The huge imbalance of attention paid to the International Brigades is a constant theme in scholarly literature. The impact of the Brigades, it is usually maintained, has been overemphasized from the time of their formation right through to the present day. In some ways this is understandable, in that many non-Spanish scholars have chosen to focus on the involvement of their own countries. It has long been accepted that the actual Spanish nature of the war is the one feature most often forgotten, both in later historical assessment and in the contemporary situation. Such is the point made by Tom Rees in a review article of recent literature on the Spanish Civil War where he writes that books "give the impression that Spaniards themselves had little to do with the Civil War." This recognition may be important for several reasons, but it hardly adds anything to the field in itself, unless the question of why this has been the case is addressed further. The essential point though, is in how material about the International Brigades is used and for what end. This information can be used specifically to understand radical men in Britain in the inter-war period, and while this project illuminates aspects of the war in Spain that need not be the prime concern. Writings by British participants can be considered in their own right and analyzed for the kind of story they tell and how they tell it, including their position on the Spanish nature of the conflict. Rather than using information about volunteers as another example in an analysis of Spain and its politics, volunteers' experiences help an understanding of aspects of life in Britain and for specific groups of men. This does not deny that the war took place in Spain between primarily Spanish factions, but realizes that it also included foreigners who were only marginally aware of this context. Their experiences need to be understood in another vein, and not dismissed as deluded or self-centred.
Another trend in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War is a focus on the working class nature of most if its combatants. Both in Spain itself and in the International Brigades, the overwhelming majority of volunteers were from the working class. Many historians have argued that this fact had been over-looked due to the high profile position of the few select writers and intellectuals whose words were made famous by the War. Accompanying the huge interest in oral histories, several projects have interviewed "ordinary" ex-Brigaders whose origins were in the British working class. Judith Cook's Apprentices of Freedom allows ordinary voices from the Brigades to speak, as does David Corkill and Stuart Rawnsley's The Road to Spain. Corkill and Rawnsley write of their intention to interview ex-Brigaders in order provide "a balanced cross-section of the membership whose story has not been told elsewhere." Their work and other oral histories have definitely provided a new perspective and information about a different type of volunteer, but have failed to use this material as thoughtfully and creatively as they might have. Many oral history projects simply aim to provide an addition to the body of historical data, as if this information was enough on its own and should speak for itself. These new sources can be used to probe such issues as inter-class relationships between men as Spain was one place where they met on relatively equal footing. As Michael Jackson points out, there is a mystery revolving around the relationship between middle-class intellectuals and members of the working class. It is also important to ask how a group of men who could loosely be termed as socialists reacted to the diversity of their members' experiences. We can ask how being immersed in a newly "egalitarian" society affected British volunteers, and how their socialist ideas appeared in reality in relationship with other men and with women.
Most histories still assert that the upper and middle class volunteers have received all the attention and accolades for their participation in the Spanish Civil War. Corkill and Rawnsley mention historians who "overemphasise the role and significance of the men who rose to positions of leadership or the intelligentsia...to the detriment of the rank and file." It is now unfashionable to look at the poets or intellectuals involved in the War, even though very few of these are particularly well known. The reasons for this censure are not entirely clear. It is true that all types of source material should be looked at in this case, and the historical investigation should not stop with autobiographies and poems. But now that educational background and the skills of articulation this bestows are no longer the only factors which determine who is of historical import, it must be time to allow freedom within the field and to analyze themes which affected the upper and middle class soldiers as well. Attention to published accounts of the war by men involved does not glorify their words or actions, but instead opens up their writings to close scrutiny in order to draw conclusions which are far from self-evident.
