For the years that Truda and I had been in love, we had shared the pre-Hitler richness of liberal North Germany. My German, as her English, had improved, and in 1936, we both lamented the practical obstacles that still hindered our seeing more of each other. But when it had become possible for us to set up house together in London, we had somehow failed to take effective action; it was almost as though we were faced with a subconscious miss-match. Though we were both still very much involved with each other, Truda had gone back to Hamburg where I was to meet her in her family home "later in the year". I had limply let her go instead of insisting that she stay as we had originally planned.

Truda had wired me in May of 1936 to say that she was coming via Hull; she was going to stay with a Yorkshire family and would then come on to London. The Yorkshire visit was being used by Truda as a part of her cover story for her London fugue; she was totally committed to being with me. I was twenty three, she was twenty. Viewed in retrospect, I was, as I now see it, emotionally immature. Though Truda was a virgin, she had a more adult appreciation of our personal situation than had I. For a girl of her upright, academic and liberal background, ceasing to be a virgin was not a trivial matter, she had had serious reserves about this final move.

She had fancied lots of people before and had been fancied back, but she was by nature a careful chooser. At that time, in the spring of 1936, I was, in the emotional sense, by far a less complex, a less well-finished person than was Truda. It had been wonderful sleeping together. For at least half the day, and for the whole of the night, we were completely happy. What went wrong in that other fraction of the twenty four hours? Had that other fraction of our time together been a more profound success, I would not be writing this book but another one. What went wrong? On our very first morning together Truda woke up within a new persona. She quite simply had become a prudent wife who had taken charge of what had been my own chaotic household. I did not mind the place becoming cleaner and tidier, but I did find her sympathetic but firm control over our expenditure, and the good economical meals (often vegetarian) an odd way of paying for the Van Gogh and Franz Marc prints she got for the sitting room. There was no doubt that she was very loving, but her domain was the home, and there she ruled. She revised my wardrobe, made wonderful plans for the weekend - always in a spirit of partnership, but nonetheless somehow mandatory. In making a choice, her priorities expressed her own view of our long-term interests, rather than of the immediate desires of either of us. Truda was meant to have stayed on in London.

Coming, as she did, from a Germany and from a sector of its culture that had welcomed the Jugundstille, reveled in Der Sturm, Kandinski, Arp and Klee, while preferring the Wandervogel to the Hitler Jugund, she would not have needed an immediate marriage. She could have lived with me right away; she already had the vision of us as the happy couple taking on my father's house in Dorset. She saw me in the role of the most esteemed doctor for miles around, with a boat in Poole harbour for weekends and she the happy consort. In bed it was warm and comforting. For her, making love was a giving; it was not an exchange of gifts. She most freely consented; she wanted to make me the happiest man on earth, but she was giving something that she herself did not need. The result was the stilling, or quenching, of my desire rather than the liberating of two persons totally united in each other's fulfillment.

So, after six weeks, Truda went back home. We had been planning for her to leave Hamburg to continue her studies in London, but we both fell into agreement that, as it was the end of her 'legal' holidays, it would be silly to provoke family upheavals by her staying on for all the summer as this might put in risk the tolerance for that full academic year's stay in London starting in October. Was this an unconscious face-save? I realised that something was lacking; the bricks had not fallen into position automatically as they had always done before. Her absence from the flat was something I felt physically, the place seemed empty without her but despite this I was almost relieved to find myself once again the sole master of my own movements. If I was less comfortable without her, at any rate it was in my own way. Of course at the time I had no inkling of the interruption that was coming to our joint plans. Our deep friendship, the heart of our relationship, did indeed survive everything - our subsequent marriages and the wars; it lasted until her death in 1984. When she had known it was coming she sent me back almost all my fifty years of letters, with a warm note in which she said goodbye. This reached me after she had gone. She told me that she was keeping with her but two especially precious letters. Separated, in facing our separate emotional lives, we undoubtedly gave each other something more than courage. That gift stays with me still today.

I was enjoying the last days of that 1936 July when Mary Redfern Davies, a Cambridge contemporary, rang up to ask me to make out a list of Medical supplies to the value of one hundred pounds. What had provoked this odd request was that the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of Fascism had received cash gifts earmarked for Spain. It seemed that the Army had just mutinied in an attempt to overthrow the Popular Front Government. I did the job with Mary in Hennekey's over a couple of Tio Pepes. Twenty-four hours later Mary told me that the Relief Committee had doubled the quantities as more earmarked money had come in. The Committee's secretary then wanted to see us so we went round and found her all bemused; she now had about nine hundred pounds and while we were there more came in bringing the total over the thousand - in those days that amount of money would have kept me for two years. I suggested that if it went on like this once she got over two thousand pounds she could buy a vehicle and stuff it with whatever the Spaniards might ask for.

There is nothing like activity to put a stop to introspective thinking: I had not come to terms with the seeming failure of Truda's all important visit. I soon had no need to bother anymore about myself, because within twenty-four hours the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of Fascism had bowed out and a Spanish Medical Aid Committee had been formed with me as one of its founder members. It was a solid affair with the Medical Advisor to the TUC, eminent Quaker worthies, some labour and liberal MPs, a couple of peers, a charming Italian-born peeress, and several Secretaries-General of major Trade Unions all ready to meet 3 times a week. This group represented a cross-section of all that was progressive and contactable in an England bent on enjoying the high summer of 1936.

The Committee started work on the first of August. Three weeks later I left London with a unit of twenty volunteers and the equipment for an advanced field hospital. The eminent doctors who had helped set it up were unable to abandon their London jobs and go to Spain themselves. I had no such constraints and was happy to volunteer for an emergency that, in the general conception, could not very well persist for more than a few weeks. I welcomed the intensity of activity as it counterbalanced the unanalyzed void of Truda's departure. About a week before we were due to leave for Spain, the Committee appointed me Administrator of the Field Unit. To have established the equipment list for a mobile hospital, then to procure and pack it all within three weeks, was in itself a remarkable logistic feat made possible by three forces working in concert. These same forces were to make possible our victory in the war of 1939/45. The first force in this triad was the energy of young people working together for something they really wanted to do; the second factor has been called "working-class solidarity" and the third is often referred to disparagingly as the "old boy network". These last two forces are isometric; upper class solidarity is the mirror image of the working class network.

When I was trying to buy drugs, dressings, sterilisers, hospital ward equipment, kitchen stores and field cookers - all on the same day, I seemed to get a lot of miraculous help. The Committee's Peers would telephone the top of a supplying company, while the warehousemen, hearing that it was for Spain, would service no other orders until ours were satisfied. There was a catalytic agent in all this ferment or, to change the metaphor, a current that passed by a selective circuit through our working group. It had an expediting effect, it resolved knotty questions and simplified debates. A determined minority can have a decisive influence in a democracy, the more so if it keeps a low profile. This phenomenon is, often enough, used by forceful minorities, and, often enough, it is deplored by the disappointed majority. This quiet but powerful mechanism has not been studied sufficiently.

In London I had remained unincorporated so far as political parties were concerned, but I was an active member of the Inter-Hospitals Socialist Society, a forum of debate on matters of social medicine, frequented by anti-fascists of all sorts. All this is to say that I knew what a communist was - I was not politically naive.

The composition of the Unit had already been settled when, rather surprisingly, Lord Faringdon, an active Committee member, suggested that someone like Hugh O'Donnell, who for the previous few days had been doing odd jobs around the Aid Committee's Offices, would be worth considering. Such a generalist, so Lord Faringdon believed, might greatly strengthen the Unit. For the previous ten days, O'Donnell had been acting as messenger and expediter. While showing good will he had not been especially brilliant. Isobel Brown (a wonderfully warm personality later to become the British Passionaria of the Aid Spain movement) supported his recruitment, and I saw that special voltage pass around the meeting producing a positive consensus. I realised that Hugh O'Donnel was a CPGB nominee. No one raised any objection; in 1936 the Popular Front was real.

Lord Faringdon (Gavin Henderson, usually called Hendy by his Eton contemporaries) had returned, after a brief marriage which had been without issue, to the bachelordom that suited him better. His own particular version of the Marxist dialectic had enabled him to make a synthesis of Party discipline and the aristocratic vie du chateau. It seems that his butler had become convener of the Party Cell and had the responsibility for the agenda of its meetings, which took place in the library of Buscot Park. Legend had it that the butler would say at the end of dinner: "May I draw to his Lordship's attention that this evening there is a meeting in the Library," but once the meeting started the forms of speech became more appropriate. The butler would ask Comrade Henderson to read the minutes of the last meeting. I am not clear about the membership of this Party Branch; the butler chaired the meetings, and Comrade Henderson was the Branch Secretary. It is hard to believe it was organised on a factory model with a membership drawn from amongst the estate workers and the inside staff of that peer's country house. So far as the Spanish Medical Aid Committee was concerned, I always found Lord Faringdon quick at seizing the nuances of field situations and eminently helpful in solving practical problems.

On his recruitment O'Donnell became more matey; he told me that he was sure that he would be able to be of great help to me personally with the Unit's contacts with local bodies in Spain. I was naturally interested to learn more about his background and how his qualities had been forged and tempered. I was assuming that he had some Spanish language capacity as I'd always seen him around with a British Argentine volunteer who had been rejected on health grounds. In the event it turned out that he spoke nothing but English.

I did eventually learn something of O'Donnell's unusual job-history. He had been jailed for incitement to mutiny after distributing leaflets to airmen; his case had been aggravated by his display of a disloyal banner at the annual Hendon Air Force Show. He had built a certain reputation for 'agitprop', and, at the peak of his career, had enlivened the Jubilee carriage drives of Queen Mary and King George V to the Metropolitan Borough Town Halls. On these State occasions the Sovereign's route had always been decorated with flags and banderoles bearing loyal messages such as "GOD BLESS OUR KING AND QUEEN". Hugh O'Donnell had devised ways by which, at the pull of a string, the banderole would unwind to read "TWENTY FIVE YEARS OF HUNGER AND WAR". I learnt that this did not in any way upset the King. My authority lies in a statement made by the His Majesty himself which had inadvertently been broadcast by the BBC when a mike had been left alive at the end of the Royal visit to Stepney. King George the Fifth had always liked a bet; leaving the Town Hall the Sovereign said to the Queen, "I'll lay you two to one in half crowns there will be more than three on the way back," to which his Consort, who also liked a bet, had replied: "Taken."

I did not see much application in Spain for Hugh O'Donnell's talents, but it was clear that I was stuck with him. Once or twice I had noticed him to be the centre of a small group which changed the subject of conversation when I joined them. I did not fancy the risk of becoming subject to a concealed veto under his inspiration via a CP linkage, so I decided to go to the top. I had really come to like and to respect Isobel Brown (an open Communist who was the Secretary of the Committee for the Relief of the Victims of Fascism), so I told this approachable lady that before we left for Spain I wanted to meet Harry Pollit, the Secretary General of the CPGB. Isobel Brown replied that Pollit did not see anybody any day just like that, and I retorted in a rather flip way that neither did I go off to Spain any day, anyhow, just like that.

