Spanish Ordeal

The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas. Harper, $8.50 On an April day in 1937 a British General and I, both on our way to the front, entered the cemetery of Huesca shortly after it had been liberated by the Nationalists. This is what they had found: Coffins had been broken open—I photographed the corpse of a small child whose head been torn off—and the walls of the cemetery were covered with obscene drawings. The chapel of Our Lady had been turned into a bar, and somebody had carefully removed with a diamond the actual face of Our Lady from a stained glass window.

“You can’t call this kind of thing bestial,” said my companion, a man with no definite religious belief, “a beast could not sink so low. There is something in this cemetery which is not of this world.”

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Sir Arnold Lunn

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The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas. Harper, $8.50 On an April day in 1937 a British General and I, both on our way to the front, entered the cemetery of Huesca shortly after it had been liberated by the Nationalists. This is what they had found: Coffins had been broken open—I photographed the corpse of a small child whose head been torn off—and the walls of the cemetery were covered with obscene drawings. The chapel of Our Lady had been turned into a bar, and somebody had carefully removed with a diamond the actual face of Our Lady from a stained glass window.

“You can’t call this kind of thing bestial,” said my companion, a man with no definite religious belief, “a beast could not sink so low. There is something in this cemetery which is not of this world.”