MADRID: It was a war that fuelled passion and anger like almost no other, spurring thousands from all around the globe to come and fight for their ideas.

But many, instead of weapons, used pens and typewriters.

Capturing a unique period in modern history, Spain’s Cervantes Institute has organised an exhibition commemorating the 70th anniversary of the start of the three-year Civil War with 30 original clippings from a selection of the finest journalists, writers and intellectuals who came to cover the conflict, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Langston Hughes.

“The ’30s constituted the golden age of correspondents,” historian Hugh Thomas is quoted as saying in the catalogue. “From the end of July of 1936, and for the next 2 1/2 years, it was common to find the greatest journalists in the world south of the Pyrenees.”

The civil war erupted when rebel generals, among them the future dictator Francisco Franco, rose up against a democratically elected, left-leaning government. It became a battlefield of ideologies and beliefs-- church against the state; the landed against landless; most of all, fascism against democracy.

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini responded generously to rebel pleas for armed assistance and the Soviet Union sold weapons to the Republican government, while the rest of Europe and the United States opted for non-intervention, not wishing to confront fascism just yet.

However, a groundswell of popular support led to thousands joining international brigades to help the Republic while others, few in number, joined Franco’s crusade.

The phenomenon was mirrored in the foreign press.

“The journalists didn’t just come to exercise their profession but to fight for their ideas,” said exhibition curator Carlos Garcia Santa Cecilia. “It was a war in which the future models and values of society were at stake.”

From America came Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Marta Gelhorn and Virginia Cowles, from Britain, Orwell and Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, who writing for the London Times gathered experience on his road to become one of the world’s most famous spies. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French aviator who wrote ‘The Little Prince,’ flew himself in to write about the war.

All were deeply affected by what they witnessed.

“This is the most painful story it has ever been my lot to handle,” The Chicago Tribune’s Jay Allen wrote of a July 1936 massacre in the south-western city of Badajoz. “I write it at four in the morning sick at heart and in body.”

“They are burning bodies. Four thousand men and women have died at Badajoz since Gen. Francisco Franco’s rebel Foreign Legionnaires and Moors climbed over the bodies of their own dead through its many times blood-drenched walls.”

Swedish woman journalist Barbro ‘Bang’ Alving reported about how schools and hospitals managed to function during the war, while Mikhail Koltsov’s articles for Pravda told millions of readers in the Soviet Union of the trials and tribulations of the Republican struggle.

There is also Felix Correia’s interview with Franco a month into the war for Portugal’s Diario de Lisboa. In it, the general lays out clearly his plans for a future dictatorship which would respect private property and the Roman Catholic Church.

Then there are Hughes’ observations on the racist treatment of Franco’s Arab troops for The Afro American newspaper.

“As usually happens with coloured troops in the service of white imperialists, the Moors have been put in the front line of the Franco offensives in Spain-- and shot down like flies,” Hughes wrote for the Afro American on Oct 30, 1937 under a headline that read: “Hughes Finds Moors Being Used as Pawns by Fascists in Spain.”

“There was such a richness of names, the best writers about and the best intellectuals,” said Garcia Santa Cecilia. “They came because they felt the necessity to explain to the world what was happening.”

There were those who took their political commitments to the battlefield, such as Orwell, who fought in the northeast Aragon region and witnessed bitter internecine fighting on the Republican side in Barcelona. His “Spilling the Spanish Beans” dispatch to the New English Weekly was the basis for his novel “Homage to Catalonia”.

Most of the correspondents at one time or another ended up staying at the Hotel Florida, just off the capital’s Gran Via and a walk away from the Telefonica building were they filed their dispatches after vetting by the censor. The exhibit features a telephone operator’s desk and typewriters used by war correspondents.

Hemingway was among the better heeled in Spain, writing for North America Newspaper Alliance publications.

Titled “Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War,” runs in Madrid until Feb 25.—AP