though not a British volunteer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's romantic account of Madrid and Barcelona in 1936, written in Wind, Sand and Stars, expresses commonly felt sentiments about war and comradeship. It may be precisely his position as a non-combatant observer which allowed him to draw romantic conclusions such as that "man finds that his essential manhood comes alive at the sight of self-sacrifice, co-operative effort, a rigorous vision of justice." While travelling by train with his fellow soldiers, John Sommerfield "looked at them all in turn, and somehow in each different sleeping countenance was a certain dignity, a beauty, something that they had in common that was hard to understand or explain, but it made me glad and proud that they were my comrades beside whom I would soon be fighting." This kind of extreme romanticism, whereby the cause of the war seems to become less important than the act of fighting it with other good men again harkens back to World War One. Where men fight a war without personal convictions it was often only thoughts of protecting themselves and their soldier companions which kept them going. For example, Wilfred Owen expressed male fellowship and self-sacrifice as values in themselves, absolute and separate from everything else in the war. For some in Spain the community spirit of the army was the most important thing, but it does not seem to have been the central factor. Some men were single minded enough in their beliefs that they did not need the company of others. There was genuine affection between men though, and some formed intense friendships which were all the more emotional since the possibility of death hovered over them all.
Most personal accounts by soldiers who were not officers do concentrate a fair amount on friendship. Some men developed extremely close bonds with their comrades while others felt generally positive emotion for all the men they met. However different in ideology, Romilly's Boadilla has much in common with the sentiments expressed in World War One writing. Boadilla is Romilly's testament to his comrades from the English group of the Thaelmann Battalion of the International Brigades, all but one of whom perished at the village of the same name. Few of the personal accounts of the Spanish War are directly political, although all of course have a political agenda. But rarely do they describe political events or attempt to glamourize the Republican cause. Most tend to be intensely personal and express the ways in which the individual was motivated to go to Spain, the surprises they found there and how they coped with them. There is usually some sense of community, but none as strong as Romilly's. Boadilla, he writes "is the story of the eighteen men who were my companions," and he hopes to memorialize them without romance giving "a true picture of our life." Romilly's skills of observation and talent as a writer make his memoir a fascinating text which represents the love and respect of one's comrades taken to the extreme and idealized as the sole purpose for his book.
Esmond Romilly was described by all his friends as not a particularly emotional man, and it is curious that his account of the war is in some ways the most emotionally charged. Although Boadilla is simple and not sentimental, it is elegiac in tone and reflects the profound affection Romilly felt for other men in Spain. He may have been thinking about its appeal to the public who would be the audience of his book as he has no means of support at the time. Unable to find work as a reporter he began work on Boadilla in the fall of 1937 while living in the briefly autonomous Basque Republic. The advance he received for the book was a large sum for him and it may have influenced the way he envisioned his artistic project. Either way, the personal testament to his fallen comrades seemed important to him and perhaps to the reading public of Britain as well. His insistence on the personal nature of the experience for him perhaps marked a turning point in his life, and may signify the effect fighting in Spain had on other British men. While almost without exception men went to Spain knowing nothing about the actual details of the struggle and armed only with their romantic ideals, most returned with a different appreciation of Spain in particular and of the other men who had chosen to fight there. Romilly was devastated by the loss of his comrades and the affection and respect he felt for them is evident throughout Boadilla.
Some other accounts provide extraordinary stories of the interaction between comrades and a casual atmosphere between men. Vincent Brome writes of men relaxing by playing cards, sunbathing, playing ping-pong and football. "As the sun grew hotter," Brome reports, "it was nothing unusual to see a score of men, stark naked except for their boots, playing a tough game of football, rushing madly around with great whoops and cheers, while three hundred yards away a nationalist and Government tank were fighting it out helped by artillery from both sides." Given the amount of time spent waiting to fight and in everyday activities, this kind of atmosphere is not so surprising. Though a man depended on his comrades in battle, actual fighting can be seen a more individual activity. But volunteers often found that for long periods of time little actual fighting went on, a situation which frustrated many of them, and during this time they had to relax with other men.
In Boadilla a great deal of this kind of bonding takes place during leave from the front which gave men a chance to relax and to try to forget the circumstances which brought them to Spain. The towns and cities of the Republic were pleasurable places to be in for the volunteers, and all felt a spirit of comradeship from the people they encountered. The abandoned Playa de Madrid night-club was a haven for the Englsh group of the Thaelmann Batllaion who spent several days there. There Romilly writes, "we could sit on a sun roof smoking cigars, or take out a boat on to the river, or gather round the table to play poker, with cups of steamng hot coffee at our side - it was the nearest we had got to comfort and civilization." On a return trip they met a group of anarchists and spent the day arguing about the war, Russia, poltics and philosophy. The whole British group was bound together by friendship, and even the men who did not get along had a bond from their shared experiences.
