The subtitle of Elizabeth Roberts’s work, British Soldiers of Conscience in Greece, Spain and Finland, indicates what, to this reviewer, is problematic in her study. Though Roberts succeeds, especially in the case of Greece, in evoking the personal experiences of her soldiers of conscience and providing a rich historical narrative, her project is rather contrived in that the three cases have little in common. The only material link connecting Roberts’s various “soldiers of conscience” is the Foreign Enlistment Acts (legislation through which British governments sought to control those seeking to fight in foreign wars): this seems a slender peg on which to hang her study.

To take two of Roberts’s exemplars—Lord Byron and Bill Alexander (the British communist who fought for the Spanish Republic)—we could say that both were children of the Enlightenment, inspired by the belief that all men should be brothers. But beyond that, what connects them? Byron was a heroic, romantic individual, while Alexander was but one member of that archetypal product of the twentieth century, the international communist movement. Similarly, while Byron and Alexander went to fight in defiance of government policy, those who journeyed to support Finland in the Winter War against the Soviet Union did so with the connivance of the British government.

Roberts’s discussion of each case is certainly thorough and interesting and, in the case of Spain—the conflict with which the present reviewer is most familiar—casts new light on the matter. Her investigation of the personal circumstances of the international brigaders and the discussion of the festering resentments that some left behind is a necessary corrective to the heroic narrative of British Volunteers for Liberty (London, 1986), Bill Alexander’s rather starry-eyed account of the British members of the International Brigade. But Roberts concentrates too much on the personal and the particular. Her discussion of the dress sense of members of the International Brigades might be rewarding to some, but not to this reviewer.

Those wedded to postmodernism, those who reject “grand narratives,” might well find Roberts’s concentration on individual motivation and personal experience satisfactory. But her failure to adequately locate individuals in their historical context is disappointing. Some such context is provided, but it lacks depth. We learn quite a lot, in the case of Greece, where Roberts’s discussion is strongest, about the British government’s Mediterranean strategy, but it would have been good to have been reminded of early nineteenth-century “liberal Toryism” and the support of those such as Canning for Latin American independence movements.

Roberts’s concentration on the immediate and the particular is even more marked in the case of Spain. No doubt some of those who went to Spain did so, as Roberts implies, mainly to escape the deprivation and depression of 1930s Britain rather than to fight fascism and defend democracy. But there seems little doubt but that for most ideological and political considerations were the primary motivation. In this respect, a notable omission from Roberts’s discussion of the historiography is Tom Buchanan’s The Spanish Civil War and the British Labour Movement (Cambridge, 1991). Buchanan did demonstrate the leading role of ideology, notably how religious divisions between Protestants and Catholics in the Labour Movement inhibited the growth of a more whole-hearted support for the Spanish Republic.

For her part, Roberts provides no reason to doubt that the vast majority of those who fought in Spain or wanted to fight in Finland (the Winter War was over before the British volunteers arrived in Finland) did so as foot soldiers in what Eric Hobsbawm called the “international civil war” of the first half of the twentieth century. Seen in this light, Roberts’s study is unsatisfactory. In the case of Spain, we learn something of Spanish society and politics and of the Soviet Union’s motivation in supporting the Spanish Republic against Franco’s nationalist rebels, but the British government’s determination to remain neutral, which was in fact a pro-Franco policy, is inadequately explored. This may be because Roberts’s view of international relations in this period is open to question. She claims that the invasion of Finland represented a “disavowal” of the antifascist policy the Soviet Union had previously followed (148). But given that Soviet antifascism was essentially an anti-German policy, the invasion of Finland, intended to protect the approaches to Leningrad against Germany, was no “disavowal” at all.

The British government’s policy too had an inner consistency, which Roberts fails to highlight. How do we account for, on the one hand, its neutrality with regard to Spain and its failure to vigorously propagate the war against Germany in the “phoney war” period and, on the other hand, its active support for British anti-Soviet volunteers in Finland? The connecting thread is of course appeasement. While appeasement was more than mere anti-Sovietism, men such as Chamberlain, Halifax, and Henderson were far more prepared to vigorously oppose the Soviet Union than they were Nazi Germany. But Roberts treats British policy toward the Finnish War as essentially pragmatic, rather than an element of an anti-Soviet policy stretching back to 1917.

The problem then with Roberts’s study is more one of conception than of execution. Her work is well researched, and her discussion of British volunteers in Greece, Spain, and Finland is interesting, but probably only those with a specialist interest in the Foreign Enlistment Acts will find the work as a whole worthy of attention.