(1) John Cornford, A Letter From Aragon (1936)

This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.

We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,

But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.

The stink of his corpse came through the clean pine boards

And some of the bearers wrapped handkerchiefs round their faces.

Death was not dignified.

We hacked a ragged grave in the unfriendly earth

And fired a ragged volley over the grave.

You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.

This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.

There is no poison gas and no H.E.3

But when they shelled the other end of the village

And the streets were choked with dust

Women came screaming out of the crumbling houses,

Clutched under one arm the naked rump of an infant.

I thought: how ugly fear is.

This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.

Our nerves are steady; we all sleep soundly.

In the clean hospital bed my eyes were so heavy

Sleep easily blotted out one ugly picture,

A wounded militiaman moaning on a stretcher,

Now out of danger, but still crying for water,

Strong against death, but unprepared for such pain.

This on a quiet front.

But when I shook hands to leave, an Anarchist worker

Said: "Tell the workers of England

This was a war not of our own making,

We did not seek it.

But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona

It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it."

 

(2) Kenneth Sinclair Loutit, Very Little Luggage (2009)

My second meeting with James Klugman must have been after my return from Germany. He was accompanied by John Cornford. As contemporaries we all knew each other by sight, and Klugman remembered his previous recruiting visit. They said, very reasonably, that it was only by working together that people sharing the same goals could hope to achieve them, so I really could not do other than join the University Socialist Society. I had already told James the year before that I was not a joiner. His manner had a hint of recognition that at last virtue was starting to prevail, that I was beginning to see the light. This was too reminiscent of Father Gilbey, and it triggered my renewed refusal.

John Cornford then took over asking what I saw as the most important thing for the next decade. To me avoiding the "New German" road was the first priority along with beating unemployment. I was ready to share activities bearing on these ends, but I was not ready to spend time in debate or in 'study group' activities. Though I was not a pacifist, I also believed that war and militarism were neither a cure for unemployment nor a substitute for using the League of Nations. I therefore agreed to be in the group that, on Armistice Day, would lay a wreath of white peace poppies on the Cambridge War Memorial. On November the eleventh 1934 I joined the peace procession to the War Memorial. There was a fracas near Peterhouse where a large group of undergraduates did not approve of the banner "Workers by Hand and Brain Unite against War". There is a good photo of this in Stanski and Abrahams "Journey to the Frontier" (1966, Constable) showing the faces of a future UK High Court judge and two Colonial Governors. Unfortunately, one face is lacking. It is that of a young man who did not share my views but for whom I retain an affectionate respect. His reactions, just as he was facing up to strike out at me, were a part of a now-vanished code. He had pushed me round and was gathering up his punch when he suddenly dropped his guard and said, "No, I can't, it's Loutit; after all we have rowed in the same boat." We exchanged a brief uneasy smile and, sadly, our paths have never crossed again. This is an example of that 'Old Boy' system so disliked by Peter Wright, but should Beale, the stroke of that boat we shared with seven others, ever read these words he will know that his forbearance has never been forgotten. It had in it something noble and eminently civilised. I was mildly disappointed in the lack of interest in me shown by my old beach playmate, Donald Maclean. I recognised that he was living on a plane to which I did not aspire and that, reciprocally, he did not consider me to be worth much notice. We did have the chance of meeting later, when he certainly made up for this earlier neglect. In fact it was from him, in Moscow sometime in the 1960s, that I learnt of the Stanski and Adams book. He gave me his copy - after cutting out the fly-leaf that must have borne a private inscription. I did not know John Cornford well, as this was impossible without following him into his Party life. I believe that his version of that life was pretty idiosyncratic. Had he not died in Spain, he would certainly have got into trouble with the Party orthodox. As things were, I saw enough of him to respect and to like him. John had a middle initial to his name - 'R'. It stood for Rupert - his mother was of the Rupert Brooke generation and had been one of the "neo-pagans" who had animated Cambridge life in the decade before the 1914 war. They had in fact done much more than live their own lives in their own way. They provided a franchise for us who were to come after; they showed that young people could be both independent and responsible.

The quicksilver rapidity of John's emotional and intellectual appreciation did not come from his Marxist companions, from Klugman's faith. It came from his mother's generation, from that generation of uncles peopling the 1914 war cemeteries, those who did not live to tell us their tales personally. Not for nothing had John been nurtured with Darwins, Raverats and Keyneses. It was no accident that he, like many of his contemporaries, had been at that Malting House School created by Susan Isaacs and Geoffrey Pyke, whose pioneering genius (from which I was later allowed to benefit myself) has been so insufficiently appreciated. Afterwards John went to Dartington; his life and way reflected more that of his Rupert namesake's than that of any CP stereotype. He was more true to the Rupert heritage than the left has ever conceded. The approval of the political left shown by the older Cambridge intelligentsia, was due to their seeing it as a continuation of the intense liberal generosity of their own youth. They saw exactly this in young people like John Cornford; but from their Cambridge Elysium, that older generation was sensitively fearful of the emergence of both the aparatchik and Stalinism. It all seemed to them as but shadows fleeting over the back of their safe cave.