Viva La Quinta Brigada: New Anthem for an Extinct Ideal

A Vivid Tribute to Volunteers Who Fought Hitler and Mussolini in Spain [History and Music]

There was a time when it was unnecessary, even gratuitous, to label your enemies as resembling or channeling Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In 1937-39, you could go and shoot a gun at, or get yourself killed fighting against, the Real Adolf’s Messerschmitts and 70,000 of the Real Benito’s goose-stepping troops just back from the conquest of Ethiopia.

Viva La Quinta Brigada was composed 44 years after the movement it represents, and the brave men it praises were defeated,  many of the men buried. That makes Viva La Quinta Brigada a retroactive anthem for an extinct population. Yet, today in Glasgow or Cork, you can hear it sung in concert, joined loudly by a large audience of adherents, none of them nonagenarians — which to be a living witness to the Spanish Civil War, you’d have to be. What can this all mean? First, let’s take a listen and a look:

This crowd shows plenty of enthusiasm for a spirit of the 1930’s refreshed in Christy Moore’s 1983 composition. The International Brigades arrived after ten Spanish Republican brigades were already in the field. The 15th Brigade, the last, was organized by Irish Revolution veteran Frank Ryan. The 15th was known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and within that grouping, the Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. Poets and novelists picked up rifles and humped packs, joining the ranks. Paul Eluard, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Andre Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and the remarkable photographer Robert Capa all served in the International Brigades. Let’s take a look at the words on the page:

“Ten years before I saw the light of morning

A comradeship of heroes was laid

From every corner of the world came sailing

The Fifteenth International Brigade.

They came to stand beside the Spanish people

To try and stem the rising fascist tide

Franco's allies were the powerful and wealthy

Frank Ryan's men came from the other side.

 Even the olives were bleeding

As the battle for Madrid it thundered on

Truth and love against the force of evil

Brotherhood against the fascist clan.”

Chorus: “Viva la Quinta Brigada,

No Pasaran, the pledge that made them fight

Adelante was the cry around the hillside

Let us all remember them tonight.”

“Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor

From Killarney across the Pyrenees he came

From Derry came a brave young Christian Brother

And side by side they fought and died in Spain.

Tommy Woods age seventeen died in Cordoba

With Na Fianna he learned to hold his gun

From Dublin to the Villa del Rio He fought

  and died beneath the Spanish sun.”

(Chorus)

 “Many Irishmen heard the call of Franco

  Joined Hitler and Mussolini too

Propaganda from the pulpit and newspapers

Helped O'Duffy to enlist his crew.

The call came from Maynooth,

"support the fascists"

  The men of cloth had failed yet again

When the Bishops blessed the Blueshirts in Dun Laoghaire

  As they sailed beneath the swastika to Spain.”

(Chorus)

“This song is a tribute to Frank Ryan

Kit Conway and Dinny Coady too

Peter Daly, Charlie Regan and Hugh Bonar

Though many died I can but name a few.

Danny Boyle, Blaser-Brown and Charlie Donnelly

Liam Tumilson and Jim Straney from the Falls

Jack Nalty, Tommy Patton and Frank Conroy

  Jim Foley, Tony Fox and Dick O'Neill.”

(Chorus repeated)

No pasaran = they shall not pass! none shall pass! — spoken in defense of Madrid

Adelante = forward! ahead! onwards!

Viva La Quinta Brigada takes me directly back to age twelve. I hear this song with a rush of blood to my heart, and I read its words feeling a powerful impulse to throw myself into some desperate action in pursuit of a worthy and beautiful lost cause. Nothing is more romantic than martyrdom — to die in the arms of God defending Truth and love against the force of evil. To join a comradeship of heroes! Life cannot ever get better than that, at least when you’re twelve years old and the world hurts so much.

For a 12-year-old, that is as good as it gets. But sooner or later, by the time we are five or seven times 12, we can recognize that the fierce energy driving each side in every bloody conflict is the conviction — even delusion — that they are the avatars of truth and love. There is no higher calling; each pursues its dream of perfect virtue.

