Books: Spanish Histories

IN PLACE OF SPLENDOR—Constancia de la Mora—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

THE LINCOLN BATTALION—Edwin Rolfe —Random House ($2.50).

Constancia de la Mora was born in Madrid, in 1906. Her grandfather Don Antonio, an old man of majestic beauty, was Spain’s greatest statesman; and she was subjected to the petrifying education which was the privilege of females of her class. When she was 20, in spotless ignorance, she married a pathic provincial nearly seven feet tall, who gave her a daughter and lived off her money.

She left him in 1931 and, like Spain, began a new chapter of life. She rejoiced with the rest of the Spanish people in the somewhat piteous end of the King “with his evil-looking nose and famous bad breath.” First woman to be divorced in Spain, she promptly married Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, who was to become Chief of the Loyalist Air Force during the Civil War. Under the tepid, professorial new Republic she lived in Rome and Berlin, where her husband, as Air Attaché, learned much of value, which, however, did not interest his Government.

The last half of her book is devoted to the Civil War, which she prefers to describe as a fascist invasion. Though she keeps her account simple and personal, she gives an abundance of the war’s history, of which, as head of the Foreign Press Bureau, she is well qualified to speak. She handled the press at Geneva when Spain made its futile appeal before the League, feels that the “cynicism and treachery” of the British and French Governments reached their highest points there. Of the four-month battle of the Ebro: “We fought the last part of that battle with our fists and the fascists fought it with heavy artillery.” Franco’s advance on Barcelona: “An unarmed man is killed, and then the fascists step on his body to advance.” Her pages on the evacuation of Barcelona, on the treatment the refugees received at the hands of the French Government, are dreadful reading. In February 1939 she came to the U. S. to raise money. She had scarcely arrived when Madrid fell.

Of U. S. and English correspondents and visitors, she has good to say of Hemingway, Jay Allen, Josephine Herbst, Dorothy Parker, Joe North; bad of Errol Flynn, Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwood.

Constancia de la Mora’s story of her life could serve, if one were needed, or if all others were destroyed, as a history of Spain in the 20th Century.

Edwin Rolfe’s book is the class history of a graduating class of 61—the number of men mustered by the Lincoln Battalion at its last inspection. Most of them were very young; the best soldiers among them were Communists. Their school was a bitter war. Of hundreds who did not graduate, most were neither flunked nor fired; they were casualties. In recording their names, words, battles, songs, commanders, Rolfe writes hardly ever as an individual but as the chosen chronicler of a group. His book is thus an official history, clearly and decently told but subject to the narrowness and reticence of its kind, supplementing and to be supplemented by such a vivid personal history as Alvah Bessie’s (TIME, Oct. 16).

In Not Peace But a Sword, Vincent Sheean gave a chapter called The Last Volunteer to the story of Jim Lardner, Ring’s son, who was lost during the Ebro offensive. Among other facts recorded by Edwin Rolfe is that Lardner was not the last U. S. volunteer, but perhaps the seventh from last. Rolfe also preserves the marching song composed by Lardner (to the tune of Titwillow) for the Americans, who consistently fought as shock troops and consistently failed to rate truck rides:

In the hills by the Ebro the Fifteenth Brigade

Marched oop au and oop au ay arro*

And they kept right in step while their officers brayed

Loudly “oop au and oop au ay arro.”

Oh the MacPaps and British and Spanish as well

Get no practice in marching, it’s easy to tell,

And compared with the Lincolns they’re lousy as hell,

Singing “oop au and oop au ay arro.”

* “oop, au, ay, arro” was a military corruption of One, Two, Three, Four in Spanish.