Romilly writes affectionately of the close friendship which developed between himself and Joe Gough in the course of their experiences in Spain. Romilly found his opnions of many members of his English group changing over time, and it was the same with Gough whom he disliked at first. At first he made friends with Gough partly because he was useful in getting extra supplies. The two talked about their families and jobs. Gough was a young unemployed Vauxhall metal finisher who was a Communist Party member. He had travelled in Russia as well as touring Nazi Germany in the disguise of a Mosley supporter. During leave in Madrid the two got permission to take a country walk on which they took a picnic of wine and bread. "Sometimes there were airplanes in the sky," Romilly records, "but they did not disturb the serenity of the day. We walked through the woods of El Prado, skirted Fuencarral, and got briskly down country lanes to the peaceful little town of Aravaca... We forgot the war." This is the most romantic episode in Boadilla, but it is similar in tone to many of the other times where the men relaxed together.
Before describing the battle of Boadilla in which his friends died Romilly eulogizes them and reflects on the qualities he admired most in all his friends. He thinks about how he and Gough had "shared everything at the Playa and become very close friends all the time from then." He describes the horror of seeing Gough die, which he could not quite take in. He said to himself, "All right, Joe's killed, that's finished, absolutely settled, that's all right, Joe's killed, that's the end of that." It was the loss of Gough which was the most devastating event of the war for Romilly. Ovenden comments, "Romilly was almost crying. It was a terrible experience for him." The less than perfect circumstances of war had brought him together with like-minded men (although some could hardly have been more different) and given them the chance to form bonds heightened by the stress of the situation. In the end that was as central to some men as the cause they had fought for.
The sense of comradeship in Spain was able to cross the class divide in ways which had seemed impossible at home in Britain. Middle class radicals had felt that they were in an awkward position in Britain. Many of them felt out of place in a working class movement, although they were still committed to it. David Cook described the "feeling of being neither flesh nor fish, which the middle class know only too well." But this contradiction was resolved for him in Spain. He was delighted to see that even the second in command of his battalion might be told off by the common soldiers. Jason Gurney felt his position to be anomalous and as pleased that the Spanish working class could not distinguish between the British classes. One of Aussie's reasons for approving of men fighting was the feeling that social barriers broken down when men fought. "Don't matter who a man is or where he comes from," Romilly records him saying. "He might have been to Oxford or he might be a tramp: a man like me that's picked up his own education. But it's all the same here, when you might get killed the next moment." The gulf between the middle class and worker, which was often so pronounced in Britain, seemed less insurmountable in Spain. Beevor notes that British men had a romantic notion of the Spanish working class which they believed to have a defiant and independent attitude unlike perceptions of the workers in Britain. In his study of 1930's literary life Julian Symons writes that "war melts away the barriers between classes," and while this may be an over-romanticized vision of events it reflects how most middle class volunteers felt to some degree. More impenetrable is how working men felt about the middle class men who joined them to fight in Spain. Again there is no evidence of resentment or ill feelings so it is possible to propose that Spain really did provide a model of the new egalitarian world which preoccupied so many men. Socialism did idealize equal relationships between and this aspects was definitely important to the middle class men involved.
Sexuality is rarely raised as an issue in the Spanish Civil War, either in the writings of those men and women involved, or in the secondary literature on the subject. When it does intrude into primary narratives it is usually a peripheral subject. Both the few references to relations with women or between men and the way these are placed within the narratives are telling. Men do not comment on the homoerotic nature of the war situation, or the similarities which have existed between male sexuality in the world of the public schools and at the front. Homosexuality is discussed as a discrete phenomenon, an isolate condition of a few of the soldiers which had to be apologised for or ignored completely. Sexuality is not an issue ever mentioned in secondary literature, as if the political struggle made sexuality inconsequential or non-existent. It fact it is a central issues, which illuminate ideas about male comradeship, ideas about aesthetics, warfare and masculinity, and interaction between socialist men and women.
