Ken
APRIL 21, 1938
It has been going on now, in Spain, all day and all night long for over a year and a half. So you are all tired of it. Even the word doesn’t mean anything anymore. War is not a word that frightens people any longer. They are getting used to it now. You even hear that we have been promised one if business does not pick up. Though nobody believes that of course.
So now, before you read any further in this, look across the page and you will see two pictures of Italian soldiers who died well in battle. They look pretty good, don’t they?
The boy at the bottom of the page was shot through the head. The man at the top was hit in the hand, had bandaged that wound, and then was killed by a bullet in the chest. The man at the top of the next page was shot through the legs and the chest. There was nothing very odd nor very extraordinary about any of those wounds; and in this last year one has seen many people that one knew die in the same way.
But at the bottom of the next page, and on the page opposite you see three photographs of three Italian soldiers who came to Spain to die but did not have quite such good luck at it.
The man at the bottom of the left-hand page was hit by high explosive. There are no feet to his legs.
The man at the bottom of the other page was hit by a tank shell which exploded in the little pile of rocks where he was working an automatic rifle. The other man, who was helping serve the gun, is dead on the left from the same shell. He does not show in the picture; but he looks all right. There’s nothing very startling about him; but he is quite dead.
The man at the top of the right-hand page was hit by a light bomb dropped from a pursuit plane which was ground-strafing. He is rather impressive to those who are not accustomed to a battle-field. But in your time you’ve seen good friends look as bad or worse.
You remember this man quite well because you turned him over to look at his papers and among them was a letter from his wife that you kept until you lost it. She wrote how badly things were going in the village, how pleased she was to get his pay allotment; but that she cried every night because he was not there. She also told how many times she prayed each day to keep him safe and that she had never ceased to thank St. Joseph for sending her such a good husband.
These are photographs of what happens to the men sent to die in a fascist invasion of a democratic country; a country with a republican form of government.
The men who are defending that country against the Moors, the Italians and the Germans, die in the same way. They die in as strange ways, in as ugly ways, as do the invaders. But they die knowing why they die; they die fighting for you now; knowing that unless they beat the fascists now you will have to fight them later. Many of them came a long way to die in Spain and none of them who fought on the ground got more than 50¢ a day. They, the men of the International Brigades, were not soldiers of fortune or adventurers. They were just very clear thinkers. No one sent them. They came to Spain to fight fascism because they saw, long before the diplomats, how dangerous it was.
Before this is published, the Italians will have attacked again. In the last three months while discussing the withdrawal of volunteers, Italy has sent 50,000 more troops to Spain. She has also sent three full brigades of artillery, and Germany, hiding behind the Italians, has sent between three and four hundred new planes and much new artillery and tanks. The fascist nations act while the democratic nations talk, vacillate, connive and betray.
If the democratic nations allow Spain to be over-run by the fascists through their refusal to allow the legal Spanish government to buy and import arms to combat a military insurrection and fascist invasion, they will deserve whatever fate that brings them. The majority of the career diplomats of England, France, and the United States, are fascist, and it is they who supply the erroneous information on which their foreign offices and state departments act. But no matter what excuse the democratic countries may have for their ignorance of the necessity for beating the fascists in Spain, history will label their actions in 1936 and 1937, when they refused to allow Spain to arm herself to fight their enemies, as criminal stupidity.
Meantime all day, and all night, it goes on. The resistance of the republican government in Spain against the first combined fascist invasion is the great holding attack to save what we call civilization. If Italy could be beaten in Spain, as Napoleon was beaten there, the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis would be broken before it ever had a chance to make the war it threatens. But because it has gone on so long the people who do not have to go hungry, fight and die in it, get quite tired of the whole thing. They do not even want to hear about it. Perhaps these pictures will make it seem a little more real. Because those pictures are what you will look like if we let the next war come.