More telegrams were sent, one intended to reach Franco himself, along with letters to Congress, the White House, and the Department of State. Michael Evanoff, a young lawyer in Flint, wrote to Prentiss M. Brown, a U.S. senator from Michigan, “A few days ago, I learned that a very close friend of mine, my best pal in college days, Ralph Neafus, had been captured by fascist troops in Spain. His life, if not already lost, is in grave danger. This boy comes from New Mexico, has lived in Michigan many years, and is an American if there ever was one. He went to Spain to fight in the ranks of the Republican army because of his intense love of democracy and the belief that by helping to keep democracy alive in Spain he would be helping to preserve liberty in America.”
The issue was taken up by the Michigan Student Senate, where Phil Cummins, Bob’s younger brother, argued that the student government should go on record asking Secretary Hull for help, but the measure was defeated by one vote, 14–13. The position against supporting Neafus was articulated by students William B. Otto and Chas D. Johnson, who called student supporters of the Loyalist cause “a small and blindly prejudiced minority” and said the idea that Neafus was fighting for democratic principles was a “gross misrepresentation.”
This line of thinking is what compelled Stan Swinton to write an essay for his history class, the paper that opened with his memories of Bob Cummins in the basement of Hagen’s Recess Tavern five weeks before he left for Spain. Swinton called Otto and Johnson “two gentlemen whose dogmas seem to have been little modified by contact with a supposedly intellectual community.” What separated Neafus and Cummins from so many contemporaries, he asserted, was the courage to follow their convictions. He quoted what a Toledo newspaperman had told him a few days earlier—“If I had any guts I’d be over there myself”—and said that was a sentiment he and many of his classmates shared. Neafus and Cummins “were good friends, enlisted at the same time, fought for the same reasons. Both Ralph and Bob rather thought they were communists. Neither was sure. But their adherence to the great American bogey was a minor matter in influencing their decision. They were fighting for democracy.”
In search of more influential voices, the Michigan students turned to Henry Wallace, FDR’s progressive secretary of agriculture, and persuaded him to write Hull, his cabinet colleague. Wallace told Hull that Neafus had worked as a young forester in his department—the U.S. Forest Service is in the Ag Department’s domain—and lamented, “It would be sincerely regretted if so promising a life should be lost without an effort.” The reply was blunt. Neafus went to Spain under false pretenses, a Hull deputy told Wallace. In his passport application, he said he intended to visit England, Germany, Sweden, and France for travel and study. He signed an affidavit stating that he would not use the passport to travel to Spain. The passport was stamped that it was not valid for travel to Spain. The conclusion: “This department cannot intervene.”
Soldiers from the International Brigade captured by Franco’s troops were usually held at San Pedro de Cardeña, a former monastery transformed into a concentration camp near Burgos. Was Neafus there? The American consulate in Seville was asked to find out and eventually filed a dispatch to Washington. With reference to the capture of Neafus and the three other Americans named in Carney’s article, the dispatch writer noted, “I have the honor to inform the Department that . . . General Quei-po de Llano informs me that, according to a letter received by him from the Inspector of Concentration Camp of Prisoners, none of the persons named are included among prisoners.” Some honor. This was not good news, and it was soon followed by worse, when Carney in a follow-up article reported that “from unofficial but usually well-informed sources he had heard that some Americans with whom he had already talked had been shot without trial shortly after having been captured.”
* * *
NEAFUS’S SISTERS AND mother would continue to hold out hope for months, writing one heartbroken letter after another, pleading with U.S. officials to secure Ralph’s release or check on rumors that he might be in a hospital in Barcelona and so badly wounded that he could not write them. The truth was he was dead. As Carney suspected, Neafus and the other American prisoners detained at the church in Alcañiz were executed by Moorish troops under Franco’s command, their bullet-riddled bodies dumped into an irrigation ditch.
“This was one of the debts I would carry in my heart, an invisible force,” Arthur Miller later wrote of the moment he received the news.
