Departure (7 page)

But Sidney's hatred—and there must have been a fierce, terrible hatred of the things that pervert and destroy human beings—found expression only in what he did; the mildness in this small, sensitive Jew was so entire that even we who knew him well were surprised when he left college to join the International Brigade in Spain. He hated and mistrusted guns; the most complimentary thing we could say was that a person as politically developed as he might make a very good advisor, or commissar, as they were beginning to call them. But as a matter of fact we were wrong, and after the retreat across the Ebro, they made him a captain.

III

I had the story of the retreat across the Ebro, and the last attack, afterwards, from at least six or seven people who had known Sidney and fought next to him. Also, in his letters to Janie and to old Mr. Greenspan and to Adrian, his brother, and to his sister, Fannie, there were enough details to make some sort of blueprint, but he didn't figure in that blueprint; he wrote of the things all around him, and it was his comrades who filled in the place he occupied.

Remember how it was then, in 1937, when the Lincoln Battalion first raised its banner with the International Brigade! Madrid was to be the tomb of fascism! Boys who had never seen anything more lethal than a cop's revolver signed up for the Battalion; skinny, myopic boys from the city streets marched off alongside the workers to face the Messerschmitts and the Panzers. The final conflict was being fought among the treeless buttes and canyons of Spain, and from the devastation wrought by the first fascist monsters would arise the beginnings of the brave new world. We believed that—and looking back, it might have been that way.

It was early in 1937 that Sidney Greenspan arrived with his contingent in Spain. Between then and April of '38, when the retreat across the Ebro took place, he had two slight wounds; he became a lieutenant, he learned how to assemble a machine gun with his eyes closed, and he learned more thoroughly that if you considered in advance what you were going to do and did it, it was better for body and soul than to straddle the horns of a dilemma. But on the outside, he remained the same; he still studied a good deal. In those days he read everything he could have sent to him on the working class in America, and when he talked about the future, it was with the certainty that this phase of the struggle would soon be over, and he thought he would like to be a labor organizer in the South, going there to live and taking Janie with him.

When the big retreat began in '38, he was with the 58th Lincoln Battalion. But they didn't know that it was a retreat then. It was determined at GHQ that the tide had to be turned, whatever the cost, and Dave Doran, the Brigade Commissar, wrote orders to advance and keep advancing until otherwise instructed. So the 58th Battalion advanced, not knowing that everywhere else the line was breaking and all up and down the long front the battered Republican Army was in retreat. Here is the matter-of-fact way in which Sidney told about that in a letter to Janie:

… please don't worry, because I'm all right now. But it was bad a few weeks ago, and we lost most of the Battalion. Maybe you will read about it in the papers, but here is the truth of how it happened. Johnny Gates, our Commissar—you remember, you met him at Milty's house—told us about the general orders to go ahead, and we went ahead and we just kept advancing. First we were low and very thirsty, but we captured a fascist water truck, and we felt better. But we were moving fast with just the ammunition we could pack and we had no liaison and we didn't know that everywhere else our people were retreating. I don't know who was to blame for that; I don't want to blame anyone now.

Well, we went on with our crazy, wild advance until about three o'clock in the afternoon, and then we were resting under some olive trees when we realized something was wrong. Bob Merriman—he was from California U., Brigade Operations Officer—came up and told us to get the devil out. There were about three hundred of us then, I mean boys from home, and we hit out cross country. We got to a hill above Gandesa, and we looked down, and we could see the fascists attacking in the streets, and some of the houses were burning, but our people still held a good part of the town. Merriman thought the wisest thing to do would be to break through to the defenders, and we sent out a patrol of about twenty-five guys. They were wiped out, all of them. It was like the end of something, the first end. We retreated onto two hills, the Americans on one, the Spaniards and others on the other. They sent cavalry against us then, and we repulsed the charge, cutting them up pretty good. Then the cavalry dismounted and set up lines, and along about dusk, they started in with artillery. Then Vernon Selby—he's that boy from Virginia Military Institute—found a way out for us, and it seemed that Corbera was still open.

Here's where we lost all our men, including Spaniards. We went Indian file and traveled at night, across country. Men would go to sleep and not wake up, just out of weariness. They would crawl into the bushes and go to sleep, and we'd lose them. We'd think they were there and go on. How can we forgive ourselves for that? Then we ran smack into Corbera, into a German radio station. They started in with grenades and machine guns, and cut us to pieces. Merriman and Doran were killed there, but I didn't know that then. But that broke us up, and I took off with two other guys, Smith and Goldstein. Somehow, we got to the Ebro. They were both wounded, and the next night we had to crawl through a whole sleeping Italian division. But only sixty of our guys got across the Ebro—only sixty.…

Sidney didn't tell her, in that letter, that when Smith and Goldstein were wounded, he had cared for them, nursed them, and sometimes carried them, that he bore them both across the Ebro. He didn't tell her that the next day he recrossed the Ebro and found Abel Clark, and dressed his wounds and returned with him. How he did it and where his strength came from can't easily be told; he belonged to something new and incredible, that came out of the people. For the moment, it can merely be detailed, as an epitaph or as a requiem. He stopped a tank once with a bottle of petrol and a rag, and once he broke his glasses and fought for two weeks in a shadow world.

He was in the nine days on the Sierra Carbolam after they had mounted the last offensive back across the Ebro and had won almost to Gandesa. Then he was a captain—he became a captain after the retreat across the Ebro—and his company hung onto the rocky lump of Hill 366 and then was pushed off it under the fire of heavy artillery, with no other cover than some sandbags and the bare rock. In three days, he led twelve attacks to take back the hill. But afterwards, when he spoke about it once, the thing he mentioned was how, coming back to the lines after a short rest, they met the Dimitroff Battalion, the Slav Battalion; all the boys in the Brigade knew that the Slav Battalion was the best, iron and steel, and not to be broken by anything short of hell: and when the men from the Dimitroff outfit, beat as they were, saw the Lincoln Battallion going up to fill the hole for them, they broke down and wept. The big, blond Slavs stood there, crying, and then they joined the Americans and all of them went up together, with some rifles and some pistols, against the heavy artillery, the armor, and the Junkers-filled sky.

After that, Sidney was not afraid; he would say that he only had to remember that and he wouldn't be afraid. And it was not long after that that he was taken by the Moors. Some of the boys who were there remembered exactly how it had happened. The Battalion thought there was a Spanish outfit on their right flank—good men, not fascists—and a patrol went out. Sidney took the patrol out; Jim Lardner was with him, and that was where Lardner died, and Sidney was taken by the Moors.

IV

About the time in prison, Sidney had least to say. A jail is a jail in any land, and the rats, the mice, the bedbugs, and the soul-destroying monotony are international qualities. But the fascists, wherever they are, develop refinements. The Moors amused themselves by breaking all the fingers in his right hand, and Sidney thought he would never be able to use it again. They found out that he was a Jew and they turned him over to the Nazis. The Nazis, who were more creative even than the Moors, had developed in Spain the standing cells, which they were putting to such good purpose against members of the German underground. A standing cell is two and a half feet wide and a foot and half deep; you stand in it until your legs and your mind go, and then you fall, but there is no place for you to fall. For six weeks they gave Sidney the standing cell for two days a week; they were scientifically curious about how much such a small, frail young man could take, and they had theories about Jewish blood and Jewish powers of resistance, and it was always interesting to test those theories under actual conditions.

How Sidney escaped still cannot be told; Franco still sits like a blood-fatted spider in Spain, and the gentlemen in our Congress still debate. But he escaped, and he made his way to the coast, and a small boat took him to France. He was twenty-four when he came back to America, and his hair was turning gray, and he didn't care to talk much about how it had been in prison. His main interest was to find out whether he could ever use his right hand again, and when the operation turned out successfully, his whole state of mind became better. He and Janie went away for the three months his hand was in a cast; it was the only time Sidney had anything like that, three months in the country, with nothing to do but sit and read and taste the sweetness of life.

