They are legend

Drift east along our sleepy lane, away from the patch­work farms, lush gar­dens ra­di­at­ing from the vil­lage, to­wards the brood­ing pine for­est and tooth of lime­stone that is La Mola Moun­tain. It is a timely thing to do.

I'm going there now, flow­ers in hand, words in my head. It is late af­ter­noon, the heat prick­ing my back, weigh­ing my feet. It is peace­ful, but not quiet, for echoes abound.

How must it have been, liv­ing rough, so far from home, un­cer­tain of sur­vival? I am think­ing of Amer­i­can Delmer Berg who died this Feb­ru­ary aged 100. He was here, among the many, a sur­vivor, now the last to die.

I never met him, but wish that I had. His pass­ing is the toil­ing of a mighty bell, for there are no more voices to tell first hand of Chabola Val­ley, of that mo­ment in time when the last of the vol­un­teers from more than 50 coun­tries who had re-grouped after the ter­ri­ble re­treat from Aragon, camped, trained and some­how steeled them­selves again, right here, for one last bloody en­deav­our across the Ebre river to stop Franco.

And as I wan­der in and out of shad­ows I am also think­ing of those mem­bers of the In­ter­na­tional Brigades that I had met – Mil­ton Wolff and Clarence Kailin. Abra­ham Lin­coln com­man­der Mil­ton died aged 92. Clarence sol­diered on until he was 95, both in­de­fati­ga­ble to the end. My good friend fel­low writer and his­to­rian An­gela Jack­son, whose words you may have read in Cat­alo­nia Today, can tes­tify.

I am head­ing to Clarence's grave and that of an­other Amer­i­can, 500 me­tres from my home. They are not in a ceme­tery, but deep in the val­ley where he once camped, co­cooned by the trees and cane, Clarence's dying wish ful­filled. Place my ashes be­side my dear friend John Cook­son, he told his fam­ily, and so they did. John and Clarence came from their homes in Wis­con­sin, Amer­ica, in 1936, two among the 2800 Amer­i­cans who fought for the Re­pub­lic.

John Cook­son was a star stu­dent of physics, bound to make his mark on the world. In a twist of fate he has. He died on Sep­tem­ber 11th of all days, 1938. And I be­lieve his is the only known grave of all the Amer­i­cans killed fight­ing for the Re­pub­lic. Nearly a quar­ter of the Amer­i­can vol­un­teers died. Of the 2500 British men and women, 526 were killed.

So here it is, in the shadow of a pine, a place that sym­bol­ises so much, one small part of the com­plex his­tory that must faced. Eighty years on from the start of the Span­ish civil war it is ab­solutely right and fit­ting that the case be made for Cat­alo­nia to es­tab­lish the first major mu­seum of the epochal con­flict, to en­sure last­ing un­der­stand­ing that Spain des­per­ately needs. A bal­anced, com­pre­hen­sive and ob­jec­tive cen­tre of learn­ing and re­mem­brance is long over­due. And within it John's and the brigaders' story will live on.

As La Pa­sion­aria, Do­lores Ibárruri, told the sur­vivors of the in­ter­na­tional brigades as they were with­drawn from Spain in late 1938: “You can go with pride. You are his­tory. You are leg­end. You are the heroic ex­am­ple of the sol­i­dar­ity and the uni­ver­sal­ity of democ­racy.”