This book goes a long way towards explaining why General Francisco Franco won the Spanish Civil War. First it charts the course of the ugly colonial struggle which Spain fought between 1908 and 1927 to consolidate its hold over a mountainous strip of Morocco just across the Straits of Gibraltar. Then it explains how the Spanish officers involved in this often painful experience evolved into a group of like-minded, right-wing nationalists who, when the moment came in 1936, were ready, willing and able to purge what they perceived as the plague of leftism from the decadent mainland.
The author, Sebastian Balfour, is an alumnus of E.C. Riley's remarkable late 1950s/early 1960s Spanish Department at T.C.D. Balfour, now a professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics, has created a niche for himself in the historiography of early 20th-century Spain.
This is by far his most ambitious book. It weaves a complex, sometimes demanding, narrative out of a staccato series of events covering 30 turbulent years. Spain's "deadly embrace" of Morocco began with relatively peaceful commercial penetration of what was an agreed sphere of Spanish influence. But the Rif Mountain area was notably unstable and by 1908 the Berber tribesmen were killing Spanish iron-miners. A corrupt, often incompetent, sometimes brave, Spanish army struggled to subdue a skilful guerrilla enemy - suffering some traumatic defeats in a war which quietly meandered on, and off, until the early 1920s.
In 1921, a catastrophic disaster near the village of Anual finally made the mainland sit up and take notice. Almost 10,000 Spaniards and Moroccans fighting on the Spanish side were killed by tribesmen in an eighteen-day engagement. As a result, the colonial army became possessed with, Balfour says, "a spirit of compulsive revenge", and a determination to "civilise" the "barbarian" enemy. (The Rif guerrillas had committed their share of atrocities - being notably keen on decapitating prisoners.) The still inadequately-trained Spanish force of largely unmotivated conscripts was an unlikely instrument of revenge. So, with the encouragement of King Alfonso XIII, a "scientific" shortcut seemed to be the answer - terrify the guerrillas and the civilians who sheltered them by dropping mustard-gas bombs from aeroplanes onto their villages.
Mustard gas had been internationally proscribed since the first World War, but was still available in Europe. Bombs were bought from Germany - and also manufactured just outside Madrid. They were then dropped not too accurately by the Spanish airforce. They contained, Balfour says, "a slow-acting, thick-flowing liquid rather than a gas \ burnt the body, killed nerve-cells, polluted water and penetrated clothing and shoes . . ." It clung to buildings, land and vegetation. It devastated lives and damaged the environment in many parts of the Rif. (Here Balfour's primary research, talking to survivors and descendants of victims, is first-rate).
Mustard gas has clear military limitations, so it did not win the war for Spain. French help was required for that. They had a much larger sphere of influence in southern Morocco, and they feared that the war might spread south. A large-scale, Franco-Spanish air-sea assault, involving artillery and conventional bombing, finally led to victory in 1927.
As the 1930s approached, Spain's African Army, which included many Moroccan mercenaries and the brutal, flamboyant and effective Spanish Foreign Legion - of which Franco was second in command - began to achieve heroic status at home. Franco's reputation grew and he was called back to Spain and made head of the Academia General Militar at Zaragoza. When Alfonso abdicated and a republic was declared in 1930, Franco and other African veterans were disturbed by the challenge that democracy, separatism and communism offered to their simplistic, authoritarian, nationalist view of Spain.
When the centre began to fall apart in 1936, a hesitant Franco flew to Tetuan in Morocco, then finally summoned the determination to lead his troops across the Straits of Gibraltar to start an insurrection on the mainland. Moroccans were quickly recruited in large numbers to fight on the Nationalist side, and the Foreign Legion provided Franco's most effective troops throughout the war. The Moroccans fought for Franco largely for economic reasons; they were mercenaries rather than idealists; they could earn more as soldiers than as labourers. Within six months there were 50,000 in the Nationalist army; by the end of the war more than 70,000 had served, of which a very high percentage had been killed or wounded. Their tendency to take no prisoners helped to escalate the level of brutality in a war full of mindless killing, and the mere presence of Los Moros (the Moors) frightened civilians and opponents alike. Their contribution to Franco's victory was significant - although, of course, he also had a little help from Hitler and Mussolini.
Deadly Embrace tells an interesting story, but for the general reader this account of the road to the Spanish Civil War may be too discursive early on. More compression in the first third of what is inevitably an episodic tale, might have made it easier to reach the core of the book - a scholarly and thoughtful contribution to our understanding of the ideology, as well as the mysterious military and political success, of one of the least charismatic European dictators of the 20th century.
Bernard Adams is a writer and critic. His Denis Johnston: A Life was published earlier this year
Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War. By Sebastian Balfour. Oxford University Press, 349 pp. £25 sterling