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WAR IS BEAUTIFUL:
An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War
By James Neugass (Edited by Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer)
314 pp. The New Press $26.95
Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller
About 15,000 books have been written about the Spanish Civil War. Of those, only about a dozen are memoirs published by American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The most notable include Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle, Harry Fisher’s Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War and James Yate’s Mississippi to Madrid: Memoir of a Black American in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The newest entry in this category is James Neugass’s War is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Peter N. Carroll and Peter Glazer, scholars and board members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), and published 60 years after Neugass’s death.
Neugass, a young unmarried poet whose work had appeared in noted publications such as The Atlantic, The Dial, and The Nation, arrived in Spain in mid-November of 1937, when Republicans were fighting General Francisco Franco's Falangists for control of the provincial city of Teruel. He volunteered to join the American Medical Bureau, which was led by the American surgeon Dr. Edward Barsky, and was assigned to the American Hospital at Villa Paz as an ambulance driver.
From the beginning of his assignment he kept a journal in which he captured the daily activities of the base hospital, and provided commentary that only an insider would know about the medical staff members:
The staff members are at least half Spanish. For each of our American Registered Nurses, two Spanish chicas are in training. Before the outbreak there was not one trained nurse in Spain. The sick were cared for by nuns who had no formal instruction. I understand that most of these nuns are still at their duties. One of them, who now dresses as a woman and has let her hair grow into a handsome mannish bob, has in a very few months learned almost everything she could be taught at an American Nursing school.
Neugass describes the events that unfold in this matter-of-fact manner, providing his readers with lists of mundane activities, including menus that detail what was available for all three meals and pointers for anyone who happens to find himself having to sleep on a cold floor or the ground. But his grim and succinct accounts of rescuing the wounded and the dead from the battlefields are what make his journal valuable:
One of the wounded was a head case. He came in gray, cold, nose visibly stopped by blood, bloodstained bandage behind ear. Arms flopped down from stretcher as we unload him. Pulse hard to find. We put him in kitchen, head near fire, lower end of stretcher propped by water jug, and threw so much wood in the chimneyless flames that the lieutenant had to hold handkerchief over his nose while using a stethoscope. Robust, healthy young guy. Looked like a born wisecracker. When he pushed on the chest the lips bubbled. Didn’t warm up in half an hour so we took papers out of his pocket, carried him outside, opened up two feet of earth with shovel and pickax, one of us holding a candle and the others standing about, miserably cold. Nothing fancy. No songs no speeches. Not a single word. We were cold, hungry and tired. We hurried.
He also provides a roll call of those who died, giving the reader a hint of who these men were and how they selflessly gave their lives for their beliefs. The dignity and simplicity of the language in these brief memorials adds to the narrative's poignancy.
Neugass intended to publish War is Beautiful, but it was set aside after he had sent it to at least one publisher. When he returned to the United States, he married, had children and worked at numerous jobs. During this period, he turned his full attention to a novel, Rain of Ashes, which was accepted by Harper & Brothers in 1949. Unfortunately, he died of a sudden heart attack that same year in New York and never saw the novel in print.
Whatever happened to War is Beautiful? In their introduction, Carroll and Glazer explain that the manuscript was found in the year 2000 at a Vermont book shop among the papers of Max Eastman, editor of The Masses. The manuscript was accompanied by editorial queries and comments, including an observation on the title: “The title, ‘War is Beautiful’, is a Fascist slogan. If this is a naïve and misdirected irony, it is very dangerous.”
War is Beautiful is a straightforward and honest account by a passionate and idealistic man who, unlike other memoirists, didn’t embellish for dramatic effect, but eloquently told the horrors of war. It is a welcome addition to the ever-growing collection of Spanish Civil War history.
Rebeca Schiller is a freelance writer. Her interests include: The Spanish Civil War, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and anything having to do with Spanish Civil War veteran, novelist, and Hollywood Ten member Alvah Bessie.
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