A very high percentage of commanding generals and ruling politicians in these conflicts have seemed to exercise the emotional maturity of 12-year-olds. It reminds me of Arlo Guthrie’ s song, Alice’s Restaurant. There is one scene where Arlo is at the old Whitehall St., NYC, Army induction center. When he steps into the Army psychologist’s office, there are the usual inkblot free-association pictures and the mind puzzles. Creative and playful, Arlo keeps making the shrink laugh, until finally, in an adolescent rush of feeling, Arlo and the shrink end up jumping up and down, both shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!” at the tops of their lungs. Belatedly remembering his responsibilities, the psychologist comes down from his high, and disqualifies Arlo from military service, presumably in the interests of keeping Arlo — and any GIs in his prospective platoon — alive and in a steady frame of mind.

That 12-year-old’s intrinsic way of seeing the world is intoxicating, in itself as addictive as the first breath of spring on winter ice. I know certain sure that war is not a festival or a moral lesson. Still,Viva La Quinta Brigada revs me up for 20 or 90 minutes just like Arlo Guthrie and the Army induction medic, and gives me a shot of adrenaline and a picture of something worth hoping for. This part-fantasy, part-intent is incredibly appealing. As in America this week I see 7-year-old children shot, sometimes in streets I used to walk as a child. As I can see swarms of diamond-backed parasites sucking the life out of America’s families, only in pursuit of more and more diamonds in an unholy obsession with dead rocks.

Could we not form our own Quinta Brigada to liberate the children of Chicago and Atlanta from the morbid violence of wilders and gangs? Could we not send a few battalions of Truth and love to the precincts of law and power in the halls of Congress and the suites of Wall Street? Even if we were as outgunned and as defeated as the real Quinta Brigada, we might hope that someone would sing a fine, strong song of praise for us eight decades and more after we fell.

(If you noticed that “quinta” means fifth, not fifteenth, you’ve caught an error Moore made in his original composition. He later corrected it to “quince” — 15th — but it’s still “quinta” on several of his recordings.)

Viva La Quinta Brigada relishes the joy that comes from doing a right thing. To have put your life on the line against the greatest evil the world has known, and to have done so before the politicians and massive armaments of the great nations were deployed — to have taken the lonely stand, like the shepherd boy David did in protecting his master’s flocks — that is heroism. In today’s world of untested loyalties and uncertain alliances, the romance and simplicity of the good-and-evil narrative of 1937-39 can appeal to the upcoming generations, young and old alike.

The Fifteenth International Brigade is a fair subject for an anthem. All anthems express collective enthusiasm. They come in customized packets – tailored shapes and sizes. National anthems, such as La Marseillaise, express patriotic feeling, as the viewer feels in the scene in the movie Casablanca where Victor Laszlo tells the band, “Play it,” -- at a time (1942) when France, including French Morocco, is under German occupation. Some anthems offer class solidarity, such as the labor movement’s Joe Hill (“I dreamt I saw Joe Hill Last Night….”) Protesters often adopt anthems, such as the civil rights movement’s We Shall Overcome in 1963. Both military and paramilitary organizations have formal or informal anthems, from the US’ The Marines Hymn (“From the halls of Montezuma…”) to the Irish Republican Army’s Kevin Barry (“In Mounjoy jail one Monday morning….”)

All anthems are sentimental, uncritical, and one-sided. As an anthem, Christy Moore’s Viva La Quinta Brigada is a rousing addition to the genre, its merits written in blood and toil and tears. My dad tried to join up for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, but at just 16, recruiters had to turn him down. Growing up, we had three 78 RPM records of Spanish Civil War songs. Viva La Quinta Brigada would have been a fine addition, but it had not been written yet.

The truth of the Spanish Republic’s demise is a dense web of ambition, sabotage, double- and triple-crosses, and histories revised and re-revised to suit the preferences of the winners. It is a complex subject that throws a wide but intermittent light across the maneuvering that led up to WWII. Everything from the story of the oil company Texaco to the Communist Party purges in the Soviet Union attaches like tentacles to the narrative of Spain. The reality of that time could not be farther from romance and simplicity. Here is a short list of interesting viewpoints on that war, its antecedents and consequences: Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge (Vladimir Kibalchik); The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura; Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (Eric Blair); Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler; The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas; Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild; Wind in the Olive Trees by Abel Plenn. While Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is a spellbinding parable, its core themes and character representations are distorted by romanticized versions of events. Beautifully written, it does not tell us much about how things really were during the Spanish Civil War.

Christy Moore has credited Michael O’Riordan’s Connolly Column as his inspiration for writing Viva La Quinta Brigada. The most recent printing of Connolly Column was 1979, now out of print, according to Amazon.