Alvah's Books

Part 9

Part 10

Part 5

Part 6

Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks
Edited by Dan Bessie
The University Press of Kentucky
156 pages
$22.00

This historical and valuable first-hand personal account presents the war in Spain through the eyes of writer and volunteer soldier Alvah Bessie. Edited by Dan Bessie, Alvah’s son, Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks are a daily record of activities, which he jotted down in four notebooks (and incidentally are kept for the general public to view and read if they can decipher Bessie’s scrawl at New York University’s Tamiment Library in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives) when he was in Spain from February 3^rd to December 1^st 1938.

As Bessie fils writes, these four pocket notebooks were filled with details of his father’s arrival in Spain (via Paris, for it was illegal to travel to Spain at that time), his training, his battlefield experiences and his work for the Lincolns’ newspaper The Volunteer for Liberty and his departure from Spain.
 
These notebooks are the foundation for Bessie’s brilliant memoir Men in Battle, first published in 1939 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. These events covered in the notebooks are fully detailed in Men in Battle, but the beauty of the notebooks is actually reading what happened at the given moment or as Dan Bessie writes, “…have an immediacy that reflects the fast pace of a soldier in training and combat, jotting down impressions while on the move.”

Bessie provides a two page chronology of his father’s arrival to Spain and his departure and then kicks it off with Notebook 1. This section includes diagrams of infantry formations, letters from his children and his ex-wife, and drawings. Entries are succinct, yet descriptive. In one, he aptly illustrates fear (dated April 10, [1938]):

Fear: men who have experienced avion attacks show greatest demoralization. One man carries a stick in his mouth to prevent his teeth from chattering and equalize pressure between inner ear and outside. Others noticeably jittery when “avion” is called.

Bessie starts Notebook 2 on April 16, 1938. About the same time period that his iconic photograph at Darmos, Catalonia was taken [and is shown in the About Alvah’s Books page—editor]. In this notebook, Bessie includes a list of Spanish expressions and slang frequently used by soldiers, he writes of his budding friendship with poet Edwin Rolfe, and introduces his company commander Aaron Lopoff, a young man who will be like a close brother to Bessie and will leave a lasting mark as reflected in the writer’s work.

Bessie was a prolific letter writer and on numerous occasions he drew several panoramic diagrams of his location. These letters were met with exasperation from military censors. On May 15^th, Bessie received this handwritten letter from the Anglo-American sector of the Brigades stationed in Barcelona:

May 15 – 1938 SR 20E – C333 – Barcelona

Comrade Bessie –

This is just to inform you that thereafter your correspondence that contains any diagrams – calculations or similar items necessary for regular communication will be detained indefinitely and possible cause you some individual inconvenience. I believe you are a reliable comrade but, please use your intelligence and don’t complicate the necessary work of the censorship. 

[Signature illegible]
Anglo-American Sector
Censura Militar 

Bessie would receive several of these handwritten reprimands.

Notebook 3 starts in late July 1938; the entries are longer with more details of battles. He is close to Gandesa and is part of the Ebro Offensive. In a brief section on August 17th Bessie notes that Lopoff is wounded in the head with expectations to recover. On August 19^th, he writes:

The worst day so far, of this life. Hell broke loose at 12:30 pm . . . . artillery and mortars, preparation for a fascist attack. For 7-1/2 hours we were shelled, the shells covering practically every inch of our parapets and the barranco behind our hill. The strain, unbearable, the shells, thousands, falling in groups of 3, 4 at second intervals. . . . Whitney, translator for the company, 1-1/2 years here, scared as a rabbit, nearly hysterical with fear for weeks now, severely wounded two feet from me, together with telephonist who occupied the same shallow refugio . . . the sight of Whiney, his buttocks nearly torn off, hold them, his face dead yellow, covered with rock dust, screaming…

August 24: Word last night that Lopoff’s wound is worse than thought. At first – 3 m.g. (?) bullets in the head, which apparently destroyed the eye and may result in the loss of the other.

September 8: Tte. Aaron Lopoff, we learn, died of his wounds received on hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols the night of August 17, leading a night attack against fascist positions. He received 3 m.g. bullets in the head, which destroyed one eye. Report that meningitis set in.

Notebook 4 is the shortest of all. Here, Bessie writes of the retreat of the Brigades and his return to Barcelona and then to Paris. The journal ends on December 1^st, yet Bessie continues to make entries until December 4. His last entry is:

PS: We sailed on the Paris from Cherbourg, after going there by train. Were back in New York before Christmas. At New York we were held aboard the ship for six hours before disembarking, out passports were taken away from us. But there was a terrific welcoming committee of thousands who stood in the bitter cold from 6 a.m. (when the ship docked) till noon, when we came off.

For Bessie, Spain, was a turning point in his life and these notebooks were the first of many letters, speeches, short stories, articles and books about his time with the Lincolns and fighting to save the Spanish Republic. In 1980, Bessie commented in Peter Wedyn’s The Passionate War:

 This is the most important experience of my life, and it always has remained so, and I have never regretted it for a moment.

Thanks to his experience and his notebooks, historians and readers of the Spanish Civil War have a priceless source to add to their libraries.

[Editor's Note: Ibarruri was still alive, and had not returned to Spain at the time this review was written. After Franco's death in 1975 she returned and was again elected a member of the Cortes, representing Asturias. She died in Madrid at the age of 93.]

Pasionaria’s story of Spanish War

THEY SHALL NOT PASS (EL UNICO CAMINO)
By Dolores Ibarruri, International Publishers,
New York, 368 pages.

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie for the National Guardian, 1966

For some reason we will never know, the late Ernest Hemingway, in his Cosmopolitan magazine version of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, felt it necessary to slander one of the greatest women of our time: Dolores Ibarruri, known then and now as Pasionaria.

The slander was not placed in the mouth of his hero, Robert Jordan, who “had no politics,” but it was uttered twice: once by a Spanish guerilla, who baited a young Spanish communist by telling him that Dolores “has a son in Russia since the start of the movement” – to save him from the war; the second time by a Soviet correspondent who referred to her contemptuously as “that great face . . . that great voice.”

It is true that Dolores Ibarruri’s son turned up in the Soviet Union, and he died there. He was buried in Stalingrad (Volgograd), where he fell with Soviet soldiers under his command, and his tomb may be found on its Avenue of Heros, where you will not notice his name unless you can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet and read: Ruben Ibarruri. He was 18 when he died – in 1942.

Ruben Ibarruri’s mother, who will be 71 this winter, has lived in the U.S.S.R many years, ever since the French Republic made her life in southern France impossible through harassment and the same sort of slander Hemingway employed.

La Pasionaria’s “great voice” may be heard again – in all its eloquence, its passion and its dedication to her people and her cause – in the pages of her “autobiography,” originally titled El Unico Camino (the only way). It is the same voice that spoke on Radio Madrid July 18, 1936, and which has been quoted ever since: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

That Dolores Ibarruri was and is something more than a sloganeer scarcely needs documentation, for even her worst enemies acknowledge she was a leader and a major focus of the resistance of her people during three years of war against Franco’s forces and the Nazi and Italian invaders. If quotation marks are used around the word autobiography, it is only because her book is far more than the history of her tortured country and her heroic people than it is the sort of personal history to which Western readers are accustomed.

The daughter of a miner, born in Gallarta in the Basque country, Dolores “finished” her education at 15; she had neither the money nor the health to continue. At 20 she married a miner and at 20 she became a communist. She bore six children, of whom four died in infancy – a tragedy common enough to her time, place and class. With her husband she was not happy, although they shared the hardships of organizational work among the miners, as well as several individual jail sentences. By 1936 she was in Madrid and a communist deputy in the Spanish Republican Cortes.

On August 12, 1961, near Moscow, a handful of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sat in her dining room at a lunch she had prepared and served herself, and listened, as she spoke for 20 minutes without interruption about the situation in Spain, its present and its future. The detailed information she had astonished us; you would have thought she had a pipeline to Madrid or had just returned from Barcelona that afternoon.

But it was her confidence in the future of a Spain she had not seen in 22 years that astonished us even more: this was no bitter, sad, defeated expatriate such as we have all met from time to time; this was a Spanish woman who had never been separated from her people since she was born in a mud hovel in Vizcaya.

She may not live to return to a new Spanish Republic, but when that republic is reborn, it will owe much of its vitality and health to this powerful and utterly feminine woman who was for so long its great face, its great voice.