For Hemingway and his friends, the Spanish civil war was the happiest time of their lives. But, as Raymond Carr writes, it was this conflict that darkened the horizon of the 20th century

Why, asks Professor Paul Preston, in his perceptive introduction to the catalogue of "The Spanish Civil War: dreams and nightmares" at the Imperial War Museum, should what now seems "a tiny and forgettable squabble" in Spain, dwarfed by the world war that followed it, be worthy of celebration in 2001? In its own time, the answer may be, it was seen as a preview of the greater world conflict. In this exhibition, there is a Republican poster of a dead child under a sky darkened by bombers. Under it is written: "If you tolerate this your children will be next". But this does not account for the enduring resonance of the civil war. The interest at stake in wars between states may be cloaked in the garments of ideology or religion. But it is the very essence of civil wars that they are ideological conflicts about the abiding issues between right and left, between liberals and conservatives.

Franco's brother-in-law described the war as a struggle to the death between absolute evil and good, with the Caudillo as saviour of Christian civilisation against the barbarian hordes of Marxist atheists. To the poet Cecil Day Lewis, the war was simply "a battle between light and darkness", a defence of the decent values of western liberal democracy against the brutalities of fascism. To a generation of liberal intellectuals beaten down by the Depression, unemployment and the triumph of Hitler, it gave intellectuals what they so often crave: a sense of effective action. Gustav Regler, the German communist who joined the International Brigades, wrote: "We don't write history, we make it." To Ernest Hemingway and his friends, as long as the Republic seemed capable of victory, the war represented "the happiest times of our lives". Ezra Pound was the odd man out. "Spain," he growled, "is in an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes." These dilettantes included the greatest artists and almost every prominent intellectual and writer of the west. When the Republic went down to defeat, they kept its memory alive as the great lost cause, the wound in the heart. In the end, they did not make history as they wished it might be; they wrote history as they saw it from the barricades.

As one Republican poster runs, "Culture is Liberty . . . Art is the target of Fascist aviation". This exhibition is a celebration of the cultural achievements of the embattled Republic, which stand in sharp contrast to the cultural conservatism, the crude anti-intellectualism of the Nationalists. There are shrines to poets with showcases displaying their relics: the faded snapshots and letters of Federico GarcIa Lorca, murdered by thugs in Granada; the battered typewriter of Miguel Hernandez, the shepherd poet who joined the International Brigades, and the flask in which his wife brought him milk in prison. He was to die in prison in 1942. They are martyrs of the cause. The artists whose works are exhibited here were its propagandists - Picasso's sketches for Guernica, the huge painting that was to stamp on the European mind the horrors of the war; a design for a poster by Joan Miro; Magritte's Le Drapeau noir, its dark sky filled with menacing aeroplanes; and, to my delight, a print by W S Hayter, the most accomplished engraver of the time, moved by the memory of the war for the rest of his life.

The war in Spain was presented to the outside world as part of an international crusade against fascism. The International Brigades represented the commitment of workers and progressives outside Spain to that struggle. Hardened militants from Poland, Hungary, Italy, Germany and Yugoslavia would win, in the battle of Madrid, the victory denied them in their own countries. Jason Gurney, a bohemian sculptor from the King's Road in London, felt that by fighting against fascism in Spain, he would be fighting Mosley's Black Shirts at home. But wars are not won by sculptors. The core of the British volunteers, their names inscribed at the entrance to the exhibition, were unemployed workers from the depressed areas with a radical tradition - Glasgow, the north-east of England and the Welsh valleys. Other than those from London, only a handful came from the relatively prosperous conservative strongholds of the south. Yet the shrines are to the intellectuals who joined the Brigades: Virginia Woolf's nephew Julian Bell; the Cambridge communist poet John Cornford. No one can doubt their heroism - both were killed - or their commitment. "No resistance," wrote Bell, "means suffering the full power of fascism." But it was the working-class heroes who slogged it out on the battlefields of Jarama, Madrid and Guadalajara. So heavy were the casualties that, by 1938, 80 per cent of Brigades were Spanish conscripts. Unlike the volunteers in the Brigades, these young Spaniards did not see themselves as fighting a war to save Europe from fascism. A minister of the Catalan government told the Soviet consul in Barcelona that there was no fascism in Catalonia: "Here the war is with Spanish militarists and clericalism." That is how the war is seen by Spaniards today. Two generations have suffered the consequences of victory by the traditional enemies of democracy. Only after the death of Franco in 1975 could they recover the liberties lost in 1939.

A visitor to this exhibition, staged in a museum devoted to war, finds few images of the faces of battle. Robert Capa's photograph of a militiaman, falling back, shot, with his outstretched arms flinging away his rifle, has become a universal icon. Fake or not, it does not illustrate the sordid realities of war, the suffering so movingly illustrated in the photographs of the First World War exhibited elsewhere in the museum. The photographs of this exhibition on the Spanish civil war concentrate more on the suffering of the civilian population. Wars are won not by striking photographs or well-designed posters, but by the best-equipped and most disciplined army. No historian can question that the non-interventionist policy of the appeasers in the western democracies, while it allowed Hitler and Mussolini to pour in arms to the Nationalists on credit, denied aid to the Republic at war. It was forced to rely on exorbitantly priced supplies from the Soviet Union, paid for on the nail from the Republican gold reserves deposited in Moscow, as well as to fiddle the books and manipulate the exchange rate. But it was not only arms that failed the Republic. It could not muster the political will to create an effective, strong and united wartime government. The factional fighting of the parties - anarchists against communists, left-wing socialists against right-wing socialists, Catalan nationalists in Barcelona against the centralisers of Madrid - exposed in all their virulence in the press and mass meetings, had disastrous effects on the war effort. General Vicente Rojo, chief of staff of the Republican armies, had to battle with the politicians' interference in his operations and the refusal of politicised units to obey his orders on the battlefield. In despair, he offered to resign.

Compare this to Franco. He was granted supreme command by his fellow generals in September 1936. They may have questioned his strategic gifts, but they obeyed him as their troops obeyed their commanders. In April 1937, he became head of the only political party in the Nationalist zone. A month later, the Republican factions were fighting each other in the streets of Barcelona, a "dust-up" so eloquently described in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. As Rojo told me, in his internal exile in Madrid after the war, "Franco won the war politically and militarily". This exhibition gives little account of how he established a mando unico, a single political and military command and, to Rojo, the essential condition of victory that the Republicans failed to achieve. The whole propaganda machine of the Nationalists was devoted to exalting Franco as the providential saviour of Spain. One poster here, issued after his victory, gives a taste of this.

Perhaps to complain of this comparative neglect of the Nationalists is to ask for a balanced, neutral account of the war in a display intended as a celebration of the defence of the Republic. Hemingway confessed that his enthusiasm for the Republic had resembled a religious experience, "a consecration". This exhibition, parts of it dimly lit, has something of the atmosphere of a midnight mass. Short-sighted octogenarians like myself, who come to mourn the lost idealism of their youth, must spend time on their knees, peering at the small print of the explanatory notices. Youth may come as pilgrims to see a preview of later wars of liberation, in Vietnam or Cuba. They are better equipped for the physical rigours of this moving exhibition.

"The Spanish Civil War: dreams and nightmares" is at the Imperial War Museum, London SE1 (020 7416 5000), until 28 April 2002

Raymond Carr's The Spanish Tragedy: the civil war in perspective is published by Weidenfeld (£7.99); Spain: a history is available in paperback from OUP (£11.99)

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