Books: Man in War

VOLUNTEER IN SPAIN—John Sommerfield—Knopf ($1.50).

By boat and train to Paris, where in a small secret office his enlistment papers were filled out and approved; by train to Marseille and thence, by night and with all lights darkened, in a freighter across the Mediterranean—so John Sommerfield, young English Leftist writer, got into Spain to join the Loyalist Army. Landing, he was rushed to Albacete (“when I saw the name on the station it meant nothing then”), where in an ex-nunnery the collection of foreign volunteers later to be known as the International Column were being drilled for combat. Here he had his first chance to look about him, see what his comrades-in-arms were like. They were an odd assortment.

Sommerfield’s own section, a machine-gun unit, consisted of himself and John Cornford (later killed in action); Marcel, a young tough from the Bastille quarter of Paris; Freddie, another Englishman, an ex-Guardsman; Richter, a dapper German of mysterious antecedents; miscellaneous Poles, Italians. Equipment and uniforms were equally scanty; the men wore mostly overalls and windbreakers, had one antiquated Hotchkiss gun for the whole company to train on. (Later, on the eve of their first engagement, they wangled Lewis guns, had a day to learn the new mechanism before going into action.) Drill commands were in French, which only half the men understood. Food was determinedly, indigestibly Spanish.

But the group, and indeed the whole army, had a spirit that for Sommerneld made up for deficiencies. Once, on a routemarch, they passed a column coming back from the front. “They were utterly worn out, unshaven, filthy, dressed in thin, bleached and tattered overalls, mostly wearing worn-out rope-soled canvas shoes through which their toes protruded: they had hardly any kit, were armed with rusty, ancient Mausers and threadbare, emptied cartridge-slings. They were soaking wet, shivering, utterly exhausted, huddled together for warmth in bedraggled groups. . . . But they were singing, not loudly, their voices coming from far away, from the depths of their exhaustion; the song (low, monotonous, tragic) positively wrung from their entrails, the very sound and expression of an unquenchable and undefeatable vitality. They were mostly young, very young, the month’s growth of hair on their faces soft and curling.”

Sommerfield went into action when his detachment occupied the building of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, in Madrid’s University City.

Of the operations in which he had a part, Sommerfield can tell little, indeed knew little beyond his immediate experiences. “In a war you are lost, you are like atoms in a chemical reaction, you are lost in a boiling confusion in which you are not conscious of the part you are playing. Whatever you are fighting about in a war, it is a long way away, and you are nothing.” He was in University City for a while, sniping from the windows of rooms whose floors were a crunch with shattered laboratory equipment, littered with blasted furniture. Then as the Rebel advance was stopped, forced back, he was in open-country fighting: advancing, dropping back, advancing again, sometimes in big attacks where tanks and armored cars accompanied the troops and enemy bombers retaliated in force (“I had been waiting to feel frightened, but each time the bombs fell before I knew, and then when it was over I thought that I had only felt excited”); sometimes in minor engagements where their only objective would be a patch of woods across a ploughed field, but where men would be killed as dead as anywhere else in the taking or losing of it. It was not until the whole army halted and his detachment rested beside a quiet stream somewhere in the region of Pozuelo that Sommerfield knew the Franco advance had been broken and Madrid had been saved. Firing had died to an intermittent rumbling, far away. “We dabbled our feet in the icy water, and it was the first time we had taken our boots off for three weeks.”

Unlike British Major Geoffrey McNeill-Moss’s factually authoritative but notably pro-Rebel account of one of the most heroic episodes in Spain’s civil war (The Siege of Alcazar; Knopf: $3.50), Sommerfield’s book is unpretentious historically, uninsistent politically, is marred only by a too-obvious leaning towards Ernest Hemingway in style. It provides an excellent report of one man’s experiences, impressions, in battle, offers in two or three of its episodes descriptions hardly-to-be-forgotten of life in wartime. For these in particular, most readers will find it valuable.

Twenty-eight-year-old Author Sommerfield, whose education was, as he says, “dubious,” ducked school at 16 and worked as sailor, carpenter, stage manager, had one novel published, May Day, before enlisting for Spain. Volunteering in October 1936, he saw six months action, was at one time reported dead, returned this spring to England “to discredit this rumor,” is now living in Lancashire.