The homoerotic nature of communities of soldiers was brought into the light in a public manner for almost the first time in World War One poetry. It had never been acceptable to express love for one's comrades before this, but the exceptional nature of circumstances during the war made it possible to express these emotions. Eroticized images of beautiful soldier boys and their heroic comrades were featured in war writings and the popular press. A certain degree of homoeroticism became associated with the army, although this might not actually include sexual behaviour. There is little or no sense of this in the International Brigades. Volunteers rarely wrote about sexual or romantic encounters, with men or with women. Though who do mention homosexuality do so disparagingly, and tend to regard men obviously homosexual as inferior soldiers. As none of those men identified as homosexual wrote memoirs about the Spanish Civil war it is nearly impossible to discover how they viewed the situation, and how they may have felt their experiences were different in Spain from in Britain.
Certain individuals in the Brigades were identified as being homosexual. Given the connection between bohemian intellectuals and homosexuality both in reality and in the public imagination, it is not surprising that some of those interested in Spain might be homosexual. The most intriguing reference is by Jason Gurney who mentions Giles Romilly as being the leader of a "small coterie of middle class intellectuals...the majority of [whom] were homosexuals." Gurney characterizes these men as "amongst the strangest phenomenon of the period [which] existed on no other basis than pure fashion." Within this group he included intellectuals and writers like Wystan Auden and Spender who, in Gurney's opinion, flirted with "neo-Communism" because it was in style, not because of any real beliefs. Several writers faulted Auden and Spender for their seeming commitment to Spain and their travels in the regions, because they felt they were only allying themselves with Communism for aesthetic reasons.
Other prominent figures who were known or thought to be homosexual are represented in different ways. George Nathan, Chief of Staff of the XVth Brigade, had a colourful reputation and is mentioned in many accounts of the War. Gurney reports that it had often been said that he was a homosexual. "While it is true that he did build up a personal entourage of chauffeur, batman and so forth which may have been suspect," Gurney wrote, "he always behaved with such admirable personal discretion that there was certainly never any overt suggestion of homosexual tendencies." Gurney excuses Nathan's possible sexual deviance because he lived up to the expectations of the professional soldier. Unlike Giles Romilly and his companions, Nathan is represented as an individual with perfectly acceptable external behaviour, which is matched by his skill and determination as a soldier. Tom Wintringham mentions Nathan only as a "first-rate soldier," from whom the Great War years "were the best he could remember." There is no mention of his reputation, but Wintringham does seem to be justifying his reputation against some unspoken slur. Men are able to overlook the questionable reputations of other men when they are accomplished soldiers like Nathan, but not when they believe the men involved to be less than committed.
Homosexuality figures prominently in TC Worsley's fictionalized Fellow Travellers, where the Civil War is only one event which occurs in the sexually intertwined lives of four men based on his friends and himself. It is sexual intrigue and jealous which prompts the characters to volunteers for Spain, although all are also struggling with their relationship to the Communist Party. One of the young characters is sexually available for the soldiers during the boring weeks of training when they "can't find any girls." Most of the soldiers though, are hostile to this little band, and "damn..all intellectuals and queers." This is a novel, unlike any of the other material discussed, and can not be taken as necessarily indicative of Worsley's interpretation of life in Spain. However it does seem to correspond to his assessment of the involvement of his friends, and his insistence on the personal nature of each man's experience in Spain. The fact that it is fictionalized, and was published many years after the events it portrays, allows Worsley to be explicit about homosexual relationships in a way which would not have been possible in the 1930's.
Some individuals took advantage of being away from home to look for sexual adventure and to blend into a world of male companionship. Esmond Romilly and one of his fellow volunteers were propositioned by a Labour MP while on leave in Madrid. This individual was part of a delegation of six MPs visiting Spain and after a dinner at the Gran Via Hotel asked Romilly to keep in touch and to come see him in London if he needed a job. He then offered to let the two soldiers share his room and as they had nowhere else to go they agreed. Romilly does not actually make the nature of the situation explicit but evidently told the story to his friend Toynbee who recorded it in Friends Apart where he describes Romilly and Birch having "to defend themselves continuously against his incorrigible assaults." Romilly must have been aware of the implications of the situation, travelling in the circles he had, and had been propositioned by several left-wing personalities while living at the Parton Street Bookshop. In this case Romilly simply remarks that the MP "particularly didn't want others to know we were sharing his room." In the morning Romilly threatened to reveal the MP as a homosexual if he did not publicly support the Spanish Republic. Sexual politics are part of the larger political world in this case, and it is likely that many who came to Spain mixed the personal and political when it came to this area.
