Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto on 12 July 1904, in Parral, Chile, a city in Linares Province in the Maule Region, some 350 km south of Santiago, to Jose del Carmen Reyes Morales, a railway employee, and Rosa Basoalto, a schoolteacher who died two months after he was born. Soon after her death, Reyes moved to Temuco, where he married a woman with whom he had had another child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo and a half-sister, Laura, one of his father's children by another woman. He composed his first poems in the winter of 1914.

After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain. He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico Garcia Lorca, and the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. A daughter, Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934; she was plagued with health problems, especially hydrocephalus, during her short life. During this period, Neruda slowly became estranged from his wife and began a relationship with Delia del Carril, an Argentine twenty years his senior.  As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicised for the first time. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from privately focused work in the direction of collective obligation. Neruda became an ardent Communist for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends, as well as that of del Carril, were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of Garcia Lorca by forces loyal to the dictator Francisco Franco. By means of his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Spanish Republic, publishing the collection Espana en el corazon (Spain in Our Hearts, 1938). He lost his post as consul due to his political militancy.  Neruda's marriage to Vogelzang broke down and the couple divorced in 1936. His ex-wife moved to Monte Carlo and then to the Netherlands with their only child, and he never saw either of them again. After leaving his wife, Neruda lived with Delia del Carril in France.  Following the election of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whom Neruda supported, as President of Chile in 1938, Neruda was appointed special consul for Spanish emigrants in Paris. There he was responsible for what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken": transporting 2,000 Spanish refugees who had been housed by the French in squalid camps to Chile on an old ship called the Winnipeg. Neruda is sometimes charged with having selected only fellow Communists for emigration, to the exclusion of others who had fought on the side of the Republic. Many of these Republicans and Anarchists were killed during the German invasion and occupation. Others deny these accusations, pointing out that Neruda chose only a few hundred of the 2,000 refugees personally; the rest were selected by the Service for the Evacuation of Spanish Refugees set up by Juan Negrin, President of the Spanish Republican Government in Exile.

Using a quote from the above article, answer the following question: How long did the Spanish Civil War last?