The essential fact about a totalitarian régime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant. It took Mr. d’Ydewalle some time to get used to this idea, and, as he observed, there were other Western European prisoners who had difficulty in grasping it as well. When he had been several months in jail some British soldiers, escaped from France, came to join him. He told them about the shootings. At the beginning they flatly disbelieved him, and only gradually, as mattress after mattress appeared outside this cell or that, came to realise that what he said was true: whereupon they commented, not inaptly, ‘Well, give me England every time.’

This book is a useful footnote to history. The author’s simplicity of outlook is an advantage to him as a narrator. But, if one may make a guess, the next variant of General Franco who appears will not have Mr. d’Ydewalle’s support.

[2944]

Review of The Clash by Arturo Barea1

Observer, 24 March 1946

The third and final volume of Arturo Barea’s autobiography covers the period 1935–9, and is therefore largely a story of civil war. His private struggle and the failure of his first marriage cannot be separated from the general social tension of which the war was a result; and in his second marriage, which took place about the end of 1937, personal and political motives are even more closely intermingled. The book starts off in a Castilian village and ends up in Paris, but its essential subject is the siege of Madrid.

Mr. Barea was in Madrid from the very start of the war, and remained there almost continuously until vague but irresistible political pressures drove him out of the country in the summer of 1938. He saw the wild enthusiasm and chaos of the early period, the expropriations, the massacres, the bombing and shelling of the almost helpless city, the gradual restoration of order, the three-sided struggle for power between the common people, the bureaucracy, and the foreign Communists. For about two years he held an important post in the Foreign Press Censorship, and for a while he delivered the ‘Voice of Madrid’ broadcasts, which scored a considerable success in Latin America. Before the war he had been an engineer employed in the Patent Office, a would-be writer who had not actually written anything, a believing Catholic disgusted by the Spanish Church, and a temperamental Anarchist with no close political affiliations. But it is most of all his peasant origin that fits him to describe the war from a specifically Spanish point of view.