MADRID: Spies and soldiers, politically engaged and deeply partisan — such is the way a new exhibition portrays some of the intriguing band of foreign correspondents who risked their lives to report on the Spanish Civil War.

It is well known that novelists like George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos wrote in defence of Spain’s Republican government troops as they battled General Francisco Franco’s rebel troops between 1936-39.

However, history has sometimes forgotten the contributions of ordinary war reporters and that many British and American newspapers once championed Franco even as he was aided by Hitler and Mussolini.

Run by the socialist cultural centre, the Pablo Iglesias Foundation, along with the Cervantes Institute, the exhibition being held in Merida, Spain, and in Lyon, France, includes newspaper clippings from countries like America, Britain, France and Russia.Jay Allen, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, was the first foreign reporter to interview Franco.

“For that the Francoists were out to get him. He accurately reported Franco saying that he would happily shoot half of Spain if necessary,” said historian Paul Preston, one of the leading authorities on modern Spanish history.

Preston is set to publish We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Civil War — inspired by the Spanish exhibition, which he helped promote, and a New York exhibition called Facing Fascism: New York and the Civil War.

EVERYBODY’S FIGHT: “The bulk of the reporters became so committed to the Republic, partly because of the horrible things they saw such as the bombing of civilians, but even more so because they felt that what was going on in Spain was everybody’s fight,” said Preston.