Although not many people outside Spain had heard of him before the beginning of 1939. Colonel Casado’s name1 will always be among those that are remembered in connection with the Spanish Civil War. He it was who overthrew the Negrín Government2 and negotiated the surrender of Madrid – and, considering the actual military situation and the sufferings of the Spanish people, it is difficult not to feel that he was right. The truly disgraceful thing, as Mr. Croft-Cooke says forcibly in his introduction, was that the war was ever allowed to continue so long. Colonel Casado and those associated with him were denounced all over the world in the left-wing press as traitors, crypto-Fascists, etc., etc., but these accusations came very badly from people who had saved their own skins long before Franco entered Madrid. Besteiro,3 who took part in the Casado administration and afterwards stayed behind to face the Fascists, was also denounced as ‘pro-Franco’. Besteiro was given thirty years’ imprisonment! The Fascists certainly have a strange way of treating their friends.

Perhaps the chief interest of Colonel Casado’s book is the light it throws on the Russian intervention in Spain and the Spanish reaction to it. Although well-meaning people denied it at the time, there is little doubt that from the middle of 1937 until nearly the end of the war the Spanish Government was directly under the control of Moscow. The ultimate motives of the Russians are uncertain, but at any rate they aimed at setting up in Spain a Government obedient to their own orders, and in the Negrín Government they had one. But the bid that they had made for middle-class support produced unforeseen complications. In the earlier part of the war the main adversaries of the Communists in their fight for power had been the Anarchists and left-wing Socialists, and the emphasis of Communist propaganda was therefore on a ‘moderate’ policy. The effect of this was to put power into the hands of ‘bourgeois Republican’ officers and officials, of whom Colonel Casado became the leader. But these people were first and foremost Spaniards and resented the Russian interference almost as much as that of the Germans and Italians. Consequently the Communist-Anarchist struggle was followed by another struggle of Communists against Republicans, in which the Negrín Government was finally overthrown and many Communists lost their lives.