That evening Isobel Brown took me to the CPGB's King Street Headquarters. Harry Pollit, about whom I knew but little and whom I had never seen before, turned out to be a warm friendly man with a manner that made personal contact easy. He had with him someone called Campbell who, in contrast to Pollit, seemed curmudgeonly; I felt he disapproved of me and my accent. Since Pollit's manner encouraged the direct approach, I led off by saying that, as he probably must have heard, I was going to Spain with a medical unit supported by all shades of decent opinion in Britain. I felt that I had a very heavy reponsibility towards its members and towards those who were sending us. We were a small unit and I was not going to do anything behind the backs of its members. They would always know what was happening, and I needed to know that nothing would be going on behind my own back. Pollit commented that this seemed to him an entirely right attitude, but why did I feel the need to express it to him? An old hand, like Pollit, would not have returned the ball to an apprentice player like me unless he had wanted the rally to continue. Thus encouraged I went on to say that a party fraction was being established in the Unit and since I was sure that its members had the work as much to heart as the rest of us it was hard to see why it had seemed necessary to create it. I had nothing to hide and nor conceivably could they. I was ready to demonstrate this by making my administration entirely open. With one exception, everyone in the unit had either been pre-selected or approved, by me. Pollit asked who the exception was, and when I said O'Donnel, he let out a laugh in which Cambell did not join. As I did not seem to be getting very far I then played my only other card saying, "If you won't let them come out into the open let me come inside. Let me join you, as we can't have a Unit being pulled two ways". This did indeed provoke Cambell who was emphatic saying that the Party was not a darts club a man can just walk into at will when it suited him. To which I remarked that this was exactly what I felt about the Unit. Pollit seemed to be enjoying himself and came back with a friendly bit about the lad having a point. He went on to say that the Unit was a real Popular Front activity. He asked Campbell to get that well across to O'Donnel and, turning to me he said something like, "The world's very far from perfect. You'll have to take the rough with the smooth out there". Turning to Cambell he said, "I am going to give him something to show that, in the spirit of today, we trust him." To me he added, "Keep it in a safe place like inside your belt. Only use it if you really need to. The party will always back that Medical Unit; you've helped a lot by coming to see us". He went to his desk and typed a few lines, reciting them as he did so, requesting that I should be given every help. He signed it and put a rubber stamp on it. Then, to my surprise, he cut the document down to minimum size with a pair of scissors. When he put in my hands I realised that it was not typed on paper but on a piece of white silk.

That evening Mary Redfern Davies very neatly opened the seam of a leather belt and slipped in the little bit of silk. Until typing these words in 1995, the only people outside Pollit's office to know of the existence of that scrap of silk have been myself, Mary Redfern Davies and Thora Silverthorn. It is just possible that when O'Donnell was told to behave himself, he was also told that I was carrying a word from Harry Pollit. I was to have reason to consider this a year later.

So on the 23rd of August 1936 a friendly group of relative strangers, dressed in khaki drill from Millet's Army Surplus stores, arrived at Victoria Station. Our destination was Barcelona. For me it was a completely overwhelming occasion; I was dropping with physical fatigue. Seeing us off, we were faced with a galaxy of Mayors in their robes and chains, Trade Union Banners, the leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party Arthur Greenwood, and 10,000 others - all on parade. It was an immensely impressive experience for the staff of that First British Medical Unit. Our little group had not realised before that what we were doing was considered so important. Such a send-off provoked in us all the beginnings of our sense of collective responsibility. One thing that sticks out in my mind about that journey was the solicitude the railway men showed to us everywhere, in England as in France.

Our first stop was Paris where the railway men put us into the Hotel Terminus at the Gare du Nord. We had to stay over while arrangements were being made for our onward travel. Our transit was being assured by Leon Jouhaud of the Confédération Générale de Travaille. I was the only French speaker in our group, so I was asked to call on Victor Bache, that great protector of Human Rights, whom the Nazis were to murder only a few years later. He wanted to take me off to dine which I would have dearly liked, but when I explained that I had to look after the Unit, whose members were beginning to ask why we were in Paris at all, he teased me about the British Puritan Spirit. It was important to get the dose right. According to him, the French did not have enough of it, and we, the British, had far too much.

On the 25th of August 1936, our last in Paris, we were guests of honour at a monster Aid Spain meeting in the Stade Bufalo where some 30,000 people were shouting the slogan "Les Avions Pour L'Espagne". We had had star billing in the Stade Bufalo as we were the first Medical Unit, indeed the first organised group of volunteers of any sort, to be sent to help the Spanish Republic. I had been asked to speak and had a suitable bit ready, when the O'Donnell cloven-foot suddenly became visible. He asked what I was going to say. As I was due to take the mike in two or three minutes and as I was not without nerves, I said that I would tell him afterwards since I had no time to translate back the French text that I was going over in my head. O'Donnell decided to get the good word out at all costs and strode uninvited to the mike in front of me to say "a few words of introduction". He became carried away by the occasion and blocked the meeting for about ten minutes with a ranting discourse in English. The 30,000 cheered every time he took breath until one of the cheers was long enough for the Chairman to get him off the mike by shaking his hand. Then there was no time for me. One could but recall Mr. Gladstone's put-down to Disraeli: "The Honourable Gentleman is intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity". How he would shape up under service conditions was what bothered me.

We were all deeply touched by the massive impact of this meeting; it escaped none of us. That meeting's collective Presidency included Leon Jouhaux of the CGT, the leaders of the Socialist and of the Radical Parties, as well as André Malraux. Thorez spoke. It is worth remarking that the French CP was taking a very cautious line at this early stage. Thorez actually said, "Oui, nous communistes, nous sommes résolument pour la non-intervention. Nous considerons que le peuple d'Espagne est capable de liquider lui-même la rebellion.

But before our eyes was a flood-lit plane in the middle of the arena and the collection was to buy another. Thorez and the French Communist leadership were not yet anywhere near the spirit that was to lead to the formation of the International Brigade. Barcelona, on that old broad-gauge rail-track, could only be reached by changing trains at the Spanish frontier. As those from Paris lacked sleepers, the cheminotsI saw to it that we got complete carriages to ourselves on this next lap of our journey. We were all just getting to know each other, and this long train ride helped us to shake down and to get beyond the banalities of first contact. We had to spend the best part of a day and a whole night getting to the Spanish Frontier. We were all tired, but no one was bad tempered; as the night darkened we fell asleep like a litter of puppies. Next to me in the train was a Welsh nurse called Thora Silverthorn. After a while I found that as we all stretched out in our seats, Thora's head had come to rest on my shoulder. She was certainly fast asleep. It felt good and I too slept.

It was mid-morning when finally we got into Cerbère. An engineless Spanish train was standing at the other platform. We tumbled out and, as usual, found ourselves being looked after by the railway men. I was introduced to someone from the Front Populaire organisation of Cerbère. He had with him a young Catalan woman who was the local delegate of the PSUC. This was the start of our education into the acronymic labyrinth of Spanish politics. The Partido Socialista Unificada Catalunya (PSUC) was the main party in the Government of virtually autonomous Catalonia. Considering our absence of plan, that we were traveling without any sort of preliminary reconnaisance, and that I had no Ordre de Mission putting me into direct contact with a responsible level of Government, the Unit led a charmed life. We were young enough not to worry; the Trade Unions of every territory through which we passed vied with each other to help, and 'progressive forces' worked their old boy network in our favour. Those who helped us in 1936 were the very same people who were to make the French Resistance a reality five years later. I was very young. Cerbère was a sort of Limbo. The French had delivered us - the young lady from Catalunya had accepted the package but did not seen to know exactly what to do with it. There was no point sitting in a driverless train. As I was in charge, it was up to me to do something or at least to ensure a perspective of action, thus sustaining the Unit's morale which I could already see was far from monolithic. The Catalans from both sides of the frontier wanted to lay on a party - a vin d'honneur. Some of our number were already starting to grumble about the seeming impropriety of tippling instead of getting down to work. The only cure for unconstructive grumbling is activity, so I fixed with the cheminots that, as we needed to do a stores check, we ourselves would transfer the baggage and equipment into the still engineless Spanish train. The grumbler was put in charge of this and of writing a loading list. The rest of the Unit was divided between two English speaking Catalans for a mutual briefing on the Spanish situation and to give to these, our very first Spanish contacts, some news of the British reaction in their favour.

What models, the OTC apart, did I have to guide me, consciously or unconsciously, in running this Medical Unit? We all knew we were going into a war; all our equipment had been procured with this in mind - right down to our clothing which was British Army Surplus khaki drill. Many of our ideas, like our clothing, were left over from 1914-18 but at least this helped to give us an air of purposeful efficiency. The only reference model available in 1936, apart from the Great War which was still very much in people's minds, was Dr. Melley's Ambulance in Abyssinia at the time of the Italian invasion. Since very little had been said or written about the lessons of the Ethiopian campaign, we had been happy to recruit two ex- orderlies from Dr Melley's Ambulance. They were good ex-RAMC men but had little new to tell us. For me it was lucky that someone called Tom Wintringham got on to our train at Paris. He became a friend and stayed so for the rest of his life. At the end of the Great War he had been one of the millions demobilized who were not ready to return to the slot in Society from which they had come. His father had been a well-to-do Quaker solicitor in Hull, but his son had not been a pacifist. In 1918 he had ended up as a dispatch-rider. In 1920, once again a civilian, he got onto his faithful Douglas and motorcycled to Moscow. When he came back to England he settled into London's left wing intellectual life. His reasons for being on the train were not clear but, he was known as the man from the Daily Worker. His subsequent career shows him as a bit more than that. He helped to form the fist British Unit in the International Brigade. He became the military inspiration of the Home Guard in 1940 and went on, with Sir Richard Rees to found the Commonwealth Party which won a couple of Parliamentary seats on a social-democratic basis. In August 1936 at the Spanish frontier it was me whom Tom Wintringham was inspiring; only a short time later on the Aragon front it was from him that I was to learn my first lessons under fire. You do not forget someone who shows you how to stay alive. Fortunately on the Cerbère station platform, he was standing by. I told him that I was fed-up with the lack of engine and that I did not feel that the welcoming committee had grasped the fact that all we wanted to do was to go. I was pretty sure that what they were enjoying was our staying around to enliven their day.

I obviously needed advice and I got it. Tom suggested that I throw my weight around and tell the PSUC girl that I must see without any further delay the delegates of the French and the Spanish railway men. Once I got them together they had to be told that we must, repeat must, get to Barcelona that very afternoon, because the Unit was to be received by Lluis Companys, the President of Catalunya. This last was, of course, an inspired improvisation. I put on my cap and went off to see the Trade Union delegates. In a few minutes we were in the Station Master's office with the Frenchman, but on that day the Spanish Trade Union delegate was on his own side of the frontier. My saying that Cerbère was surely a Franco-Spanish station, so why was the Spanish element missing, provoked a lot of cross-talk which gave me the chance to say my bit about having to be in Barcelona that evening without fail. The French Trade Unionist sensibly transferred our meeting to the last signal box in France so that we could talk to the first signal box in Spain. Very rapidly all became clear;, the engine was at Port Bou waiting to be called forward. Engrossed as they were with the welcoming programme, no one in the Cerbère station had yet talked to Port Bou. In no time we were under way for Barcelona.

