Journalists at the Front: Ramiro de Maeztu, 'Inglaterra en armas' and Spanish intellectuals during the First World War

Abstract

Ramiro de Maeztu's short book 'Inglaterra en armas' (1916) has remained largely unnoticed by critics. A chronicle of its author's visit to the Western Front in the middle stages of the First World War, it is a puzzling text which is hard to fit in with the rest of Maeztu's intellectual production. In this essay I will argue that the text is only comprehensible when we insert it within a larger genre that appeared in Spain between 1914 and 1918: the 'crónicas del frente' written by Spanish intellectuals and journalists for the newspapers, and which they afterwards published in book form. Through an analysis of similar works by Azaña, Azorín, Valle-Inclán, Pérez de Ayala and Álvaro Alcalá Galiano, I aim to demonstrate that the more puzzling features of Inglaterra en armas are due to the constraints imposed by the pro-Allied propaganda discourse in which this text was participating. These constraints were brought about by the active efforts of the Allied propaganda apparatus, but also by these authors’ pre-existing sympathies and agendas, as well as by the literary and intellectual conventions of the time. What emerges is an approximation of the complex operations that Spanish intellectuals and foreign governments engaged in throughout the First World War.