Up to 35,000 men from fifty-three countries served in the International Brigades and another five thousand in militias affiliated with anarchists and the POUM. Over a thousand journalists and authors went, too, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the poet Stephen Spender, who later wrote, “It was in part an anarchist’s war, a poet’s war.” Few, if any, foreigners understood the complexity of the political situation before they arrived, but still, said the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, “it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined in
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