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Title: Brothers in Arms Author: Stuart Christie Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Spanish Civil War Source: Retrieved on 22nd September 2020 from https://libcom.org/history/brothers-arms Notes: Article by Stuart Christie in Scottish Review of Books, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2009
WRITING IN the preface to lâEspagne Libre, in 1946, the year of my
birth, Albert Camus said of the Spanish struggle: âIt is now nine years
that men of my generation have had Spain within their hearts. Nine years
that they have carried it with them like an evil wound. It was in Spain
that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can
vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own
recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the
world over, regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedyâ.
On 1 April 2009 seventy years will have passed since General Franco
declared victory in his three-year crusade against the Spanish Republic.
His victory was won with the military support of Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy, the moral support of the Roman Catholic Church and the
covert diplomatic connivance of Britain and France, the prime movers in
the Non-Intervention Agreement. It brought not peace but the outbreak of
a vengeful and prolonged forty-year war of vindictive terror,
humiliation and suffering for the losers, the Spanish people. Apart from
the victims of the war itself, between 1939 and 1951 at least 50,000
Spaniards paid with their lives for their support of the Republic while
hundreds of thousands paid with their freedom. Today, forty-four years
after Francoâs death, Spain still has unfinished business to deal with.
In July 1936, progressive people everywhere seized on the Spanish
workersâ successful thwarting of the attempted coup by a cabal of
ultra-rightist Spanish generals in Spain and Africa. It became the great
idealistic cause of the twentieth centuryâs first half. Some,
particularly the Defence Committees of the anarcho-syndicalist labour
unions of the ConfederaciĂłn Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) â the ones who
seized the initiative by declaring a revolutionary general strike and
arming the people in the face of government opposition, confusion and
middle class horror â saw it as the start of the social revolution,
whereas the middle classes, the petite bourgeoisie and the Spanish
Communist Party (PCE), which sought to become their champion, chose to
view it in terms of a struggle between bourgeois democracy and fascism.
But despite their differences, for all of them it became the line in the
sand; the rallying point for over 30,000 mostly idealistic and
heroically selfless men and women from fifty-three countries who
realised that here, possibly, was an opportunity to connect all the
1930sâ struggles for social and political justice and, at the same time,
roll back the inextricably interlinked rise of fascism and reaction.
During the first days of the army uprising, as many as 1,500 foreigners
living in Spain took to the barricades to join the armed workersâ
defence groups in surrounding the barracks and quashing the military
rebellion. Among these were two hundred athletes who had come to
Barcelona to compete in the Peopleâs Olympiad (Spartakiad) organised by
the trades union movement and the Popular Front government, in protest
against the official Olympic Games then taking place in Hitlerâs Berlin.
The Peoplesâ Olympics had been due to open on July 19, the day the
fascist army marched out of their barracks to seize control of
Barcelona.
Many workers and intellectuals of every conceivable nationality had been
horrified by their own governmentsâ inaction in the face of fascist
aggression and had gone off to fight for justice on their own. The
first, informal, âInternationalsâ were the foreign volunteers who
flocked to join the union-organised militia units such as the Durruti,
Ascaso and OrtĂz columns, named after their charismatic organisers of
the Nosotros action group. People of all ages, from fourteen to seventy,
and all nationalities â French Germans, Italians, Moroccans, British and
Americans â enrolled in these and other anarchist and socialist
expeditionary columns to liberate Zaragoza and hold the front line in
AragĂłn. Some of these militia columns were led by four Scotsâ bagpipers,
four of whom had been due to open the Spartakiad ceremonies on that
fateful day. Toronto Star journalist Pierre van Paassen, for example,
refers to the fact that one of Durrutiâs adjutants, a Briton by the name
of Middleton, had jumped ship in Barcelona when he learned of the
workersâ uprising and the social revolution that was sweeping the
country.
Ethel MacDonald, an anarchist from Motherwell, just a few miles up the
road from where I lived in Blantyre, was another of the countless people
who made this individual pilgrimage to Spain. In October 1936 Ethel left
Glasgow for Spain with another Scotswoman, Jenny Patrick, a long-time
anarchist activist who had been the secretary of the Glasgow anarchists
during the industrial troubles of 1916. Ethel became a regular
broadcaster on the English-language programmes of the Barcelona
anarchist radio station. Their high profile and defence of the social
revolution led to both Ethel and Jenny being arrested and held without
trial by the Stalinist secret police. But they were among the lucky ones
who survived and were able to return to Glasgow. Her extraordinary story
is told in Chris Dolanâs An Anarchistâs Story: The Life of Ethel
Macdonald, a fascinating personal account of the pivotal events of the
spring and summer of 1937 as seen through the prism of a Scottish
anarchist woman who was at the centre of contemporary events. Dolanâs
book has particular resonance for me because of the people and places he
talks about, names known to me personally from my youth: Charlie Doran,
Bob Smillie and âBigâ Dan Mullen from Victoria Crescent in Blantyre
where I spent my formative teenage years in the late 1950s and early
1960s. It was there I first came across these names and others, local
men like Tommy Brannan, Tommy Flecks, Willie Fox, dead Brigaders who
were spoken of, rightly, as heroes and martyrs. Nor was it unusual on a
Friday or Saturday night for old anarchist and communist miners to end
rancorous discussions about the role of the Communist Party in Spain
brawling outside the Minersâ Welfare.
But not everyone could make their own way to Spain, and for some the
process was too hit and miss â too uncontrolled and unmonitored. The
decision to set up an organisation to capitalise on and channel the
popular wave of anti-fascist enthusiasm and idealism, and coordinate the
mobilisation of volunteers to fight for the Spanish Republic was taken
in Moscow on September 18, 1936, during a meeting of the Comintern
Executive Committee. It was a little over a week after the
Non-Intervention Committee met for the first time in London, and just
five days after the decree from Spainâs pro-Soviet Finance Minister Juan
NegrĂn authorising the transfer of all of Spainâs 510 tons of gold
reserves first to Cartagena, and thence to Moscow â for safekeeping!
This Comintern-led initiative â which became known as the International
Brigades (IBs) â should be seen, therefore, in the context of Soviet
geopolitical leverage and paid-for, stringsattached, military aid. It
should also recognised that membership of the Partido Comunista Española
(PCE) at the outbreak of the uprising was small and largely middle
class, perhaps between thirty- and a hundred-thousand, and with little
influence among the workers when compared with the two million members
of the anarcho- syndicalist CNT and the million and a half members of
the socialist UGT. The PCE had virtually no militia presence of its own
in the late summer of 1936, yet by the end of the year its membership
had increased tenfold to around a million.
By championing the privileges, status and property of the professional
as well as the urban and rural bourgeoisie against the rapid advances of
the anarchist-led social revolution, the Catalan counterpart of the PCE,
the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC) â formed on July
23^(rd) 1936 with between 3,000 and 6,000 members â increased its
membership dramatically within a matter of months. Spanish anarchist
historian Jose Peirats estimates that in Catalonia, between July and
October, the PCE recruited to its ranks 8,000 landowners and around
16,000 middle class âprofessionalsâ.
The most powerful reason for the rapid growth in influence of the PCE,
however, was Stalinâs decision to provide military support for the
Republic which had nothing to do with altruism or working class
solidarity. His decision to send arms to Republican Spain was based on
the diplomatic and strategic exigencies of Soviet foreign policy. For
Stalin, Spain was a pawn in a diplomatic chess game being played out by
the three great European power blocs â the Axis, France and Britain, and
Russia. Stalin hoped that the surrogate war being fought in Spain would
provide him with sufficient breathing space to divert or minimise the
effect on the Soviet Union of a wider European conflict, which was
looking ever more inevitable. Hitlerâs expansionist policies would,
Stalin believed, drag Germany into conflict with Britain and France
leaving Russia as an onlooker. However, Soviet foreign policy at the
time was in fact counter-revolutionary, requiring that the European
balance of forces should not be disturbed as any perceived support for
social revolution in Europe would upset Russiaâs delicate military
alliance with France and its relationship with Great Britain. But the
problem, as dissident Marxist historian Fernando ClaudĂn pointed out,
was that neither could the USSR realistically dodge its duty âto show
active solidarity with the Spanish people in arms without risk of losing
all prestige in the eyes of the world proletariatâ.
Take Dolores IbĂĄrruri GĂłmez for example, La Pasionaria whose statue
looms over Glasgowâs Clyde Walkway. She was a member of the Political
Bureau of the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party, a
parliamentary deputy and a Comintern delegate. She effectively
blackmailed the Republican government into accepting Communist Party
demands which included: the right to nominate and appoint political
commissars and Soviet military cadres to each army unit; the dismantling
of the agricultural, industrial and service industry collectives that
were being set up in the social revolution that was then building
momentum; and the outlawing of the independent Marxist and allegedly
âTrotskyistâ POUM. Remember, too, that this period coincided with the
start of Stalinâs most murderous phase of his reign of terror within his
own country, flagged by the Moscow show trials that opened in August
1936. The message was simple: if the Republican government refused to
accept the conditions demanded by the Communist Party then the Soviet
freighters lying offshore would not unload their cargoes of arms and
ammunition.
Charlotte Haldane, the honorary secretary of the IBsâ Dependantsâ Aid
Committee in the UK, has stated that each national Communist Party was
assigned a recruitment quota linked to the size, age and the strategic
importance of its paid-up membership, as well as the number of
fellowtravellers it could count on. The Communist Party of Great
Britain, for example, because of its size, had a smaller quota than
most, but even so, between late October 1936 and the summer of 1938, it
was still able to recruit between 1,800 and 2,400 volunteers (estimates
vary here), of whom 563 were killed and most of the others wounded.
A NEW and fascinating contribution to Scotlandâs role in the Spanish
Civil War, Daniel Grayâs Homage To Caledonia brings together for the
first time riveting accounts of the plots and sub-plots of the 1930s
Scottish- Spanish connection, together with the personal stories and
testimonies of some of the 549 Scottish volunteers who made Spainâs
struggle their own. Most of this Scottish contingent (around
twenty-three per cent of the British Battalion) came from the urban and
industrial areas of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow,
specifically Maryhill, Springburn and Bridgeton and, of course, the
mining communities of Lanarkshire and Fife. Of the ninety-two Scottish
IB volunteers killed in Spain, sixtyfive were from Glasgow; another nine
came from the Lanarkshire mining communities around Blantyre.
Sixty-seven per cent of them were members of the Communist Party.
With the British Battalion so overwhelmingly dominated by Party cadres,
rank-andfile militants and fellow travellers, itâs hardly surprising
that so many of them belonged to either the CP or the Young Communist
League. Even so, in spite of tight Party discipline, most rank-and-file
volunteers were far from being ideologically sectarian; their reasons
for risking their lives to fight for the Republic or for socialism may
have been complex and diverse, but the one thing they all had in common
was a visceral loathing of fascism and a profound sense of international
solidarity.
With the UKâs Foreign Recruitment Act making enlistment in a foreign
army illegal, the British authorities became increasingly rigorous in
their attempts to enforce nonintervention and implement the law, so
Brigaders were recruited discretely through the Communist Party network
by local cadres and âSpanish Aid Committeeâ organisers who took it on
themselves to vet all volunteers, especially non-party members.
Politically, around sixty per cent of the Scottish IB volunteers were
paid-up CPGB members with twenty per cent or so drawn from the Labour
Party, with, perhaps, a scattering of ILP, Scottish Socialist Party or
Scottish Workersâ Republican Party members. The remaining twenty per
cent claimed to have no formal political allegiances. These figures were
more or less the same for the whole of the British Battalion of the XVth
International Brigade, although itâs impossible to say how many of the
110 Labour Party members were also â as Lewis Clive was â covert CP
members. The British Battalion appears to have had at least seven ILP
volunteers which to me was unusual given that the ILP line was close to
that of the CNT defence committees: that the social revolution was
inseparable from the war. It was for this reason that most of the 175
ILPers who fought in Spain did so with the anarchosyndicalist militias
or, like George Orwell, with the anti-Stalinist, Marxist POUM.
Few British workers had passports in those days so the usual practice
was for the volunteers to make their way across the Channel on special
weekend returns â which didnât require passports â and then travel down
to Spain with the help of the efficient and well-disciplined French
Communist Party â and the French authorities mostly turning a blind eye.
The first batch of foreign volunteers to arrive in Spain in the autumn
of 1936 were obliged to surrender their passports to the âForeignersâ
Bureau of the Catalan Communist Party, the PSUC, then controlled by the
NKVD, Stalinâs secret police. Later the International Brigade
established its own âControl and Security Serviceâ headed by Alexander
Orlov, chief of NKVD operations in Spain. Their passports were never
returned and were used in covert NKVD and GRU clandestine operations.
