Send Not to Know for Whom the Bell Tolls

by Bill Peak

September 19, 1981, was a beautiful day in the nation’s capital—high blue sky, not a cloud in sight, and a living quilt of several hundred thousand protesters milling about on the mall. They were working class men and women, union members who had come from all over the country to show their support for Solidarność, the Polish labor union then challenging that country’s Communist rule.

The AFL-CIO organized the march, which would prove to be the largest rally on the mall since the March on Washington in 1963. To show their support for the air traffic controllers then out on strike, protesters arriving from as far away as California had travelled by car and bus rather than board a plane.

Melissa and I were living across the river in Alexandria in 1981 and, full of youthful idealism, we decided to attend the rally. Luminaries on the program that day included Coretta Scott King, Ozzie Davis, Pete Seeger, and Maryland’s own Barbara Mikulski. There was a march at one point, and we took great pride in walking up Constitution Avenue in the company of the West Virginia Glass Blowers Union.

Later that afternoon, as the crowd began to thin and protesters carrying their signs at port arms started flooding the mall’s lone Metro station, Melissa and I noticed a small knot of older men beginning to pack up their gear near the Washington Monument. The men were dressed in a hodgepodge of faded khaki uniforms, and several wore berets, which, in those long ago days, were seldom seen in America.

Curious, we walked over and struck up a conversation. It turned out the men were veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—American volunteers who had crossed the Atlantic in the mid-1930s to fight against Franco’s Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Members of a generation that had studiously avoided combat in Vietnam, Melissa and I were in awe of these men who, on their own dime, had risked life and limb for someone else’s freedom.

I have met a few famous people in my life—Bob Feller, Buck Leonard, and Annie Dillard come immediately to mind—but that moment on the Washington mall with the remnants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade still shines in memory. Which probably explains why, on a recent reconnaissance of the Talbot County Free Library’s storied aisles, my eyes lit up when, among the 940s, I spied Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939.

Spain, in the years prior to its civil war, was almost a feudal state. Though the majority of people made their living working the land, most owned little or no land themselves. Two percent of the population owned sixty-five percent of the country’s arable property. There were estates as large as 75,000 acres. In February 1936, however, and to the surprise of many, a leftist coalition of liberal, Socialist, and Communist parties narrowly won control of the parliament.

In a sort of spontaneous celebration of this victory, hungry peasants began occupying large estates and planting crops. Workers assumed control of factories, posh restaurants saw their waiters serving anyone who walked in regardless of class, and hotels came under the management of bellboys and maids.

The reaction from the right was swift and brutal. The Count of Alba de Yeltes placed all the peasants on his estate against a wall and shot twelve of them. He wanted to make sure they understood who was still in charge. Fascist forces under Generalissimo Franco launched a bloody coup and, shooting prisoners as they advanced, took over the western half of the country. The Count was made their press officer. Hitler and Mussolini joined the fun, placing their countries’ advanced munitions and troops at the Fascists’ disposal. And the ragtag forces of the freely-elected Republic began marching out with rifles dating from the nineteenth century to confront professional soldiers armed with automatic weapons, their advance covered by Stuka dive bombers and Messerschmitt 109s.

One must remember this was all taking place at the height of the Great Depression. From one end of the Western World to the other, men and women—inspired by the Spanish Republic’s example and appalled by the uneven nature of the contest—began travelling to Madrid to volunteer for the Republic.

Great writers like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway joined the crusade, but Hochschild devotes most of his account to the private journals and letters written by otherwise unknown volunteers. Joe Selligman, for instance, wrote to his parents after dropping out of college, “By the time you get this letter I will be in Europe. I am going to Spain….a lot of good a diploma would do in a Fascist era—and Spain seems to me to be the crucial test…. Please don’t try to follow or catch me or anything.”

He would be mortally wounded on his first day in combat.

Lini Fuhr, an American nurse sent immediately upon arrival to a medical unit in the field, wrote about cutting the clothes off wounded boys she had danced with on the voyage over.

Jim Neugass, a poet from New Orleans with an interesting sense of humor, wrote that, “Hacking night-coughs, jaundice, sores, itches, diarrhea and constipation are the occupational diseases of war in Spain….Constipation is the least serious of them, since it is often cured by the sight and sound of planes.”

These were the perfectly normal, perfectly remarkable young Americans who gave up their plans for the future and sometimes their lives to join arms with foreign visionaries who dreamt of a better world. Speaking of them, La Pasionaria would tell her fellow countrywomen, ”Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are stanched … when pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards—then speak to your children. Tell them of the International Brigades. Tell them how, coming over seas and mountains, crossing frontiers bristling with bayonets … these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom. They gave up everything, their loves, their country, home and fortune…they came and told us: ‘We are here. Your cause, Spain’s cause, is ours.’”