Rebel Voices

by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel

  HOBO: You’re not so crazy! What did they put you in for?

  NUT: I used to keep my barrow right-side-up like you nuts.

  HOBO: How come they put you in for that?

  NUT: They used to fill it up that high with bricks.

  HOBO: They can’t put you in for that.

  NUT: Well, I used to take my clothes off when at work.

  HOBO: What did you do that for?

  NUT: I figured that if I had to work like a horse, I might as well look like one, too.

  HOBO: No—not so nutty after all.

  NUT: Did you ever run one of these things? (Indicating barrow.)

  HOBO: Often—I’m an expert on that thing.

  NUT: Which side did you keep up?

  HOBO: I kept the other side up.

  NUT: I’ll bet that made it hard work—but if that was the right way to run it, why didn’t you keep on running it?

  HOBO: The job blew up.

  NUT: An explosion?

  HOBO: No—it got finished. We did all the work. There wasn’t anything more to do. We worked ourselves out of a job.

  NUT: You should have run it like I run mine. Where are you going now?

  HOBO: I’m going downtown to see if I can find some breakfast.

  NUT: I ate mine a couple of hours ago. Where are you going to get it?

  HOBO: I don’t know, but I’ll get it somewhere likely.

  NUT: I think you’re crazy. Where are you going to eat dinner?

  HOBO: I don’t know. If I can’t get it in this town, I’ll get it in some other town.

  NUT: I get mine at sharp noon everyday. You must be goofy. Where are you going to sleep tonight?

  HOBO: I don’t know. Last night I found a pretty good reefer.

  NUT: What’s a reefer?

  HOBO: It’s a box car with double walls, and an icebox in each end for keeping things frozen.

  NUT: And you think that’s a pretty good place to sleep? I always sleep in a nice, soft, warm, clean bed.

  HOBO: Say, who are you anyway?

  NUT: Last week I was Napoleon, but that was by my first marriage; when I got divorced that made me General Lee; but next week I’m going to be Washington crossing the Delaware.

  HOBO: You can be Napoleon if you want to, but you insult me when you say you’re George Washington. He was the father of our country. Do you mean to tell me he was crazy?

  NUT: Haven’t you seen a picture of him crossing the Delaware?

  HOBO: Sure—every good American has.

  NUT: Isn’t he standing up in the boat instead of sitting down?

  Industrial Worker, September 9, 1939—

  HOBO: Yes.

  NUT: Isn’t that crazy?—Say, how much of this country do you own?

  HOBO: I don’t own any of it.

  NUT: Then you’re crazy to call it your country. (Starts to trundle away with barrow.) Say, when you were running a wheel barrow what were you making?

  HOBO: We were building a flour mill.

  NUT: What are you doing with the flour mill now?

  HOBO: I’m not doing anything with it. It isn’t mine.

  NUT: How did you lose it?

  HOBO: It never was mine.

  NUT: If you fellows that built it don’t own it, who does?

  HOBO: Why the owners own it.

  NUT: Did they work to build it?

  HOBO: That kind of people never work.

  NUT: The folks that didn’t build it own it, and the fellows who built it don’t own it. I think that’s crazy.

  HOBO: Why that’s the way with every job. When we get through making something, we never own it. It always belongs to the people who don’t work.

  NUT: That’s why I want the guard to turn this sign around. The way it hangs now, people would think the nuts were on this side of the fence, wouldn’t they?

  HOBO: That’s why it’s there.

  NUT: But it should be turned around, for the nuts are all on the other side. (Starts to trundle barrow away, but stops.) Say, when do you think you’ll start running a wheel barrow again?

  HOBO: I’ll get a job soon—I hear we may go to war.

  NUT: That’s terrible! Who are you going to kill?

  HOBO: It may be the Japs and it may be the Chinks, I’m not sure who it will be.

  NUT: Where are you going to kill them, in town here?

  HOBO: Hell, no—we’ll go over to their country and kill them.

  NUT: Ever been over there?

  HOBO: No.

  NUT: Ever seen the fellows you’re going to kill?

  HOBO: No.

  NUT: Did they ever hit you, or hurt you, or do anything to you?

  HOBO: No.

