HOWZAT

Smouldering resentment within the ancien régime exploded on July 17, 1936, when generals Franco, Goded, Mola and Sanjurjo launched a coup d’état. Their attempt to take Madrid failed, but only just. As news of the coup spread, towns and villages declared for either the Republic on the left or the rebels on the right, and within 48 hours the battle lines of the Spanish civil war had been drawn. Belchite found itself behind fascist lines, and its socialist reformers never stood a chance.

Aurelio Salavera still lives in Belchite. He was seven years old when the neighbours came knocking. “They’d warned my father they would come for him, but he didn’t really believe it,” he recalls. “He told my mother not to worry because he hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t campaigned for the left or spoken out – like everyone around here, he was just a farmer.”

He was wrong. “They shot 370 Belchitanos that day,” says Salavera. The victims included his father, 11 uncles and aunts, three pregnant women, the village idiot, and Mariano Castillo, the socialist mayor.

Similar massacres were being perpetrated by left and right all over Spain, and while the German and Italian governments knew how to respond – by sending troops, arms and aircraft to aid the rebels – the British and French prevaricated.

On the one hand, the democratically elected government of a European state was being threatened by fascist insurgents and was begging for help. On the other was the inconvenient truth that the Spanish administration was a little too friendly with Moscow. If Spain fell to the Bolsheviks, France and Britain could be next.

Thus was born the non-intervention pact – signed by 27 countries, including Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Portugal and Sweden, as well as Germany and Italy. This cynical agreement, then described by Time magazine as “a suave British finesse”, prohibited the export of men or warlike materiel to aid either side, while ignoring American, German and Italian assistance to the fascists.

Paddy Cochrane didn’t agree with non-intervention. At seven – like Aurelio Salavera – he’d seen his father dragged into the back yard of his Dublin home and shot by the Black and Tans. By the age of 12 he was reading about Marxism, and at 15 he was seeing the effects of the Great Depression from the American Dust Bowl. In July 1936 he was living in Liverpool’s slums and spoiling for a fight.

“Fascism was like a forest fire, and I could see that if we didn’t put it out in Spain it would spread to the whole of Europe,” he says. “I stood up at a meeting and told them that bombs on Madrid meant bombs on London.”

Men and women all over the world were coming to the same conclusion. By July 1937 more than 35,000 – 2,300 from the UK and Eire – had enlisted in the International Brigades, established by the Soviet Comintern.

Vilified as “reds” by their governments, their motives were as diverse as their backgrounds. Hardened IRA men shared trenches with Oxbridge dreamers and Jewish East Enders who had fought Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. But, badly organised and poorly equipped, the British battalion stood little chance against Franco’s army and Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Their greatest victory was the defence of Madrid against Mola in November 1936, a battle from which was born the war cry of the International Brigades: “No pasaran” – they shall not pass.

Their final engagement, in July 1938, was the battle of the Ebro, the last, desperate attempt by the republic to avoid the inevitable. It was a bloody failure, with 90 British volunteers among the 30,000 killed in eight catastrophic weeks.

That September, the survivors were sent home – the then Spanish prime minister, Juan Negrin, naively hoped that withdrawing the Republic’s foreign troops would persuade the League of Nations to ask Franco to do likewise with his German and Italian forces.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy