Word: sommerfield
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VOLUNTEER IN SPAIN-John Sommerfield-Knopf...
...boat and train to Paris, where in a small secret office his enlistment papers were filled out and approved; by train to Marseille and thence, by night and with all lights darkened, in a freighter across the Mediterranean-so John Sommerfield, young English Leftist writer, got into Spain to join the Loyalist Army. Landing, he was rushed to Albacete ("when I saw the name on the station it meant nothing then"), where in an ex-nunnery the collection of foreign volunteers later to be known as the International Column were being drilled for combat. Here he had his first chance...
...Sommerfield's own section, a machine-gun unit, consisted of himself and John Cornford (later killed in action); Marcel, a young tough from the Bastille quarter of Paris; Freddie, another Englishman, an ex-Guardsman; Richter, a dapper German of mysterious antecedents; miscellaneous Poles, Italians. Equipment and uniforms were equally scanty; the men wore mostly overalls and windbreakers, had one antiquated Hotchkiss gun for the whole company to train on. (Later, on the eve of their first engagement, they wangled Lewis guns, had a day to learn the new mechanism before going into action.) Drill commands were in French, which...
...Sommerfield went into action when his detachment occupied the building of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, in Madrid's University City...
...operations in which he had a part, Sommerfield can tell little, indeed knew little beyond his immediate experiences. "In a war you are lost, you are like atoms in a chemical reaction, you are lost in a boiling confusion in which you are not conscious of the part you are playing. Whatever you are fighting about in a war, it is a long way away, and you are nothing." He was in University City for a while, sniping from the windows of rooms whose floors were a crunch with shattered laboratory equipment, littered with blasted furniture. Then as the Rebel...