Letters from Tarazona could not be sent by civilian mail. They were routed through the International Brigade post office in Albacete, examined by the censor department, then shipped in pouches to an office at 1 Cité de Paradis in Paris, where French stamps were attached and the letters forwarded to addresses in the States. My uncle’s first letter to Ann Arbor arrived in August. He sent it to friends at the Daily. “The staff planned to publish it and then remembered that Mrs. Cummins did not know of Bob’s true whereabouts,” Stan Swinton recalled. “The story was immediately killed.” Bob’s mother remained in the dark, and the Mac-Paps remained in Tarazona. They were at camp all through the relentless heat of August, when in preparation for combat their ranks were bolstered by an infusion of young Spanish recruits.
Bob Cummins, son of the Jayhawk two-miler “Little Cummins,” was assigned as a runner. His job would be to carry battlefield messages between brigade and battalion and between battalion command and its companies. Many of the other Mac-Paps runners were Spaniards who knew the countryside. Bob was not familiar with the land, but he had stamina and excellent orienting skills. During his childhood, his father had taught him how to navigate by the stars at night.
Service was assigned to drive a truck, and Neafus was attached to the headquarters staff as a scout. In a buoyant letter to a friend, Neafus asserted that this army now “compares with any in the world.” A miner was his immediate supervisor, and a college professor above that, reflecting the diversity of the unit. “There are labor organizers, students, workers of all kinds, a farmer or two, a few lumberjacks, sailors, several teachers, and as far as nationalities go—every kind. Our battalion has Americans and Canadians with a Finnish section of thirty men in addition, and half the outfit is Spanish in conformity with the government’s policy.”
* * *
THE MAC-PAPS WERE deployed at last in the second week of September, moving by train from Tarazona to Valencia and northwest toward Hijar on the edge of the Aragon front, where they were held in reserve after other elements of the International Brigade had prevailed, though suffering heavy casualties, at Quinto and Belchite. The battalion rotated in circular fashion from Albalate del Arzobispo to Senés de Alcubierre to Quinto before being sent into battle at Fuentes de Ebro, a village along the Ebro River south of Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon province.
It was October 13. The well-trained but untested Mac-Paps advanced against blistering gunfire, and their leaders fell one by one. Commissar Dallet did not last his first day in battle. He was shot in the groin and was crawling back to shelter when his body was shredded by machine-gun bullets. One of his company commanders was also killed and two more badly wounded. The Michigan boys survived. Neafus described his experience in a letter afterward: “The baptism is over. It took! I’m still on two feet, but there are a goodly number of the boys who are not. We went over the top for the first time on the 13th. At the present time we have a nice cross-fire that makes us keep down during the day. Today a bath for the first time in three weeks. During that time, I have washed my hands twice. There is only water to drink. We are a dirty, unshaven lot—dead tired but still very much anti-fascist.” Not a word about losing Dallet or the other brass.
My uncle, describing that period in an essay he wrote later, made it sound almost carefree. Perhaps it was an expression of survivor’s relief, but it reflected a public attitude of optimism from which he rarely wavered, even when free of the censor’s pen. All wars are brutal, and this one was far from an exception, with horrors all around. Mass executions, desertions, prison camps, fright, stench, chaos, destruction, bombardment—all there, but little of that evoked in Bob’s writings. “When we came out of the lines at Fuentes we knew we were going into rest. We were back at Quinto and waiting for transportation. Those were very happy times for most of us. The recruits had come through their first action successfully. It made us feel good to see our Fifth Army Corps posters on the walls of all the Aragon villages, showing a menacing soldier with fixed bayonet and the simple legend ‘Fifth Army Corps,’ and down the sides the names of its victories: Jarama, Guadalajara, Villanueva de la Canada, Brunete, Estacion de Pina, Quinto, Villamayor, Code, Belchite.”
