"It was in Spain," wrote the Algerian-born French author Albert Camus, "that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward." That, Camus added, is why so many people around the world came to regard the Spanish Civil War as a personal tragedy. "It was a war that, rightly or wrongly, seemed very pure and worth fighting," says British historian Paul Preston, one of the world's foremost authorities on the 1936-39 conflict. "People had absolutely no doubt about the moral choices that were...
