Alvah Bessie on Soldiers

“Every soldier in every army is taught first off to be neat and clean, to keep his clothes in good repair, his buttons sewed on and his shoes polished, his face and hands and body washed, his beard shaved. He is respectful to his officers and stands at attention when he is addressed; he moves with precision about his business, walking as a soldier should, head up, chin in, arms at his sides.”

“The sun beat upon our heads and we lay there wondering what was going on in our particular sector, what was the significance of the intermittent firing, whether we were advancing or holding our own. For to the average soldier battle always remains a chaos and an impression of immense confusion; he has only a worm's-eye view of the affair; he has no way of knowing what it's all about. One minute he is advancing under fire; the next he is lying low; the next withdrawing. He receives definite orders and they are immediately countermanded; he rarely sees the enemy and the fire that is directed at him assumes astonishing impersonality, as though it were independent of any human agency.”

“It is a hard trade, and one that does things to you as a man; that changes you from one sort of man into another. It is not easy to be a good soldier, and for a middle-class intellectual who had spent most of his conscious life in the sedentary pursuit of finding words for things he believed he felt, it was an almost impossible life. For years I had not awaked in the morning before ten, and loved to lie abed; now I was up daily before dawn. I had always avoided walking when I could ride; and now spent hours every day marching all over the landscape. And the intellectual is likely to find his likely to find his greatest satisfaction (perverted as it is) in long periods of solitude when he can justify his loneliness by looking down upon his fellow man. "You're in the ar-my now," the boys would sing, "you're not be-hind the plow. You'll never get rich, you son of a bitch..." You're in the army now, and when you're in the army you learn to keep a large part of your precious individualism to yourself. An army of individualists cannot function in the field, and this the Spanish people had learned to their sorrow earlier in the war, when individualized units recruited independently by dozens of political parties and trade unions had done a beautiful job of failing to cooperate with each other- while demonstrating determination and heroism that will be remembered so long as there are men to whom the defense of democracy is more than a hackneyed phrase.”