At the Frontier, I had been made very conscious of the absence of cohesion within our group, as well as of the uncertain nature of my own authority which did not as yet have the sanction of general consent from those over whom it would have to be exercised. I personally lacked the force that age, or previous public reputation, would have conferred. When we had been stuck in Cerbère, the personnel had shown a justifiable watchfulness; it would soon have verged into a discernable rejection had I failed to get the Unit moving forward into Spain. I realised that the next few days were all that I had to create an acceptable, and accepted, working discipline. We certainly would need to build some of that ésprit-de-corps that I had heard so much about at school.

Our Barcelona arrival was a frightening experience for me. We were tumultuously received. Our unit had immense political significance for the Spanish Republic. Since the start of Franco's revolt, our Unit constituted the first visible sign of collective international support. We were a group of photographable men and women in neat uniforms, proving that Spain was not alone. Most frightening of all was my growing realisation of the responsibility lying on me personally.

For me that first day in Spain was completed by a summons to the Generalitat - the medieval palace of the Government of Catalunya. I wondered if my Port Bou bluff had been called, but it was an enchanting, ethereal experience that in my mind's eye still seems magical. A young man called for me at our billets in the Hotel Lloret. He was dressed in a Catalan shirt with a crisscross lacing instead of buttons. He asked me to accompany him at once - Luis Companys the President of Catalunya wished to see me. As we drove to the Generalitat, he said in beautiful English how moved the President had been at the news of our arrival. He explained that it would not be possible for the interview to be other than extremely short but the President insisted on seeing the leader of the British Group personally.

My guide took me up the steps into the 17th Century garden court-yard of the Generalitat. We passed successive groups of guards. Some smartly gave the clenched-fist salute (PSUC Militia); two sailors presented arms and at the top of the steps someone dressed like an El Greco chamberlain led us through a rose garden with strolling peacocks to a corner of a cloister where, in a screened space, we were offered iced wine, mineral water and ratafia biscuits. In the longish wait, maybe forty-five minutes, we had time to talk. It became clear that my companion knew England well; his English was so good that he may in part have been educated there. Suddenly the El Greco Chamberlain came and led us in to the President's Office. Lluis Companys was immensely dignified while radiating an urbane and smiling welcome. He asked me to be sure that the Unit, and those who had sent it, should be told of the profound importance of their act of faith in the Catalan democratic cause ; he wanted me to know that he had given instructions that we should be given every facility, all I had to do was to ask Don Pepe. He hoped I had liked the claret which, in his view, was the only wine worth drinking between meals. On this he excused himself for his negligence as host; he would have liked to have entertained the whole British mission to dinner, but he counted on our understanding of the burdens of these difficult times so, alas, he must return to his Military Council. The phrases, admittedly, were those of a political intellectual of the old school, but clichés can also come from the heart and reflect a truth. Don Pepe had translated that musical but emphatic Catalan with professional grace but, as we strolled back through the enchanted peacock garden, he made one correction. We were speaking English, but I had called him, imitating the President, Don Pepe. He said "It is better to call me “Compañero” rather than “Don”. Just ring the switchboard and ask for me at any time; I really mean what I am saying". When I tried to learn more about him he said, "Names no longer count in Spain, more particularly today, when so many of us are separated by the war. I have family on the other side. Everyone here calls me Pepe". I wonder if 'Pepe' survived the defeat which, when we first met, was so unthinkable. In this civil war I could tell him my own name but he, for the sake of his kin on the other side, could not give me his. This original discretion started a half century of silence on my side. I have long since become reconciled to the sad probability that he too must have fallen but, should he still be with us, he will remember me as I remember him. I can but hope that by some happy miracle he may read these words and that once again we may drink clarete together in the Generalitat.

He saw me through the cordon of sentries saying that he thought we would all come to appreciate that the clenched fist salute was now a universal and uniting symbol in the Spanish Republic. The Unit got Luis Companys' message that night when I returned to the Hotel, excepting only Hugh O'Donnell who had gone out. Everyone was happy that at last we had arrived and that we had been made welcome. We decided that we would start each day with a staff meeting and finish it likewise. Our target was to get to work, to get to the front. Next morning at the meeting O'Donnell wanted to know why I had gone alone to see Companys. I said that it was he that wanted to see me and that even finding those few minutes had been very difficult for him. It was not a moment for visitors to impose themselves. As I had explained on returning the night before, the President was doing everything he could to underline his Government's appreciation of our presence. O'Donnell then suggested that I should have sought the agreement of our fellow volunteers in the Unit before going to see the President. I could only ask him to explain why he thought that the Administrator should not administrate and who, in his opinion, was the appropriate person to represent the Unit on occasions when, as had been the case the night before, it would be wrong for the whole group to present themselves.

O'Donnell fell into this pit of his own making, as he clearly wanted to perform tasks for which he was not suited. At the same time, he obviously had no wish to share the chores. He never gave any account of his absences and had not filled his space on the duty rosters we had set up in London and Paris; in that first morning meeting in Barcelona he lost any hold he might have made on the personnel of the Unit.

Stores and staff were beginning to arrive. Among the first new faces were those of Peter Spencer (Viscount Churchill) and of Stanley Richardson, whom the London Committee had recruited after our own departure. It is impossible to remember these two without remembering also some of their more outrageous goings-on. They are both dead so they cannot answer back. I had known Stanley at Cambridge. Without question he was a talented poet. He was also wildly gay and oddly innocent. Indeed I believe him to be unique in that he really and truly was once afraid that he was going to have a baby after a series of country walks he had been taking with a Rugby blue. I was amazed to see him arrive with Churchill even though they, quite evidently, had shared interests. Lord Churchill had been one of the aristocratic supporters of the Committee. Stanley Richardson I had not seen since Cambridge where he had been a brilliant Spanish scholar and had since become a superb interpreter. Despite their talents I doubted whether, either separately or together, they were suited to the current atmosphere of Barcelona. I was not entirely right, as I later found that Stanley went down surprisingly well with macho types, especially big, ferocious, pistol-toting anarchists while the left-leaning Viscount certainly pleased the communists. Stanley helped me to get a feeling for Spanish semantics; without him, my understanding of the language, and of Spanish ways of thinking, would have been dangerously low. For someone of Stanley's temperament it was not possible to be in a city like Barcelona and to go to bed early. In Catalonia, with his perfect Spanish, he would pass as a Castillian; he and Peter Spencer went out one evening, only to come back, at most a couple of hours later, after a brush with a Militia Patrol. The Militia must have been intrigued by their very bourgeois appearance. Stanley told me privately, "It was all Peter's fault, he tried to come over big. He should have left it to me, I could easily have managed them." It seems that they had discovered a Café with a night life that suited them. I told Stanley that we had not come to Spain for specialised pub- crawling to which he replied that he would certainly not go out with Peter again.

What in fact did happen was that Stanley went back alone to the Café in question, which turned out to be a resort of the Partida Obrera Unificada Marxista, the Trotskist grouping (POUM). Stanley told me that he had had a wonderful evening and had heard a lot of "terribly naughty conversation". It seems that the people in that place made fun of absolutely everybody and everything. He had met with great success in that café "because you see I know Llorca by heart and they were making spontaneous poetry, each table contributing a line with me throwing in a line of Llorca or one of my own". It was clear that this was the safe harbour of a broad anti-Stalinist wedge of the population, as well as being the meeting place of left-wing gays and other non-conformists. But fun though it may have been this second visit allowed Stanley to smell danger and he drew back. Soon after this Stanley took fright; in Barcelona the noise and the killings became too much for him and he went home. He himself died in the London Blitz. I was to have another glimpse of the Barcelona POUM on leave in November.

Peter Spencer had a very special background. He had been one of King Edward the Seventh's Pages-of-Honour, and his father had been Master of the Robes at King George the Fifth's Coronation. Peter himself had then been a very young General Staff Officer in the Great War. His gift to me was a post-graduate course in map-reading. I had started with my father, done a bachelor's course in the OTC but with Peter I was with a master. When we were trying to site the Unit's first hospital he taught me how to squeeze the last bit of truth out of a map. It was Lord Churchill who found the Grañen site of our first hospital with its road and rail support, its river and its favourable position on the Huesca front.

I often think of Peter with pleasure when I open a map, but otherwise I feel less charitable. When he was going back to London from Barcelona, I lent him a set of keys to my flat. He did not in any way leave it as he had found it; we were not to meet again until sometime in the 1970s. I learnt later that the Committee had much trouble with the expenses he incurred while traveling. He not only had to go everywhere by First Class, he could only use the best hotels and he also needed a cash float for which no accounting was ever vouchsafed. As in fact he would have been some sort of Great Uncle to Princess Diana I regret he did not survive long enough to enliven the journalistic treatment of that family's affairs.

Compañero Pepe had sent us an attaché called Pujol. He was dressed in the blue mono--the workman's overalls, that had become the uniform of the Catalan refusal of Franco. His function was to see that we got around without bother. Peter Spencer and I needed to go on reconnaissance to find where best to implant the Unit. The idea of attaching us to a hospital in Barcelona was much favoured by some of those who had sent Pujol to us, and even more so by that man himself. The more Pujol said that it was crazy to go to the ill-defined front, the more we were all determined to do so. We had not come out to Spain to sit down well away from the action. Pujol had lived in the USA where he had gained his only strong point - his excellent American English. The Generalitat had also sent us a car. Compañero Pepe had told me that the driver was responsible to me and that I was not to lend it to anyone outside the Unit, and never was I to allow Pujol to go out alone. There were road blocks all over the place; some manned by Anarchist Militia, some by POUM and some by PSUC. The first two groupings were inclined to liberate property from individual hands for communal use by their own comrades, but once they got to know you and your vehicle they would greet you, waving you through their barrages. I considered us to be immune from arbitrary requisitioning. So I went off with Pujol and the driver to reconnoitre the western exits of the city. I did not want to spend valuable time the next day arguing our way round barrages when Peter Spencer and I set out to find the best point of implantation for our Unit.

We were exploring the short cuts to get to the inland highway and found ourselves in the bleak western suburbs on a semi-rural strip winding up the side of a hill. A man was lying on the side of the road, Pujol screamed, "Let's get the Hell out of here!" I motioned to the driver to stop. The man was dead - the coup-de-grace had left a hole in the center of his forehead. Pujol became hysterical. "Get the fucking-hell out of here, you'll have us all shot." The dead man had bled copiously from body wounds into the dust. I had never seen a violent death before, still less one from bullets. Pujol was beside himself, while the Generalitat driver took it cooly, remarking (so far as my school Latin plus French let me follow) that it was certainly the Anarchists who had done it. As to the reasons for the execution - Quien sabe? Matar es muy facil.

