Crusade in Spain

by Jason Gurney

Book by Gurney, Jason

Genres: Spanish Civil War

189 pages, Hardcover

First published April 22, 1974

Reviews

[Mike Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most eyewitness accounts of the Spanish Civil War are, I suspect, no longer that widely read - probably only Laurie Lee's and George Orwell's nowadays. There might be a reason for this. George Orwell wrote in Inside the Whale (1940) that: "The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and badness. ...[They are] by cocksure partisans telling you what to think."

This one is an exception and deserves not to be forgotten. Jason Gurney was a sculptor. He was born in England but brought up partly in South Africa; he had seen the impact of the Depression in both countries, was politically committed, and was appalled by the rise of Fascism. "Either you were opposed to the growth of Fascism and went out to fight against it," he wrote later, "or you acquiesced in its crimes and were guilty of permitting its growth."

Despite Gurney's commitment, Crusade in Spain isn't a "partisan book telling you what to think". It was written years later and published several years after Gurney's death in the 1970s. It is one of the better books in English about the Spanish Civil War. Gurney is a lively and perceptive writer. There are also no heroics; he pulls no punches, and far from toeing the party line, he is deeply critical of some of his comrades. (André Marty, the effective head of the International Brigades, is "ludicrous and sinister".)

The sheer grossness of war is here too. At the battle of Jarama in 1937:

I found a group of wounded (British) men who had been carried to a non-existent field dressing station and then forgotten. There were about fifty stretchers, but many men had already died and most of the others would be dead by morning. ...One little Jewish kid of about eighteen lay on his back with his bowels exposed from his navel to his genitals ...they all called for water and I had none to give. I was filled with such horror at their suffering and my inability to help them that I felt I had suffered some permanent injury to my spirit.

Not long afterwards Gurney suffered a more concrete wound; he was shot through the hand and never worked as a sculptor again.

Although I first read the book very many years ago, it has stayed with me. Orwell was onto something here; when it comes to books, it's often the personal that survive.

[Sean Carman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crusade in Spain is both a personal account of Jason Gurney's enlistment with the International Brigades and his fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and a remarkably lucid description of the political forces that gave rise to the conflict and the day-to-day hardships and horrors of combat. Gurney describes his Bohemian life as a sculptor in Chelsea, and the political idealism that essentially compelled him to join the fight to save the Republic, but he also describes, in vivid detail, what is like to be a soldier on the front. Spoiler: It was horrible.

I really enjoyed this book. There may not be that many good accounts of the Spanish Civil War, as Orwell noted, but this is surely one of them.

[Nicholas Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books by a member of the International Brigades.

[Rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently reading in the sense that I use this excellent work for research, especially on the Battle of Jarama which was fought outside Madrid in Febrary 1937. A throwback to the idealism that pervaded every social class in Britain in the 1930s, it is a thoroughly readable account of that battle, (one of the first that can rightly be called "modern" since it involved tanks and aviation as well as infantry), probably the best I have ever come across. Gurney doesn't shirk from describing the horror of untrained idealists going up against a brutal, well-drilled regular army, the chaos, desperation and confusion of the battle itself, the incompetence of some but not all of their commanders and the horrific picture of those left to die from their wounds. Not a leisurely read by any means.