[This is the second in a series of articles written in a Madrid hospital by Samuel Levinger, Columbus youth, who died last week from the wounds he suffered while fighting against the Fascists. The articles, being published exclusively in The Citizen, were transcribed from pencilled notes by the youth's mother, Mrs. Lee J. Levinger, 2257 Indianola-av.]
The castle was rather a grim place. Before the days of planes and artillery it must have been impregnable. It had triple walls a dozen feet thick, a deep moat, now empty, where some goats grazed, and was situated in a splendid position on top of a steep hill.
Its history was grim too. I was told that it was built against the Moors at a time when only a corner of Spain remained under Christian control. In more recent years it was a prison for enemies of the monarchy and the dictatorship. The bravest fighters for Spain's freedom suffered there, making straw baskets in the dim wet cellars. After the Asturian revolt in 1934 those of the miners who survived the slaughter were sent here and imprisoned until the electoral victory of the People's Front in 1936.
The place was very different today. A year ago our comrades had been here as prisoners; now we had come as solders [sic] in training. We brought our duffel bags and suit cases down to the low roofed cellar and spread our blankets on the boards which were to be our beds. Those suitcases! How hard we worked lugging them around and how soon we lost them! And my mother had packed mine so carefully, too, with all the sorts of silly things she was sure I would need at the front!
The Germans, who had been out drilling, marched in singing: "We do not fear the thunder of the cannon! We do not ear the Nazi police!" Then the French, a great many of them, with their rousing song, "Le Jeune Garde:" "We are the young guard. We are the bodyguard of the future." And the British, signing the most ringing of all labor songs:
We meet today in Freedom's cause,
And raise our voices high;
We'll battle here in union strong
To conquer or to die."
Had Sung It in United States
I had sung it many times myself at union meetings on the picket line in America: it made me feel more at home to hear it.
These men marched well. Many of them and seen World War service; most of the rest had served their time in the conscript armies at home. In fact several of them had run away from military service in their own countries to come here. We Americans found that we were the least trained soldiers of the International Brigades, but for all that we proved ourselves with the best at the front.
Supper was good. Beans and rice, excellent black bread and a big swig of powerful white wine. We had rather expected to live on bread dipped in vino and this meal was a pleasant surprise.
In the bar room, where we bought the vino for about a penny a glass, an American boy cornered me. "Got any smokes?" I hadn't - the french customs officials had seen to that.
"The cigarets here are one of the horrors of war," he declared. "They call them pillow slips, and they contain two grains of dynamate [sic] and one of strychnine each."
He showed me how to smoke them - bite off the ends, lick the cigaret which is too loosely packed, light it, then take a deep breath and see what happens.
One becomes inured even to pillow-slips. A month later this same boy was smoking them and "liking it." But that does not prevent the howls of joy whenever a few cartons of American smokes arrive on the scene. Packages from relatives or the Friends of the Lincoln Battalion make many gloom,y day on the front a little less gloomy.
There was an informal show on the whine shop table that evening. I think more and better talent climbed on that creaking table than climbs on the average vaudeville stage in New York. There was a bull fight between two Frenchmen in which the bull took the cloak and sword away from the toreador and the bull fighter had to become a bull. An Irish-American boy sang "Gavin Berry" and the English cheered as loudly as the real when he mourned:
"Another martyr for old Ireland.
Another victim for the crown.
Whose brutal laws may crush the Irish,
But cannot put their spirit down."
There I first heard that beautiful song which we Americans soon loved so much:
"On the earth our tanks shall rumble,
In the sky our planes shall sing;
With the sun behind our shoulders,
Songs of battle we will sing."
An Englishman past middle age set the audience crazy with a dance act, half hoofing, half shuffling and the rest hop-skip-jump. He must have been a professional hoofer sometime in his life. I met him six months later in a hospital in Madrid. His arm was in a a sling - three machine gun bullets he told me - but he was still doing his act for delighted Spanish wounded.
In the morning we had drill. Right wheel, left oblique, about face. We were awkward but picked up quickly.