We called it a day and went back to the Hotel Lloret in silence. Pujol did not turn up the next morning. Peter and I waited around for an hour, then I rang Pepe. He said not to bother and anyhow he thought it better for us to put off the trip for a day and to go without Pujol. He suggested we get on the road at 4:30 am; our driver was reliable and the main check points would be warned of our movement. As for language, he said we would get by in French and our uniform would be a good passport, we had the Union Jack and the Red-Cross on our brassards. The one thing I did not have was an alarm clock. Personally I can wake up without fuss at any given time after dawn, but before first-light I have never been reliable. I was asking around when Thora, who was duty-officer, told me to leave the problem with her. That evening she said she would call me at 4 am and would bring some coffee from the Hotel kitchens, and I then could call Peter. It was pitch dark when Thora's hand shaking my shoulder woke me the next morning. She had three mugs of steaming coffee; we drank ours - Peter got his only luke-warm. While his coffee was cooling Thora and I were both beginning to understand that we were going to be of great importance to each other. The only map Peter and I had been able to get was a Michelin 1:200,000 on which, as we drove towards Lerida, we tried to position the front. All that we knew for certain was that Franco had Huesca while we held Barbastro and Tardienta. Peter kept asking me to show on the map where I thought we ought to base the Unit and to give him my reasons for the choice. In the end he said that there was no choice at all, there was but one satisfactory site: Grañen. Why Grañen? In Peter's words the answer was on the map. Everything we needed to know was there - all I had to know was how to read it.

Grañen was close up to the front against an enemy with no artillery. A fanwork of roads and tracks led back from the front while there were three roads leaving the village for the rear. It was on the railway line to Saragossa, which might one day prove useful and, moreover, it was a market town. Why did Peter think it was a market town and anyway what had that got to do with us? Such a network of roads and tracks showed. Grañen to be a place of resort for the whole country-side, it simply must a market-town inevitably having a blacksmith, a mason, a carpenter, a well digger and who knows what other artisan skills. Moreover, Peter insisted, there must be at least one big house we could requisition. All of these suppositions were, in the event, fully born out plus a great deal more.

Amongst the extras figured the fact that Grañen was an anarchist fief, an island in a sector otherwise held by PSUC militia under Del Bario, the socialist Trade Union leader. His militia was composed of the workers who had left the Barcelona factories with the guns the Government had put in their hands when the Army revolted. The points where they confronted the Army of Franco marked the Aragon Front.

It was only when I had left Grañen for the Madrid Front, after working there for four months, that I realised the importance of a vital factor that had not been covered in Peter's percipient map-analysis. In the Grañen zone, the even tension between the Anarchist FAI and the Socialist PSUC, had had the effect of conferring on us a remarkable independence because neither Party could risk swallowing us while the other was looking. This even political tension gave us respite and the time to earn a viability based on an evident good performance. While the outward stance of the Frente Popular was solid against the Falange its interior relations were full of nuance. The doctrine of Anarchy may have its noble abstract beauty but it is not easy to live with. We were very lucky to have got off as lightly as we did in Grañen. When, on the very day of Franco's revolt, the first anti-fascist coordinating committee was convened in Barcelona by Lluis Companys, the attitude of the Party delegations symbolised the real state of affairs. Lluis Companys came in to take the chair, so the Izquierda Catalana delegation (his own party) stood up, the United Communists and Socialists stirred in their seats and half stood, while the Anarchists remained seated. As the meeting broke up, Durutti, the Anarchist chief, is reported to have said of the elegant Companys, "Tell him to stay at home. If I have to listen to him again I shall fill him full of holes."

We the volunteer crew of that Spanish Medical Aid Unit, were far from being an homogenous group; none of us had ever worked together beforehand; we lacked a common culture and in fact were a very mixed lot. As this diversity leaps into my mind's eye it still strikes me as an asset. In our very different ways we each had our own unique contribution. I wish I could write about them all.

Nurse Bird must have been about forty years old in 1936. She had been in an ambulance unit in the Great War when she must have been a pretty blond kid. Naturally, she wanted to use her previous experience, and it was she who went up to the Front with the stand-by ambulance. She gave to us all an example of quiet courage. I still think of her as exemplary and picture her, a bit weather beaten without make-up but somehow young, leaning against the Bedford's radiator, sharing a fag with one of our two Cockney drivers - both Charlies. At first we found her tough-guy stance touchingly engaging; it grew more pronounced when she acquired a pair of breeches and spoke with her cigarette in her mouth. Then she got a pistol in her belt which I had to ask her to return to its donor (the Geneva Convention etc said "no") but in the end we realised that her 1914-18 nostalgia had deeper roots. Her hair shortened into a butch cut and she moved into a sheltering recess in the dormitory with Lisl, a German volunter nurse from Barcelona. Harry Forster was a magnificent improviser; he doubled as steriliser, electrician, plumber and quarter-master. He had a genius for brewing-up tea at the right moment. He kept our two Charlies from creating too much hell; they were a couple of lorry drivers who had come out mostly for a lark. They were interested in girls, but picking up female company in Grañen needed another technique than theirs. They resented attempts to discipline them but their hearts were certainly in the right place and they never let us down when the Front was active.

Thora Silverthorne, our Operating Theatre Chief Nurse, had been born into a large mining family in Abertillery. She was about my age. In the 1920s her father had been an early recruit to the Communist Party and had been active in that now vanished culture of the Welsh valleys. He had had a fine singing voice; his interests went much wider then politics. Thora had been bright at school and had been selected by her father's Union Lodge to be sent to Moscow with a scholarship to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. She decided for herself that she wanted to be a nurse so she went instead to the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. She had been steeped in three cultures: native Welsh Radical practice and thought, modern Medicine and, thirdly, that general awareness with its self-confident boldness, its refusal of unthinking convention, that in those days was the main result of residence in Oxford or Cambridge. She could just as well have ended up gracing a Master's Lodge as behind the Secretary General's desk of a major Trade Union. She would never have been a success as an apparatchik.

It was of course inevitable that I should fall in love with Thora; all-in-all we behaved responsibly. We were only a few kilometres from an active war front. Our daily work told us that bullets kill, when there are plenty around it alters the perspectives of emotional life. We both worked extremely hard, without leisure for any sweet dalliance. Thora. was outstandingly competent. Her social ease and her care for her neighbour put her above fault. She had a clear bright eye with a wonderful freshness of attention, plus a quality of instinctive understanding of other peoples feelings, which made her social relationships successful. All this encased in Celtic good-looks made me a very privileged man. In a corresponding measure, our quite unconcealed relationship provoked more sympathy than criticism. The fact that the Unit had been successfully implanted, that it served a real function, and had not been the subject of political, medical or military catastrophe, was due to the quality of the collective work of the twenty or thirty, mostly young, people concerned. This had to be orchestrated by the Administrator. He was criticised, but no one else showed any ambition to replace him. Such toleration owed much to the fact that I had understood early in my life that orders will not be followed unless the person who gives them is capable of carrying them out himself. I therefore took an active part in all the fatigues and jobs incidental to setting up and running the hospital. Another factor was the very sense of commitment which had provoked our staff to volunteer in the first place. The inspiration behind this had varied sources; there were some quiet Quakers; there were some sons and daughters from the solid old democratic working class that, in those days, gave weight to the Trade Union and Cooperative movements.

There were also the communists, numerically not a major element, some of whom were inspirational and here I think of Aileen Palmer. Aileen was the child of Nettie (Janet Higgens) and Vance Palmer of the Melbourne Independant Theatre which put them both into the Australian literary pantheon. She had an acute sense of duty and put her whole being into her work. She had no special skills, but she would turn her hand to anything, using any spare moment to act as secretary and record keeper. In action, she kept the register of admissions and of discharges - whether these latter were by evacuation to the rear or by exitus lethalis, by death.

Aileen therefore became the custodian of the effectuos de los muertes those pathetic little bundles of treasured objects that were all that remained of the material and emotional existence of a once living lively man. When there was any trace of his origins, Aileen wrote a letter to his family but mostly there was a name without an address, a cigarette lighter and some photos all wrapped in a handkerchief or in a pouch together with a knife. The thought of these poor treasures, piled on the shelf behind Aileen's desk, still tugs at my heart as does the knife lying on my desk that she gave me from that sad and modest store. From this same source we also re-equipped those discharged casualties who would otherwise have left our hospital with nothing they could call their own. Aileen was indeed of the stuff of the Saints - but there was nothing transcendental in her make-up; she was a marxist but not a party fanatic. Preaching did not interest her, action did. Had Aileen been born a few hundred years earlier, she would been a Franciscan or a Carmelite. Coming to Spain in 1936 had enabled her vocation to flourish and her devotion to be expressed in the "apostolate of works", as her predecessors would have called it. She was so convinced that she was ugly that she punished her femininity by neglecting her appearance; Thora would tease and chivvy her into taking minimum care of herself and of her looks. Aileen, whose only indulgence was in continuous cigarette smoking, showed a very sweet protectiveness towards Thora and myself. She loved seeing Thora happy and this made her tolerant about us.

I was fortunate to have Tom Wintringham with me when I went up late in the afternoon on my first front-line reconnaissance. We drove our Bedford truck some three kilometres up a sunken lane and came to a bombed cottage just beyond the safe limit for farming. There we had left our truck as Tom said "Why make a present of it by bringing it into a target zone.” Spread-eagled in the wreckage of the roof-truss was the body of a woman, of the housewife of this peasant home, who had been dead sometime. We stopped a moment and for the first time in my life I experienced that cruel smell. Further up this sunken lane was our rendezvous point - the Thaelman Centuria's field kitchen. A Polish ex-seaman called Abrasha ran that field-kitchen. He turned out to have sailed under the British flag and liked to air his English. Whenever he served food or even a cup of coffee, he would say, "Eat yr bloody brkfus!" For greeting and for leave taking he used his other English phrase - "bugger off".

There was a dry gulley, leading up from Abrasha's kitchen to the Thaelman's Command Post, which gave a fully protected approach to the right flank of their position. We went up and, needless to say, they were delighted to have the better medical support our Unit would provide. The bother was that the way over to their left flank had little natural protection. Once you got there it was a good position but getting in and out of it had to be done quickly as the approach was open to enemy observation. The Thaelman volunteers went over by ones and twos in the day, but they relieved and serviced their left flank only at night. Evacuating a serious casualty by such a route would have been inviting trouble so we decided to go across to this position and see if there was not a more logical track back to the bombed cottage which lay several hundred metres to their rear.

Talking to the Thaelmann's Commander, we mentioned the corpse. He gave immediate orders for some men to go and make the cottage decent while we went up to the start point for reaching that left flank. Tom told us to cross the open ground, one by one, our guide going first as he knew the way. Tom went second, zig-zaging a bit to show me how. Tom thought that the hundred or so metres of open ground were not very well covered from the fascist lines and, anyway, the sun was in their eyes. The no-mans-land between the lines must have been between four and six hundred yards wide. Away we went, the guide sailed over with no hostile response; Tom took off on a different course; I heard two distant single shots just as he jumped into the trench on the other side.

A moment later I stood up, still undercover. A few paces later I was trotting across the dry field; a. little stubble was still showing; I could just see Huesca and its church tower over to my right. I then heard some very noisy wasps as I changed my direction. In turning I lost sight of Huesca, more wasp noises, some dirt kicked up a few paces away from me. Then it looked as though a stone had bounced five or six times in the dirt to my right and I realised that someone was firing at me. As I dropped full length I heard Tom shout, "Get down! GET DOWN!" My new horizon allowed me to see Tom. while an almost invisible ridge cut off all vision on the hostile Huesca side and hid me from the marksman. I had been exhilarated but suddenly a trembling took over my whole body. Those shots had been aimed at me as an individual. A few deep breaths, and I waved at Tom. He was within easy shouting, almost talking, distance - it was but the proverbial cricket-pitch separating us. "Keep your head and bum down, creep over." I did so and was glad to get across those few yards. Tom said that I had showed good judgment in choosing to drop where I did. I replied that this was nonsense; at first I had not understood that I was being fired at and when I did I had quite simply become a frightened animal hugging the ground.

