Milton Wolff was the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the group of volunteers the FBI classified as ‘premature antifascists,’ the brave men and women who went to Spain in the late 1930s to fight against Franco and the forces—both domestic and international—that he had allied in his bid to topple the duly elected and progressive Second Republic government. Wolff was a high school dropout and something of an anti-intellectual who disdained talk about the larger, political and tactical, conception of the war he was involved in, though he was fully aware of the consequences of defeat. Like most of the 2,800 American volunteers, Wolff had no military training or experience prior to that which he gained on the front lines of the battle for Brunete, outside of Madrid, in July of 1937, when he assumed his first command, that of a machine gun unit.
But Wolff was a natural, and this is something that comes through quite clearly in his autobiographical novel which relates his experiences in Spain, fifty-six years prior to the publication of Another Hill, by the University of Illinois Press, in 1994.
Through the eyes of his alter ego, Mitch Castle, the reader gets a very good idea of what it was like to form part of the vanguard in the early violent and enthusiastic struggle against the spread of European fascism. Wolff is an uneven stylist, but that fits his character perfectly: that of a man who was largely self-educated, detested the pomp of rank and the comforts of privilege, and gained a reputation for being fearless of the stray rounds that took the lives of so many of his comrades (over a third of the Lincolns were killed in Spain, as were half of the eight Lincoln Battalion commanders who preceded Wolff, the other four being wounded; Wolff was twenty-two years old when he assumed command).
But the writing is above all, honest and true to the gritty and unforgiving experience of being involved in the last great ideological war, when the odds, at least in the beginning, were so heavily stacked against the cause of democracy. Though Wolff—and like him, Castle—was a member, as were most of the volunteers, of an organization related to the American Communist Party (the Young Communist League), he was much more interested in protecting his men and killing the enemy and advancing if possible to take another position, usually atop another hill, than he was in towing the party line that the political commissars attached to each battalion sought to inculcate in the minds of the weary and brave men who fought for the Republic[1].
It’s true that the “history of the Spanish civil war is consumed by mythology and legend, so much so that it is extremely difficult to separate fact from fiction,[2]” and that’s why Wolff chose to blend the two in an avowedly autobiographical piece of writing, where real and imagined characters interact with each other.
Wolff puts together this story in a roughly chronological fashion, though there are sometimes abrupt leaps from one scene to another. Sometimes the writing as writing per se doesn’t shine or hold much intrinsic interest, but there are moments, throughout the novel, when the writing acquires the concision and suggestive power of poetry, particularly towards the end, when Mitch Castle is in Barcelona, having been withdrawn from the last fight, and he’s sitting around a table with Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn and Jo Davidson and the NY Times reporter Herb Matthews and Joe North, a reporter for the Daily Worker and the New Masses, and Castle is recounting for the others that last night and day in the field, when he had been ordered first to cut a road (which he failed to do) and then to take and hold a hill (number 666 in the Sierra de Pándols), and the writing, in this denouement of the novel, becomes brilliant.
Wolff always manages the speech of his characters from all over the world with considerable talent, though his Spanish is atrocious. But the things Hemingway says, for example, are consonant with all we know of Hemingway, and the British speech patterns are true to the ear too. And yet it’s more than this sort of accurate reportage, even at a distance of over fifty years from the memories, that makes the book worth reading. The way Wolff treats the parallel and often intersecting story of Leo Rogin is handled with considerable mastery, especially once Castle shoots Rogin for being a compulsive and recurrent deserter and tosses his body in a slit trench where he’s buried while still warm. In the end the exceptional honesty of the prose together with its reticence works for a forceful and memorable reading experience, while the autobiography, though always relevant, blends effortlessly with the fiction.
[1] “Though a man of great principles and ideals, he avoided dogma and rhetoric, and appreciated the imperfections of given situations.” Quoted from an article written by Peter N. Carroll that appeared in counterpunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/carroll01192008.html ), A Lincoln Brigader Passes at 92, In Memory of Milton Wolff, 1915 - 2008
[2] Carroll, Peter N.: Odyssey of the Lincoln Brigade, Americans in the Spanish Civil War.