He could have gotten a job in a good berth; he had friends; he had people who felt a debt. But he was able to talk Janie around to his old dream of organizing in the South, and she went down there with him.

V

An epitaph for Sidney should explain as well as tell, but how are you to explain what the movement for freedom means for one human being? The papers, the magazines, the press of the whole nation explain why people like Sidney Greenspan are corrupt, evil, selfish, and enemies of mankind, and to that they devote countless millions of words; so, in return, what can one say about Sidney except to state that there was no rest for him so long as one man was enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by another. He went to the South and joined in the struggle to organize the sharecroppers. He spent fourteen months down there, and that was in the area where three organizers were killed—where they simply disappeared, vanished from the face of the earth.

And this he did for thirty dollars a week, to live day in and day out with the threat of the Klan hanging over him, to be shot at three times, to win neither glory nor credit nor wealth nor fame. I remember speaking to him when he was back from that, a few months before he managed to enlist. A group of us were in the little place downtown which he and Janie shared, and someone asked why a person like him did what he did.

“It's not so much,” Sidney said. “I saw the party people in Spain. They stayed there. I could go home.”

“But why do you do it?”

“Why does any man do anything? The factors in him add up. They make a sum total, and he adds to that out of his understanding. Then he does what he has to do.”

Then someone said, “Suppose you won and suppose you built your brave new world, do you think anyone would remember?”

“It isn't important,” Sidney answered slowly. “But they'll remember.”

Once before, many years ago, when we were very young, and Sidney and a good many more of us were brought into court during the unemployment demonstrations, a magistrate asked him the same question, why he did what he did; and it was then that I realized, for the first time I imagine, with what zest and joy a person can taste of life, for Sidney, leaning forward on the rail, told the magistrate, his voice level:

“You don't question what you do. You do it because you have to—and you're paid for it. You want me to make you understand why I do what I do—could I make you hear a million voices? I'm paid in my own coin!”—holding out an empty hand.

Again, not so long ago, I went to call on the old man Greenspan, still alive, more shriveled, more used up, but still working, and after we had spoken about other things, he asked me:

“Why couldn't Sidney be satisfied to live quiet?”

Seeing the old man with his rheumy eyes, his bent back, his poor swollen feet, I was brought back to the time when I first knew Sidney, and I realized that what he had always wanted was to live quiet, as the old man said, to step into the old, generous stream of life, and to taste it deeply and comfortingly for the time that is given to any man; I had it for a moment, the full answer, and then I lost it.

VI

After Pearl Harbor, Sidney managed to enlist through a fraud. It doesn't hurt to say that. Young as he was, he was no good physically, but he knew an army doctor down at Monmouth, and he got in. But because of the inescapable condition of his eyes, and because of headaches—they called them migraine, but they were the result of fascist efficiency—he was placed in the medics and shipped to a camp in Georgia. For a year and a half he remained in that Georgia camp, and three times he tried to be transferred to the infantry. There were long periods when none of us but Janie heard from him; we went in all directions as the war spread over the face of the earth. I had one letter from him in that time, in which he said:

… It's not like Spain. Some officers here found out I was in the Brigade—I never could or wanted to keep my mouth shut—and they gave me no peace, day or night. It's you red bastard this, and you red bastard that, and what did they pay you to go to Spain? I'm trying to get into a combat outfit. In a war, the only safe place, from a mental point of view, is at the front.…

He went over to England as a combat medic, and from England into North Africa. In North Africa, he ran into Johnny Graham, from the Brigade, who was with the 1st Rangers. Johnny told me about it afterwards; it was one of those crazy coincidences, which happen so often in life. Johnny fell over with a bad splinter in his thigh, and he was lying in the sand and plucking at it, and plucking at it, and swearing because the amount of blood frightened him and unnerved him, when this small medic crawled up and said, “Let me try,” and got the splinter out and put the sulfa on, and was bandaging it when Johnny saw his face and recognized him. That calmed Johnny, and I can understand how he was able to relax, and take the cigarette that was offered to him, and say, “Hullo, Sidney.”