Nearly eighty years later, my wife and I visited Alcañiz. Our guide, Alan Warren, an expert on the Spanish Civil War, rode with us up the serpentine streets to the Iglesia del Carmen, a religious bulwark at the top of the city, its beige cut-stone front encrusted in centuries of dirt. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. As we approached the front entrance, a stork swooped overhead and roosted atop the bell tower. Life or death. Then a watchman scampered up the steps carrying oversized keys. He opened the giant medieval doors and led us inside. The darkened chamber, cold, damp, and musty, evoked the interwoven history of violence and Catholicism in Spain, especially during the Spanish Civil War. I felt overtaken by the past as we walked down a dimly lit aisle, votive candles flickering in the distance, and thought back to Ralph Neafus’s final hours in this silent cathedral that once had been used not for worship but as a gloomy dungeon of death.
* * *
In the days just after Neafus disappeared, another piece of alarming news reached Ann Arbor. A sister of Grace Cummins, Bob’s aunt Lucia, who lived in Spokane, Washington, saw a photo in the Spokane Spokesman-Review that was taken on March 20 and showed twenty Loyalist prisoners being paraded through a town near Belchite, where another round of fighting was taking place. She clipped the page and mailed it to Bob’s parents. The picture was blurry, but Lucia thought one of the soldiers looked like Bob. Grace and Andrew had not heard from their son since February, just before the battle of Teruel, when Grace first learned that he was fighting in Spain. Now this. The fact that one of the other Michigan students had been captured raised the likelihood that Bob had also. Looking at the photo, his family thought it might be him. Phil brought the clipping to the Daily offices, and they ran a story about it under the headline “Michigan Grad Feared Captured.” The night editor, my father, called World Wide Photos in New York and asked for the original print. When the print came in at the end of March, the family was relieved. They said that Bob’s resemblance to the prisoner in the photo was “very slight.” But there was still cause for concern. No one had heard from him in more than a month.
Friends back in Michigan had also lost touch with Elman Service. He had become ill with dysentery earlier that year and, after his release from a hospital, returned to the front lines as an ambulance driver. The International Brigade was in full retreat and disarray by then. Franco’s troops and a unit of Italians had driven them down from Belchite and Alcañiz. The town of Gandesa was taken and the Mac-Paps and the Lincolns were cut off on the wrong side of the Ebro River in western Catalonia. Robert Merriman, who had left the Mac-Paps to return to his original Lincoln battalion, was dead, probably surrounded and killed while taking cover in a furrow off the road to Corbera, though his body was never found. Neafus was gone, and now gone as well were the two top officers who had trained the Michigan men at Tarazona de la Mancha the previous summer.
As the companies were riven and officers lost, any sense of command dissolved. Men were left to fend for themselves and scramble as best they could to the safer side of the Ebro. They were hunted, hungry, and desperate, eating grass and roots and sleeping in prickly gorse. In his account of the retreat, Eby mentioned my uncle, the runner. “Robert Cummins wandered alone and was completely lost when he spotted a Moorish cavalry patrol regarding him from a hilltop. He knew it would be death to run. He had lost his army cap in the melee and with a blanket over his shoulders, poncho-style, he prayed that the Moors would mistake him for a local campesino. When he covered enough distance to look back, the Moors had disappeared.”
In a letter h
e wrote long after the retreat, Bob did not mention seeing the Moors. He said only that he was surrounded and managed to escape, but he was more descriptive in relaying news about how his friend Service survived those chaotic hours: “Elman marched along with a fascist column for three or four kilometers. He set his pace for the most part a little faster or slower than the column so he wouldn’t have to speak with them. One insisted on talking and Elman said he was a German technician to explain his inadequate Spanish. He was believed. I met him on the road later. We were very glad to see each other.”
