HELL AND GOOD COMPANY

Readers who pay attention to the preface will look elsewhere for a definitive history of the Spanish Civil War, but there are plenty of good reasons to continue with this one.

Veteran, prizewinning historian Rhodes (Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, 2011, etc.) delivers a fairly superficial account of the fighting as a backdrop for insightful digressions into the war’s medicine, art and journalism. Foreign volunteers organized and staffed dozens of hospitals whose doctors and nurses worked under appalling conditions and then often went on to write about their experiences. The author extols the many medical advances, which vastly benefited wounded soldiers in future wars. A Spanish doctor, Frederic Durán-Jordà, organized the world’s first mobile transfusion service, which, expanded by legendary Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, collected and distributed blood to the wounded near the front. Rhodes pauses regularly to describe the Spanish artists working at the time (Picasso and others), whose paintings immortalized the suffering of their people. Even more familiar is the flood of foreign supporters of the Republic who came to fight (George Orwell, Andre Malraux) or report (Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Mathews). Some of the fighters wrote books now considered classics—e.g., George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). Nowadays, few read the reportage that emphasized the war’s horrors, Franco’s atrocities and the courage of the Spanish people. It produced widespread sympathy among the democracies, save for their governments, which steadfastly refused to get involved. History has not been kind to their version of events.

This is not one of Rhodes' major works, but it is an interesting collection of observations on an iconic war that the good guys lost but which produced important cultural and therapeutic advances.