  NUT: And when you go to kill them, maybe they’ll kill you?

  HOBO: Sure, we’ve got to take that chance.

  NUT: How far away do these Japs and Chinese live?

  HOBO: I guess about three or four thousand miles.

  NUT: So you re going three or four thousand miles to kill some poor people you never saw, who never hit you or hurt you or did anything to you, and you may be killed doing it? That is crazy … Or may be they’re the fellows who took your flour mill away from you?

  HOBO: No—those fellows live in Minneapolis.

  NUTS: Quick—before the guard comes—give me a hand and we’ll turn this sign around.

  HOBO: Maybe we ought to.

  NUT: No—we can’t do it now—I see the guard coming, and he won’t let us.

  HOBO: Don’t those guards ever get afraid of you nuts?

  NUT: No—I asked him once and he said that even if there were a thousand of us nuts and only four guards, they still wouldn’t be afraid of us.

  HOBO: Why?

  NUT: He said it was because nuts never organize.

  —CURTAIN—

  15

  During the Spanish Civil War, the I.W.W. had an assessment for the support of the C.N.T. and maintained friendly relations with the anarchist International Workingmen’s Association. Many I.W.W. members fought with C.N.T. forces. This article by a Wobbly participant in the Spanish Civil War was one of a series that ran in the One Big Union Monthly (April 1938).

  REMINISCENCES OF SPAIN

  By RAYMOND GALSTAD

  It is midafternoon. We are in a huddle reading a bulletin that has just been posted on the wall. It contains a list of the names of men who are to leave for Paris this evening. Discharges and repatriation papers are in the office ready for distribution. Some read the bulletin and dash down the corridor to the office. Those unable to run just shuffle. There’s a brightness in their eyes as though they just gulped a bracing drink. Satisfied smiles stretch across their sun-parched faces. Monosyllables of joy snag in their throats. They’re the lucky ones. They’re going home.

  I’m new here. Just arrived from the hospital a few minutes ago. My name is not up yet. I might just as well get used to it here for a while. I think a tour of inspection of my new headquarters is in order, so I take a gander at the dormitory. My nose sniffs the smell of freshly laundered sheets strongly bleached. The odors are clean and medicinal like the hospital, or maybe my memory of the hospital is playing tricks with me.

  Uniformed men sprawl across the beds taking “siestas” with their eyes wide open and their Hps moving in conversation that sends up a hum of French, Spanish, and English. Over in a corner a few Frenchmen are making melody with the “Waiting Song,” a tune composed by a wounded British veteran of the International Brigade while he waited at Albacete for his discharge papers. The soldiers make up their own words, as soldiers will, when inspiration moves them.

  I introduce myself to a group and we start rubbing our memories together, making warm conversation. The front is still the favorite bone to chew on. We mentally place our bets on the outcome of the next battle. One intelligent face says the best defense is an attack, and nodding heads approve, and that puts the favorite bone back in the cupboard of memory until we become intellectually hungry for the Front again. We just sit and regard ea
ch other silently for a while with vacant wool-gathering eyes. It’s not an embarrassing silence. It’s just as if we intuitively agreed to dream for a few moments. I call them to attention with a question, and they all start talking at once. I gather there are a bunch of Americans and Canadians waiting here, but they’re out doing the town right now, from what I’m told. I thank them for the information and take my leave of them.

  I meet another American, and we walk into the messroom together. I put the bum on him for some tobacco. He says he ain’t got none. Says he’s been here four days and the Commissars ain’t putting out, though he hears there’s a whole warehouse bulking with Luckies. He’s been down on the waterfront all day trying to mooch some butts from the English sailors, but he didn’t have much luck. Wishes to hell his papers were O.K.’d so he could leave for the French border tonight. Even French smokes would beat nothing.

  We bump into a Canuck who’s been around a lot, and knows Barcelona to a “T.” We learn from him that English smokes can be had from a bootlegger uptown. The stuff is priced, though, at one hundred pesetas a pound, about two dollars in American coin, according to him, and my friend’s chin drops like the ‘29 stock market. That’s a lot of money for a buck private, earning seven pesetas a day, to have on him all at one time, we agree. But I was paid off this morning, and I’m still holding forty-seven pesetas, so I suggest we hold a conference on the matter. We decide to ask three others to chip in, and go off to round up the unsuspecting donors.

  Industrial Worker, September 16, 1939.

  It isn’t hard to persuade the other three to chip in. They want to inhale some smoke as badly as we do, so we collect the necessary money, and detail the Canuck to sally forth to the tobacconist’s, and make arrangements to meet him in the park across the road from the barracks.

  It doesn’t take him long to carry out his mission. We see him coming back with a small tinfoil package with the evening light glinting off it, like sun-starts off a mirror. He’s walking a great deal more leisurely than when he left us to go after the weed. A cigarette is dangling listlessly from a corner of his lips. We run up to him and relieve him of the burden, and nervously begin to fashion cigarettes with our fingers.

  We stroll back across the road to the park, and our group grows to eleven members. They’re attracted by the smell of burning tobacco. The park itself comes under discussion. One young soldier remarks that it’s the finest and largest park in Spain. He says he likes the zoo and the museum, and the statues, but best of all he likes the palm trees, and the lime trees, and the orange trees. They give good shade in the day-time, and he likes shade, he says. Another soldier interrupts him and says he talks too much; that he should give others a chance. The youthful one makes excuses for his monopolizing the conversation. He says the doctors told him he would lose his voice any time now as a result of a shrapnel wound in his throat, and he’s determined to hear his voice as much as he can as long as he can.

  The mention of his wound invites the others to start talking of their disabilities, like a bevy of old ladies discussing their operations and their miscarriages. The names of the battlefields, Belchite, Guadamalga, Bilboa, Saragossa, Cordoba, and Madrid seem like a checkerboard of blood, becoming more gloriously gory as they talk about how they lost a leg, an arm, an eye, a hand, or acquired a scar as a precious souvenir of battle. The lad whose voice will go haywire notes pointedly that we didn’t get any medals, but he’s glad about it, somehow because nobody will mistake him for a Commissar with all medals and no scars. We laugh a little at that.

  An American West Coast seaman feels like rehashing the story of the part he filled in the Guadamalga offensive. He says it was a tough scrap. The Loyalists went up against the German troops and they had machine guns ‘til hell wouldn’t have ’em. How the Loyalists took their objective, Christ only knows! The boys were dropping all around him like ripe apples in a gale. He lost his buddy; saw him fall right in front of him, but he kept going. They got within throwing distance of the fascists and let loose with hand grenades. That’s what got ’em. When you get close enough to toss the grenades, the fascists either come out of their trenches and meet you face to face, or they retreat. They hate like hell to be in the dug-outs when the grenades start pouring in. They don’t want to be in the trenches when you’re ready to jump ’em, either. Not when you got that cold piece of steel, two feet long, sticking on the end of your rifle. That’s scary stuff, and plenty hard to take. And when a guy’s on top, he’s got all the breaks in the world, they know that. Just one good thrust, and you know there’s one fascist scab that ain’t gonna win the war for Franco …

  He keeps talking about the strategies of combat in his tangy voice and the rest of us listen to the familiar details as if they were being carried out before our eyes. With his one arm he churns the air with emphatic gestures, his fist opening and closing like the maw of a sea anemone.

  Speaking of battle tactics, a Britisher has something to say about the fight at the Cordoba front. His voice is clear and his language faultless, and he isn’t selling his H’s short like an English Cockney. All his listeners seem enlisted for action as they lean toward him to learn that the front was very quiet for several weeks, with no excitement at all, and no signs of war about. Then the Rebels came over the top with their right arms in salute, and singing the Internationale. It looked like they were surrendering. But they went into action and dished out hell. It was a furious hand to hand battle. But they were driven back to their trenches. Three days later they came over again with women on the lead. They used the girls as shields. The Loyalists held their fire and were nearly wiped out. Only fifty men returned from the skirmish, and every one of them wounded. The English Brigade lost over four hundred that day.

  The listeners agree it was a moral victory, and take some comfort in it, even though they regret the loss of Cordoba.

