American Commander in Spain: Robert Bale Merriman and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Marrion Merrimann and Warren Lerude. Nevada, 1986.

Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Spain 1936-39
ed. by Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago. Monthly Review Press, 1987.

On the night af April 2, 1938 Robert Hale Merriman, then Chief of Staff of the 15th International Brigade, disappeared on the road to Corbera. Caught up in the collapse of the Aragon front, along with men fron the Abraham Lincoln Battalion he stumbled into a rebel patrol. In the confusion Merriman and Brigade commissar Dave Doran went missing. Accounts of what happened next vary, but what is certain is that they did not escape.

For Merriman the confused events of that night marked the end of a personal odyssey that had begun six years earlier as a graduate student in California. As Marrion Merriman remembers in American Commander In Spain, in the economics department at Berkeley students were encouraged 'to find new ways to make it a better world'. That search led Merriman first to the Soviet Union to explore the economics of collectivisation, and finally to Spaln.

From the beginning he stood out among his fellow Americans. He had not crossed to Spain with the original group, he was rumoured to have been to the Soviet Union, he was made second in command of the newly formed Abraham Lincoln Battalion. These facts seemed to indicate that he had status in and with the Communist Party. He was instead perhaps unique among battalion commanders both in his experience of life in the Soviet state and in his distance from the Communists. Called upon to praise the revolution during a visit to a Byelorussian village, he had characteristically commented, "That's not part of my speech."

Objectivity

For some he looked even more the academic in uniform than in civilian life, and it was his ability to bring something of the researcher's objectivity to bear on the responsibilities of command which accounts for his promotion to Brigade Staff. Although Merriman disliked Copic, and had argued furiously with him to prevent the disastrous attack by the Lincolns at Jarama, he had early accepted the inevitability of losses while privately lamenting each individual death.

Although in translating the intimacy of conversation to the printed page Warren Lerude has proved a sensitive collaborator, despite unrivalled access to his diaries this account does little to extend our knowledge of Merriman. This failing can in part be explained by the book's lack of distinct focus. It is at the same time biography of Robert and memoir of the Merrimans' relationship, from first meeting at Reno to separation in Spain.

Marroon Merriman's Spanish experience began with a summons to Robert's side after he had been wounded at Jarama. Unwilling to leave him again she was one of only two women to join the 15th Brigade, realised her commitment to the Spanish cause during a terrifying visit to besieged Madrid, and paid her own price when raped by a Slav IB officer on a fact finding trip to Murcia. Late in 1937 she finally left Spain, at Robert's insistence, to rally support in the US for an end to America's non-intervention policy.

In details of obscure radio broadcasts, in all too brief extracts from Robert's diaries, and in less well known samples of Hemingway's journalism, there is much here of interest. But it is as a very personal record of a relationship that this book should be read.

Anthology

Alvah Bessie and Albert Prago reprint part of Merriman and Lerude's chapter on Jarama in their anthology Our Fight. In doing so they repeat the Communist 'revision' of Alec McDade's 'Jarama Song' exposed by Valentine Cunningham (The Penguine Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, 1980. Where American Commander includes the song's first stanza as it appears in the Book of the XVth Brigade (1938), Bessie and Prago print the sanitised version which first appeared after McDade's death.

This piece of gratuitous vandalism mars what is otherwise an excellent anthology of writings by veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (sic). The rationale for this is inexplicable when the editors also include material as unidealistic as James Jones' hard-hitting description of the final days of the Ebro offensive: "Such a scramble I had never before seen: friendliness, comradeship evaporated. "

Use of the term 'Brigade' in the subtitle is justified by the inclusion of writings by veterans of the John Brown Artillery Battery, the Mackenzie-Papineaus, the Twenty-fourth Battalion, and of others associated with VALB after the war rather than aa part of the Lincolns in Spain.

The anthology ranges from essays by Prago on Jews in the Brigades, and by Arthur Landis on international volunteers in the air service, to poetry by Edwin Rolfe and the essential personal memoirs. The majority of these are well written, vivid and as laconic as Joseph Grunblatt's comment on the cavalry squadron to which he was attached at Brunete: "My unit never returned. The only one who survived was Captaln Alocca, who was court-martialed later."

As a collection this work fulfils a valuable function in making available extracts from obscure and otherwise out of print material. In this, as in its general testament to the role of 'Americans' in Spain, it succeeds admirably.

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