While some historians believe that enough attention has been given to the privileged classes, it is important to realize the ambiguous class and social position of many volunteers given their commitment to left-wing politics. They may not have known the financial deprivation of Depression Britain, but many were self-supporting as artists or salesmen and had lost the support of their families. Though the 1930's were a politically radical decade, serious commitment to the Labour or Communist Parties was still relatively limited among the generation of young men. In fact some of the reason for an emphasis on the "distinguished" members of the Brigades was a propaganda ploy at the time to prove that the volunteers were not all "unemployed hordes," as the press often made them out to be. Recent analyses of middle-class men have shown how many insights into gender and history can be achieved by looking at the privileged. Much interesting material can be derived from examining how these men imagined the working classes and how they interacted with them in Spain. It is a serious mistake to ignore the experiences of individuals who are in positions of power, especially when the purpose of such study is to offer a challenging interpretation of cultural ideas and not simply a description of writings and actions.
Given the complex nature of the Spanish War it is not surprising that books continue to attempt a grasp of the political events and to evaluate them in retrospect. Veterans seem to retain heroic status in most eyes while still being chastised for their idealist naivete. To many of those historians with socialist sympathies the Spanish Civil War remains a tragic cause, a possibility destroyed by factionalism rather than Franco's army, and the political splintering is detailed with a note of regret. It is perhaps a mistake to attempt to assess whether volunteers were duped into action and manipulated during the war. Some volunteers began to see their participation in the War in these terms by the later period, and express anger and bewilderment at the circumstances which made some of them wanted men for having enlisted in the wrong' military unit. Rather, it is useful to try to understand the factors which made them view the Spanish struggle in such black and white terms and how the war in Spain was such a semina event for men in the late 1930's. Another consideration is how the media in its various forms condensed the issue to one simply of Fascism versus democracy and whose interests were served by this. Analyzing the views and opinions of the individuals actually involved is a way to understand the situation as it was seen at the time, and contextualize British attitudes within the 1930's and the debates which were raging at the time.
All of these common approaches to the material on the Spanish Civil War use it in an unimaginative manner. Not only do they probe the same questions but they ask them in the same way and do not look for possible innovations. It is not simply that there has been little analytical attention paid to the International Brigades, but also that what attention there has been has used limited conceptual tools. Men regarded certain episodes and characters as essential to their Spanish experiences while some ideas could only creep through at the edges of their stories. Looking for signs of this kind involves considering men as gendered individuals, seeing war as a man's activity despite the Spanish women involved and in observing how ideas about masculinity were deployed in the Spanish situation.
The field of the history of masculinity is a relatively recent one, and many areas have yet to be explored. Since it is an approach which can be used to interrogate many historical problems there is seldom a body of literature on any one topic and theoretical insights must be used from a variety of studies which differ vastly. Those works which interrogate the category of masculinity have been aided by theoretical work dealing with gender and history. In her 1986 article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, Joan Scott theorized an approach to gender which would make its questions and methodology applicable to any field of historical inquiry. In this context gender can be seen as a concept structuring the way nations and other communities are defined and imagined, and as a central factor in the justification and rhetoricizing of war. Scott points out that "power relations among nations and the status of colonial subjects have been made comprehensible in terms of relations between male and female." If difference is often understood in gendered terms then all kinds of social and ideological hierarchies which operate in the conceptualization of war can be usefully considered as reliant on ideas about gender. Gender and masculinity are more than simply aspects which can be studied in relation to war, but are conceptual approaches which ask new questions about how fighting is imagined, discussed, carried out and experienced and how gender is involved in the construction of these ideas. It allows for an evaluation of these conflicts which contradictions between rhetoric and realities in social ideas and examines how the period of war constructs and reconstructs notions of gender.