Exactly, replied Tom, “It's the wise use of the animal in us that allows the soldier to survive.” The utility of posting an ambulance in the sunken lane behind Abrasha's kitchen had been demonstrated. We found a safe track from the Thaelman's left flank back to the bombed cottage where a grave had by then been dug for the housewife. Tom's reasonable way of sharing his old-soldier experience soon afterwards persuaded the Thaelman to cut a communication trench to connect their two flanks.

A few days later the first drip-dry cotton any of us had ever seen was hanging in the Grañen hospital garden. It belonged to an American free-lance journalist called Kitty. She dressed smartly and neatly in practical "sporty" clothes. She had come to have a look at us, because Tom Wintringham had told her that there was a good story waiting to be written on the Huesca front. She later became Kitty Wintringham; by 1938 their coming together was to result in Tom being expelled from the British Communist Party.

Tom's fault was maintaining personal relations with elements considered undesirable by the CPGB which dated from the very week of my baptism of fire. It was the arrival of Kitty that did it. Tom was only fifteen years older than me, but I had read very widely and was in some ways older than my own twenty three. This meant that we could talk together on a plane that helped us both. Tom's conclusions, after a few weeks of Spain, were clear-cut and definite. In war, as in boxing, amateurs can only win a fight against professionals by scoring a knock-out in an early round. In the case of Spain, the amateurs were not making a full-time job of fighting the enemy; they were taking time off for fighting each other. The rivalry of PSUC and the FAI was ruinous. The foreign volunteers were tragically amateur. Who could imagine that the Thaelmann Centuria Germans were from a great military nation? They had good morale, they were risking their lives, but their lines were a slum and all military initiative was left to the enemy. Tom wrote a paper in September 1936 suggesting that international volunteers must show real military expertise. To use foreign volunteers for their journalistic impact on non- Spanish public opinion might be politically useful, but such amateurs would not change the military position. He wanted the Central Committee of the British Communist Party to reach a mature appreciation of the military position because he thought that the working-class movement's current reaction to the Civil War was altogether lacking in realism.

For Tom Winteringham, the Popular Front should be showing professionalism in military matters. International military assistance should be as professional as was the medical assistance. He was asking for an International Brigade of ex-servicemen. He got Kitty to take his report back to King Street (the CPGB H/Q) where she was to put it directly into the hands of Harry Pollitt, the Secretary General of the British Communist Party. The risk of mailing it from Spain was certainly far too great, but the choice of Kitty as a courier for this 'high security' tract was in fact a tactical error. Kitty was a college-girl archetype - leggy with a swinging walk, bottom in and bust out even though she did not have much of either. Her quick-fire, clear, zesty, American speech came out of a neatly lipsticked mouth which was set in a young self-confident face. I suppose she was then just less than 30 years old. So Kitty hurtled back to London arriving at Victoria Station early one morning feeling pretty beat up. She wanted to do a good job for Tom. Her background told her that a beat-up girl does not get as good a hearing as one who looks on top of the world. For a good hearing in King Street in 1936 this was a wrong. Led by her mistaken intuition, Kitty went straight from Victoria Station to the Bond Street Elisabeth Arden and gave herself the works: sauna, full facial, hairdo, and no doubt put on a clean drip-dry swirly skirt.

On the top of her form, she took King Street by storm. She certainly laid them all flat, but with the wrong emotions. A month or so later I had her side of the tale; she said that only one person in King Street knew how to smile but he worked with a sour-puss. They were glad to get Tom's report, but they did not seem to want any discussion. She also had taken the chance to tell them that they ought to make better financial arrangements for Tom in Spain, as he was quite evidently short of money.

A secondary source later indicated to me that Tom's lawful wedded wife, a party-member of standing, had been in King Street on the morning that Tom's dispatch was delivered. Kitty's mere presence, to say nothing of her Elizabeth Arden aura, must have served to confirm all the earlier traveller's tales. In those days a certain greyness, a quakerish sobriety, an evident renunciation of the superfluous, was reckoned as becoming to females with Party links. Poor Kitty must have exemplified the very licentiousness of the class-enemy, the bourgeoisie. Tom had certainly chosen Kitty as courier because he knew that she would get there, through Hell or high-water, without fail. What he failed to see was that her appearance, and her frank drive, would serve to weaken the force of his dispatches. He had not yet come to grips with Stalinist mediocracy; a characteristic so well demonstrated by O'Donnell. Right at the beginning of this account I mentioned how much, as a child, my generation missed that cohort of younger uncles who had all been killed in the 1914-18 war. As we grew older we had somehow transferred our resentment to the soldiers who had survived. This was on an entirely subconscious level, but it is a fact that my Cambridge generation was unsympathetic to tales of the trenches etc. Armistice Day was held by many to be a reactionary device which had failed to bamboozle that majority of the Oxford University Union when they voted that: "This House is in no event prepared to fight for King and Country". 'Progressive elements' held that anyone heading for the army must be both unintelligent and reactionary. My membership of the Royal Horse Artillary OTC had. been criticised. In fact it gave me access to a military treasure house.

All this is to say that no one on the left tried to understand Military Science. Instinctively the British left- wing was anti-militarist and pacifist in its reactions. But in 1936, we had to face a war that had to be fought, not in the parliament of words, but on the battle-field with bullets. Gandhi might have been able to do otherwise, but, neither in Spain, nor later against Hitler, was there anything else for Europeans to do but to fight. War is a science; tactics and strategy are the subject of a valid and honourable intellectual discipline. It is no good having Political Commissars if all they do is sermonise like Marxist chaplains. Tom was starting to penetrate the whole problem of the people's army at war. It's a pity he was so little understood before 1939. Tom made significant contributions to military science. His Osterly Park Home-Guard Training School (which he ran with Hugh Slater, a former International Brigade Chief of Staff) heralded the British tactical break-through of the 1940s.

By early October our Medical Unit was up to full strength and the Grañen hospital was well established. Rural Spain had virtually no medical service apart from the barber practicante, and the Popular Front Militia was little better off. We therefore, by comparison with our surroundings, shone as an oasis of excellence. We were, de facto, the medical service of the Thaelmann Centuria, which had a very strong German Communist political backbone. Ludwig Renn used to come and see us every now and again. More frequently we used to be visited by a young man called Hermann whom Thora mothered. He was often disheartened, particularly by the seemingly relentless and doctrinaire political leadership that would give him extra fatigues for his ideological shortcomings. Partly because few of us spoke Spanish, we lived a very introverted life. We were but a random grouping of volunteers, and we had a crisis of democracy. In moments of external tension, when the front was very active, a line of command was accepted. By common consent I was allowed to make immediate decisions, but when we fell on quieter spells, there were meetings and bickerings about the food, the lack of newspapers, why we were in Aragon and not at Madrid, or why we were not doing more for civilians. In Grañen, as autumn faded into winter, we headed towards a crisis of authority. We had had a long lull at the front. The novelty had worn off and the material inconveniences of life in a primitive village bore down heavily on us all.

One volunteer was especially critical of all aspects of our implantation on the Aragon front. He developed paranoid suspicions, thinned down plaster to listen through walls and feared a conspiracy to silence him. There was certainly plenty to question - we were after all in a Civil War. Moreover we were terribly isolated in that utterly austere Aragon plateau. A state of internal dissent must have become visible because we were suddenly faced with a Visitation. I received a message from the Barcelona Office, which housed O'Donnell, Peter Spencer and a Spanish speaker called Rosita Davson, that we were soon going to be inspected by someone from the Hotel Colon - the H/Q of the United Socialist and Communist Party. We were told to be helpful; as this message did not seem to be specially important we thought no more about it. It had come to us via a Dr Edith Bone.

Dr Bone was in her early forties - a wonderful woman, dressed invariably like a Gibson Girl with trim leather belt, light-blue shirt and long dark-blue skirt. She was always hard at work with her Leica and spoke beautiful English with a fine Viennese accent. She went everywhere; she was always alone and seemed to know everybody. I never understood her status or functions. When she was asked by Thora (or maybe by me) for some insight into this inspection, she replied that she was going to break a self-imposed rule, and she would risk giving us some advice. "Someone in the Hotel Colon is being disobliging about your Unit in general and about you two in particular. There is no halfway house with the people you will be seeing; you either bow before the wind like grass in summer or you stand up straight as a tree and tell what you see as the facts without intellectualising." She told us that we both needed a rest. We had to get to Barcelona when this inspection was over. She would see to it that we were put up in comfort. The visitation when it came had dual leadership. First there was Ralph Bates, author of the "Olive Tree", whose wife Winifrid was to be immensely helpful to us later. He was wearing a uniform of a deep burgundy colour which displayed no badges or rank-markings. In reply to my enquiry, he said that it was the uniform of a Political Commissar and that his rank was such that it could not be expressed in gold braid. He certainly wore his rank lightly, as he took no part whatsoever in the subsequent proceedings. The second element was Hans Beimler who had been a leading communist deputy in the Reichstag and became the Political Commissar of the 11th (Thaelmann). Brigade. He had immense prestige within international Communist circles and later fell in action on the Madrid front. We all sat down in the mess-room recreation space.

Beimler set to with imposing authority and without any preliminary greeting. His words were heavily translated, word-for-word, by a female German comrade who seemed scared of loosing the slightest mite of meaning. She spoke slowly, checking back with him on several occasions. Beimler's voice indicated the shades of his meaning by heavy changes of emphasis and of tone. The interpreter trudged on with monotonous weight. Two of the leaders of the Thaelmann Centuria had come down from the front; they looked oddly uneasy. Beimler was clear. "We are here to fight the fascists, and you are wasting time fighting each other; if this continues you shall be sent back to wherever you came from." Hans Beimler's interventions in the Reichstag had been famous, but there was no oratory in what he had to say to us. He worked around his theme a few times which, while it reflected a certain truth, overstated our faults and neglected our positive qualities in such a hard-line manner as to be singularly unendearing.

Hans Beimler finally asked if any comrade wished to add to what he had had to say. There was a long silence. I remembered Edith Bone's advice about standing up straight and telling the facts as I saw them without intellectualising. So I got up and said that what Comrade Beimler had been totally logical but, before the meeting closed, I would like to suggest that he have someone check the kilometer readings on our ambulances which would convince him that they had not been idle. He might also have a word with Comrade Aileen, who would show him the Registers where he would find how many wounded and sick we dealt with each day. "We may talk too much but we do also work". His interpreter translated me sentence by sentence; I was very much shorter than he had been. There was another silence. No atmosphere of collaborative discussion had been generated. We got up; Hans Beimler said he would eat with the Thaelman at the front. This gave me the chance to say that we too appreciated Abrasha's cooking and that he would find our Ambulance crew up there if, as had been my own experience, he got shot at. We shook hands and our eyes met for the first time. Once you met them, his eyes were in fact both penetrating and kind. I noticed that at least one of his fingers was clubbed and bent with the nail wrongly set; I later learnt that this was a legacy from Gestapo interrogation.
The intellectual bomb he had been carrying went away defused. Subsequently, our awe-struck silent friends from the Thaelmann told us that over Abrasha's meal Hans Beimler had spoken well of us and that they had told him how valuable the Unit's services were to the Centuria.

