The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

by Antony Beevor

The code of the hidalgo (Spanish nobleman) forced him to despise money in general and the earning of it in particular. The census of 1788 showed that almost 50 per cent of the adult male population was not involved in any form of productive work. The army, the Church and, above all, the vast nobility were a dead weight on the rest of the population. It was perhaps this statistic which provoked the well-known saying that ‘one half of Spain eats but does not work, while the other half works but does not eat’.

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One checa opened a fake embassy some months later and killed all those who came there for shelter.

they went so regularly to see the executions that stalls selling coffee and churros were set up so that they could eat and drink while they watched.’

It was reminiscent of the way the Inquisition’s persecution of Jews and Moors helped make pork such an important part of the Spanish diet.

The journalist John Langdon-Davies described the contradictions in Barcelona, calling it ‘the strangest city in the world today, the city of anarcho-syndicalism supporting democracy, of anarchists keeping order, and anti-political philosophers wielding power’.

Gerald Brenan said that visitors to Barcelona in the autumn of 1936 would never forget the moving and uplifting experience. Foreigners who gave a tip had it returned politely with an explanation of why the practice corrupted both the giver and the receiver.

What mattered was that the labourers ran their own collectives – a distinct contrast to the disasters of state collectivization in the Soviet Union, which the peasants had resisted by slaughtering livestock and sabotaging the harvest.

Nationalist pilots devised an original method of dropping fragile supplies. They attached them to live turkeys which descended flapping their wings, thus serving as parachutes which could also be eaten by the defenders.