His book is sub-titled ‘A Field Study of Modern War’, but as a matter of fact it is not at all clear how much he has seen with his own eyes and how much he is repeating from hearsay. Nearly every incident is described as though by an eye-witness, but it is obviously impossible that Mr. Steer can have been in all places at once. However, there is one very important and much-disputed event upon which he speaks with undoubted authority – the bombing of Guernica (or Gernika). He was in the immediate neighbourhood at the time of the aeroplane raids, and his account leaves no doubt that the little town was not‘burnt by Red militiamen’ but systematically destroyed from the air, out of sheer, wanton brutality. Guernica was not even of much importance as a military objective. And the most horrible thought of all is that this blotting-out of an open town was simply the correct and logical use of a modern weapon. For it is precisely to slaughter and terrify the civilian population – not to destroy entrenchments, which are very difficult to hit from the air – that bombing aeroplanes exist. The photographs in this book are very good. All photo graphs in books on the Spanish war have a certain similarity, but these have much more character in them than most.

Mr. Arthur Koestler,1 a News Chronicle correspondent, stayed in Maálaga when the Republican troops had departed – a bold thing to do, for he had already published a book containing some very unfriendly remarks about General Queipo de Llano.2 He was thrown into jail by the rebels, and suffered what must have been the fate of literally tens of thousands of political prisoners in Spain. That is to say, he was condemned to death without trial and then kept in prison for months, much of the time in solitary confinement, listening at his keyhole night after night for the roar of rifle-fire as his fellow prisoners were shot in batches of six or a dozen. As usual – for it really does seem to be quite usual – he knew that he was under sentence of death without knowing with any certainty what he was accused of.

The prison part of the book is written mainly in the form of a diary. It is of the greatest psychological interest – probably one of the most honest and unusual documents that have been produced by the Spanish war. The earlier part is more ordinary and in places even looks rather as though it had been ‘edited’ for the benefit of the Left Book Club. Even more than Mr. Steer’s, this book lays bare the central evil of modern war – the fact that, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘he who fights against dragons becomes a dragon himself’.3

Mr. Koestler says: