Freedom, faction, fame and blood
Subtitle: British soldiers of conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland
By: by Elizabeth Roberts.
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Brighton; Portland, Or
Language: eng
Number of pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9781845193188
Subjects: Russo-Finnish War, 1939-1940 -- Participation, British; Soldiers -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Soldiers -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century; Greece -- History -- War of Independence, 1821-1829 -- Participation, British; Spain -- History -- Civil War, 1936-1939 -- Participation, British
Description: "Under the rubric from Lord Byron, this book offers a unique comparison of three sets of British volunteers who left their homes to fight in the Greek War of Independence, the Spanish Civil War and the Russo-Finnish War. From Lord Byron's journey to Greece, to the legendary International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, to the strange sojourn of a contingent of British misfits during a bitter Finnish winter, Elizabeth Roberts examines the passions, ideals and ideologies that motivated these individuals to take up arms, as well as their experiences of warfare, the rhetorical and discursive cultures they encountered in the volunteer contingents, and the problems they faced when - and if - they returned home. The author traces the political consequences of the volunteers' participation in these foreign wars in the context of the evolving concept of 'neutrality' in foreign relations and challenges to the state's control over the use of violence. Of the three wars, it was the Spanish Civil War that most caught the public imagination and generated the most controversy. The volunteers' defiance of the British state, the ideological, social and cultural imperatives that sent them to Spain, and the nature of the war in which they fought, give rise to a number of issues explored in this work, including the imposition of Communist Party discipline on the British Battalion in the International Brigades; the fate of the British volunteers who sided with the Spanish revolutionaries and the dissident Left; and the ways in which volunteers sought to 'perform' war and revolution in an ideological environment. In considering these themes, Freedom, Faction, Fame, and Blood establishes the 'soldier of conscience' as a discrete category of historical actor, in Spain and elsewhere."--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Shelley's ghost: British Philhellenes and the Greek War of Independence; title: Ways of feeling: Lord Byron and Edward Trelawny in Greece; title: Perseverance: Captain Hastings goes to war; title: Two loyalties: the British battalion and the communist party in the Spanish Civil War; title: Object lessons: unorthodoxy, dissent and revolution in Spain; title: The surfaces of things: the politics of appearance in the Spanish Civil War; title: The Spanish precedent: British intervention in the Russo-Finnish war; title: Our hush-hush committee: the Finnish Aid Bureau and the volunteers; title: A fine body of blackguards: the contingent, stranded.