The Walking Dead

5 March 1937

I feel it tonight, so strongly that it is hard to describe — I have not shared it with Ralph but I do not doubt he has the same emotions as me — but I will try to express it.

There is around us an atmosphere of evil. It is suspicion and fear. The commissars tell us that treachery is all around us. We are infiltrated by Fascist spies and Trotskyist agents. Ralph has heard that some of the brigadiers speak of this obsession with betrayal as 'Russian Syphilis'.

I am hesitant of writing where I could be seen. Only Ralph knows that I have my diary. There are many English lads in our unit but I would not let them know that I have the notebook and my thoughts.

It has rained very heavily in the Jarama valley and our trenches are flooded. We have three inches of water in our bunker. We try to bail the water out each night before we sleep but it is useless because the water comes in faster than we can clear it. It is a place of misery.

The British company is now attached to the French battalion, and alongside us were the Americans from the Lincoln brigade…I think they started the Jarama campaign with a force of 500 men. Ralph says that they have lost 120 dead and 175 wounded. They have a song that they sing, and the commissars permit it because they are Russians and do not understand the words: 'There's a valley in Spain called Jarama, It's a place that we all know too well, For 'tis there that we wasted our manhood, And most of our old age as well. ' It is two days now since the Americans — they are younger than us, mostly students and very naïve, but honest — were pulled out of the line. They had mutinied.

They had refused to go forward.

Their officers said they would not advance because they had poor kit and were only given impossible targets to capture.

They refused the order from the staff. We could not see this, but word of it had spread by the evening. They formed up, their backs to the enemy, and set off for the rear, marching in step. Within a mile they were blocked. Machine-guns and an armoured car were across their road. They were told that if they took another step forward they would all be killed. They retreated: they had no choice.

What sort of war is this? Machine-guns at your front and at your back.

Commissars at the rear order us forward for offensives and tell us not to retreat, 'not a metre', when we are attacked by aircraft and tanks and the Moors. But they always stay safe and are distant from the battles. Their skins are not risked.

What sort of war is this?

Last week the commanding officer of the French battalion — they call it the 'Marseillaise'—was arrested and accused of incompetence and cowardice, and of being a Fascist spy. He was put before a court martial and found guilty. On the same day as his arrest and trial, he was executed. He knelt, and showed no fear, and was shot in the back of the head.

It is that sort of war.

I do not know whether it is better to die facing the enemy, or facing those who are supposed to be colleagues, comrades in arms.

Tomorrow we are told that the film star, Errol Flynn, will visit us. Maybe he will come far enough forward to get mud on his shoes, and then he will be able to return to his hotel in Madrid and tell people that he has shared our hardships.

There is no retreat. A volunteer in the German battalion shot himself in the foot and thought it would be sufficient to have him sent to the rear. A self-inflicted wound is an offence and he was shot by a firing squad. There is no way out of this hell.

I thank God each day that Ralph is beside me.

It is raining again, heavier, and I must bale some more.