It is not easy for any thinking person to write in praise of dictatorships, because of the obvious fact that when any dictatorship gets into its stride the thinking person is the first to be liquidated. Possibly Mr. Wyndham Lewis still approves of Hitler, but does Hitler approve of Mr. Lewis? Which side would Hitler have been on in the recent set-to about Mr. Eliot’s portrait?2 It is true that over against the German dictatorship there is the Russian dictatorship, but to a western European that is less immediately menacing. We are still in the position of being able to admire it from beyond gunshot range.

Consequently, bad as the pro-Government books on the Spanish war have been, the pro-Franco ones have been worse. All or almost all that I have seen – I except those of Professor Allison Peers, who is only rather tepidly pro-Franco – have been written by Roman Catholics. Mr. Sencourt’s book does not sink to the level of Arnold Lunn’s Spanish Rehearsal, but its general thesis is the same. Franco is a Christian gentleman, the Valencia Government are a gang of robbers, the Badajoz massacre didn’t happen, Guernica was not bombed but wantonly burnt by Red militiamen – and so on and so forth. The truth is that all the haggling about ‘who started it’ and who committed which atrocity that goes on in books of this kind is a waste of time, because it does not tell you anything about the real conflict of motives. It would be much simpler if everyone would say outright, ‘My money is on Franco (or Negrín), atrocities or no atrocities.’ For that is what everyone who takes sides really thinks.

Mr. Sencourt at any rate differs from Messrs. Lunn, Yeats-Brown, etc., in that he knows a great deal about Spain and loves the Spaniards, so that though he is hostile to the ‘Reds’ he is not vulgarly spiteful. But like almost everyone who has written of this war he suffers a great disadvantage from having only been able to study conditions on one side of the line. What he says of the pre-war situation is probably sound enough, but his account of internal conditions on the Government side during the war is very misleading. He enormously exaggerates the amount of civil disorder, and though he gives the main outline of the struggle between the various political parties he misunderstands the role and aim of most of them, because he feels himself obliged to equate ‘Red’ with ‘bad’. Communism he speaks of as though it were a disruptive force and nothing else, and he uses ‘Anarchism’ indifferently with ‘anarchy’, which is a hardly more correct use of words than saying that a Conservative is one who makes jam. Still, this is not an ill-natured or dishonest book, and to say that of a book on a political subject is a great deal nowadays.