'A great, brave soldier'
Milton Wolff – loud, large, rumbustious, truculent, pony-tailed – fills the room. This is not difficult as the room is about 9ft square, and he doesn’t want to spend the night in it. But as London hotel rooms go, it is cheap, so he submits muttering imprecations. He perches precariously on a table to have his photograph taken; he won’t hold a bottle of booze – “My comrades would have me shot” – and he won’t put on his red bandana. At 84, Wolff has lost none of his bite.
The California-based Wolff, legendary commander of the US battalion in the Spanish civil war and uneasy friend of Ernest Hemingway, us visiting the UK for the first time. So far, all he has seen is a two-hour traffic jam and the inside of a room he hates. He has flown in from a civil war symposium in Madrid, is sipping a brandy a Spanish interviewer gave him, and has to out his hearing aid in because I talk too fast. But he is certainly not tired and launches into a matter-of-fact account of one of those remarkable lives that make you all too aware of the mundanity of your own.
Wolff was 22 when he volunteered to fight for the embattled Spanish republic. Born in Brooklyn, he was a child of the Depression who, with his parents on relief, had to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, a make-work scheme that employed young men building roads and landscaping the countryside. The men in the Corps went on hunger strike to demand better food and Wolff – “I participated and saw that this kind of thing could work and should be done even if it couldn’t work “ – set out on a lifetime of political struggle that has seen him, at different times, work with and against the American state.
Back in New York, he became active in the Young Communists and one day at a meeting a guest speaker asked for volunteers for the war against Franco in Spain. There were already Americans there fighting and dying, and Wolff joined up, telling his mother that he was going to work in a factory to free a man to go to the front.
“I was a pacifist,” says Wolff. “We had seen in film and literature the senseless slaughter of world war one and we didn’t want a repeat of that. But when Franco attacked the republic we became internationals, even though I might not have known where Portugal was before then.” The democracies wouldn’t help the republic; Russia and the international brigades would. Wolff boarded a ship for France, headed south, and crossed the Pyrenees to join his fellow Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.
Wolff arrived in February 1937 as fighting raged around Madrid. Initially he was a medical orderly, but within a few months he was trained as a machine gunner, and three weeks spent continuously manning a gun at the battle of Bruneté left his hearing impaired.
It was at this point that he ran into Hemingway in a bar in Madrid. Hemingway, who was covering the war as a journalist, was holding forth about military tactics; Wolff was bored by – or perhaps couldn’t properly hear – the great man’s conversation and went off to dinner, taking Hemingway’s girlfriend with him. The two spent a passionate night together. Hemingway sent an emissary round the following moment to tell Wolff he was forgiven.
It was the start of a touchy, tetchy relationship that reached its nadir with the publication in 1940 of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Wolff took exception to a scene in the book which depicted republican violence and also to accusations of hypocrisy levelled against Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria). He sent Hemingway a curt note accusing him of having been a “tourist” in Spain. Hemingway replied with a stream if invective.
They didn’t speak for seven years, until in 1947 Wolff was persuaded to call Hemingway to ask him to attend the 10th anniversary dinner for the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (the vets’ organisation was called a brigade because it embraced all Americans who served in the war, not just the members of the battalion). Hemingway greeted him warmly, calling him commander; he couldn’t come to the dinner but instead sent a moving recording of himself reading his essay “On the American Dead in Spain”.
Wolff was in Spain for two years, ending up as commander of the much-depleted Lincoln Battalion. Some 3,000 Americans fought for the republic; a third of them were killed. Wolff was marked for the rest of his life, and not just by the damage to his hearing. “Once you have out your life on the line you’re committed. In Spain it was sealed in blood. We were all volunteers; there were no mercenaries. There wasn’t a pot to piss in. There were no rewards, no medals. There was nothing. We got our asses kicked in Spain and then we came back.”
Hemingway believed he had found a hero in the tall, fearless Wolff. “Twenty-three years old, tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg,” he wrote of the young commander. “He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed.”
I had imagined that defeat in Spain would have left Wolff dejected and exhausted, but dar from it. “When I signed up I had no idea that we would leave without having won: we went there to win. But I was an activist; I’d figured that we lost, but it was one battle.”
He was involved in recruiting former International Brigade members to work with the resistance in occupied Europe in the early part of the war, then went to fight in Burma and Italy, eventually ending up behind enemy lines and anxious to link up with the Spanish resistance to Franco. But by then the hot war was won and the cold war was beginning; suddenly Franco was seen as a bulwark against communism and “premature anti-fascists” (used as term of abuse in the US) were surplus to requirements. Wolff was told to get on the first plane home. “They pulled all the suspects, all the shady characters that they had been using, out,” he says. “They were through with us.”
After the war life was tough. He went from hero to villain: frontman for an organisation, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, that was constantly under surveillance by the FBI for alleged communist sympathies. But he kept up the fight: for Spanish refugees and old members of the battalion; against Franco and the cold war hawks. He wrote a pamphlet opposing Spain’s admission to the United Nations; Picasso contributed an illustration for the cover. “His drawing was a magnificent thing,” says Wolff, “and like a jerk I don’t know what the hell I did with it.”
Wolff was one of the earliest supporters of civil rights, working for the Civil Rights Congress in the south. He opposed nuclear proliferation, supported the Sandinistas – raising money to buy ambulances in Nicaragua – and, after Franco (“the sonofabitch”) died in 1975, returned in triumph to Spain, as La Pasionaria had predicted the internationals would when they pulled out in 1938.
Wolff wrote of his experiences in an acclaimed autobiographical novel called Another Hill, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1994, the memoir of a survivor who never forgot his debt to his fallen comrades. It recorded a battle lost, but its publication signified a triumphant life, a successful war. “That’s the story comrade,” he says. “Let’s go eat.”
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