Women play only a small and limited role in the experiences of the International Brigaders, at least in their accounts of the War. They fulfill the same symbolic functions as women often did in wars: waving goodbye to soldiers as they left for the front, kissing them farewell, and as features in propaganda. They were sometimes present as romantic interests, although sexuality rarely emerged as an issue in anything volunteers wrote about the War. It was as wives or girlfriends that women were central to volunteers, but these stories are rare, and women usually fulfilled a more symbolic role. Sometimes women were present as symbols of peace and redemption, and British volunteers were impressed by the determination of women they encountered. Sometimes it was the unusual sight of the guerilla woman who personified the special nature of the Spanish War. As usual, men were still often taken care of by women, with female units doing cooking and nursing. Although women were quickly entering new positions in the early years of the Republic, the fighting of the Civil war itself remained a male dominated activity. Even women themselves describe themselves as peripheral to the action, and while wishing to help, usually did this by staying out of the way of their male comrades.
Many of the male volunteers noticed the oddity of the situation when they saw women in military roles. George Orwell comments on the Spanish wife of his English militia comrade that "she was a gentle, dark-eyed, intensely feminine creature who looked as though her life-work was to rock a cradle, but who as a matter of fact had fought bravely in the street-battles of July." Saint-Exupery made a mental note that "women do not know how to hold a rifle." John Sommerfield, however, saw the militia women as emblematic of the Spanish struggle. The "serious beauty" of the Spanish working girls "whose figures and features were stamped with a peculiar strength and grace [were] the living symbols of a whole generation of women who were freeing themselves." Sommerfield does not seem to have any more specific information about the conditions of women and the way they were situated during the War, instead seeing female militance as a romantic symbol.
Some men describe more important encounters or experiences with women. Jason Gurney met his future wife while being nursed from injuries sustained at the front. The romantic encounter between nurse and soldier is of course a popular feature of all war stories. Gurney's wife Toby was not a Spanish nurse, but rather an American who was herself an international volunteer. In their first meeting they talked for a long time, Gurney reports, "never about the War, but about the way we had lived in peacetime, before the War started." It is as if the presence of a woman, and the potential romance of the situation made it seem as if the war does not exist any longer. This is a peace he can gain only with a women, who represented caring and security, not with one of his male comrades who exuded the war experience. Gurney is one of the few volunteers who expresses his feelings about war and sexuality directly. Sex had been a central concern in his life, and this did not change because he was fighting in a "pure" conflict, though he did report that he had less thoughts of women in Spain.
George Orwell's wife Eileen joined him in Spain after he had been there a short time. She applied for a job she had seen advertised through the International Labour Party for an office position in Spain. Although it was officially against the rules she managed to visit her husband at the front. Orwell's descriptions of his and Eileen's movements and relationship in Spain is remarkable. In Homage to Catalonia Orwell made several references to being in Barcelona with Eileen, or travelling somewhere with her, but did not mention her name or explain how it was that she came to be in Spain with him. It was extremely unusual that a volunteer's wife would also be a participant in Spain, in whatever capacity. That Orwell did not comment on any of this can be interpreted in several ways. Perhaps he saw this element of his experience in Spain to be extraneous to his narrative, but considering the sometimes disjointed and episodic nature of his book that would not have been true. Eileen Blair appears only as a nurturing character, someone who sends cigarettes or food to the front, or someone who might be needed as a nurse during street fighting. Orwell also mentions that he hopes that during his leave they "might go to the seaside for two or three days." Eileen Blair appears as only peripheral to the political and military struggle which Orwell was engaged in, and it can only be interpreted that this is how he viewed her.
Esmond Romilly's romantic adventure was slightly different. After his return to Britain from the front in January of 1937 he was making plans to return to Spain again. During this period he met his cousin Jessica Mitford who asked Romilly to take her with him to Spain. She had always been romantically impressed by Romilly's many exploits and was a burgeoning young radical herself but had never had the freedom to express and explore those ideas as her cousin had. She had earlier met with her cousin Giles to discuss the possibility of going to Spain. He was thinking of joining the International Brigades and Mitford expressed interested in being a nurse although she thought that in Spain "it wouldn't be too hard to join the guerillas." She remembers cutting "pictures of women guerillas out of the papers," and wondering "how to take my place at their side?" Esmond Romilly, always the active brother, agreed to help her run away from home and accompany him to Spain and this intrigue soon became romantic. Mitford has less opportunity to express her support for Spain and following her romantic attachment for Romilly by accompanying him to Spain was the perfect combination. Despite attempts by the Mitfords to have Jessica sent back to England as she was still under age, the couple were soon married. Mitford managed some brief celebrity in Spain even though it was for her romantic elopement rather than political action. Of their elopement she writes, "the endless stories about our adventures had driven the war news off the front pages." For her the event was a political one, the closest she could get to showing support for Spain in her personal situation.