The study of masculinity and war is one topic which has received considerable attention and yielded many important insights. There has been some concentration of works on the First World War, a popular topic which has remained large in the imaginations of academics for eighty years. Books such as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and Eric Leed's No Man's Land consider some of the issues of men in this war, although not specifically from the point of view of masculinity. Others have examined the legacy of the War for later generations, particularly how it illuminated or redefined men's roles in terms of combat and aggression. Joanna Bourke's recent Dismembering the Male approaches the subject of men's bodies and how issus such as mutilation, death, male bonding, and male aesthetics both during and after the war can be understood in terms of masculinity. She examines the strageties used by discontent soldiers to escape the war and how they coped with the expectations of their masculine role. She asserts that the British population felt the War to have altered the relationship between the sexes and that various ideas to do with promoting manliness and the male body, which continued thorugh the inter-war years, responded to this belief. George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers evaluates masculinity in the wake of World War One. He recognizes that the preoccupation with war and masculinity outlasted the Great War, and that although the idea of the camaraderie of the trenches and the cult of comradely love might be rejected it was never forgotten. He explores the relationship of Fascism to the cult of war, emphasizing that Fascism was dominated by the worship of the masculinity community and advocated a clear and unambiguous division of labour between the sexes. Mosse has contributed some of the best consideration on the subject of men and war and shown how a certain type of military masculinity became the proof of respectable character and patriotism and how this form of masculinity was imagined as the preferred vehicle for men to express their beliefs.
Much theoretical literature dealing with masculinity and war centres around the issues of patriotism and nationalism. The ability and privilege to fight for one's country, and the right to bear arms have been crucial in the defining of citizenship. In the late nineteenth century women often demanded the opportunity to contribute actively to nationalistic war efforts in order to prove that they were as worthy of full citizenship as men. Anne Summer's Angels and Citizens looks at the development of women as military nurses and how their participation in war was a powerful platform from which to demand citizenship. Both men and women could fulfill a masculine role by dutifully defending their nation and their Empire. Lynne's Layton's article "Vera Brittain's Testament(s)" demonstrates how the notion of a masculinity vitalized by nationalistic war was held by men and women in the early twentieth century. Conversely, pacifism was interpreted as a stand against the community of the nation and the arena of masculine citizenship. The Spanish Civil War offers a peculiar scenario, being one of the most striking examples of a situation where men volunteered to fight a war which was not a nationalistic one. Individual motivations for supporting Spain were diverse though, as some were fighting against all the central precepts of the British nation while others were defending Spain's right to form a liberal democratic government such as Britain's. The International Brigaders offer many insights into support for nationalism and internationalism and can demonstrate how masculinity and war could be linked not only to the nation but other communities which men felt solidarity with.
Other works have examined how masculinity, especially in its military manifestation, has been constructed as a moral voice, and the means by which men express the will and ideals of a community. In Soldier Heroes Graham Dawson examines the centrality of a military identity to self-perceptions of manhood. His work is important in that it emphasizes the need to look at both masculinity as a socially and culturally identified role and as a personal identity lived out by individuals. The individual heroes he looks at, and the ways in which their stories were constructed for consumption by the British public at specific historical moments, highlight the qualities which were seen as essentially masculine and how they remained bound up with the ideas of adventure and war. With the example of Lawrence of Arabia he analyzes how the myth of this soldier hero reflected a "desire for the reassertion of a heroic British identity to set against the destruction not only of life, but of meaning, values and beliefs." Dawson interprets the story of Lawrence as integrating themes of rejection of military authority, preserving the exciting qualities of military adventure and yet also distancing it from the negative qualities associated with the trenches. One of the vital characteristics of the solder hero is his propensity for engaging in masculine adventure, a possibility that only exists Dawson points out, "firmly distanced from the domestic." Dawson also considers the ways in which soldiering masculinity becomes the voice of struggle in war, and how it sets the agenda. Dawson's work also stresses how ideas about gender and war are continually evolving even in peace-time.
The decade of the 1930's has received little attention from gender historians in comparison with the decades both before and after. It is deserving of much more study though, as it has much to reveal about gender, politics and culture. The evolution and effects of ideas about gender have been explored in relation to the First and Second World Wars, both in terms of male and female identities during the wars and adapting to circumstances afterwards. No works focus on the position of men in the inter-war period though, except to assess the late after-math of the First World War. Joanna Bourke's insights into developements in masculinity after the War are particularly intriguing, and such movements as that concerned with dress reform can be profitably compared to issues concerning men in the later period. Several sources tackle the subject of femininity and its renegotiation after the War. Susan Kent's Making Peace details the difficult process of re-establishing a gender order after the devastating War, but what can be learned about men must be read in between the lines and understood through their omission. Men are not often considered as gendered in this period (as in many others), except perhaps as those who had done the fighting in the Great War. Gender is seen as a more meaningful category for women, who had received the vote and who had the suffrage campaign in their recent history. No attention is given to the ways in which men organized. Both socialism and fascism, while involving women, were male-domanated movements which addressed predominantly male concerns. This may have been hidden by concerns which purported to be beyond the question of men as a group, but the political ideologies of the 1930's had special appeal to men as men and this is what has not been recognized.
