In Europe

Brunete, the slaughterhouse of Fuentes and the snows of Teruel. This was the same man who drove the cream car.
    The last time I saw Milton was in 1993, during a sunny meal with Californian friends. He was still a tall, handsome man, and there was a girlfriend in the background then as well, half his age, as always. He had worked for the British Secret Service during the Second World War, including a stint in Burma, and later on he had served as an American intelligence service liaison officer with the communist resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy. After the war the American government treated him, like many other former Spanish volunteers, to the fascinating title of‘premature anti-fascist’. An army career, therefore, was out of the question for him. Even in his eighties he was still out to improve the world: collecting medicine for Cuba and financing ambulances and local clinics in Nicaragua.
    That afternoon in 1993, Milton was in a sombre mood. ‘They're dropping like flies these days, all my old comrades.’ He mumbled something about the ‘bastards’ who had ruined it all, then turned his attention to my girlfriend's blonde locks. The squirrels were running along the tops of the fences. From the kitchen we could hear our hostess flattening used cans with a hammer, for the collective recycling service: metal with metal, compost with compost, paper with paper.
    ‘It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth,’ George Orwell wrote. ‘But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.’
    Right after the civil war broke out, German and Italian aid to Franco began pouring in: Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts, technicians and pilots, guns and munitions, thousands of volunteers. It was, in part, a purely commercial transaction: Franco sold the Germans one mining concession after another. The Americans, ostensibly neutral, provided oil and 12,000 trucks. In their eyes, a ‘fascist’ coup posed less of a risk than a ‘communist’ revolution.
    The republic received support from Mexico, which immediately sent 20,000 rifles. All republican eyes were fixed on France, where the left wing Popular Front was in power at the time. French friends of the republic quickly arranged for the transport of more than seventy airplanes, but then the assistance stopped. Britain was determined not to be drawn into another unclear conflict on the continent, and France followed suit. ‘Appeasement’ was the key word in those years; that is to say, the containment of dictatorships by means of patience and prudence, the very opposite of the bellicosity of 1914.
    And so it happened that, on 8 August, 1936, France closed the Spanishborder to all military transports. This inevitably forced the republic into the arms of the only ally they had left: the communists and Stalin's Soviet Union. With that, their fate was sealed in the very first weeks of the war.
    The part of the country where Milton Wolff once fought lies along today's national highway N420, about a hundred kilometres south-west of Barcelona, behind the bungalows and the filling stations. Here were his positions, amid the olive trees in the quiet hills close to Gandesa. From his memoirs: ‘A lone plane appeared and circled over the hills. A lull … And finally the entire hill seemed to come alive with shouting and shooting and exploding grenades, and then it was over.’ For him, that was a crucial moment: it was when he lost contact with his battalion. Ascó, this must be the ‘poor brown village’ where he hid. Behind that the Ebro, which he finally swam across to get through the lines. The water is wild and red.
    Further along, Calaceite and Alcañiz lie baking in the sun, all their shutters closed. Two old women are sitting before their houses in knitted vests; the rest of the city is either asleep or dead, there's no telling which. Along the road you constantly come across flattened foxes, rabbits, badgers, weasels and partridges. Above the mountaintops hangs an endless roll of cloud, folded back on itself like a duvet. The