In the afternoon we divided into attacking and defending armies. I was in the attacking group which stormed the fort. We took it, but I got a glimpse then of what I saw later in action - the terrific losses of an army which charges into the rifle and especially the machine gun fire of entrenched enemies.
That evening we lined up in the square and the commandant gave us a talk, translated by interpreters into several languages. The commandant was a little Austrian, for many years an officer in the Austrian army. He had been on the side of the workers when Dolfus shelled the Karl Marx Apartments in Vienna and smashed the Austrian trade unions. Since then he had been a fugitive. He had been in Spain from the beginning and was severely wounded in Casa del Campo in November. When he recovered he was put in command of this post.
He told us about many things, especially wine. "Spanish wine is very strong," he said. "Drink but do not get drunk. The International Brigade is no place for drunkards. The first time a man is drunk, he is put in jail; the second time he is deported. Drunkenness at the front is a court martial offense."
We found, indeed, that only when we were on leave after a long stretch at the front was drunkenness tolerated at all. Even then it was forbidden to fight among ourselves or break windows. On the whole there is probably no more sober army in the world.
After two days' hard drill we left the castle one morning and marched to the railroad station. The village was gathered around to see us off whit the six-deep line of children singing "Jeune Guardia."
It was a scene we soon got to know well, for it was repeated at every town where we stopped. In front the packed children singing the first stanza enthusiastically, though off key; the second verse rather uncertainly with a few arguments between boys in the back row, and the third stanza attempted by only a half dozen sturdy singers. Behind them were massed the older people of the town - a great many pretty girls, laughing a great deal; the working men and their wives; a half dozen young men home on leave, or wounded, or exempt from military duty for some physical weakness, and the volunteer militia who patrol the town.
Then there was usually an old woman who picked out one of our boys to give oranges to, and to ell about her son who was at the front. We understood neither Catalonian nor Spanish, but the fact that these poor old women, with none too much themselves, should force fruit on us and refuse payment always touched us.
After a delay of about an hour, the train started. The last we saw of our town, nestling about the castle, was a little girl standing by the railroad track with fist at salute.
We were traveling through gorgeous country now. Catalonia is the richest part of Spain and the most highly industrialized. On one side was the Mediterranean (I remembered from my Child's Edition of Homer how the old Greek poet had called it the "wine-dark sea"_' on the other orange groves stretched back to the snow-capped mountains. Now and then we passed through towns; many of them had factories, sometimes large ones.
In the beach, trenches had been dug; near towns cannon pointed out over the sea. Fascist cruisers had been prowling the neighborhood and had attempted to land men; but volunteer guards always rushed out to meet them and kept the boats off even where there were no cannon.
Catalonia is at the same time the most militant and (during the first year of the war) the least active section of loyalist Spain. In Catalonia the workers are well organized, the farmers also; the Anarchists had always been powerful there, and recently the Unified Socialist party has also become strong. When the military revolt started against the government, the people without arms overwhelmed the army by sheer enthusiasm.
They tore rifles out of the hands of the soldier, they stacked street cars and trucks with sandbags and crashed through machine gun barricades. In all of Catalonia the revolt was crushed with comparative ease. Perhaps it was too easy! Catalonia, a strongly separatist province, simple held its own front without giving much aid to the rest of Spain, which was suffering under the main Fascist attack.
However, in the crucial days of November the Anarchist hero Durruti, led a column to aid Madrid; he was killed in action. Lately Italian bombers have been flying over Barcelona from the Baleric Islands, bombing the workers' quarters without any military objective. Incidents like these have shown Catalonia that she cannot separate her destiny from that of the rest of Spain. There has been more activity on the Aragon Front than ever before. When the great Catalonia army really gets into its stride it will be a tremendous help for the Spanish people.
[Tomorrow - Mr. Levinger's journal tells of his trip by train to Barcelona and Valencia and on to Albacete, headquarters of the International Brigade. He tells of the danger of spies and the guarding of the doors of the trains.]