Books: Epitaph

THE GREAT CRUSADE—Gustav Regler —Longmans, Green ($2.50).

In 1936 the first International Brigades marched into the Spanish Civil War, shouting: Spain is the grave of fascism. It turned out to be the grave of most of the Internationals. They had almost no arms, often no rations. They were refugees from Germany and Italy, workingmen and intellectuals from France and Belgium, men without identification papers, passports, even names. Most of them were Communists, but there were few Russians among them. They believed they were fighting to save democracy from fascism. In their political innocence and lack of military equipment, they were determined, if necessary, to make a living barrier of their bodies to keep Franco’s Moors out of Madrid. They did. Most of them were killed. Their successors, chiefly Americans, were later terribly routed at Teruel; Alvah Bessie described their extermination in a powerful book, Men in Battle. But until Gustav Regler published The Great Crusade this week, nobody who fought in all the battles had ever described the heroic period of the International Brigades, the defense of Madrid.

The book is history in novel form—the story of the first great military action in the war against fascism of which the Battle of Britain is the latest. It is built up around the battles that the Internationals fought to save Madrid—University City, Boadilla del Monte, the Arganda Bridge, Guadalajara where they routed Mussolini’s troops. It is written in great chunks in which the rabble armies struggle to advance a mile, are thrown back ten, somehow hold on; in which their little human components hope, despair, suffer, exult, sometimes betray, always fight to stay alive, to kill before they are killed.

No one was in a better position to write such a book than Gustav Regler. A leftish German émigré writer, Regler was one of scores of salon Bolsheviki who, drawn like flies by the smell of blood, swarmed down on Spain in 1936. There he ran into his great & good friend, Matei Jalka Lukacz, former Hungarian officer, former defender of the Marxist faith in matters esthetic for Linkskurve (Left Curve), the most influential German Marxist literary magazine. In Spain Lukacz (General Paul in The Great Crusade) was general of the Eleventh and Twelfth International Brigades. He quickly made Author Regler (Albert in The Great Crusade) his political commissar.

Said General Paul: “A commissar is a maid of all work, a democratic priest, an army doctor with his fingers always on the pulse of the Brigade.” More significantly he added: “You are my third eye.”

Quick to spot dramatic detail, General Paul’s third eye was in a position to pry into everything from the love letters of the Internationals in the trenches to the secret sessions of the staff. Most of what he pried into, Regler got into his novel. For back of the eye was a mind burning with a deep hatred of fascism (publishers report that Regler was once named Nazi Public Enemy No. 19), a keen sense of the historical importance of the events he was observing, an almost religious reverence (Regler is an ex-Catholic) for the simple, anonymous, resolute volunteers who had come to fight for freedom in a strange land. From these feelings comes the book’s emotional charge, its human understanding, its martial sweep. Its weaknesses are Regler’s weaknesses — sentimentality and political obtuseness. Sentimentality makes him glorify the most ill-natured, suspicious, truculent crowd among the Internationals — the Communist diehards. Politi cal opacity makes him bat around franti cally trying to rationalize the Russian Purge when it begins to disrupt the Inter national Brigades, leads him to an ac quiescence that would be dishonest if it were not merely smug and naïve.

General Lukacz was killed when a shell struck the automobile in which he and Commissar Regler were riding. Says Novelist Ernest Hemingway in his flattering preface: it might have been better for Regler if he had been killed too. He survived, but a steel splinter so nearly bisected him that the doctor who dressed the wound was able to push his hand completely through Regler’s body. Author Regler escaped from France just before the Nazi invasion, is now in Mexico.