Bob and Elman were among the Mac-Paps who regrouped near the river town of Móra la Nova. Alvah Bessie, who was also there, later wrote that the area was “jammed with ragged and demoralized men, wandering idly about in the utmost confusion.” On the second morning, as Bessie looked toward distant Gandesa, he saw “great clouds of smoke rising from a valley between the hills.” Then he noticed a car approaching from the other direction. Three men emerged from the car: Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, Sefton Delmer of London’s Daily Express, and Ernest Hemingway. “They had rushed down from Barcelona after hearing that the XVth Brigade had been annihilated,” Bessie recalled in his battlefield memoir, Men in Battle. “Concluding their interview, Hemingway, who had a penchant for histrionics, shook his fist at the far shore and shouted, ‘You fascist bastards haven’t won yet. We’ll show you!’ ”
Bob wrote three letters to his family later in April, but they would not reach Ann Arbor until mid-May. His parents in the intervening weeks grew increasingly worried that he had been captured or killed. A. A. Cummins sent letters to the Department of State in Washington and the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on West 45th Street in Manhattan seeking any information on his son’s whereabouts. State said it had nothing to tell him, but assured him, “Inquiries will be continued and upon the receipt of any report you will be informed.” New York came back with a similar report, prompting A.A. to write another letter saying that Bob should be sent home, where he would be more valuable spreading the story of the antifascist effort and its need for American support. On Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade stationery came this reply:
Mr. and Mrs. A. A. Cummins
c/o Cummins and Barnard
Wolverine Building
Ann Arbor, Michigan
My dear Mr. and Mrs. Cummins:
Though I very well understand your desire to have your son, Robert, back and though I do not doubt his value in the States as one who can very successfully bring the cause of the Loyalist Spain before the eyes of the American people, I regret that I can do nothing at all for you in this direction.
It is only natural that no organization in this country should have jurisdiction over the question of repatriation in Spain. We in this country can have no contact with the rapidly shifting circumstances surrounding each man which must determine this question. The question of the return of a man is taken up by the individual himself and his application is considered by the Brigade. Therefore, I suggest that you write to your son telling him of your desire to have him back and your reasons.
I am sorry that there is nothing positive we are able to do for you and ask you to write us again if there is any other information we are able to give you.
Very sincerely yours,
David McKelvy White
National Chairman
THE NAME REVERBERATES through this story: David McKelvy White had gone to fight in Spain, after graduating from Princeton and teaching at Brooklyn College. He was in the war for six months, serving as a stretcher-bearer for a machine-gun company in the George Washington battalion, and returned to the U.S. in September 1937, just as Bob was moving to the Fuentes de Ebro front with the Mac-Paps. Back in the States, White took up the Spanish cause with the Friends, the precise path that A. A. Cummins hoped his son would follow. The coda to White’s story shifts it into tragedy. When he died in July 1945, the fascists of the world had been defeated. First reports said that White succumbed to a heart attack. Later it was determined that he committed suicide when members of the Communist Party threatened to expose him as a homosexual.
The Mac-Paps and the rest of the International Brigade spent most of May, June, and July regrouping, retraining, repairing. Their encampments were in and around Marçà, a Catalonian village on the safe side of the Ebro, seventeen kilometers to the northwest of the river. Situated on hills, with narrow streets and old stone and cement houses, Marçà was the quintessential Spanish village. The soldiers mingled with townspeople for festivals and concerts. They played soccer in a field next to an old theater where they staged intense political meetings at night. The Mac-Paps slept in a rolling field near a swimming hole surrounded by smooth boulders, the officers quartered in an old stone-and-plaster command building a hundred yards away. The building, long since abandoned, was still there when we visited this remote site in 2017. One of the haunting aspects of a Spanish Civil War tour is seeing how many ruins have been left untouched.
The Mac-Paps trained by day and took turns on guard duty at night. Bob wrote several letters home from Marçà. He said he had borrowed a pencil from his fellow runner, Captain Fish, the fishmonger from Alicante, to let them know he was safe. But he had another message. If the Loyalists were to prevail, they needed help, especially from the U.S. government. He was writing, he said, “on the assumption that a plea would be made for Spain. But you already know how much the lifting of the embargo would help, I think.”
