The Great Crusade

This epic novel, published in 1940, is an intense account of the campaigns of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. The action described is based on the owner’s own service with the International Brigades. As Ernest Hemingway explains in his foreword to this novel, which “deals with the days when the Eleventh and Twelfth Brigades fought in defence of Madrid”, “no one has more right to write of these actions which saved Madrid than Gustav Regler. He fought in all of them.”

The author, Gustav Regler (born 25 May 1898), grew up in Saarland near the German border with France. On finishing school, he enlisted for war service in November 1916. He was sent to the Western Front and fought at Chemin des Dames near Soissons. He was invalided  with severe gas poisoning in autumn 1917 and was also treated in a mental hospital. After the war, he studied in the universities of Heidelberg and München. While working in journalism, his first novel was published in 1928. A member of the Communist Party from 1929, he fled his homeland in 1933 after the Reichstag fire. In 1936 he went to Spain to serve as a commissar of the Twelfth International Brigade, which consisted of battalions of Belgian, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish volunteers. He was badly wounded in June 1937 near Huesca in northern Aragón . He was imprisoned in southern France on the outbreak of the Second World War but his Brigade colleague, Ernest Hemingway, successfully led a campaign for his release and he emigrated to Mexico. He wrote several more novels in exile as well as poetry and an autobiography. He was awarded the Art Prize of Saarland in 1960.

Many of the volunteers in the International Brigades had fought as young men in the First World War. One of the main characters in this novel is referred was a commissar called Albert. His war service on the Western Front takes place at the same location as the author’s:
“As a boy of 17 he had fought through the World War against France. On the heights of the Chemin des Dames he had kille the fathers of these volunteers with whom he now stood before Madrid. After the war he became a pacifist. In 1932, at that Soissons, which in 1917 he had helped to destroy, in Soissons the resurrected, he spoke on peace. A French war invalid with a wooden leg showed him about the city, which still smelled of paint and fresh plaster. They had walked arm in arm, a happy symbol of their two republics, which more and more must come to know each other. That was their hope”