Les grands cimetières sous la lune

Majorca had been secured for the Nationalist rebels by Manuel Goded Llopis at the outset of the Spanish Civil War.

"When the Spanish war broke out, Bernanos had been living for more than a year in Palma, Majorca, in very difficult circumstances, and suffering from the after-effects of a motor-cycle accident.

The majority of legal sentences - I shall refer later to the executions without trial, of which there were many more - were merely for desafeccion al movimento salvador: Disloyalty to the Salvation movement, expressed in words or gestures alone.

"[3] According to the historian Antony Beevor, the publication of the book in 1938, "which described the nationalist terror on Majorca, greatly strengthened the liberal Catholic reaction against the Church's official support for Franco.

"[4] Writing in 1938, Richard Rees named it, along with George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and Elliot Paul's Life and Death of a Spanish Town, amongst, "the only books about Spain that can be said to be written by people with free (i.e. fundamentally honest, if often mistaken) minds.