It was April 1938. The Great Depression had torn through the United States six years earlier, leaving one-third of the labor force hungry and jobless. Hitler and Mussolini were beginning to spread terror across Europe. In Spain, peasants and workers fought to defend an infant democracy from General Francisco Franco and his Fascist allies. Rebel planes had flattened Guernica. Trenches scarred the wheat fields of Aragón, and the rivers ran with blood.

I came.     An ocean in between     And half a continent.     Frontiers,     And mountains skyline tall,     And governments that told me     NO,     YOU CANNOT GO!     I came.

Langston Hughes, Harlem Renaiisance poet, accompanied the Intl. Brigades. Listen to L. Hughes recite his poetry here.

A young American, Carl Geiser, pressed his back to the stone wall of a Spanish farmer's courtyard near the Ebro River. He stared ahead at a dozen Italian soldiers leaning on their rifles. They gazed back steadily. A priest in a black robe paced behind the soldiers as the morning sun blazed down. Next to Geiser, fifteen gaunt prisoners straightened themselves against the rough stone. Everyone waited quietly.

Above: Carl Geiser, against the wall for execution, in Spain

Finally, two Italian officers rounded the corner. After speaking with the sergeant in charge, they strolled up to the prisoner nearest the road. Geiser strained to pick out Spanish words as the officers worked their way up the line. "Nationality!" they demanded of a prisoner a few feet down.

Geiser had heard stories of men who faced imminent death. Some saw their lives flash before them. Others trembled or lost control of their bowels. But the men flanking him stood in silence.

Above: the famed photographer Robert Capra accompanied the Internationalsand snapped this famous photo.

Some of the men were Canadians. Others, like Geiser, were American volunteers — part of an army of nearly 3,000 who saw the specter of fascism in Europe while the rest of the world slept. They feared that Franco, Hitler and Mussolini would launch a second world war, and they had come to Spain to try to stop it. They were known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and by 1939 one-fourth of them would be buried in the Spanish earth...

Below: George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, joined the Intl. Brigades

Today, Carl Geiser is ninety years old and one of only a handful of surviving Lincoln Brigade veterans. He shuffles around his Corvallis, Oregon, apartment in a button-down shirt and blue jeans. He's always laughing about something, and when he does, tears gather in his liquid blue eyes and run down the sides of his nose. His sharp humor masks an inevitable frailty. He tires easily. He talks for a while, then his voice falters and he has to steady himself against a sturdy, black exercise bike in the center of the living room.

Behind him, a stiff bed sealed with blankets crowds the couch and coffee table. Geiser has converted the apartment's only bedroom into a cluttered office — no room for the bed...

Spain's brilliant poet and playwrite F. Garcia Lorca was kidnapped and brutally murdered by the proNazi Falange. Lorca's murder had a catalyzing effect worldwide.

By the time Geiser was ten, his father had died of the flu and his mother of tuberculosis, so he moved to his grandparents' farm in Orrville, Ohio. They were Swiss immigrants who spoke only German and grew oats, wheat and corn on their sixteen-acre plot. None of the neighbors had much, so they worked together to get the most out of the land. They shared one thrashing machine and took turns helping each other beat down the wheat and oats. "The people helped each other without any thought to repayment," Geiser remembers.

Like most other young men in the Depression years, Geiser worried about how he would find a job. He wasn't particularly politically active — he spent most of his time studying electrical engineering at Fenn College, waiting tables and attending the local Baptist church...

In Chicago he was elected secretary of the organization, and it was there that he met his future wife, Sylvia. He liked her politics. "She was quite bright," he says. "She was also quite radical." When they decided to marry in 1933, they paid ten cents for a ring at Woolworth's, and a City Hall official conducted their brief ceremony.

Sylvia was a substitute teacher and made just enough money to support them both. With the Depression at its worst, Geiser couldn't find paying work. "The only thing I found I could do was pro bono," he explains. He and Sylvia moved to New York...

It wasn't easy — he had to sleep in Union Square now and then when he didn't have a nickel for the train home to the Bronx. Because he spoke German and Spanish, International Labor Defense asked him to translate correspondence coming into the office from Europe. What he was reading about Hitler, Franco and Mussolini made him uneasy, though most Americans hadn't yet begun to pay attention to the storm brewing in Europe.

