History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake - 4

As a teenager reading the Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties I had a vaguely romantic view of the Spanish Republic at the time of the Civil War. Oh for such innocence again. 

Reading Antony Beevor's brutally incisive The Battle for Spain would cure any teenager of such a delusion, even though I sense that Beevor's essential sympathies lie far from the nationalist cause. The chapter on the Battle of the Ebro alone is devastating in its analysis of republican stupidity. Here's its last sentence, reflecting on the republican military leadership after their sacrifice of pretty much an entire army for a pointless thrust across the river into the belly of a superior enemy: It was beyond military stupidity, it was the mad delusion of propaganda. Ouch.