Artistic heroes of the war on fascism – or just ‘gap year’ glory hunters?

Tomorrow Perhaps The Future Sarah Watling Jonathan Cape £22 ★★★★★

In March 1937 the young American journalist Martha Gellhorn was brushing her teeth in her Madrid hotel when a shell whizzed past the window and landed in a nearby residential building, instantly killing a 14-year-old child. ‘I heard it and went on,’ she wrote two decades later, to show how normal the killing and bloodshed had become. If Gellhorn sounded hard-hearted, it was because she knew she had a job to do. She was here to report to the American people on what might be the beginning of the end of the free world.

Gellhorn, still in her 20s, was one of a generation of international journalists, poets and photographers who had made their way to the edge of Europe to watch what they believed was a battle between good and evil. On the one side was General Franco and his fascist nationalist forces, and on the other was the democratically elected Republican party Franco was trying to overthrow.

It might have sounded like a local dispute in a run-down corner of Europe, but Gellhorn and her colleagues knew that what was happening in Spain today could very soon spill out across the whole of Europe. Hitler and Mussolini were already in power in their respective countries and supplying Franco with military help. If their man won, it would give these dictators the signal they needed to set out on their own murderous campaigns.

In her exhilarating book, Sarah Watling follows a handful of brilliant intellectuals as they wrestle with the nature of duty in a morally complicated world. Martha Gellhorn wrote articles, Robert Capa took photographs and the eccentric heiress Nancy Cunard provided wodges of cash and some rather good poetry. None of them actually took up arms, although all of them were embedded with the Republican side, which could lead to some pretty hair-raising, even fatal, consequences. Capa’s partner Gerda Taro was the first woman photojournalist to die while covering a war. She was just 26 and had insisted on getting involved because, being German and Jewish and an exile from her home country, she knew better than anyone where fascism could lead.

One of the most fascinating of the characters Watling has marshalled is Salaria Kea, an African-American nurse who volunteered for service but found herself subject to the same humiliating segregation so familiar from home. One doctor, from the American South, even refused to eat in the same dining hall with her.

And then there is Virginia Woolf. She instinctively belonged to the ‘art for art’s sake’ camp and didn’t think that writers had any business getting involved in politics. But when in the summer of 1937 her beloved nephew Julian was killed while serving as an ambulance driver, she poured her grief into the most powerfully political book she ever wrote, Three Guineas.

Watling is admirably clear about the fact that many of these strong-willed individuals were hell to get along with. The veteran Marxist Josephine Herbst thought Martha Gellhorn was ‘pushy’. Herbst also happened to be a friend of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife and was naturally cool with Gellhorn, whom she knew was having an affair with the older celebrity novelist who had also made it out to Spain.

Also ‘pushy’ was Nancy Cunard, who had a habit of sweeping into other people’s cultures and appropriating them. Still, there is no denying her deep compassion: she gave away her clothes to refugees from Barcelona and made urgent appeals to the outside world to send food.

Many of the foreign journalists, photographers, aid workers and observers who travelled to Spain had enough selfknowledge to worry about the deeper morality of what they were doing. Not the rights and wrongs of the Republican cause so much as the act of turning the whole thing into a spectacle. Gellhorn was there because she believed in bearing witness to a righteous cause, but she was also thrilled at the way her reports were raising her profile at home. Capa may have lost his partner Gerda, but he also took pictures that would kickstart a career as one of the most distinguished photographers of the 20th Century.

Even Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the infamous Mitford sisters, ran away to Spain not just because of her left-leaning beliefs but because she was in love with her daredevil cousin Esmond Romilly, who had been fighting at the front.

Most importantly, all these young people were aware that, unlike the Spaniards, they had the choice of going home to safety, not to mention a warm bed and a good supper, if it all got a bit too much. It was, if you were feeling churlish, the equivalent of a particularly thrilling gap year.