It is noticeable that Professor Peers seems surprised as well as pained that the ‘non-belligerent’ Spanish Government has been so consistently unfriendly to ourselves. He lists the endless provocations, and the inspired campaigns of libel in the Spanish Press, as though these in some way contradicted Franco’s earlier record. But, in fact, there was never very much doubt as to where the sympathies of Franco and his more influential followers lay, and the time when it might have been useful to point out that Franco was the friend of our enemies was in 1936. At that time Professor Peers did nothing of the kind. No one would accuse him of falsifying facts, but the tone of the books he was then writing did, there is little doubt, tend to make the Nationalist cause more respectable in British eyes. In so far as books influence events, Professor Peers must be held to have done something towards establishing Franco’s régime, and he ought not now to be astonished because Franco has behaved in very much the manner that every supporter of the Republic foretold at the time.1

Mr. Dundas’s book is written round the speculative but interesting thesis that a quite different kind of rebellion – a Conservative but not Fascist rebellion – had been planned in the beginning, and that events only took the course they did because of Sanjurjo’s2 death and because the Nationalists, having failed in their first coup, had to apply for help to the Germans and Italians, who imposed their own terms. The importance of this is that the régime which has actually been set up is, as Mr. Dundas says, ‘not Spanish’. It is a régime modelled on foreign lines and intolerable from the point of view of an ordinary Spaniard, even an aristocrat; it might therefore turn out to be brittle in a moment of emergency. The book contains some interesting details about Civil War events in Majorca. But Mr. Dundas is surely wrong in suggesting that Franco will fight for the Axis if the Allies invade Europe. Fidelity is not the strong point of the minor dictators.

1. Also in 1943, under the name of Bruce Truscot, Professor Peers published Redbrick University. This included ‘The Nature and Aims of a Modern University’, which proved influential in post-war British university development. A more modest publication, under the name E. Allison Peers, was A Skeleton Spanish Grammar (1917). See also p. 259, n. 4.