The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

On 12 October the steamer Ciudad de Barcelona reached Alicante with the first 500 volunteers who had embarked two days earlier in Marseilles. They then boarded a train which took them to Albacete, the base chosen for the International Brigades. Their barracks in the Calle de la Libertad had been seized from the Civil Guard after the rising.

The barracks where many of the nationalist defenders had been killed was used as the induction centre. It was in a disgusting state until a party of German communists cleaned it out thoroughly. Hygiene was a problem, especially for those who were weakened by the malnutrition of unemployment. Certainly the rations of beans in oil contributed to the dysentery suffered by the British working-class volunteers who, like the Canadians and Americans, were unused to foreign food. As soon as they arrived, the German communists put up a large slogan in their quarters proclaiming ‘We Exalt Discipline’, while the French posted precautions against venereal disease. (With the lack of antibiotics, the latter was to take almost as heavy a toll as in the militias.)

In Albacete, the Brigaders were given their initial indoctrination and issued with ‘uniforms’–often either woolly Alpine hats or khaki berets, ski jerkins, breeches, long thick socks and ill-fitting boots. Some found themselves in army surplus uniforms from the First World War, and the Americans later turned up almost entirely kitted out as ‘doughboys’. It was rare to find anything that fitted satisfactorily. Senior Party cadres and commissars were conspicuously different. They favoured black leather jackets, dark-blue berets, and a Sam Browne belt with a heavy 9mm automatic pistol. This last item was the great status symbol of the Party functionary.

The recruits were lined up on the parade ground for an address by André Marty, the Brigades’ controller who had earlier brought the French volunteers over the border during the fighting at Irún. Marty, a squat man with white moustache, drooping jowl and outsize beret, had made his name in the 1919 mutiny of the French Black Sea fleet. The heroic legend woven around him in Party mythology made him one of the most powerful figures in the Comintern. Almost nobody dared challenge his authority. At that time he was starting to develop a conspiracy complex that rivalled Stalin’s. Influenced by the show trials in Moscow, he became convinced that ‘Fascist-Trotskyist’ spies were everywhere, and that it was his duty to exterminate them. Marty later admitted that he had ordered the shooting of about 500 Brigaders, nearly one-tenth of the total killed in the war, but some question this figure.¹¹

The organizational committee of the International Brigades transformed itself on 26 October into a military council, which included Vital Gayman (‘Vidal’) and Carlos Contreras as well as General Walter. Constancia de la Mora, the niece of the conservative prime minister Antonio Maura and the wife of the communist commander of the republican air force, Hidalgo de Cisneros, acted as interpreter. The military council installed itself in a villa on the outskirts of the town and André Marty requisitioned other buildings in Albacete. The Brigades’ military commander was General ‘Kléber’ (alias Lazar Stern), a tall, grey-haired Hungarian Jew and veteran of the Red Army, who was later to be shot on Stalin’s orders. He had travelled under the name of ‘Manfred Stern’ on a Canadian passport faked by the NKVD.¹²

The parade ground at Albacete was used for drill, after which battalion commissars gave the volunteers long lectures on ‘why we are fighting’. These talks were followed by group discussions, used by the commissars to introduce ‘ideas’ which were then ‘discussed and voted upon democratically’. The International Brigades followed the 5th Regiment in introducing the saluting of officers. ‘A salute is a sign that a comrade who has been an egocentric individualist in private life has adjusted to the collective way of getting things done. A salute is proof that our Brigade is on its way from being a collection of well-meaning amateurs to a precision implement for eliminating fascists.’¹³

Such meetings and ‘democratic procedures’ provided tempting targets for the iconoclasts to mock, but these light-hearted jokers were marked down by the commissars. They were likely to be the first suspected of ‘Trotskyist-Fascist leanings’. Other sceptics, especially the old sweats from the Great War, were bitterly critical of the ‘training’. Most of the volunteers were very unfit, as well as ignorant of the most elementary military skills. As one of the veterans remarked, they were not preparing to go over the top with Das Kapital in their hands.