Many themes of cultural, social and political life in the 1930's beg for a gender analysis. One is the popularity of fascism, a historical theme many British historians would prefer to ignore. It can only be assumed that the serious lack of literature on the very striking appeal of British Fascism stems from a political distaste of the subject and even embarrassment given the discredit which was to befall the fascist ideology. However fascism is more interesting in its cultural manifestation which demonstrates how much British society, especially the middle class, had in common with Continental Europe. One of the elements of this ideology was the call for a return to traditional gender roles, where the divisions between masculine and feminine behaviour were thought to be clear and defined. This was an element of many ideologies after the First World War which sought to restore order through strict gender roles. The implications of fascism as a gendered system have not been explored, either in its military manfestation or its domestic ideology. Fascism also glorified an explicitly masculine role, where militant men were praised and idealized. How and why this would appeal to people at this time has not been analyzed, although previous insights by gender historians are clearly applicable to this instance.
The attraction of extreme political ideologies of all kinds in the 1930's is another point which is very provocative. It was this climate which prompted men into action in Spain and made political activity so central to the young generation of this period. The fervour with which middle class rebels embraced communism, socialism, pacifism, or even fascism is a phenomenon which deserves to be examined in more detail. With the growing popularity of leftist politics in general and of pacifism in particular, the two became conflated and part of a set of ideas about progressivism. Communism and socialism had a growing appeal to privileged youth in the 1930's. Part of the reason may have been that it was a fashionable ideology and associated with bohemian life styles. Communism was also a romantic, idealistic kind of ideology, and its sparkle for some had not yet been tarnished by Stalinist policies. Esmond Romilly describes his socialist utopia as a "fantasy-life" in which he could do things quite apart from his ordinary existence, and where his aspirations for justice would be achieved. For the boys involved there was also certainly a degree of rebellion against their often very conservative families and the environment they were brought up in. Young radicals were estranged by the rigidity of the public school and scoffed at schools' few limited efforts to modernize. The pursuit of knowledge was usually discouraged in favour of athletics and military training which were supposed to shape the character of the man. This kind of environment was frustrating for intelligent and creative boys who might be attracted by whatever alternatives were available. Amongst all these reasons was real feeling and real commitment to an ideology which they felt would create a better world. It is important to stress that there were numerous factors which radicalized some middle class youths in the 1930's, and while they were never exactly the same, they were very much shaped by the cultural background of the values of public school and increasing resistance to them. For many men, experiences in Spain continued to work out the contradictions between their beliefs and their social and psychological training at public school.
It is important to consider each piece of writing on the Spanish Civil War, be it a poem or an autobiography, as an individual source and to examine how and why it has been constructed. There is a great variety in the sources, even when these have been written by men of similar backgrounds, men who knew each other or who experienced the same situations. Most of the men discussed in this study were young upper-middle class radicals who shared the experience of public school and some degree of radical political experience in Britain. Those from a different background had been exposed to this world though, as most of them were well-acquainted. Much can be learned from how men transferred their experiences into a narrative form, how this was presented stylistically, which experiences were included and which could not find their way into the story. When it is seen what strategies these men use in writing about themselves and others, then the group of accounts can be compared to see where they diverge and where they share much in common. There are certain themes of male identity and being a soldier which can help to make sense of the involvement of volunteers if they are allowed to be heard within the texts.