There was also an IB âCadre Commissionâ set up in Albacete in February
1937 to monitor and assess the âtrustworthynessâ of volunteersâ and to
expose âfascistâ spies and Trotksyist-anarchist provocateurs. A cadre
report on the British Battalion, for example, listed 363 British
volunteers, half of them CPers, and described forty-one them as
âcadresâ, 142 as reliable, and 133 â of whom forty were Party members â
as âweak or badâ.
In contrast to the Comintern, the anarchist international, the AIT, did
not mount a central recruitment campaign. The CNTFAI, the
anarcho-syndicalist labour union and the Spanish anarchist federation,
disapproved of recruiting foreigners into its militias â except, of
course, for stateless refugee volunteers such as the Italians and
Germans â preferring instead for comrades to show their solidarity and
defend the revolutionary nature of the Spanish Civil War by actions and
applying political and industrial pressure at home. The French Anarchist
Federation, however, did have a network in place for sending foreign
revolutionary volunteers into Spain, but on a much smaller scale than
that of the Comintern. The reality was that more than two thousand
foreign anarchist volunteers joined the CNT militias.
Between October 1936 and September 1937, when they were finally
incorporated into the Republican army as Spanish Foreign Legion units,
seven International Brigades were headquartered in Albacete under the
commissarship of the paranoid Comintern Secretary Andre Marty â the
XIth, XIIth, XIIIth, XIVth, XVth, 129^(th) and 150^(th). Each of these,
led by a brigade commander and a political commissar, consisted of four
battalions of mainly foreign volunteers organised by language group and
ethnic background â to avoid problems of communication. An increasing
number of Spaniards were conscripted into the Brigades as the war
progressed, but there was no attempt to teach Brigaders Spanish until
1937, and even then few actually bothered to learn the language or even
have much to do with their fellow Spanish Brigaders. There was actually
a fair bit of racism, especially in the French and German IB Battalions.
The fact that so few Brigaders understood Spanish meant they were
largely dependant on the overwhelmingly pro- Soviet and virulently
anti-Trotskyist and anti-anarchist International Brigade press for
information as to what was happening in Spain, especially relating to
the events of May 1937 in Barcelona and the NKVD-led Stalinist
repression both in the Soviet Union and in the Spanish rearguard. On
February 16, 1937, the IB paper Soldado de la Republica stated that
after the latest of the Moscow trials âthe whole world can now seeâ that
the Trotskyists were âagents of German-Japanese fascismâŠand an
incredible system of provocations, sabotage and murderâ who in Spain had
been revealed as âthe artificial mist that hid Francoâs Fifth ColumnâŠ.
The unmasking of Trotskyists united all International Brigadersâ.
Tragically, most ordinary International Brigades volunteers were unaware
of the strategic geopolitical âgreat gameâ they were engaged in on
behalf of Stalin. They were idealists manipulated by cynics, lions led
by vipers.
Morale was undermined constantly, especially among non-Communist
volunteers. Jason Gurney, the British sculptor who fought with the IBs
from December 1936 until August 1937 described the process in his
memoir, Crusade In Spain: âthe pattern of unkept promises of support,
chaotic orders and communications, followed by inquests, the search for
scapegoats and their execution as enemy agents was to underlie the whole
course of events. The battle of Jarama in February 1937, the first major
battle in which the British participated, was presented as a victory,
mainly because they managed to recover the ground they had lost, but it
was won at a heavy price with over a quarter of the five hundred-strong
British Battalion killed and a comparable number seriously wounded.
Around thirty-five Scots died in the main battle at Jarama and many were
taken prisoner, including James Maley of the Calton who died in April
2007. Steve Fullarton, the last surviving Scottish IB veteran, passed
away just a year later.
The erosion of Brigade morale began with Jarama. Partly this was due to
the harsh realities of a war in which they were used as expendable shock
troops, but other things were bubbling below the surface at Brigade
level. Command of the Battalion had been due to be taken over by
Scotsman Wilf McCartney, but he was shot and wounded, allegedly
accidentally, by Brigade Commissar Peter Kerrigan, the CPGB
representative to the Comintern and the commissar for the
English-speaking International Brigaders at Albacete just before the
British left for Jarama,. McCartney was forced to return to Britain due
to his injuries and command of the Battalion passed to an Englishman,
Tom Wintringham.