In the aftermath of battle, Quinto felt like a war museum to the Mac-Paps. “We loafed there for a week,” Bob wrote, “walking around seeing where the machine gun nests had been and what streets the tanks had come down two months before, reading the fantastic accounts of the war in old copies of the fascist Heraldo de Aragón that we found lying around. We could buy small, bright colored bottles of crème de menthe, rum, and cacao for two pesetas. There was lots to eat.” After seven days in Quinto, word came in the middle of the night that they were to pack up and prepare to leave for another holding station near Madrid.
“It took three trains to move the whole brigade. We traveled in box cars, the most comfortable way, and we brigade runners had one box car to ourselves although there were but fourteen of us. Of the fourteen, seven were English-speaking and seven were Spanish.” They rode from Quinto to Tarragona on the Mediterranean coast, then down to Valencia and inland again across the country to Toledo province south of Madrid. So glorious was this journey that Bob said three days was not enough; he wished it had taken a week. “Every day was a beautiful Indian summer day. We could slide the doors wide open on each side and sit, our legs dangling out, with the sun warming us and the woods rolling by, bright red and yellow in the autumn. At all the stations there were crowds, partly just to see the brigade and partly in the hope of seeing a son, husband, or brother. We had brilliant posters plastered on the sides of the box cars telling who we were and there was lots of singing and cheering because Spanish trains stop at every station.”
Among the Spaniards, a runner named Rafael became Bob’s best friend. They bonded during that sunny autumn train ride by talking about their siblings. Bob had one brother and three sisters, including my mother, Mary, then a junior at Ann Arbor High School. Rafael told him that he now had only sisters; all his brothers had been killed by the fascists in Granada in July 1936, forcing his parents and sisters to flee to a section of Córdoba province still held by the government. He took out a photograph of the family. It struck Bob that they were “posed stiffly, in an old-fashioned way.” After his brothers were killed, Rafael enlisted in the Republican army. He was slightly older than Bob, twenty-three, and not a college man but a self-taught scholar who learned to read at age sixteen and now loved to study the history and geography of Spain. He taught Bob about all the provinces and seemed to have “very nearly memorized the first geography book he had read” so that he could tell the American “to the meter how high were the greater mountains in Spain.”
The thirteen other runners voted unanimously to make Rafael their responsable, the comrade in charge of dividing up food, acquiring new clothes and shoes, and making out the duty schedules. Proud of his hard-earned literacy, he drew up “elaborate tabulations and charts” to keep track of their assignments. “In the daily political periods when events were discussed and analyzed, it was always Rafael who read the newspapers aloud.” Bob came to think that Rafael was fighting for his right to education. “Fascist Spain would deny him that right as surely as monarchist Spain had done for the first sixteen years of his life.”
Another Spanish runner was Llorens, a bank clerk and Catalan nationalist who volunteered when he turned eighteen and who impressed Bob by singing most of the Cole Porter songs from Top Hat, the 1935 Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire musical. “He sang them in English and once came to me asking the meaning to the words in ‘Night and Day,’ ” Bob recalled. Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops / when the summer shower is through / So a voice within me keeps repeating—you, you, you. There was also a Valencian fishmonger nicknamed Captain Fish, who had the best singing voice in the battalion, and the poet Genaro and the firebrand Antonio, who came out of an anarchist trade union, and Luis, a working-class kid who lied about his age so he could enlist and was dead within a few mo
nths, before he had turned seventeen, killed by the concussion of a bomb that never touched him. Some American soldiers spoke disparagingly of the Spaniards on their side, portraying them inaccurately as feckless, but from my uncle’s perspective they were the noble reason to be there.
Their destination near Madrid was an expansive villa with a paper mill on the estate in the village of Ambite, fifty kilometers east of the capital. It was a luxurious resting spot for soldiers of the International Brigade, who set up an encampment there and in the nearby village of Mondéjar. The villa itself was a frequent stopping place for sympathetic visitors. There are photographs of Hemingway standing outside the main building with a group of soldiers and officials, and Clement Attlee, the British Labour Party leader, paid a visit while the Mac-Paps were there. It has been said that he was greeted first by Segundo, the village dwarf.
