"Did you do that?" said a Gestapo officer pointing to a picture of Guernica in Picasso's apartment in occupied Paris.
"No" said Picasso, "You did."
It is 1936 and the lights of democracy are going out. Mussolini is land grabbing in Abyssinia, Hitler's persecution of Jews is well underway and suddenly Spain's fledgling democracy is in turmoil following an attempted coup by a little known military leader, General Franco.
The few remaining neighbouring democracies turn a blind eye to the plight of the Spanish Republic and follow a policy of appeasement and non intervention. But thousands of individual young men and women from around the globe are inspired to take direct action by going to Spain in the firm belief that to defeat Franco there is to stop the spread of fascism and avert a world war.
"To meet them Half Way" opens in London, late in 1936. "College boy" Newton teams up with Dai, a Welsh unemployed miner and Isaac, a Jewish East Ender, all of whom are preparing to undertake the adventurous journey to Spain. At the same time three young seasonal crop pickers, Hans and Claus, refugees from Nazi Germany, and Inez a student from Cuba, are heading to fight Mosely's Black Shirts in Cable Street after which they will join the Medical Aid Services volunteering to support the International Brigades in Spain.
The narrative follows their entry into the dark terror of Spain's civil war which ultimately ends with Franco's forces crushing Spanish democracy, after being helped enormously by Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini's Fascist forces, in flagrant breach of the non intervention policy followed by Britain and France. Soon Spain and the International Brigaders are written out of history as the world becomes embroiled in World War Two.
The volunteers and their fight with fascism are overlooked for decades. Only after Franco's death does a new democracy emerge after his rule, conditional on a on a strict pact of silence about what has been described as the "Spanish Genocide" * carried out under Franco's repressive dictatorship.
*(The Spanish Holocaust, by Historian Paul Preston)
To Meet Them Half Way is a fictional romp through these historical events; inspired partly as a result of the authors reflection that the subject was absent in the range of comics available when growing up, and how there was a general paucity of popular cultural reference to The Spanish Civil War to help him understand the conflict which attracted ordinary men and women from around the world, including both of his grandparents, one of whom is still merged with the Spanish soil today after paying the ultimate sacrifice along with so many others of that ideal inspired generation.
The drama has resonances in today's world where political and social extremes are polarising, popular nationalism is on the rise and the theatre of war comes ever closer into our front rooms from our TV screens.
