Among them was a company of international fighters, who had enlisted in the early days in Barcelona, before the forming of the International Brigades. One of them was an older man, a German. “I came because I know what fascism is,” he said. “I have lived three years in emigration. Spain took me in and gave me work, so I fight to protect my Spanish comrades from fascism. I should not wish these friends to know the bitterness of exile that I have known.” Two Italians sat on the edge of a trench moving bits of stone about on the soil. “We are planning a counter-offensive against Mussolini,” they said.
All of this group was well informed and angry on the subject of foreign nations, and their knowledge and wrath was passed on totheir simpler Catalan friends. It was not Germany and Italy alone that drew their wrath: they expected fascist nations to be foes. But the attitude of England and France was to them like a knife in the back from an expected friend.
“It is a mock to democracy and to international law, what they have done,” a French boy from Barcelona said to me. “Yet Blum calls himself a Socialist. What he does is the death of socialism and of democracy! Can they not see that on this Madrid front we also defend France?”
“The reactionaries know it well enough,” said a Belgian, “and the democrats don’t care. If it were not for the indirect help the democratic governments thus give the fascists, we could long ago have finished them. But these big countries do it with impunity, disregarding the lives of thousands of men. Now there will be a long hard war and heavy cost to all of us before we finish.” Never once did they doubt that they would finish, however long the war and hard the cost.
“What message do you want me to take to America?” I asked them.
“Tell them,” said a youth with the red-tasseled militia cap of Catalonia, “that if they don’t fight their oppressors they’ll be all their lives exploited. Tell them”—here he sent a grin at Carlos and the brigade commander who was with us—”that if they want good things to eat at Christmas such as we have, they also must fight as we do.”
“Did you have good things to eat at Christmas?” I asked them, puzzled at his meaning.
The youth puffed out his chest and made a grandiloquent gesture. “Magnífico!” he said. Then he laughed and hit his commander on the back, saying: “I think I must give her a good impression, what!”
Spain in Arms, 1937, Anna Louise Strong (1937)