Soon after these events, the Hotel Colon issued a directive to the Communist Party ordering fraction work to stop. The Popular Front was to be supported openly by the Party and the sin of sectarianism was to be reprimanded with vigour. Thora and I learnt of all this when we went on our four days leave to Barcelona. Thanks to Edith Bone, we were lent a stylish apartment in the Diagonal, that broad avenue sweeping down to the Plaza de Catalunya. We had never before been alone for more than a few hours and during those days in Barcelona we decided that working together and living together was what we were both made for. Edith Bone mothered us. She said that Hans Beimler had been angry with certain comrades whose sectarian behaviour had caused him to waste his time. The apartment into which Edith had put us must have been "liberated" from a previous occupant whose art-deco taste had lent the place an unreality to the eyes of two visitors from the Aragon plateau. There were flowers in the bedroom with its double divan and built-in shelves. On my side there was a bottle of drinking-water; on the other side Thora had found a box of Elvas plums wrapped in silver paper. They brought back memories of Fortnum Mason so I encouraged her to try one. No sooner had she popped one in her mouth than it generated a copious foam. Edith Bone had indeed thought of everything, those plums were in fact German contraceptive pessaries.

Edith Bone carried with her all those little personal ways that, in her age-group, betrayed a cultured well-to-do upbringing. I wish I knew more about her early days. She was independent minded; it seems that she had just qualified as a doctor in Vienna when the Great War ended. She had been born into the privileges of that Hapsburg Empire against which she had rebelled but which had certainly marked her own personality with its urbane and good-humoured gemütlichkeit. Somehow, I believe via Bela Kuhn's short lived Hungarian rule, she had got to Moscow. She had worked in Russia as a doctor during the Volga famine and had walked back most of the way to Austria. As the fascist flood advanced in central Europe, she managed to keep afloat through the later 1920s and into the early 1930s when, as she said, "I decided that I needed a more reliable passport". This she got by coming to England and marrying Mr Bone. When I asked about him she said that she did not know him well, he had been polite, obliging and no trouble at all. Edith Bone must have been born about 1890 in Budapest with the golden gift of survival. We had got to know her in Barcelona but our ways were not to converge again until she turned up in London during the blitz. Her presence told me at once that the war was as good as won. Despite her wonderful courtesy she was a born fighter with an unbeaten score of victories. She was accustomed to surviving against the odds. When in 1956 she emerged from a Hungarian Stalinist jail, I should really have known that something good was bound to happen. I did not realise that what she had been waiting and working for what was to be called 'glasnost' thirty years later. Sadly she did not to live to see it.

In the evenings, during that short Barcelona leave made possible by Edith Bone, we would join the paseo, strolling down the Ramblas to have the luxury of iced vermouth in a new café each time we stopped. We would have been dressed in the mechanics mono, the standard wear of all the world, just and unjust, worst and best. Collars and ties were not to be seen on any one under fifty. On our last evening of leave we spotted a free table on a café terrace in the shade of one of the older houses on the lower part of the Ramblas and made for it quickly.

We had barely sat down when a microphone was lowered from the first floor balcony to come to a stop at the very center of our table just at the level of our foreheads. A young woman in very thick spectacles pulled up a chair to our table and three Vermouths arrived simultaneously. Speaking good English she told us that this was the microphone of Radio Verdad, the only broadcasting service that used reality in preference to make-believe.

We chatted away about this approach, so reminiscent of Tsiga-Vertov's attempts to make dramatic films using the unscripted truth garnered by concealed cameras in the Moscow of the early 1920's. It took months of lurking behind bushes in the Parks, to get the love scenes they needed. I found it hard to believe that this technique was readily adapted to Radio.

The girl had identified us as belonging to the British Medical Aid Unit, and we had talked briefly about our work. I said that I was not really ready to do an interview when she said, "But you have, that is the whole principle; you have gone out live, this is the POUM station. We not only believe in liberty but we practice it." As we left I realised that this Café, in its indoor night-time configuration, must have been the gay rendezvous that Stanley Richardson had discovered soon after our arrival in Barcelona.

Considering that Trotsky was the POUM's Patron Saint, nothing would have condoned our speaking on their heretical Radio. We both kept our mouths shut about our lapse. It went unremarked, so perhaps Radio Verdad not only lacked a studio but also listeners. Stanley Richardson's café had been the resort of free and dissident intellectuals who, while they may have been antifascist, would at the best have been dispersed a few months after our visit during the CP's violent liquidation of the POUM.

Thora and I had become a solid pair. In the 1930s the live-in girl-friend was rarer than it is today. To the Spaniards, Thora was my compañera and I her compañero. The anarchists in particular practiced faithful and monogamous free unions, the partners turning their backs upon the church and living together with the blessing of their own community.

Peasants, who were nominal believers, not infrequently neglected the marriage rites for a matter of years, either because they were too poor to face the expense of a church marriage, or because of the distance, both geographical and psychological, between them and the Catholic Church. Thus, in Spanish eyes generally, amongst younger intellectuals as well as with the Militia, we as a couple were very much reflecting the spirit of those times and we were far from being alone in our marital status - or lack of such. Inside the London Committee a consensus had formed that this was our private affair as together and separately we were doing a good job.

I had in no sense forgotten Truda. In mid August, just before leaving London, I had written to tell her that I would be away for the rest of the summer. I had even thought it realistic to say that my absence might well amount to as much as three months. Now here I was in late October committed to a task with a perspective stretching into the next year. I got further word to her, telling her honestly about my new situation. When only ten or twelve weeks back, Mary Redfern Davis and I had made up that first supply list in Henneky's, the time allotted to Spain was that needed to drink a couple of sherries. Now Spain had become, in a quite literal sense, my life. While working to make a success of the Medical Unit, something else had happened: all my other loyalties, pleasing my parents, finishing my studies, my life in London, had sunk below the horizon. Such was the aura of those times that I had become a part, a minute part, of the Spanish Civil War. All else had become secondary and, along with it all, Truda too, had receded. My whole energies went in this new direction where they joined those of Thora. Being with her, as her partner at work and as her lover, was therefore a complete fulfillment of all I then felt and of all that I then was. It is only now, fifty eight years later, that I see in this state of mind a parallel with the commitment shown by the Children of the Souls and that whole generation of uncles at the Somme. There is no repining when you know that the place you are in is uniquely right for you. That was my position in 1936.

The two of us, Thora and myself, had comparable levels of maturity so far as life and love were concerned. Thora had infinitely greater political experience, but her good Welsh blood did not allow her to abandon her feelings and to be coldly logical. We were very different, but we met as equal human beings. As lovers and as comrades-in-arms we shared our all between each other. We made ourselves, and a lot of other people, happy. It was not Dubcek who invented Marxism with a human face; that was around in Wales before he was born.

Thora was much braver than I because she was afraid. By some psychosomatic quirk I got used to the risks of war. Thora did not, but she would master her physical reactions and kept her head (thus helping others to do the same), even when the ground shook with bombing - as it did, one night I shall never forget, when we were bivouacked near Aranjuez.

When Thora and I got back to Grañen, we found that the Huesca front was becoming progressively quieter. The center of gravity of the war had moved to Madrid. The International Brigades were coming into being and most of us, excepting the good quiet Quakers, felt that to be efficient we had to become a part of the Republic's organised Army. The alternative would have been for the London Committee to create a supply pipe-line for the Unit's total needs--medical supplies, food and petrol. We could no longer hope to maintain our earlier independent status, which had been based on the assumption of a short war and the free gift from the Spanish local authorities of food and domestic necessities for both staff and patients. The London Committee was out of step with the thinking of those living inside the realities of this civil war--this was as much my fault as theirs. My own reporting cannot have been sufficiently detailed, and I had certainly been relying too much on visitors interpreting our position; I had also assumed that O'Donnell in the Spanish Medical Aid's Barcelona Office had a liaison function. This may well have been so, but it must have been political rather than operational. My later experience, in both military and in United Nations/UNICEF/WHO situations, has shown me that to keep even a small group in the field requires the employment of about the same number of support personnel at the base. We were some twenty five in the field and there were only three full time staff in London. Certain Committee members, for example Christina Hastings, the lovely Countess of Huntingdon, were putting their whole energies into Spanish Medical Aid, but their efforts were not expressed in detailed staff-work. I now can see that in fact everyone had bitten off much more than they could chew. It was just as well that we had been so blind; had the difficulties and the vastness of the enterprise been appreciated accurately, we would never have dared to start in the first place. The whole Spanish Medical Aid effort, had it been measured against logistic or military standards, would have had to have been abandoned as too risky even to contemplate. The risks of the enterprise did not enter our minds; that we did more than simply get away with it is much to the credit of those who carried on as blissfully in the field as did the Spanish Aid Committees in the UK. Though medically we were materially supported from London, we were not directed from there, and it was the Spaniards who provided the vital food, petrol and local services.

Spanish Medical Aid certainly played a major part in widening the sympathy extended by ordinary British people to the Spanish Republic. The whole Aid Spain Movement was a very important part of the late 1930s; fortunately a talented historian has written its chronicle. When this enterprise was being planned, none of us in London knew very much about Spain where the Popular Front had been formed in January 1936 by the diverse political forces of the left bogged down in arguments with each other ever since the 1933 elections. It was the final desperate electoral expedient in a virtually ungovernable situation.

A large part of the Spanish population lived outside parliamentary politics. Millions of dispossessed peasants and casual workers were non-voters. Either they were Anarchists and held the whole electoral process to be a bourgeois farce, or they lived in extreme rural poverty and quite simply did not think in electoral terms. But these hitherto silent voices started to vote in the 1936 election and its results altered the whole balance of political power.

This change of balance was significant but, it was not emphatically decisive - 4,206,000 votes for the Popular Front and 3,783,00 for the National Front. Of the two hundred and seventy eight seats gained by the combined left, only seventeen were held by the Communist Party. This was no Marxist victory and quite manifestly the margin of the Popular Front over the right wing opposition was not crushing - a mere 426,000 majority in the total 7,989,000 votes cast.

The center parties represented another 681,000 voters, but these votes could not necessarily be relied on by either side. Within the wider Popular Front, formed at the outbreak of the Civil War, there were elements that were antithetical, most notably the great Anarchist Trade Union Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) with its 2,500,000 adherents, and its fanatical source of inspiration the FAI,Federacion Anarquista Iberica. Into this maelstrom a concerned group of kindly British progressives threw our little band of innocents. Just how innocent were they who did the throwing is demonstrated by the fact that some of them thought that O'Donnel would be a good guide. They also, with singular optimism, persuaded themselves that I, a student of twenty three, had what it takes to command a field unit in a civil war. The blind leading the blind sometimes works. By the end of November 1936, it became clear that for our Unit to work to full capacity, as we had done in our earlier months, we would have to move from Grañen. Our front was no longer active; the pivotal battles of the war were starting around Madrid. The Barcelona Office of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee lacked any sort of moral authority or military understanding. O'Donnell was there but was preoccupied with the arrival of a group of nurses from Australia with whom he could find nothing better to do than to search for political heresy.

