Word: sommerfield
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Dates: during 1937-1937
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...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...
Unlike British Major Geoffrey McNeill-Moss's factually authoritative but notably pro-Rebel account of one of the most heroic episodes in Spain's civil war (The Siege of Alcazar; Knopf: $3.50), Sommerfield's book is unpretentious historically, uninsistent politically, is marred only by a too-obvious leaning towards Ernest Hemingway in style. It provides an excellent report of one man's experiences, impressions, in battle, offers in two or three of its episodes descriptions hardly-to-be-forgotten of life in wartime. For these in particular, most readers will find it valuable...
Twenty-eight-year-old Author Sommerfield, whose education was, as he says, "dubious," ducked school at 16 and worked as sailor, carpenter, stage manager, had one novel published, May Day, before enlisting for Spain. Volunteering in October 1936, he saw six months action, was at one time reported dead, returned this spring to England "to discredit this rumor," is now living in Lancashire...