Cecil Gerahty’s The Road to Madrid: An Anglo-Irish Falstaff in Spain’s Theatre of War

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to make better known a largely neglected work on the Spanish Civil War, The Road to Madrid, and its author, Cecil Gerahty. The work, which combines war reportage with travelogue, is first situated in its publishing context and then its chief claims to historiographical notoriety are explained. There follows a survey of the biographical data available for Gerahty’s life and a sketch of his character and personality based on the internal evidence of his book. After a general overview of The Road to Madrid’s contents and main characteristics, Gerahty’s connoisseurial attitude to the conflict and his aestheticisation of trauma are examined, with a discussion of their possible causes and consequences.