Late in November, Bob wrote a letter to Ed Magdol, a former Daily colleague, that described that time near the mill in Ambite. The midsummer heat of Tarazona de la Mancha seemed distant. “We have had lots of rain this month and now it is getting colder,” he wrote. “I am reluctant to warm myself before the kitchen fires for fear I won’t be able to take it the rest of the day and days to come. But I really have become used to living continuously in a temperature never better than 50 degrees. Movies and books on war themes seem the most popular in Spain today—at least I have encountered them in unusual proportions. That is natural.”
Bob then recalled the scene from that first day of battle at Fuentes de Ebro in October, a sight vivid in his memory, his rendering one of fearlessness. “It was the long line of men of the brigade, unrenowned, moving up, just before dusk of a cloudy afternoon, through our communication trenches, paying no attention to shells falling about them; them taking up positions for the attack, then attacking superbly. That was a sample of the people’s army that is growing in numbers and experience every day. It was an unforgettable sight. Because that long line knew that many among them were living the last 15 minutes of their lives, but there was none who did not subordinate that thought to his determination to save his people from fascism.”
The reality was that some soldiers, as in any war, withered at the approach of battle, and some drifted away. Camp Lukács, an International Brigade prison camp near Albacete, was filling with a few thousand deserters, along with anarchists, socialists, and others who, though committed to the anti-Franco cause, had in various ways run afoul of the brutishly unscrupulous and controlling Soviet advisers and communist hardliners who dominated the leadership. Many at Camp Lukács were “re-educated” and sent back to battalions; some deserters were executed.
During that rest period at Ambite, Bob was granted a brief leave and escaped to Madrid, where he stayed at the Hotel Alfonso near the Gran Via. “It was well run by the trade unions—the chief fault was that there was no glass in the windows. Also, there was no place to hang the laundry but in the corridors.” Those minor inconveniences were nothing compared to the field; the besieged city seemed vibrant to Bob. “The city was everywhere decorated in honor of the year of its successful defense and the 20th birthday of the Soviet Union. Although artillery, and in the still early morning hours, machine guns can be heard, the streets hum and there is a gay café and theatre life, of which I drank deep until sugar candy mixed with Spanish cognac forced me to a bed of pain my last night.”
With Christmas and the new year came new battles. The Mac-Paps were sent to Teruel, a contested city due east of Madrid and halfway back to the coast. For several months, one side and then the other had held Teruel. In a surprise offensive, the Republican army had retaken the city in December, and in January 1938 Franco’s troops were mounting a fierce counteroffensive. The Mac-Paps came in to help hold it. Known for its Moorish, or Mudéjar, architecture, Teruel sat high on the hills above the confluence of the Turia and Alfambra rivers. The Mac-Paps were assigned a dangerous position west of town. The winter there had been unforgiving. Snow remaining from a four-day blizzard made maneuvering slow and treacherous. The men had to survive below-freezing temperatures, wholly inadequate clothing, hundreds of cases of frostbite, and Hitler’s Condor Legion, whose planes had been grounded during the worst weather but eventually resumed a relentless air attack. A peak known as La Muela, or “the Tooth,” rose above the Mac-Paps on one side, and to their backs was a seventy-foot cliff. Virtually trapped and freezing, they endured an unceasing barrage and suffered heavy casualties during five weeks of fighting, with at least 150 wounded or dead.
When the brigade finally withdrew in February, lines were still disputed, both sides claiming victory. But the damage on the road toward Valencia when the Mac-Paps moved out was frightful. “As far as the eye could see there were wrecked, blackened tanks, strafed trucks, demolished staff cars and piles of house rubble,” historian Eby wrote of the scene. Adam Hochschild, in his evocative history Spain in Our Hearts, quoted an ambulance driver watching a battalion moving toward him. They “came up the road in the moonlight. Too tired to swear, the men were wordless. The torn blankets over heads and shoulders and tied like skirts around the waist, the shoes wrapped with rags, the rifles on their shoulders gave them the appearance of a battalion of beggars. Ranks of stretcher-bearers with eight-foot spear-like poles added to the Biblical quality of the scene.”
