“My Dearest Kathleen, this is the last letter before I cross over the border into Spain.  I will post it in the border town and then I will be on Spanish territory.  This is a terribly long journey we are on now, about 15 hours.”

There is a poignancy about letters written during times we can scarcely identify with.  The letter was written to my mother who was my father’s fiancé. It was penned before a clandestine mountain crossing into Spain where the Civil War (1935-1938) raged.  Father and his companions had hitch-hiked from England to Spain as members of the International Brigade to fight Fascism.

Later, letters were written during lulls in furious hand-to-hand fighting between Nationalists and Republicans at the Jarama River near Madrid.   A Nationalist force of 40,000 men, including men from the Army of Africa, had crossed the Jarama River on February 11, 1937.

On February 12, at what became known as Suicide Hill, the Republicans suffered heavy casualties.  Tom Winteringham, the British commander, was forced to order a retreat back to the next ridge. 

The Nationalists then advanced up Suicide Hill to be routed by Republican machine-gun fire.  Coming under heavy fire the British, down to 160 men out of the original 600, established defensive positions along a sunken road.  The attrition rate was far worse than that at Ypres.

On February 23, led by Robert Merriman, 373 members of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion moved into the trenches.  When they were ordered over the top they were backed by a pair of tanks from the Soviet Union.   On the first day 20 men were killed and nearly 60 wounded.

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February 27: “Of the 263 men who went into action that day only 150 survived. One soldier remarked afterwards: “The battalion was named after Abraham Lincoln because he too was assassinated.”

Edwin Rolfe survived but wrote: “When we were pulled out of the lines, I felt very tired and lonely and guilty.  Lonely because half of the battalion had been badly shot up.   And guilty because I felt I didn’t deserve to be alive now, with Arnold and Nick and Paul dead.”

Fred Copeman was wounded but survived.  He later wrote about meeting Kit Conway at the hospital at Jarma: “Kit was obviously dying.  Kit was in terrible agony, and yet his one concern was that he may have been responsible for the slaughter that had taken place.  

Six hundred and thirty men had entered the line and there were not more than eighty left unwounded, and the percentage of killed was very high.   It was hard to convince him that our fighting had taken place in the toughest, bloodiest battle of the whole Spanish campaign and that it had been decisive in the defence of the Madrid-Valencia Road.”

My father’s pencilled notes scribbled in those trenches, tell their story.  And for what did they give their lives?  Today, young men flock to Ukraine; The only thing that men never learn from history is they don’t learn from history.

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