Elman Service was encamped nearby with the Lincoln battalion, where he became close friends with Jim Lardner, the second of four sons of Ring Lardner, the American humorist. Lardner, then a twenty-three-year-old reporter in the Paris Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, had arrived in Spain in the company of Ernest Hemingway and the Tribune’s top foreign correspondent, Vincent Sheean. The trio shared a compartment on the long ride down from Paris’s Gare D’Orsay, and once in Barcelona took rooms at the Majestic Hotel. After ten days there, Lardner announced that he felt compelled not to write but to fight. “What’s the good of that?” Sheean asked him, amazed. “It’s pretty late to do that.” Lardner responded that he was tired of “pounding a typewriter” and that if he had any choice in the matter he would join the Lincolns, which he soon did. He met them in Marçà in May.
His politics were leftist; he believed that capitalism was doomed and some form of communism was the future. During officer training there, he and Service were both promoted to squad leader in the same platoon, an event they celebrated by downing two bottles of Spanish champagne and crashing a party for officers. They were such pals that they slept side by side, sharing blankets and talking into the night, even hatching plans to start a newsmagazine after the war that they would name TRUTH. They read each other’s mail, shared the same birthday, May 18, and on that day decided that each would write a letter to the other’s mother. Service lost his before he could mail it. Unlike Bob Cummins, Lardner did not keep what he had done from his own mother. In an early letter home after joining the Lincolns, he instructed her not to say that she wanted him to come home. “I know you do, and always will, but it is liable to get letters stopped if you write it. You asked me how long I enlisted for. There is only one way of enlisting: for the duration of the war. . . . I don’t mean to be cruel. But it is better that you should resign yourself to my being in Spain indefinitely. A good soldier is hard to hit and I am going to be a good soldier.”
It was through his friendship with Lardner that Service met Sheean and Hemingway. He came to think that there were two Hemingways: “I saw both. He was a very appealing person with a dark reddish complexion. He seemed kind of shy. He always deferred to others. You’d see him looking and listening. He was not drunk until late in the day. Then I never saw anybody change so much. He was a drunken bombastic braggart and fool. He had what he called the fiesta concept of life. I think he was a very shy man and was anxious to overcome it.”
In the last week of July, the Loyalist forces, restored and reple
nished, left Marçà and launched a major offensive. Bob’s unit crossed the Ebro, 150 yards from shore to shore, near Vinebre, just south of Ascó, using boats and pontoon bridges. The brigade headquarters was established high on a hill above La Fatarella, with an expansive view down toward the valley and the river and thirty kilometers to the horizon. The Moorish tower in Ascó, the village of Flix, the mountains, the pines, the fog of the river, all within sight. When my wife and I visited the site eight decades later, the remnants of the officers’ bunkers were still there, and the scene was the same except for a nuclear power plant now rising near Ascó. When my wife mentioned the scent of wild rosemary, our guide said that veterans of the Spanish Civil War could not eat pork roast spiced with rosemary because it reminded them of the smell of battle.
As a runner, Bob carried messages between headquarters and Cota 403 and Cota 705, hills where the Mac-Paps were situated during the early days of the offensive. On his first night across the river, he wrote a letter to his father. Only a few days earlier, he had written to his brother, Phil, saying that he was bored to death. “Now we are in action, and the bombers have been over three times in the last hour. We went into action last night. Everything seems to be going well, although of course the operation has been in progress only a few hours. Everyone seems to be feeling good and optimistic.” One reason for the optimism: in their first outing that morning, the Mac-Paps had taken twenty-seven prisoners. Bob was struck by how young they looked. Enemy planes were overhead but did not concern him much. “The bombers that have just been over have bothered me less than any since Fuentes [de Ebro, his first battle]. Bombers really don’t do so much damage to anything except morale. I think the reason I don’t mind these bombers is that we have good anti-aircraft batteries here, and lots of anti-aircraft guns make so much noise that they drown out the bombs’ noise. They’ve dropped three loads in this vicinity, but the nearest they got to me was a few hundred meters.”
A Good American Family Page 12