That the immediate post-war years in Spain were marked by social fragmentation should not seem surprising. Even from the cloistered surroundings of Salamanca, Franco's temporary headquarters in 1937, the Rector of the Irish seminary recognised that the horror would not be easily forgotten. A year later he had not altered his view: ‘those [who] remember our tiny civil war in Ireland, and what it cost the country, will understand what the recent war must have cost Spain’. When, a decade later, in the spring of 1949 Gerald Brenan called on a family in rural Granada he had first known years before the war he found that the horrors of the executions which had followed the military rising of 1936 were as present in their minds ‘as though they had happened yesterday’. Perhaps they felt able to talk about the war to someone who was an outsider, as had the officer of the Civil Guard cited above, more sensitive than most to fears about an ‘enemy within’.

Appalled by the violence on both sides, the wartime President of the Second Republic, Manuel Azaña, had made an impassioned plea in July 1938 for a future reconciliation, though it was to be in vain: