Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks

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.

More importantly, the review really has very little to say in relation to what the author wrote about, preferring to concentrate on the ideological stuff (which is what the CP did quite a bit in those years)"

I decided to add it to this month's reviews so readers could see how the CP sometimes let its ideology get in the way of a good review.RS]

Smouldering Freedom, by Isabel de Palencia

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie, New Masses, November 6, 1946

The story of the Spanish Republican exiles cannot be told to often. These days it is a live issue again in the mass meetings throughout the length and breadth of the land through which individuals and organizations strive to sever the diplomatic relations that still exist between our country and the fascist regime that sent these people into exile.

Isabel de Palencia, who was the last minister plenipotentiary to Sweden of the Spanish Republic, tells the story again in her new book, and tells it very well indeed. Prefacing her narrative with a thirty-six-page summary of the war itself, she follows with the personal stories of many exiles — distinguished and humble — who were driven from their native land by the invading armies of Hitler and Mussolini.

These stories gain poignancy over other refugee stories by virtue of the fact that the Spanish refugees alone among the European peoples oppressed by fascism have no place to go. Their homeland, protected by a spurious neutrality, has not yet been liberated, and this fact alone is of consummate irony. For the neutrality of Franco served only to guarantee the continuity of international fascism, to guarantee the continuing murder of Spain’s republican populations.

While Señora de Palencia tells her many stories with patent heart and sound conclusions, one has the feeling that there is something lacking in her book. I would describe it as partisanship — not for republican Spain, for she is an iron-bound artisan of the Republic. What seems lacking is a proper allegiance to those forces within and outside Spain who are going to liberate her country in the near future. By maintaining a strange neutrality between the contending groups of Spaniards in exile, Palencia fails to strengthen the hand of the one group she concedes is really capable of rallying the majority — the Negrin group.

It is a sad fact that the recently convened Cortes in Mexico succeeded in isolating Juan Negrin — together with substantial groupings without whose support no unified movement for the re-conquest of Spain is possible. While admitting that the Prieto group now holds the balance of power among the exiles, it is curious not to find Palencia evaluating Prieto and his junta as they must be evaluated. For Prieto himself has long since been exposed by Premier Negrin as a traitor to the Republic, and Prieto’s influence at all times has been toward a narrow, nationalistic understanding of the Spanish problem — and toward a vicious anti-Sovietism and anti-communism that is the hallmark of greater villains than he.

Spain will be re-conquered, however by the people who remained behind after the war, and while the exiles (if they achieve real unity) can help materially toward the reconstitution of their republic, the fight itself when it comes, will be carried on by those who could not escape from Spain. They will bring to life a slogan whose memory depressed us all for many years: Madrid Will Be the Tomb of Fascism. That slogan has been reborn again, and it will triumph. Isabel de Palencia’s new book will add to the understanding of those people whose assistance and understanding is needed to make it a reality.