  The Canuck was a chauffeur in the ambulance corps. He says his job wasn’t a snap, either, what with administering first aid before loading the wounded into the ambulance, and driving over the rough roads full of shell holes, unloading at the base hospital, and driving back again … all the while providing a swell target for fascist bombers. He says it’s no fun changing tires out in the battle areas with only a revolver strapped to your belt, and the wounded moaning in the bus, and a plane swooping overhead pouring lead into the ground around your feet. He says that a revolver is about as useful as a bow and arrow against a tank in such situations, and he rolls up his sleeve to display a groove of purple scars running from his wrist to his shoulder, just to prove the point.

  We pass the tobacco around again, and the six of us who have a vested interest in the weed, walk away from the group, each one of us thinking we’re paying too high a price for chinning with our fellow veterans. The Canuck lets them know what we’re thinking, and they smile. One says he’d swap a story any time for a cigarette.

  We walk into a nearby bar and order some drinks, and sit there while the town grows dark, waxing discursive again, but not about ourselves. The Asturian miners and their courageous fight in Santander, with only dynamite and mining tools as weapons, strikes us as an admirable display of guts. We tie up the story with miners’ struggles everywhere, and try to prove our theory that miners are a brave lot because they toil under dangerous conditions where death stalks close at hand, and they get used to being brave without knowing how brave they are, and their work develops in them a reckless fatalistic spirit that makes them formidable fighters in battle. We conjured up the battles of the Molly Maguires, Ludlow, Paint Creek, Cripple Creek, Mesabi Range, the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company strike in Colorado in the United States; the sit-downs of the French miners, and we feel satisfied that our theory about the miners’ militancy is adequately supported by history. Time passes. The yawning hour approaches, and we vote to go back to barracks and to bed.

  Shafts of morning sun pierce the barracks’ windows, and pry open the eyes of sleepy veterans. Some turn their faces into the pillows or pul
l the covers over their heads to ignore the rude intrusion of the sunlight. Others sit up; rub their eyes; pucker their lips to prime up saliva for their dry tongues, and make wry faces. A few who piled into the sheets late last night, hold their heads and emit Ohhhs of brain-ache. Hairy legs and wrinkled nightgowns change into militarily dressed vertebrates that a woman might look at without horror.

  At breakfast the Canuck and I are talking to each other again, formulating our plans for the day. A lazy walking tour of the town seems agreeable to both of us, and we gulp down the food in haste to be off. The steward hollers at us to haul in the dishes, and we’re full of blundering apologies, but he doesn’t stop scowling at us through his shaggy brows. I can feel his stare itching my back as I stroll with the Canuck out into the street.

  We walk awhile in silence, both feeling a sense of shame for forgetting to carry our dishes to the kitchen. We feel like kids caught with jam on their fingers. Disrupting the spirit and practice of cooperation is weighing heavily upon our consciences. With no high command running things at the waiting barracks, everything is left to the soldiers’ initiative and rank and file judgment; and in running counter to that judgment, however slightly, we’re feeling we betrayed the wishes of our fellow-soldiers. The Canuck looks at me, and we snap out of our conscience-stricken coma. He says we’ll carry the dishes back and forth tomorrow just to make it up to the steward, and we laugh, forgetting all about it.

  The buzz of industry whirrs in our ears as we pass through the factory district on to Rambla Street, the main thoroughfare, where we board a street car. We’re used to the idea of riding street cars without paying any fare. Very reasonable people, these transportation workers. The Canuck tells me that before the war there were more people employed counting the money taken in by the street car and bus conductors than there were actually operating the vehicles of transportation. They just decided to put the cashiers to doing useful work by abolishing the price system in the transportation industry. The fare now is to look like a fighter, a worker, or a child. In other industries where the C.N.T.-F.A.I. have control, he is telling me, a modified wage-system is still the economic vogue, and will be for some time if the workers desire greater productive capacity. If they wish to build greater industries, they must necessarily pile up surpluses. The thing that’s amazing about all this, in spite of the fact that workers still receive wages, is that they democratically decide what their wages shall be; the profit-seeking owning class is out of the picture; and the aggregation of lands and machinery are socially owned and controlled. And he is saying that if that ain’t somethings to fight for, he’ll eat his shirt; and a very unpalatable shirt it is that a soldier wears.