Possessing Anarchist Tendencies

About 1,700 Canadian volunteers fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, and more than 400 of them died. Many more were wounded and scarred. Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, by Michael Petrou, is only the second scholarly account of who these men were, why they fought, how they lived and died. Victor Hoar’s work in the 1960s, The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, could not get access to key documents and archival material. Petrou’s book takes us to a different level than Hoar’s, and it is well worth the read.

Earlier accounts, memoirs, even plays, often gave a highly romanticized account of these Canadians, and of what the war was all about. Spain’s descent into civil war has been described with great verve by Hugh Thomas and Anthony Beevor, for example, but Petrou takes us through these years at a level of detail and objectivity we have not seen before, and we are better off for it. His book is less about the geopolitics of the conflict and more a detailed view of the extraordinary challenges individual Canadians faced. We know of Norman Bethune and Ted Allan, but Petrou reminds us that it was the loggers and millworkers, the unemployed survivors of relief camps and breadlines and, to a large extent, the immigrants to Canada from all over war-torn Europe who were the real foot soldiers in the International Brigade that eventually became the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion—the Mac-Paps.

Thanks to Petrou’s access to recently declassified documents from the archives of the Communist International in Moscow, we now discover that the party was carefully evaluating the Canadian volunteers during their training and frontline service, interested not so much in their fighting skills as in their political attitudes and commitment. The Canadians in Spain were an unruly bunch, not all orthodox communists by any means. Many had come from Russia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Finland and had felt the hot breath of Soviet-style communism on their necks before coming to Canada. Most had emerged from the Depression-era relief camps, particularly in British Columbia; they were tough young men used to back-breaking backwoods labour and in no mood to follow any apparatchik’s orders. Their commanders— almost exclusively American, even in the Mac-Paps—constantly labelled the Canadians as “politically confused” and “possessing anarchist tendencies.” When asked by a commissar if he liked his morning coffee, one Canadian volunteer responded with heavy irony, “If I’m politically developed, comrade commandante, the coffee is very good. But if I am not politically developed, it tastes like horse piss.”

One of Petrou’s most interesting accounts is that of William Krehm, a political activist picked up in Barcelona as a “Trotskyist,” who was jailed for his anti-Soviet views and who escaped Spain at more risk from communist enforcers than from Franco’s troops. “Of course one is for the defeat of Franco,” Krehm said in recalling his experiences in 1965. “But one is also against having the worse aspects of the Franco regime painted red and established in Spain.” This, of course, parallels the experience of George Orwell, recounted in Homage to Catalonia. What began for Orwell as a celebration of freedom and solidarity against the forces of fascism became a grim encounter with the commissars of Soviet communism and their agents. Orwell’s imprisonment, like Krehm’s, came not from Franco but at the hands of the communist party. It was a transformative moment in his life and politics.

Canadians who ran afoul of their communist bosses found themselves imprisoned in a medieval castle at Castillo de Fels near Barcelona. The prison commander, in testimony he gave later in Moscow, admitted that some prisoners were beaten and locked in the dungeon, but “they were all guilty of being defeatists, deserters, demoralizers, or Fascist agents.” Everyone else he treated humanely. At least 117 Canadians were accused of desertion during the course of the war, quite a high percentage.

And if the communist commanders made their lives difficult in Spain, the RCMP tried to do the same back in Canada. Petrou writes of the tough lives faced by those who survived. Red-baited (some were communist party members, and some were not), harassed, marginalized, many faced poverty on their return home. Some signed up to keep fighting in World War Two; others were turned down as communists despite their experience. Some made good lives after the war, but many did not, and received no recognition or support from their government. As late as 1970, when the Mac-Paps applied for incorporation as a non-profit organization that would aid indigent veterans, lobby for official recognition and extend solidarity to other states threatened by external aggression, as Spain had been, the Trudeau government turned them down because such an organization would have objectives “antagonistic to the existing regime in Spain,” i.e., the Franco regime.

Petrou’s book does not soar. It is a thesis turned into a book, so if you are looking for dramatic prose or the broad landscape of the war you will not find it here. But you will find a painstaking account of the courageous band who chose to fight fascism before it was politically fashionable and the tough battles they fought with little training, lousy equipment and military leadership that was haphazard at best. The Canadians fought hard but lacked the political power of the Americans and the British, and were not always taken seriously. Our casualties were high, by any standard, and we were not, with a few exceptions, given a chance to play significant roles in leadership positions.

Could the Spanish Civil War have ended differently? If one reads the level of disorganization of the international brigades, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were outmanned, outspent and out-organized by the Fascists and their German and Italian allies. Franco “may have won all the battles, but we had all the best songs,” wrote American satirist Tom Lehrer of this great contest.

It is gratifying to note that this book is part of a series of Studies in Canadian Military History, published by a serious academic press in association with the Canadian War Museum. Attention must be paid to what these men fought and died for, how hard their lives were and with what courage they struggled against impossible odds. Adventurers, idealists, people looking for work and a cause, they deserve our respect. Petrou’s often dry, detailed account allows us to understand that they may have been renegades but they were also soldiers, not of fortune but of commitment and dreams. That the dreams may not have been realized does not take away from their dedication.