It had become evident that the only thing for me to do was to go to London and explain the whole position to the Committee. Every one of us in Grañen approved of this visit as also did the Committee itself. When I arrived in London I found everyone entirely helpful and understanding. Getting the members to accept that "their" Unit should become a part of the Spanish Republican Army was not at first easy, but I was very well seconded by that great pioneer Trade Unionist Ben Tillett.

He cannot have been far from 80 years old and, to use his own words, he was roaring "to have a crack at the bastards". He drank well in the National Trade Union Club where the Committee had its offices and he sometimes dozed in meetings. He was a Popular Front adherent but showed a reserve towards the Communist Party because he had once kept a Public House in partnership with Tom Mann. By 1936 Tom Mann was a revered CP pioneer whose name was to be given to a British Company in the International Brigade. Ben Tillet did not like this at all. "It won't do; it can't be done. Tom Mann was prosecuted for watering beer. It was under gravity, all behind my back, no one can trust a man who waters the beer.”

Ben Tillett always had a refreshing influence. Once, when I was sitting next to Eilleen Younghusband (Independent MP for the British Universities seat), Franco's name had just been mentioned. Ben woke up from a cat-nap. He was alert in an instant and, before closing his eyes again, loudly proclaimed, "Franco's Mussolini's ponce that's what he is, nothing more than a ponce." Miss Younghusband, Quakerish and liberal spinster, was very taken by this intervention. She whispered to me, "What a splendid word, I must use it, but perhaps I should first know what it means."

During my December visit, Auden dropped into the Committee's offices during a lunch hour when I happenned to be there alone. He had come in on impulse; he was very broke. He wanted to help but he could not give us any money. He did have a small bundle of poems with him that he placed in my hand. Some of them directly related to Spain, and we stayed chatting together when suddenly he got up and left. I was going back to Spain the next day so instead of taking them with me I passed the poems to the Secretariat. It is a pity that the Spanish Medical Aid Archives have been lost. I cannot believe they have simply been burnt and Auden's poems along with them. They must be somewhere lying around, hidden and forgotten to this day. This was the nearest Auden got to working as a stretcher-bearer. There was never any need to make that claim because the support of poets and writers was real and precious in itself. Perhaps those poems were sold in manuscript and the little they then fetched joined with all the other mites from the hundreds of thousands of our supporters who were often themselves on the poverty line.

Later on Auden himself supplied what to me is the last and final word about the Aid Spain effort. “History to the defeated can say alas but never pardons.”

Those who ensured that defeat were not even in Spain, nor indeed in Germany nor Italy. The responsibility was in France and in Britain, where the maintenance of unilateral non-intervention ushered in Franco, Petain and the war, with all its millions of deaths. My personal background did not place me in the left-wing avant-garde, nor was it ever the habit in our family to be apologetic about our actions. Therefore during my brief London stopover I stayed in the Junior Constitutional Club, which then faced Green Park half way down Piccadilly. The Conservative Party was the dominant political influence amongst its members but, though everyone knew I was in Spain, no one tried to make me in any way uncomfortable. Indeed it was clear that a considerable current of sympathy existed in that Club for the Spanish Government and, without my asking, I was given several substantial cheques for Spanish Medical Aid. I remember noting that this interest came more typically from ex-service and country members. I continued my membership of the Club until the Munich. Agreement when I resigned in disgust at Chamberlain's conduct.

That opinion in our country was becoming more and more favourable towards the Spanish Government was strikingly evident during that short London stay at the end of November 1936. By 1938 the Gallup poll showed that 57% of the British were pro-Republic and only 7% positively pro-Franco. In January 1939, it had become 72% for the Republic.

After less than ten days in London, I went back to Barcelona and thence, with Thora, on to Albacete, the International Brigade's Base H/Q. An excellent British Surgeon, Alexander Tudor Hart, had come out. He and Archie Cochrane, who like myself was still a student, were already in Albacete. We were all billeted in what, long ago, must have been the best hotel in that quiet provincial town. I remember its throne-like porcelain WCs with their iron stirrups, rather like military elephant howdahs.

Thora, who was able to combine a very Welsh intuitive mind with an amazing sense of discipline, told me that something odd was going on. She, along with everyone else, had expected that, before any commitment could be made to move to the Madrid front and to direct the Unit into the International Brigade, the word would have to come back with me from London. Why else had I gone there? But, while I was away, Archie Cochrane had seen André Marty, the Chief Commissar of the Brigades, on the basis of an introduction arranged by Hugh O'Donnell. Marty gave Cochrane an unusually warm welcome, kissing him on both cheeks and expressing his surprise and joy that an English intellectual of middle-class background should be in Spain as a volunteer.

As I was told on my return from London, Marty was most happy to accept the Spanish Medical Aid Unit as an integral part of the Medical Service of the International Brigade. Dr Neumann, the IB/HQ medical staff-officer indicated that my news and messages from the Spanish Medical Aid Committee should await a subsequent general meeting of the British group that he was arranging. That would be the appropriate moment to present to Comrade Marty the messages that I had brought with me. Dr Neuman said that André Marty was arranging all the necessary moves to ensure our getting to work with as little delay as possible. It was only very much later that I came to see why we had been the subject of such special consideration. Thora thought that I should perhaps open my belt and produce Harry Pollitt's little bit of silk in order to secure a proper meeting with André Marty about the future of our whole Grañen group. Surprise, surprise - the very next morning the belt had gone - but nothing else had been stolen from our room. We did not so much regret the inevitable decision to leave well alone; we resented more the way it had been forced. We were after all going where we had wanted to go - into the crucial front of the war and into the International Brigade.

The general meeting came in a day or two. It was not André Marty but Colonel Domanski-Dubois, PMO of the 35th Division, who presided. Later I got to know him well and can see him to this day with his little smile and firm but somehow comforting manner. He was to give his life in the Aragon offensive of August 1937. For him the meeting was called to induct a group of newly recruited personnel into his Division and to give them their assignments. We were going as a Unit into the 14th (French speaking) International Brigade. He had brought with him all that he needed, namely the badges of rank for the new officers. This he would not have been able to do without prior briefing about the persons concerned. In a genial, informal way he put into Tudor Hart's hands the insignia of a Major, into Archie Cochrane's that of a Captain and into mine the single stripe of a sub-lieutenant, saying, "C'est tous qui me reste" Externally Tudor Hart did not register surprise; Cochrane, who was, like me, a. medical student and who had worked happily with me in Grañen was visibly disconcerted. We had worked together very easily in Grañen, and he had accepted without second thoughts the fact of my being in charge - a seniority that had well ante-dated his own arrival. As the Spanish Medical Aid Administrator, I had been responsible for the Unit in all but the strictly medical sense.

I realised that I could only roll with the punches in this competently managed mini-coup. Hart, in contrast to myself, did not know a word of Spanish. Someone would have to see to the daily running of the Unit (I had, after all, played a major part in turning it into an operational entity) while Hart worked as a surgeon. So far as Thora and myself were concerned, all that mattered was that the work should go on efficiently. In fact everything sorted itself out surprisingly quickly. Tudor-Hart was a sensible man and after one attempt at exercising his senior rank in an area in which he lacked competence (trying to lead a convoy while losing his way near the fascist lines), he restricted himself to the field in which he was superb - traumatic surgery. He saved hundreds of lives and thousands of limbs, and I am proud to have worked with him. We were attached to the 14th Brigade which was very largely French. Bit by bit I eventually pieced together the reasons for the very special consideration being shown to our Unit and for the manner of our assignment, some aspects of which only became clear to me very much later.

Basically our sudden arrival had been a stroke of extraordinary good luck for Andre Marty who had been faced with the need to clear up most urgently the consequences of a politico-military disaster. On the 28th of December 1936, the Marseillaise Batallion (as the French 14th Brigade was then called) engaged in a catastrophic action on the Madrid front. There is no question that leadership had been bad, and there is no question that later, under other leadership the survivors of this action fought very well indeed. As the OC, Commandant Lasalle, who had been an officer in the French Army in 1914/18, had the military responsibility for these grave losses and for what amounted to a total military failure. Lasalle himself came out of that Madrid action with a bullet in his calf-muscle which looked very much like a self-inflicted wound. He was accused of intelligence with the enemy via certain behind the lines elements of the Medical Service. He was duly court-martialled and shot. Possibly he may have been only a pompous coward but, even taking account of Marty's rather paranoid spy-mania, what I myself learnt at the time weighs out the balance of evidence decisivley against Lasalle. The President of his Court Martial was Colonel Putz, a fellow Alsatian, a fair- minded honourable man and a former regular officer in the French Army.

In the face of this lamentable affair, the creation of a new French command together with an uncompromised Medical structure had become imperative. At that very moment we turned up from Grañen. What could have been more opportune? A clean start with a Medical Service already well run-in on the Aragon front and totally devoid of any previous attachments. 0'Donnel brokered the transfer politically. From that moment on he quite simply vanished from view.

The sorting-out of my personal position was helped by my rather old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon way of only giving orders that I myself could carryout. Immediately we took over a new position, surgeons and theatre staff had to sleep while the rest of us brought the Unit up to a state of instant readiness. One day we were setting up hospital in improvised premises, having traveled in convoy all night, I was leading the orderlies and drivers in the manual chore of unloading the trucks and placing the equipment in the barn that was being cleaned to serve as a ward, when along came Captain Bernstein, the MO at Brigade H/Q. He took me aside and reprimanded me for carrying beds, saying that performing manual tasks did not accord with the respect due to an officer's rank. I said something about it being better to lead from in front than from behind and asked him if he had ever had complaints about the actual performance of our unit. He went away and I carried on as before.

Shortly after this rebuke for actively leading a fatigue, I was elected as Délégué Politique by the Service Sanitaire of the 14th Brigade which gave me unique authority. The Délégué of a Unit had parity of rank with its Commander and access to the Brigade Command. As a choice I was most unlikely; I was not distinguished politically; I was no erudite Marxist; I had not posed my candidature; I was not French. I was amazed when my name was put forward by the rank and file. lt was, however, abundantly clear that this electorate, unlike Bernstein, approved of the Sub-lieutenant's methods. Effectively, therefore, I continued to run the daily life of the Unit for the rest of my time in Spain.

All the French volunteers in Spain had done their compulsory military service and quite a number were old enough to have fought in the 1914-18 war. Most International Brigaders had some conception of army life, based on conscript experience, with the obvious exception o the British and the Americans. In my own case, along with most other young men whose parents had bought them a Public School education, I had been in the Officers Training Corps. I had always enjoyed this and had taken not only certificate 'A' but also 'B'. I had been in the University OTC and was automatically commissionable on call-up into the British Army. I found that all I had learnt in the OTC was of immense value. My personal reaction to joining the 14th Brigade was one of relief. My own burdens were wonderfully diminished, as were all the Unit's day-to-day problems; the housekeeping, so to speak, no longer troubled me. The Brigade quartermasters looked after the victualing and, in exchange for the isolation of Grañen, we had a very real Regimental comradeship in the 14th Brigade. The atmosphere was French, but our little British group was accepted warmly. We, who looked after the casualties, had to respond instantly to the changing military needs of the Brigade, we were always ready to work or to move.