Taking written records by veterans of the Spanish Civil War as central source material imposes certain restrictions on a historical project from the very beginning. The men who wrote about their experiences were usually from the middle and upper classes, and the type of person who found it easy to express themselves in the written form. There is a wide variety within this category, though, which does include some sources written by working class men, though these are less common and are sometimes exceptional cases. Each of the sources was composed at a certain temporal point, depending on the circumstances of the author and their intentions in writing about their experiences. None of the accounts are simple exposition, however free from artifice they might seem. All draw on certain known genres, such as adventure stories or political polemics, in order to give their stories form. Those works that were published were shaped by the market they were intended for, and those private papers by the expectation that they might not be read by others. These factors influence the product, but it is how all of these operate together that makes sources such as these so interesting. The writings left behind can be used to form opinions about the actual experiences men had and how they were expressed.
There is a great deal of different between those works composed immediately after the soldier returned home and those which were written in retrospect many years later. This is most starkly emphasized by considering a work such as Jason Gurney's Crusade in Spain, composed much later in Gurney's life, and some diary writings composed on the actual day of the events they describe. Gurney was a South Africn by birth who had lived and worked as an artust in London for many years. He joined the International Brigades for eight months at the end of 1936 and wrote his memoir over thirty years later. Gurney's work is well ordered and all events have the benefit of hindsight to make them comprehensible. In describing his own reasons for volunteering and his ideas about social radicalism and protest he had the opportunity to assess his earlier life and to reflect on his thoughts he had as an younger man. Gurney has also been able to pick out episodes which he found to illustrate conditions in general and to make his story exciting and fast-moving. Many men in the trenches never had this opportunity as they were killed before they could construct such an account. Many men in the British Battalion kept notes or diaries and sections of these were put together at the time to give a sense of individual battles or time periods. Many of these break off when their author is killed. They describe the war in a completely different way, which is quite understandable given the circumstances. They often list the day by day movements of the troops at the front, giving details of the smallest movements, short excursions and failed attempts to gain territory. They contain matter of fact mentions of the men killed each day and of the constant burying of dead. For these soldiers there is no room for analysis of their situations because it is difficult to separate living them from writing about them.
Tony Hyndman, an ex-Guardsman, journeyed to Spain in January of 1937 with Giles Romilly. Hyndman had been involved in a relationship with Stephen Spender both as personal secretary and as lover, but spender's recent marriage had ended that situation. Hyndman's eight page memoir was produced for Philip Toynbee's collection, The Distant Drum, although Stephen Spender quotes from notes written earlier which he reports were given to him by Hyndman. In this, Hyndman briefly describes his decision to go to Spain, his training and the action he saw at the Jarama front. He then details his illnesses, desertion and subsequent arrest. It is a piece which expresses complete disillusionment with the War, and regret at having been involved at all. Despite its strong sense of bitterness, it is not as emotional as it might have been if it were composed soon after Hyndman's traumatic experiences in Spain. The memoir is a justification for his later pacifism and his rejection of the war.
Esmond and Giles Romilly were part of a prominent middle class family and were both well-known at a young age for their unusually radical behaviour. Esmond spent two months fighting at several different fronts in late 1936, including University City in Madrid and the town of Boadilla, which gave its name to his memoir. Esmond Romilly's Boadilla is one of the great unknown works of the Spanish Civil War, composed in 1937 at age eighteen during the months he spent in the Basque Republic almost immediately after he withdrew from the fighting. He had a prospective publisher before he wrote the work which must surely have had some effect on its production. Boadilla is a book of stories containing colourful characters, with Romilly as storyteller and actor. He sees the book as a "picture of people who were by no means fearless fanatics--but very ordinary people drawn from every section of society." Romilly attempts to keep his involvement objective and allow the voices of his friends to speak as it is to these friends that the work is dedicated. His brother Giles Romilly accompanied Tony Hyndman to Spain, but did not write of his experiences. Giles and Esmond did not cross paths in Spain, though their time briefly overlapped and Esmond was anxious for news of his brother. Information regarding Giles occurs in several different sources in which he emerges as a certain type of character; the shy, inactive Oxford man who was invigorated by the dramatic, active life of the Spanish Civil War and the sense of purpose which it bestowed.