Romilly never participated in the action in Spain in the same way after his marriage. Instead he ended his participation as a combatant after three months, deciding to aid his chosen cause as a member of the media. When that did not prove very successful he began work on the book which was to become Boadilla. Given that this work was written after his marriage to Mitford, it is possible that some of its content is justification for his own decisions, but it appears likely that after the carnage of Boadilla Romilly had already decided to end his time as a soldier. Still, he writes that he did not rejoin the International Brigades partly because he "got married and lived happily instead." While marriage to Esmond was as close to war as Mitford could get, the marriage was the conclusion to Romilly's war experience. His relationship with Mitford meant a reintegration into the social world of his home and distance from the world of soldiers. The romance had disappeared from war for Romilly and he replaced it with the romantic adventure of an elopement to the Republic which would be further disapproved of by both the couple's families.
All of these very important encounters with women are only peripheral to the stories the volunteers tell about them. While the love of men could be included in their narratives, even when the emotions might not be particularly intense, the same can not be said of their relationships with women. None of these romances are detailed in the personal accounts of the war and where they are it is an interlude from war where the woman allows war to be forgotten. Women played a noticeably large role in Spain, but this was rarely commented on by the British who were involved.
In these romances involving women sexuality is not discussed. Gurney is the only one to mention when in his courtship with his future wife they became lovers while he was recuperating. Where women's sexuality figures into the narratives it is usually in reference to prostitutes and brothels. Travel in general could be a sexually charged situation, both for homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and this atmosphere was heightened by the high drama of the Spanish situation. In war situations women's sexuality was often seen in derogatory terms and existed as a topic to unite men as a group separate from women. Prostitutes were often connected to rituals of setting off for war or rest from the front. These ideas remain similar in some ways in Spain despite the rethinking of gender expectations. In cases of wives or of casual acquaintances this meant that women were removed from the action and an were part of the world outside of fighting which could be returned to. Where women did enter into the territory of fighting they tended to be sexualized.
Few describe visits to prostitutes in Spain, but Jason Gurney does mention such an encounter and it is probable that more did indeed visit brothels. At Christmas in the barracks he and some companions visited some "evil-smelling brothels" where the "whores were very amiable." The mood was not quite what they expected, as they were mothered and taken care of by the women. "The whole situation," Gurney writes, "was more reminiscent of the sick-room of a spoilt child being fussed over by Mummy and Nanny than a sexual extravaganza as a prelude to war." The continuing existence of prostitution was a serious issue for many social reformers in Spain at the time. Propaganda posters portrayed prostitutes as slaves who also needed to be freed by the revolution. Obviously if men still regarded a sexual adventure with a prostitute as a lead up to the experience of war then it would be hard to change attitudes towards women's sexuality. Despite the concern about social problems which were central to political ideology in Spain, many British volunteers still saw the struggle in simplistic terms. This is not surprising given the complex relationship between various factions, and the lack of language skills of most volunteers. They were dependent on their own ideas of what communism or socialism entailed and reports from a biased press.
In Free Women of Spain Martha Ackelsburg examines the opportunities for women in Republican Spain and looks at various women's organizations. She does address the issue of socialism and women's liberation and discourses about this in Republican and revolutionary Spain. In one sections he does discuss visits by women to the front, where they felt their actions were misinterpreted by soldiers. They continued to be seen as sexual objects and as lesser citizens, a feature common to many revolutionary situations. Some women from the group Mujeres Libres recount their trip to the front where "when the soldiers came in and saw the girls there, the started to make advances." The women still saw the experience as a positive one, because their intentions were to make a contribution and also to help re-educate soldiers about women's capabilities. Groups like this one seemed to operate separately from men and the many debates about women's liberation do not seem to have entered the popular consciousness.
