Rows of wounded

Lyri­cal bi­og­ra­phy

Jordi Martí-Rueda’s words on the right-hand pages are care­fully and lyri­cally writ­ten. The au­thor is emo­tion­ally com­mit­ted to these vol­un­teers. He does not re­strict him­self to a con­ven­tional bi­og­ra­phy, but tells a mov­ing story about each of them. Here’s one ex­am­ple. In 2007 a small group of Irish peo­ple scat­tered the ashes of Michael O’Ri­or­dan (p.83) in Vine­bre at ex­actly the spot where Michael, their fa­ther and grand­fa­ther, had crossed the Ebre with a Cata­lan flag in one hand and a Re­pub­li­can in the other on 25 July 1938, the first day of the Bat­tle of the Ebre. One of his sons then sang a ver­sion of the pa­tri­otic Cata­lan song La Santa Es­pina. The ex-IRA man, ex-brigadista Michael O’Ri­or­dan had loved it and sung it to his chil­dren. The story un­der­lines the im­por­tance of the war for the sur­viv­ing brigadistes. Join­ing the Brigades was the great­est, most sin­cere deed of their lives, such that in this case a vol­un­teer would pass on to his chil­dren a song he had picked up in Cat­alo­nia.

I could pick sto­ries from the book al­most at ran­dom. The Jew­ish Amer­i­can Harry Fisher (p.61), brought up in an or­phan­age, work­ing at any­thing and every­thing to sur­vive, fought cap­i­tal­ism through­out the De­pres­sion of the 1930s. A vol­un­teer in Spain in the Abra­ham Lin­coln Brigade (led till his death in ac­tion by Oliver Law --p.33--, the first black leader of an in­te­grated mil­i­tary unit in U.S. his­tory), he sur­vived un­scathed both the Civil War and the Sec­ond World War fly­ing as a gun­ner on bombers. Harry died as he had lived: aged 92, he col­lapsed dur­ing a New York demon­stra­tion in March 2003 against the in­va­sion of Iraq.

Sev­eral women are in­cluded too, many more than usu­ally fea­ture in In­ter­na­tional Brigade books. The photo of Anne Taft from the Bronx shows her in high boots and gloves grin­ning broadly among fel­low-nurses. On the Jarama front, using an aban­doned school, she and her com­rades worked non-stop in the freez­ing im­pro­vised op­er­at­ing the­atres and saved dozens of lives. In the cold and blood, nights with­out sleep, “the only thing that kept them from faint­ing were the rows of wounded wait­ing to be op­er­ated on” (p.35).

Too many of the sto­ries end sadly, with young lives cut short. Pho­tos catch often-smil­ing men and women, soon to be dead. Nearly one third of the brigadistes died in Spain. By the end of World War Two, well over half had been killed. The Aus­trian nurse Paula Draxler (p.113) was ex­e­cuted by the Nazis in 1944. Or the Aus­tralian Aileen Palmer, who valiantly threw red paint over 10 Down­ing Street’s front door to protest Cham­ber­lain’s ap­pease­ment of Hitler, was then dri­ven into men­tal ill­ness by her fam­ily’s lack of sup­port.

Pur­ple

Martí-Rueda’s lyri­cal and el­e­gant prose leads at times to a cer­tain over­writ­ing. His style tends to rhetor­i­cal, pur­ple patches, as in this ex­am­ple:

On the dis­fig­ured skin of the Jarama val­ley, enemy fire erected a wall be­tween the liv­ing and those who had fallen silent. (p.31)

Or again:

The doc­tors and nurses dis­cov­ered that war had also wounded them. The wounds were not vis­i­ble, but their mus­cles were frayed and they had lost the de­sire to speak. They had fallen to the bot­tom of a well and voices echoed down from the top of the shaft where the world was hid­ing. (p.45)

Read­ers may enjoy or be ir­ri­tated by these rhetor­i­cal flour­ishes. And his pas­sion leads also to un­nec­es­sary in­ac­cu­ra­cies. Here he de­scribes the black vol­un­teer Jimmy Yates:

He had grown up in a Mis­sis­sippi town where every day the dawn re­vealed black bod­ies dan­gling from the branches of the trees. (p.15)

Come now, Jordi! Every day?? The ma­te­r­ial is pow­er­ful enough to stand on its own, with­out ex­ag­ger­a­tion.

The other point of crit­i­cism is a po­lit­i­cal one. Noble, rev­o­lu­tion­ary vol­un­teers died in the Bat­tle of the Ebre, while their po­lit­i­cal lead­ers fol­lowed the counter-rev­o­lu­tion­ary line of Stalin. Books on the In­ter­na­tional Brigades need to in­clude some recog­ni­tion of the po­lit­i­cal is­sues. I’m sure many read­ers will see this com­ment as a petty quib­ble. They will argue that Brigadistes is clearly de­signed to pop­u­larise the In­ter­na­tional Brigades for a new gen­er­a­tion.

True, but it is not suf­fi­cient only to praise the vol­un­teers. Martí-Rueda con­cludes his In­tro­duc­tion:

Sixty flashes of light, sixty brush-strokes, con­joined by one sole need and de­sire: to fight fas­cism and de­feat it be­fore it was too late. And today it is im­per­a­tive to re­live them. (p.4)

To “de­feat fas­cism be­fore it’s too late”, we need to talk of what it is and how to de­feat it. And the talk needs to lead to ac­tion. Let’s hope that the in­spir­ing fight­ers por­trayed in the book stim­u­late read­ers to or­gan­ise and join mass ac­tion in the streets to pre­vent fas­cists or­gan­is­ing, which is what most brigadistes were doing in their coun­tries of ori­gin be­fore vol­un­teer­ing. The book fails, though, to make this link.

Jordi Martí-Rueda has re­searched and writ­ten a fine and fas­ci­nat­ing book, evok­ing ro­mance and hero­ism with­out avert­ing his read­ers’ eyes from death and suf­fer­ing.

In these times of crises, the haunt­ing, poignant sto­ries he tells re­mind us of the best of human en­deav­our.