The next battle in which the British Battalion was involved occurred a
few months later, in July 1937, at Brunete, the first major offensive of
the war. It quickly turned into an unmitigated disaster, both tactically
and in terms of personnel. Of the 331 Britons who answered roll call on
July 6, 1937, the first day of the battle, by July 24, when Francoâs
forces finally broke through the Republican lines, 289 of them were
dead, wounded or captured. With such enormous losses â most battalions
were now down to under 200 men âmorale plummeted and there were
increasing outbreaks of insubordination and desertion. Around 298
British volunteers deserted (16 per cent) compared with about 100
Americans.
In the British Battalion, punitive action focused on indiscipline and
desertion, with two re-education centres and three jails established at
IB HQ in Albacete specially to deal with these cases. After the Battle
of Guadalajara, in March 1937, André Marty reported to the Comintern
that the Brigades were on the verge of collapse due to the loss of men
through demoralisation, deaths, casualties and desertions. Men
previously commended for their courage were now described as âcowards,
amoral and alcoholicsâ. No one knows how many IBers were executed by the
Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM) and the Chekists, but itâs
probably somewhere between fifty and sixty, mostly French, German,
Hungarian and Slav volunteers. Only one Briton, a Glaswegian by the name
of Peter Kemp, is known to have been formally executed, as were three
from the Lincoln and George Washington battalions, but according to
Jason Gurney âa large number disappeared without traceâ.
Morale deteriorated further in the Spring of 1937 with the Stalinist
onslaught against the CNT defence committees and the various, smaller,
anti-Stalinist Marxist parties in the rearguard, in their attempt
finally to suffocate the social revolution and wrest control of working
class Barcelona from the rank and file of the CNT unions. This scenario
was presented to the world as a legitimate governmental move to crush a
Trotksyist-fascist-anarchist coup dâetat â and the world believed it, or
pretended to.
In September 1937 the Comintern Executive Committee appealed to all IB
officers and men to be on their guard against Trotskyist-
fascist-anarchist infiltration. In fact there were few real Trotskyists
in the IBs, and the handful of anarchists who remained in the IBs were
closely-monitored by the NKVD-led Servicio de Inteligencia Militar
(SIM), operating as the partyâs private police,
In spite of a demoralising defeat at Brunete, in August 1937 the British
Battalion regrouped and fought on to the Fuentes de Ebro prior to an
advance on Zaragoza, which they failed to complete. From there they
pressed on to Belchite where they emerged victorious for a time
following a particularly bloody hand-tohand, close-quarter, battle with
the Francoists. The Battalionâs greatest success, however, was its key
role in the capture of the Aragonese town of Teruel on 8 January 1938,
but this proved short lived as by the end of the month the British were
forced into a series of retreats in the face of a fierce Francoist
onslaught. The reality was that the forced dissolution of the
libertarian Council of AragĂłn by the Communistforces of General Listerâs
XIth Army in August 1937 effectively extinguished the last guttering
flame of the social revolution in Spain. It was the beginning of the end
for âLoyalistâ Spain. The disintegration of the 450 kilometres of
AragĂłnâs front lines in March 1938 underlined the profound impact that
the devastation of the rearguard had had on the popular will to resist.
By the summer of 1938 the Soviet Union had failed in its diplomatic aim
of establishing an anti-German alliance among the Western governments
and, with a fascist victory looking increasingly inevitable, Stalinâs
foreign minister, Litvinov, informed the British ambassador that a
Franco regime would be acceptable to the Soviet Union provided Spain
didnât become a German or Italian satellite. The Soviet delegate on the
Non-Intervention Committee then drew up a plan for the withdrawal of all
foreign combatants in Spain and the granting of belligerent rights to
both sides, allowing them to purchase arms legally. Finally, on 21
September, in a cynical attempt to win the support of Western
governments â and at the height of the Ebro offensive in which 7,000
foreign volunteers were fighting â Juan NegrĂn, announced to the League
of Nations that his government had decided, unilaterally, to withdraw
all foreign combatants from the Republican zone.
