ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADEABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE
It should be remembered that this was an army of articulate, thinking, reasoning human beings - young men who fought not as automatons, but as highly conscious anti-Fascists. There was no officer-caste among them, and therefore none of the blind obedience exacted of soldiers during the World War. There was discipline, of course; no army unit can function without it. But the discipline was of a rare kind, far deeper than the usual surface discipline of military machines, with its outer formalities and trappings. . . The officers were not professional military men. No West Point had produced them, then placed them in charge of companies and battalions of strange soldiers whom they regarded merely as impersonal cogs in a fighting instrument. The officers and men were friends from the very beginning. Those who rose to command did so only after they had proved their abilities in battle. . .
Although their knowledge of practical soldiery consisted only of their current experiences in Spain, even the youngest of the American volunteers knew one basic fact which few men besides professional military theorists even considered. They knew von Clausewitz's words, "War is the continuation of politics by other means"; and they realized the significance of those words.
It was understood that soldiers would obey their officers' commands in action; question them later. And therein lies the distinction that made this army unique in military history. For while certain manifestations of individualism had to be restrained in the interest of unified action, every soldier retained the right to question his command, his officers and commissars, and to bring his grievance to the attention of his fellow soldiers and his superiors. This was done in an organized and democratic fashion through the medium of the political meeting, for this was a political army first to last.
We were not an army of automatons under the absolute authority of an unquestionable command. We were an army of responsible, thinking men. We elected our political delegates - an officer who does not exist in any of the finance-controlled armies of the so-called democracies. This political delegate, known as a commissar, was responsible to us. Meetings were called at his, or our, request, where every problem of discipline, of food, clothing, shelter, military orders, mail, tobacco (or largely the absence thereof), tactics and personal behavior was thrashed out. The majority opinion ruled; it was the commissar's obligation to see that abuses and complaints were referred to the proper authority, and to implement the will of the soldiers as well as the desires of the command. . . This solidarity within our army accounted for military miracles inexplicable to the traditional 'foreign military observers,' who cannot understand how men furnished with the most primitive of arms and handicapped by the most scanty provisions of food, medical supplies and munitions, could and did withstand for months and years the enormously overwhelming superiority of the Fascist enemy's materiel.
And the dozing tired men who had come this long way to a distant foreign country, fathers of children themselves, or future fathers of future children, or fathers of children who never would be born . . . children themselves of working fathers the world over, who had come prepared to face death, if death were necessary, to defend their living and their unborn children on a foreign soil.
And so you came to think of something Abraham Lincoln had said: "The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one of uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds."
The other day a friend of mine - a kindly old gentleman with pince-nez glasses and a long grey beard - applied for a passport. He was going to Holland and Switzerland to study cheese.
"You're not going to Spain, are you?" asked the man at the desk.
"Heavens, no," said the old gentleman. "I am going to Switzerland to study cheese. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, nothing - nothing," said the man. "I was just wondering."
After due formalities, the old man received his passport. Adjusting his glasses and opening it at random, he observed a paragraph rubber-stamped in red ink: . . ."This passport is not valid for travel in Spain." . . .
"Good gracious sakes," said the old gentleman, "what is happening to the world?"
"These are troublous times," sighed the clerk. . . "I don't know what to think. No one who comes in here is going to Spain. Some of them are going to Paris to study art, some of them intend to photograph the cathedrals, some of them want to see the Sphinx - I even had one man who said he was going abroad to study spots on the moon." The clerk sighed. "But somehow, they all seem to end up in Spain in the Loyalist trenches." . . .
"It is the policy of America," said the clerk, "to encourage its citizens to take a neutral attitude toward foreign conflicts." . . .
"For a man to be indifferent about a vital issue the outcome of which will affect the whole world and everyone living, he would, of course," said the old gentleman, "have to be an absolute ass."
"Yes," said the clerk, "I believe that would be necessary."
On The Drumhead, Pacific Publishing Foundation, San Francisco, 1948
At least once during the course of the evening Aaron, who was generally too shy to take part in the conversation, could be induced to sing. The single bulb cast our enormous shadows on the field-stone walls, and the entrance to the room was closed off with a mat made of bamboo. The worn-out rugs on the earthen floor were soft to your feet, and we sat on the cots and chairs and the bench as Aaron touched the guitar that Kozar had produced. He sang:
Give me a home, where the buf-falo roam, Where the deer and the ant-elope play,
Where sel-dom is heard, a dis-couraging word, And the skies are not cloudy all day.
And this sentimental song invariably took us home to the America we loved all the more for being so far away from it; it cash a hush over us, although we were already silent, and we felt a little sad wondering if the folks back home realized what we were doing here, and how closely this struggle would affect them all in time to come. Or did they agree with Mr. Hearst that we were either bloodthirsty revolutionists, dupes of Moscow or 'bums' who deserved to have their citizenship revoked?
Home, home on the ra-ange, Where the deer and the ant-elope play,
Where sel-dom is heard...
One afternoon, about a week after the May 1st fiesta, a young man in khaki, looking fresh and clean, showed up outside of battalion headquarters. He was immediately recognized by some of the men who had seen him among other newspaper correspondents a few days after the retreats. It was Jim Lardner, son of the famous American writer. He had trudged the mile or more from brigade headquarters to the battalion and arrived, neat and almost spotless in his new soldier's clothes, with a brand-new rucksack in which he carried, among some other articles, a French grammar, a Spanish-English dictionary and grammar and a copy of Red Star Over China. . .
Despite his late affrival, he was in a way the protype of the American volunteer in Spain. Hundreds of the men had been students and young professionals who, like Lardner, had carefully examined their own motives and impulses before they had discarded their civilian clothes to carry guns in defense of the Spanish Republic.