On getting an order to move, we would immediately evacuate any casualties we had in the wards and start taking down, packing and stowing all our equipment in our trucks; in four hours at most, we would have the convoy assembled for the road. Tudor Hart gave up trying to take charge of convoys after his near disastrous loss of way. Thora and I always acted as path-finders in a little Welsh baker's van rejuvenated with a coat of camouflage paint. We led the convoy on its night moves. Along with us in the van we always had a sterile surgery kit, our bedrolls with our personal kit plus Thora's special convoy equipment. I instituted the British army practice of the 50 minute hour. For those extra ten minutes we would draw in to the side of the road and the drivers would check their tyres, water, petrol and oil levels, making good any deficiency before coming up to report and to get the cup of tea or coffee made on Thora's special convoy kit. This consisted of three large old- fashioned biscuit tins, one of which contained a primus stove, the other two held an enormous tea-pot and the makings for a brew-up. The instant we stopped, she lit the primus, boiled the water and brewed-up. This made all the difference, since keeping the drivers going was vital during our moves, which were nearly always under night cover. After a few hours on the road, the tea would be spliced with cognac and there would be a bit of bread or biscuit. At first we were the only convoy in the Division running the fifty minute hour, which enormously promoted. road-safety by lessening fatigue and mechanical breakdown. It also made Thora into the mascot of the drivers. They were a very tough lot, working under a Brigadier (Sergeant-Major) called Puget. I shall never forget him. He had two characteristics: whenever we came to a new locality, he would organise a little feast. He might get hold of a large fish, as once at Alcala de Henares, and he would cook it himself with immense care, asking a few pals to share the meal with a wine for which he would have spent hours prospecting. All this in the zone around Madrid where nothing could be found. His second characteristic was an extraordinary neatness of movement when drunk; when sober, he was a great big clumsy truck- driver with the manner and authority of a senior NCO. Years after the war, in the late 1950s, Thora found herself face-to- face with a night-watchman in the South of France; they stared at each other, then wept in each other's arms. It was Puget but in a sadly reduced state.

At Torrelodones, on the Las Rozas/Madrid front, we really standardised our surgical procedures. We took over a Villa making it into a model little hospital. I myself had been given a shot of anti-streptococcal serum for a small infected injury; this injection provoked a monster anaphylactic reaction just as we were starting to receive wounded. I remember giving anesthetics when I could not bear to stand up, supporting myself on my elbows because my legs hurt so much when I put weight on them.

It was at Las Rozas that I did a spell as Battallion MO in circumstances that are, to this day, not entirely clear. My name was volunteered for me without my knowing it. I was perfectly happy to accept this and Thora (while not liking it at all) gave her full support. If it was someone's ploy to provoke me into refusing, it did not work. My name can only have been volunteered for me by someone on the inside of the command structure and this could only have been on a political level, that of the cloned aparatchiks, the O'Donnels.

The experience of marching off with some 600 men before dawn, being drawn up in the dry ditch of a sunken lane, served out a gut-tightener of sourish wine spliced with cognac and then deployed into the dead ground below a slope, from the crest of which we could just see the fascist-held village that was our objective, is something I shall not easily forget. I had wanted to establish a forward dressing station behind a ruined cow-byre which was close to a sunken approach lane, but I needed to know more about the plan and thrust of our attack before deciding. The Battalion Commander was waiting for orders and refused me permission. He was counting on being told to move; we had such a poor attack position, we would have had to advance up a sharp slope under fire and with poor cover. An hour later we withdrew quietly to bivouac to wait for another morning. Here again I was perpetually grateful for my School and University OTC training. There it had been a game, here it was nakedly real. This went on for a month or so and that short experience as a Batallion MO under battle conditions was, to say the least, educative. It taught me what I could ask of myself and of others. It completed my emergence as an adult as two photos, one before, one afterwards, do, I believe, show.

War is largely waiting around and, as this has sometimes to be done while one is being shot at, only strong motivation makes it acceptable. In the International Brigades there were individual cases of breakdown, but the spirit of the Brigade at Las Rozas was astoundingly good. Around January 15th 1937, as the battle for Madrid stabilised into a stalemate, each side having lost some 15,000 men, I was returned from the Batallions to the Medical Unit, since Brigade H/Q saw me as more useful in my original post. I do not want to write about that front-line life; Malraux has said it perfectly in Days of Hope:--"Je crois qu'une autre vie a commencé pour moi avec le combat; aussi absolue que celle qui a commencé quand j'ai pour la première fois couché avec une femme. La guerre rend chaste.".

Tom Wintrigham's input into the military development of the International Brigade was not the only British contribution to forming an Officer cadre. The British Brigade of Guards also had a part to play. George Nathan was a superb soldier, both as a tactical planner and as fearless leader in the field. His debonair behaviour under fire became legendary. His brass gleamed like gold; his leather might have just come from Swaine and Adney's; his good-looking batmen kept his uniform perfect; his swagger-stick was said to be gold-tipped - but that was how his brass was polished. In 1937 such turn-out was unique in the whole of Spain. He had been a CSM in a Guards battalion in 1918 and had decided to stay on in the Army. He was perhaps the first Shoreditch Jewish NCO in the whole Brigade of Guards and, so he told me, he had been determined to make a good job of it which he certainly did. He cleaned up his accent and eventually on sheer merit, was selected for a commission.

Thora and I got to know George Nathan well; he used to come to our Unit and have tea when the line was quiet. One day, very early in our friendship, he said, "Kenneth, what do you think of my accent", to which I replied, "But you have not got one". After a pause he went on "Well, you may be right, because I was just about to try and reply in the English of my own home ground when I found that I can no longer do it." I had been assuming that, like some of my own old school-fellows, he could also speak with an Irish or a Scottish lilt, so I asked him where he had been to school. He roared with laughter and replied "In the gutters of Shoreditch mostly.

He was very well set-up physically and when he had volunteered for the Army in 1916, he had only been 16 years old but he could have easily passed for twenty. Half way through the war the Recruiting Offices were scraping the bottom of the barrel and would have been only too happy to take George Nathan's six foot four with its proportionate muscle.

Nathan's mature view of military life was expressed succinctly. "Once in the Guards, they ask a lot and they give a lot. If you perform they do not let go of you, that’s the way to run a regiment and that's the way I want to do it out here."

George Nathan had been commissioned in the early 1920s. Looking at his then situation with today's eyes, I do not see how, on a subalterns pay, he could have managed to live the life of an officer in the peace-time Brigade of Guards. There is one factor that did not occur to us in the more innocent atmosphere of 1937. It could explain the accent and much else: George Nathan was without any question homosexual. His whole social recasting may well have been the result of a military friendship with someone of means and influence, dating maybe from the very day of his recruitment.

The 1926 General Strike revealed a line of cleavage running through British society - the split ran vertically not horizontally, as is so often implied. The Guards had been assigned duties in support of strike-breakers and the day came when five rounds of ammunition were issued to each man of George Nathan's platoon; Nathan got into a conversation in the ante-room of the Officers Mess about the appropriateness of using English soldiers for armed confrontation with their fellow citizens. The tone rose and Nathan's implied doubts left him in a minority of one. A more senior officer said, "Well none of us will have any compunction in putting this dock-land scum in its place. If we have to fire, we cannot have any shilly-shallying in front of the men. George here seems to have some qualms." Turning to George Nathan he said, "I think that you should not forget that, wherever you came from, now you are one of us. You must know that you have been very lucky. If you do not appreciate this, you had better get back as soon as possible to wherever you came from."

I have repeated Nathan's account as he gave it to me. I asked him how it all ended. He said that he saw in a flash that for years he had been deceiving himself; not only was he no longer a member of that family of "brother officers", but most probably, and this was a bitter realisation, he had never been "one of us". The conversation had taken a turn for the worse. The next day he was put on an infantry training course at some place in the country; as soon as he arrived there he resigned his commission. Then followed some bare and bitter years; he learnt what it meant to be jobless. He swallowed his pride and became a doorman at Peter Jones; he got involved in an attempt to form a union and lost his job. He was not political in the usual sense of the word, but he had a very strong feeling for the underdog. I do not know how he arrived in Spain, but he had found his place in the International Brigade. Everything that he had ever learnt in his old life took on a new meaningfulness so, as an officer, he shone with a rare brilliance.

George Nathan fell in the last stages of the Battle of Brunete in July 1937. At the end of a day when, ignoring the fire directed at him, he once again, swagger stick in hand, strolled down a faltering, badly defended, Battalion position. He had been showing the crumbling Spanish infantry that holding on was easy. As always he was impeccable in his turn-out and that day, true to the tradition of the Brigade of Guards, he died with his boots clean. Hit by mortar fragments, he knew that his number was up and he asked those near him to sing him out with the marching songs of his second and final love, the International Brigade.

George Nathan is buried on the banks of the Guaderama river near Brunete, buried at night with the silent tears of his comrades as was that other British Guardsman in Spain one hundred and twenty eight years earlier.

We buried him darkly at dead of night.
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeams misty light
And lanthorn dimly burning

Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow,
But we steadfastly gazed at the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we left him alone with his glory.

The point of these particular pages is that they may help to explain how an important and permanent change in my own mentality and social attitudes came about. In Spain I gained a profound respect for the soldier and a permanent sense of caution in dealing with intellectual zealots particularly those exercising a function of command. To all of us who were there, Spain proved a nodal experience that influenced us for the rest of our lives. I like to believe that it made me a better person. In writing them, I am reminded of a definition given me by General Cherkaoui who had seen service with the French Army on many fronts before taking the command of the Moroccan Royal Guard: "What is a soldier? He is an improved civilian."

A saved fragment nothing to do with foregoing: Some days later the battle wore down to a halt with some little exchange of ground. The 18 pounder no longer menaced the loop on the highway down from the Navacerada Pass. We knew that soon we would be going down because the Pioneers had been making permanent positions at key points on the other side of the crest. Thora and I were not the only members of our Unit who felt drained to the point of numbness. I hated seeing the construction of permanent, holding, positions. This meant stasis, resigning the initiative, which, by giving the other side the first move, tells them that you are too weak to take it yourself. We were mostly young, we were not yet really battle-hardened, though, by now, we had all had a sufficient experience to know what war really meant. We were certainly ready to carry on, we were convinced that our side in the Spanish Civil war was as right as the other was wrong. Even more determinant to our morale was our profound belief, irrespective of our nationality, that we were fighting for the future of our own homelands ; I then believed (as I do today) that Spain's fight was not just for the values that we in England took for granted, it was against forces that were directly antagonistic to Britain. 1939/45 proved us right but, in 1937, our premature anti-fascism was not always understood. I had not yet perceived the nature of Stalinism, my levels of contact were not with very senior levels. In our 14th Brigade there was a very uninhibited political atmosphere - there simply had to be, for me to have been elected Délégué Politique.

 

 

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