Legions of Babel

Thirty years after the Spanish Civil War started, four personal narratives, five novels, and fifteen general works on the subject were available in English. Yet no one had published a serious, comprehensive account of the International Brigades.Some forty thousand foreigners served with the Loyalists, most of them in the Brigades, and a number have published personal accounts. But not one was in a position to know what was really going on; their stories are of interest mainly as the memoirs of combatants--and one rifleman's experience is much like another's, whether at Brunete or Bastogne, Guadalajara or Guadalcanal.Too, many of the volunteers were rather naive and apt to repeat impossible information in perfectly good faith. Writing as non-Communists, Communists, or disenchanted ex-Communists, their judgements were seriously clouded by emotion. As the author points out, any historian much "struggle not only with the conflicting accounts of partisans of the Right and Left, but with those of partisans of the same camp."Here we have the first dispassionate account based on extensive research, in Spain, elsewhere in Europe, and in the United States, as well as correspondence with a number of veterans. The story begins with the arrival of the first volunteers in Spain, covers the organization of the first Brigades, their role in the defense of Madrid and the battles of Jarama and Guadalajara, the reorganization of the Brigades and the activities of the commissars and chekists, the subsequent battles, and the withdrawal of the volunteers from Spain.