Following the British Battalionâs withdrawal from the Ebro for
repatriation, Sam Wild, commander of the British Battalion, called for
volunteers to return to the front line for 48 hours to give republican
forces time to bring up fresh troops. All of the men agreed to go back;
many never returned. In the three days of fighting at the Ebro following
Negrinâs announcement, more than two hundred members of the British
Battalion were killed, wounded, or reported missing.
The evacuation of the IBs was neither easy nor quick, but even so most
British survivors were home by the end of December, leaving about 6,000
volunteers still remaining in Catalonia, albeit demobilised. In fact,
eighty per cent of them re-enlisted to fight in the rearguard actions
holding up the Francoist advance. The IBs were among the last Republican
troops to cross the border, which they did on 9 February. Two weeks
later, on 24 February France recognised the Franco government followed
quickly by Britain.
And their legacy? Even though the IBs were relatively few in numbers,
they played an important role as shock troops, and central to their
effectiveness â especially in the early days of the war â was their
political and moral commitment, for which they paid a heavy price, with
549 dead and thousands more wounded. But whatever the International
Brigades may have done for Spain, they did considerably more for the
image and credibility of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.
The moral example of the IBs certainly benefited the Republic, and as
the civil war progressed the idealism and heroism of the rank and file
had an even greater impact on the wider labour movement, with a marked
increase in the membership and influence of the CP. In spite of their
politics, the rankand- file IBsâ genuine internationalism and sense of
working class solidarity and selfless heroism could not have been in
starker contrast to the treachery of the Bolshevik leaders of the Soviet
Union or the rank hypocrisy of the socialist and bourgeois politicians
of the western democracies.
But what these âpremature anti-fascistsâ did impacted on posterity and
inspired later generations with their bravery and selfless courage. It
certainly made an impact on me, and it is because of them that I came to
see the Spanish Civil War as âunfinished businessâ, especially in the
years 1962 to 1964 when Franco was unleashing a new and brutal wave of
repression. With horror I read about the arrests and torture of striking
miners and industrial workers, the judicial murders of the Communist
Commissar Julian Grimau for alleged war crimes, and the garrotting of
two young anarchists, Delgado and Granado, for a bombing of which they
were totally innocent. It appeared to be starting all over again and no
one was doing anything about it, given Spainâs strategic importance
during the Cold War.
I may not have been wise or competent in what I did, but I did not have
the benefit of hindsight. My conscious choice about the manner of my
involvement in the anti-Francoist resistance was as a fighter â as
opposed to being a helper of Francoâs victims. To do otherwise would
have felt like running away, psychologically and intellectually. It
would have been hypocritical of me to choose what I knew to be the easy
and safe â but useless and ineffective â options of demonstrations,
picketing and leafleting and not to challenge Franco head on as it were,
following the example of those extraordinary men and women who went to
Spain in 1936 and 1937 to fight for a better world.
I felt I had a moral obligation to intervene on behalf of past, present
and future victims of Francoism. It was a just war and a just cause â
the assassination of Franco. My authority was my conscience and the
ghosts of Francoâs victims since 1936. And so, on July 31^(st), 1964,
just three weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I went back to Blantyre
to pack my Bergen, folding my kilt ostentatiously on top, and made the
final preparations for my trip to Paris â and my rendezvous with destiny
in Madrid. Like George Orwell, Ethel MacDonald, âBig Danâ Mullen and
thousands of others in 1936, I was off to Spain because at that time and
in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The
assassination did not succeed, which is another story, but Ăcrasez
lâInfĂąme!
The selfless men and women who fought in Spain for the idea of liberty
against the reactionary priest-, gun- and prisonbacked, medieval
ideology that was Francoism are the forgotten dead and a now-dying
generation to whom we have an obligation of remembrance, a duty of
commemoration which is honoured, at least in part, in Dolanâs and Grayâs
respective books.
In 1945 New York Times correspondent Herbert Lionel Matthews wrote the
following: âSpain was a melting pot in which the dross came out and pure
gold remained. It made men ready to die gladly and proudly. It gave
meaning to life; it gave courage and faith in humanity. It taught us
what internationalism means, as no League of Nations or Dumbarton Oaks
will ever do. There one learned that men could be brothers, that nations
and frontiers, religions and races were but outer trappings, and that
nothing counted, nothing was worth fighting for but the idea of
libertyâ.