How It Was

MEN IN BATTLE--Alvah Bessie--Scrib-er ($2.50).

The finest book that came out of the Spanish War was Andre Malraux's Man's Hope (TIME, Nov. 7). Alvah Bessie's book is not only the second finest; it is an addendum. Malraux's fictional account of the war ended with the Loyalist victory at Brihuega in March 1937. Bessie's personal story of eight months in the Lincoln Battalion begins in February 1938, six weeks before the battalion was cut to pieces in the Fascist drive to the sea. The author, a gifted short story writer and ex-Guggenheim fellow, took part in that retreat and later in the last desperate offensive across the Ebro River.

To get into Spain, Bessie and his fellow volunteers had to climb over the Pyrenees one windy, cold night with small paper parcels as their only baggage. At dawn they stood exhausted on a peak, their city overcoats whipping their legs, and looked south for 50 miles over peaceful country. On the way down they met three women dressed in black. "When we passed we saw that they were poor peasants; one young, one middleaged, one old. They smiled and said, 'Salud! Salud Companeros!' The oldest said nothing."

By countless such uninsistent details, Bessie's writing has the effect of telling exactly how it was. How it was for the Americans, with Times Square still in their heads, singing "There's a long, long trail awinding" at night in dimly blue-lit trains, learning infantry drill and Spanish, shaking down into an argumentative army in which every officer was "comrade." They had their own language: a man "organized himself" a new rifle, a chocolate bar, a butt; the lethal cigarillos finos they were issued were known as "anti-tanks."

Bessie got his first shock on joining the Lincoln Battalion after its retreat from Teruel. Of 500 men who had started the battle there were about 100 filthy, unarmed survivors, silent or snarling, lying dead-beat on a hillside. In a week, with new replacements and an issue of old Russian Imperial Army rifles, they had to slog back into the line, still dopey with fatigue. "You fired till the rifle got too hot to handle; then you opened the bolt and blew down the barrel and let it cool, resting your face on your extended arm, waiting. You got so you were afraid to lift your head again to fire. . . . And then you suddenly awoke to the fact that you had been asleep in the line itself. . . ."

Cut off and retreating again at night, Bessie found himself running in the dark through a camp of Franco's troops. He was one of four, out of a detachment of 70, that got across the Ebro into relative safety. After that the men knew that the People's Army was being overpowered by German and Italian force, that they were the tail-end of the International volunteers. Scared Spanish boys came in as replacements, together with deserters and "goldbricks" once thought unfit for fighting. One soldier wept. "They killed all the good guys," he said. "I seen guys die had more room between the eyes than [the new men] got across the shoulders."

Seeing defeat from the start, Bessie sometimes told himself he should have stuck to his writing, thought often of his kids in Brooklyn, shared the men's growing hope that they would be disbanded and repatriated. Yet in July this makeshift, disheartened, half-trained outfit was advancing against machine guns. On an open mountain crest above Gandesa they discovered what heroism in modern war amounts to: without seeing the enemy, scarcely firing a shot, they merely lay on the peak for ten days, holding the position, while excellent heavy artillery got their range and tore man after man to pieces with shell-bursts.

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