Initially women were as free to join the militia as men and many Spanish women were involved in the fighting. British women were often involved in the bureaucracy at home and some even worked in Spain. Few realistically imagined themselves fighting at the front and instead focussed their energies into more acceptable roles. In their way of thinking they could only be useful in certain kinds of activity, primarily nursing. Propaganda appealed to men and women in different ways, and posters calling men to fight, such as Joan Miro's "Aidez L'Espagne" depicted a male volunteer with exaggerated biceps which represent his masculine strength. Women appear as passive peacemakers or in domestic roles. Some women did travel to Spain as propagandists, but those were high-profile members of left-wing parties, such as the Duchess of Atholl. Women were barred from the Spanish militia fairly early on, but remained a feature of combat. There were no women in the International Brigades, but soldiers sometimes fought along side units with women soldiers. Vincent Brome reports an incident involving an American commissar, Ralph Bates who came across a machine-gun crew with one of the number bent over a wounded comrade. He took over the care of the soldier, and discovered that what he had presumed to be a man was in fact a young woman. He discovered this when he saw "the breast of a young girl, soft, pink-nipples..." when he tore away her vest and tunic. This woman's sister was the machine-gun leader and Bates discovered that the whole crew was sexually and emotionally involved. When he saw the gunner crying Bates asked, "She's your lover?" "No," he was told, "Berthe is mine. Marie belongs to Paul." While their may be an issue of a language barrier to consider, the way in which the relationships is articulated is significant. The women in this unit may have been unusual in that they felt strongly enough to continue fighting despite being barred from the militia, but they were still fulfilling a romantic role, and were still thought of in some sense as the property of men. While the Spanish may have accepted women as soldiers at least initially, it was an unfamiliar situation for most foreigners who had difficultly imagining women in this way.
In some ways it is surprising that British volunteers had often rather limited views on the position of women. One might expect that men willing to lay down their lives for the freedom of Spain and its progressive values might be socially astute enough to be concerned with women's oppression. Most opposed the Fascist ideology's analysis of gender roles. They rejected the notions of true womanhood and true manhood with rigid separation between them which was espoused by Fascism. Despite rejecting this idea of set gender roles, volunteers in Spain seem to have accepted these roles for themselves and the women they came into contact with. It was easy for them to continue to operate in worlds which were gender segregated with different codes of behaviour and different expectations. It is hard to know how British men felt about those women who still fought in the militia. Ralph Bates does not make a value judgement about the situation he encounters. For those other women they met, volunteers seem to have had a generally respectful attitude. Those men who had been through public school would not have had much exposure to integrated society, and the female relatives they knew were likely to have acted in a certain way in front of them.
The territory of Spain was a free space and a territory of moral flux. Leaving one's home country to embark out into the world be in the far-reaches of the Empire or travelling in Europe often had a component of sexual freedom and it is unlikely that this was different for British volunteers in Spain. British men and women had often travelled in search of places such as this where they could depart from the norms of domestic life. In most cases men's motivations for embarking on adventures, or just for leaving the well-known world in exchange for something new, had much in common despite their different backgrounds. There had long been a feeling that men could better prove themselves away from home than in Britain itself, which had for a century been seen as a feminine, domesticated world. Spain might be all the more attractive given the constant flow of volunteers, the vivid media attention and the energetic turmoil of the country. These possibilities could be part of the reason why Spain was attractive to volunteers.
Many of the men who fought in Spain expressed dissatisfaction with their personal domestic situations at home for a variety of reasons. Esmond Romilly goes out of his way to show that personal circumstances were a huge factor in determining who went to Spain and who stayed home. "If this were a political book," Romilly writes, "I would explain what I think about the Spanish struggle, which would be reason enough for my wanting to take part in it." He found that untruthful, though, and went on to say, "no doubt if my circumstances in London had been completely satisfactory, I should have gone no further than sympathy." In a passage that was deleted by the editors of a collection on John Cornford, Cornford's father speculated that domestic difficulties were part of his son's reasons for staying to fight in Spain. Cornford himself wrote that "from the age of seventeen I was in a kind of way tied down, and envied my contemporaries a good deal their fredom to bum around. And it was partly because I felt myself for the first time independent that I came out here." For Tony Hyndman Spain was partly a chance to escape England after his recent break-up with Stephen Spender and Spender's subsequent marriage. Spender felt responsible for Hyndman's rash decision to go to Spain and was preoccupied with thoughts of Hyndman for the next several months. When Hyndman got into trouble with the authorities in the International Brigades Spender spent considerable time and effort trying to get him released. "For several months," writes Spender, "my life was dominated by my concern with Jimmy's [Hyndman] problems." This is not to suggest that their central motivation in leaving for Spain was the hope for a more relaxed sexual atmosphere or freedom from other personal entanglements, only that it was a consideration. Spain was a different physical space which could represent freedom from constraints of home, be they financial, romantic, domestic or political. The hazy understanding of events in Spain and the huge regional and factional difference meant that volunteers could imagine Spain and the new society they dreamed of in any way they wanted.