Bob was among the walking wounded, nipped in the ear by shrapnel. Back in Ann Arbor, his mother had learned the truth. Her son was not on some grand tour of France and Great Britain, but fighting in Spain. At least he was alive.
* * *
ON MARCH 14 correspondent William P. Carney of the New York Times marched into the town of Alcañiz in the protective pocket of Nationalist troops who now were executing a devastating maneuver designed to slice apart the Loyalist lines from Aragon and western Catalonia all the way to the Mediterranean. Carney was known as Franco’s man on the Times. He was granted friendly access to the generalissimo’s men and wrote sympathetically about the right-wing rebels. His dispatches on the course of the war contrasted sharply with those of another Times reporter, Herbert L. Matthews, who covered the antifascist side. But on March 14 Carney’s embedding with Franco’s troops led to a disquieting revelation. It came in a story he wrote that night and sent by courier to Zaragoza, where it was transmitted by wireless to the offices in Manhattan.
Carney reported that more than 1,500 prisoners had been seized by the Nationalists near Alcañiz in recent days, including an entire unit that was surprised and rounded up the previous night in nearby Calanda without a shot being fired. (Calanda was known as the hometown of Luis Buñuel, the avant-garde director who was in Paris and Geneva during that period, supporting the antifascist cause by making pro-Republican propaganda films.) The commanding general in the unit Carney accompanied gave him permission to interview some Americans who had been captured that day and were being detained along with scores of other prisoners inside Alcañiz’s Iglesia del Carmen, an imposing cathedral high on the hill. “I saw the beautiful entrance of the church bordered by chiseled marble—the work of a seventeenth century craftsman—still intact except the head had been hacked away from a sculptured life size figure of the Virgin above the doorway,” Carney wrote. “The interior had undergone the same change as the cathedral,” with all sacred images stripped from the walls and altar. “We found four Americans, two Englishmen and two English-speaking Scandinavians in a group by themselves in a corner.” The Americans told him they had been on the run since Belchite fell and that they had been captured separately on the roads between Belchite and Alcañiz. “They explained that each seemed to have become separated from his outfit. With their limited knowledge of Spanish and their unfamiliarity with Aragon’s geography, they were completely lost.” Then Carney named the four. He described one as a schoolteacher, another as a shoe salesman, and a third as hailing from Oklahoma.
The fourth was Ralph Neafus.
The dispatch was printed in a late edition of the Times on Wednesday, March 16, and went unnoticed
in Ann Arbor until a few days later, when students who had been trying to send the three University of Michigan volunteers packages of chocolate and cigarettes through the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in New York were told about the Carney story. “A hectic search through several editions of Wednesday’s Times brought no results until the Late City edition was uncovered,” the Daily reported. “It is known that two other Michigan students were also attached to the Mackenzie-Papineau battalion. Cummins was a runner and Service a truck driver. Since they were not mentioned as being among the four Americans captured, conjectures are that they either were not at the front at the time or else escaped during the march into Alcañiz.”
News of Neafus’s capture consumed the Michigan campus, “temporarily replacing sex and the coaching situation” in student bull sessions, as the Daily put it. Arthur Miller was haunted by the memory of driving Neafus from Ann Arbor to New York the previous June, when he could not shake the feeling that he was taking his pal to his imminent death. Now Miller was about to graduate, and Neafus was in grave danger. Was he somehow responsible for what happened? Could he have prevented it?
There were larger, less personal questions to be answered. What would the Roosevelt administration do about the captured Americans? Would there be a diplomatic effort to free them, or at least protect them from being killed? Leaders at the Daily and student organizations supporting the Spanish Republic sent a telegram to Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, urging help for Neafus. The twenty-one signers included the Daily’s lead night editor, Elliott Maraniss. On the night of March 22, the day the telegram was sent, more than 150 students gathered in the Michigan Union ballroom to “protest the failure of the State Department to recognize any diplomatic responsibility toward Neafus and to protest the neutrality policy of the administration toward the Spanish war.”
A Good American Family Page 11
