National Affairs: Boys from Brunete

When 1,500,000 U. S. boys came back from France in 1919, the bands played Over There, K-K-K-Katy, The Star-Spangled Banner, and crowds lionized them. When 322 U. S. boys and a girl came back from Spain last week, a small crowd did the lionizing, and the song was again The Star-Spangled Banner.

They were fighters in a war in which the U. S. is neutral, veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, organized in January 1937 to fight for Loyalist Spain. The brigade mustered altogether 4,000 U. S. citizens. Last September the Spanish Leftist Government disbanded it. Those who filed last week from the third-class gangplank of the Cunarder Ausonia to a Manhattan dock had left behind some 2,000 killed and missing, 250 captured at Belchite, Brunete, many another battleground. (Others are still in Spain or convalescing in France, and 870 veterans had already returned to the U. S.

Typical of the brigade's personnel was the roll of last week's homecomers. Among them: 25-year-old Brigade Commissar (political instructor) John Gates from Youngstown, Ohio; Sergeant Gerald Cook, office boy for the pinko Nation; Lieut. Manny Lancer, formerly of the Workers Alliance; Sergeant Thomas Page, a Manhattan Negro (wounded on the Ebro front): an lowan who became Captain Owen Smith; 20-year-old Nurse Rose Waxman of Manhattan. Saddest of the heroes was a lad whose parents met him at the dock, snatched off his purple military beret, hopped up & down on it, indignantly marched him home.

As the most active defender of Loyalist Spain in the U. S., the Communist Party had a big hand in recruiting the brigade, slipping its rookies into Spain and naming the outfit (for Abraham Lincoln is now a Communist hero by adoption). But many other men of any or no political faith, who saw in Spain a battle for democracy, also backed it. And one who put up $10,000 to help repatriate Lincoln brigadiers was Financier Bernard Mannes Baruch.

The U. S. citizen who had the most to do with getting them home was an adventuresome San Francisco capitalist named Frederick B. Thompson, brother of Novelist Kathleen Norris. In his remarkable past he has played around with such varied characters as Jack London and Mexico's Rebel Pancho Villa. He had long since retired with a comfortable fortune and stomach ulcers when, in 1937, his young son David and his young nephew Jimmy Benét (son of Poet William Rose Benét) went to fight in Spain. Word that David had been wounded took Frederick Thompson posthaste to Madrid, where he found David recovering and insistent upon more fighting. Father Frederick wanted to fight, too, but his age (55) and his ulcers made it impracticable. So he retired to Paris, where he did his fighting with more conservative U. S. expatriates in order to get wounded U. S. veterans of the brigade admitted to the American Hospital in Paris and successfully repatriated.