Stephen Spender was one of the literary notables who visited Spain, but he did so not as a combatant but as an information gatherer and as a member of the media. He wrote about this period in poetry and in his memoir World Within World where he details his search for a missing Russian battleship and his frantic attempts to help Tony Hyndman who suffered psychological trauma, sickness and imprisonment. The Spanish section of World Within World is an adventure story in which he and his friend Thomas Cuthbert Worsley, who accompanied him on his mission, constantly journeyed through dangerous regions of Spain to interrogate people in order to solve the mystery of the missing Comsomol. Valentine Cunningham suggests that Spain was also something of a sexual or aesthetic adventure in which Spender enjoyed the sexual imagery of war and the beauty of the Spanish men. Worsley later worked as part of a ambulance team, and his memoir Behind the Battle also fits into the adventure story genre with Worsley as the naive but well-meaning hero. It appears much easier for the non-combatants to construct their tales in this manner as they never had to reconcile their imaginings of war with pain, death and loss.
John Cornford's letters and poetry were composed on the front and sent home while the author was fighting in Spain. Cornford was a well-known Cambridge Communist who was already legendary as a teenager for his willingness to confront all reactionary behaviour. "Looking back over political life in Cambridge," writes a friend, "one sees him everywhere...waiting on Parker's Piece with a band of followers ready to deal with an expected Fascist descent one summer when Mosley's vans were making frequent appearances; sitting in the middle of a hall at Fascist meeting in an outlying village, like a captain amidst his troop of hecklers." He was one of the first men to go to Spain in 1936 and it became the focus of his energy. Cornford may have composed his letters with thought of publication, but essentially they are personal exchanges between himself and his lover in Britain, Margot Heinemann. They express a sense of immediacy but since writings, even at the front, were always composed in leisure time, there is still a certain amount of distance from the events which he describes. Most of the letters were written before Cornford was involved in military engagements, so they express the anxiety of waiting and inaction. Cornford fought in Spain for only a few months before he was killed on the Cordoba front at the age of twenty-one so he had no opportunity to rearrange his writings as he may have done had he returned home alive.
George Orwell, one of the best known British intellectuals to fight in Spain, fought not in the International Brigades but in the Spanish POUM militia. This fact, which had seemed insignificant to him at the beginning of his experiences becomes the axis of his narrative, Homage to Catalonia. "If you had asked me why I joined the militia," he writes, "I should have answered: To fight against fascism," and if you has asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered Common decency." Orwell had believed all men in Spain were comrades, fighting for common ideals, but when he realizes the inaccuracy of his conceptions his already indiviualistic experience becomes even more personal. This book is both Orwell's journey through Spain to various fronts and to cities out of the action, and his political education. His portrayal of the war is often quite farsical, as when he notes "in this war everyone always did miss everyone else, when it was humanly possible." This irony is balanced though, by a concern for understanding what the War meant to the Spanish, and Orwell is one of the few writers to include lengthy sections detailing the political factions in Spain and their history. Other writers simply comment on members of these groups with whom they may have come into contact and while this may mean they had little sense of the details of the fragmentation of their ranks, they do express the splintered nature of the overall situation and cope with by writing only personal stories.
The men who wrote these works may not be typical, but they do form some kind of coherent group with both continuities and great divergences in their experiences. Some were extremely well known at the time, though most were famous only within small circles. They are indicative of the some of the range of men represented and provide an excellent group within and against which to compare attitudes and ideas. There is great contrast within the writings they produced, both in style and in content. Most shared a similar upbringing though, and the themes which concerned these men can be seen throughout their writings, sometimes in common with Spanish and working class soldiers and sometimes in contrast to them. The works are both emotionally introspective and matter of fact, and where these changes in tone occur is a central point to be analyzed. These men rarely profess grand knowledge of the war they travelled to nor political infallibility but they do express emotional opinions on the idea of war and why a conscientious man was compelled to act in the way they did given their circumstances.