Glad Reds

When contented Communists sit back in their slippers after dinner, many of their musings nowadays are about the International Column in Spain and its Red militia. In London this week British Reds were snapping up copies of a handy new work, Defence of Madrid, the siege of which still rages, written by the London News Chronicle's, civil war Correspondent Geoffrey Cox, a warm Communist sympathizer and a fairly objective reporter. Merrily he writes of a Madrid midnight spree with police of the present regime in a "black, swift, open Mercedes-Benz" which he thinks must once have "belonged to a millionaire." The driver "had nearly half a bottle [of] John Haig [whiskey], drinking it off like wine. . . .You know what this car is for--to shoot down Fascist snipers. . . . For half an hour we went on in this way, shouting or firing at lighted windows, racing through suspect streets. No one fired on us, thank God! Then they drove us home, running the car right onto the pavement a yard from the hotel door."

This was a lighter side of Reds at play, but Mr. Cox grows earnest writing his British admiration of the men now assembled in Spain under General Emilio Kleber, today Commander of the International Column, the tough soldiers of fortune from many lands who first put the backbone of trained soldiering into the defense of Madrid (TIME, Nov. 9 et seq.}. Writes News Chronicle's Cox: "General Kleber is by birth an Austrian. His family took him to Toronto when he was still a child, and he became a naturalized British citizen, which he remains to this day. He fought in the Great War. In 1919 he went to Siberia with the Canadian Army of Intervention, to serve against the Bolsheviks."

"But I managed to make my way from Siberia to Moscow and join the Red Army," General Kleber told Mr. Cox.

"He served throughout the remainder of the Russian civil war, and rose to be one of their best commanders. After it he went to Hamburg, where he organized the Communist storm troops. In 1927 he was in China, leading one group of the Red Armies against Chiang Kai-shek." Over exactly how the present International Column was organized and hurled into Spain just as Madrid's defenses were about to crumble, Communist Sympathizer Cox draws a veil, simply recording: "General Kleber was at the head of the first brigade of the International Column which arrived in Madrid on that fateful Sunday, November 8th. . . . The Spanish civil war is the third in which he has fought, and the third in which he has had experience of building up an army out of undisciplined masses."

The native Spanish Red militia also fighting to defend Madrid Mr. Cox has sketched and called the roll of their leaders, his friends, each an able Communist, including "slight, dark-haired Antonio Mije, formerly Commissar for War in the Madrid Defense Junta, and one of the leading members of the Communist Party executive." His heroes however are mainly the soldiers of the International Column: "Many of them died without ever having more than a glimpse of the city they fell to save [Madrid]. The troops were put straight into action. . . . The Thalmann Battalion,* attacking again and again with the fury of men who had suffered in concentration camps, added to the natural frontal tactic of the German, were amongst the heaviest sufferers. . . . Men like Hans Beimler, the former Communist deputy in the Reichstag, who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp . . . killed in action in November. His body was taken to Moscow, for burial under the wall of the Kremlin. . .

"British volunteers in the International Column . . . there was John Cornford, brilliant Cambridge graduate. ... He had been the leader of the Left Wing Movement in Cambridge. . . . His mother was Francis Cornford, the poet who wrote of her friend Rupert Brooke: A young Apollo, golden haired, stands dreaming on the verge of strife, magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life. How alike were these two men, Rupert Brooke and John Cornford . . . yet what a difference in the causes for which they fell! "*

The first brigade of the International Column arrived 1,900 strong, according to Mr. Cox, the second brigade 1,500, the third 1,571 and the fourth 2,000. "There were few Americans. The only one I met was certainly not 'politically conscious.' He had joined up, he said, because he was broke and out of a job. But he was the only member of the column who gave this as a reason for enlisting. . . . What a body of men these were! They formed what must be one of the finest forces of troops the world has ever seen. . . . Had the Left Wing Movement had no history before November 1936, the International Column would by now have given it one of which any people might be proud. . . . Its organization, equipment, training and political direction are all fundamentally communist. It has been supported vigorously throughout by the communist parties of the World. . . . Whether the Spanish Government wins or loses, the men of the column will provide a force of propagandists and trained fighters who will have a great influence on the future of Europe."

Since most communist organs are convinced that Britain's Catholic Charge d'Affaires George Arthur D. Ogilvie-Forbes is a sort of Papal Ogre in Spain, the News Chronicle's reasonably objective Geoffrey Cox takes time out to report that considering that he is a Catholic" he is really not such a bad lot: "At night, very late, there would come stealing faintly into the ha11 of the Embassy a sound which I am sure must have perplexed the [Spanish] guards at the gate. . . . Behind closed doors Mr. Ogilvie-Forbes was play-the bagpipes. He plays them, I understand, excellently. It always struck me that, if the Embassy should be attacked, our best defense would not be to gather in the hall, but to wait until Mr. Ogilvie-Forbes marched downstairs playing The Flowers of the Forest. It would have appealed overwhelmingly to a Spaniard's sense of curiosity, even if it did not scare him out of his wits."

*Jailed by Nazis in Germany sits the Big Red after which this battalion is named, Comrade Ernst Thalmann, once a Presidential candidate in Germany (TIME March 21, 1932 et seq.). *Poet Brooke died on the island of Scyros in 1915 , bloodpoisoning contracted during the Dardanelles campaign.

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