When Hitler and Mussolini sent planes to aid Franco in July of 1936, Spain's civil war exploded into an international cause. Geiser was hiking in the Adirondacks when it happened. As soon as he came down from the mountain and heard the news, he decided he had to go to Spain.

He opens his wrinkled hands and examines the palms. "I would have been sorry if I hadn't gone," he says. "I was in a position to go. I didn't have any dependents; my wife could take care of herself." He pauses and looks up. "In a sense, why wouldn't I go? Was it because I was afraid? I couldn't admit that."

When he confessed his wish to Sylvia, she didn't ask him to stay, but she didn't urge him to go. "She wasn't happy about my leaving," he says, rubbing the thin white fuzz on his head.

Congress had already passed a law prohibiting assistance to either side in Spain's war, but Geiser prepared himself to go. When he asked around, his anti-Fascist colleagues directed him to a secret attic in the city. There a doctor examined him while an assistant questioned him about his reasons for volunteering. They handed him a third-class ticket to France, and days later he was playing shuffleboard on a rolling freighter in the middle of the Atlantic.

French labor unions met the volunteers when the ship arrived in Le Havre in April 1937. The Americans were supposed to act as though they were vacationing in Europe, but they didn't fool anyone. Geiser shakes his head. "No Frenchman who looked at us didn't know what we were doing there. They just smiled and waved."

He was put in charge of a group of ten Canadian lumberjacks for the hike over the Pyrenees. When they arrived in Figueras, he joined the George Washington Battalion as a 3rd ammunition carrier. "I had used a gun from the age of nine," he explains. "My grandmother had a shotgun and a .22 rifle to keep off chickenhawks, so I had experience in shooting, at least. But I had no real idea of what it was going to be like at the front." He learned soon enough.

During Geiser's first battle at Brunete, the George Washington Battalion fought next to the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, but by the end of the battle half the men in each unit were dead. The surviving volunteers joined to form the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Geiser was promoted... and put in charge of raising the morale of the men. "When half the people on a unit are killed, the morale goes down," he says. "Mine didn't." He shrugs. "I knew we had to pay these casualties. I didn't join in condemning the Republic and the officers. I knew the problem was that the Fascist side had the tanks and planes...

 Before sunrise on April 1, 1938, a commander sent Geiser's unit to deliver a message to another brigade. As they walked along the Gandesa-Calceite road, chattering about what they would eat for breakfast, they heard a group of soldiers call out to them in English. Geiser assumed it was the brigade they'd been looking for, but as they drew closer, he made out the letters on one of the soldiers' uniforms: "23 de Marzo" — the name of Mussolini's Italian unit. By then it was too late to retreat.

The Italians disarmed the men and herded them back to a farmer's courtyard. There Geiser learned that Franco had ordered all international officers executed by firing squad. "The International Brigades have fought for an ideal," Franco had told the Italian ambassador, "even though the ideal is heresy. They have proven they know how to die; they remain disposed to die, just as though they were all Spaniards."

When an Italian soldier sprinted into the farmer's courtyard calling for el comisario, Geiser was sure his luck had run out. ... He shook hands with each of his men, passing them his wristwatch, his pouch of Revelation tobacco and his wedding ring.

The runner led him into a dark corridor where an Italian lieutenant was eating breakfast. Knowing that Geiser would soon be shot, the lieutenant offered him chunks of fish and bread and began to speak openly about the battle. Thirty thousand Fascist troops would be arriving in Gandesa before noon, he said. Geiser thought of the International Brigade soldiers they would find there — less than one thousand of them — waiting in the sun. He could already hear the enemy planes ripping the sky apart above him.

To Geiser's surprise, when the lieutenant finished his breakfast, he led him back to the courtyard. Geiser's men were overjoyed to see him. But as they crowded around to hear what had happened, his heart sank. He had to tell them how badly outnumbered they were. The Fascists had as good as won.

The men listened to the sounds of battle as the sun climbed over the courtyard. They sat, helpless and frustrated, imagining the Fascists slaughtering their comrades only a few miles away. Then came a cry from one of the guards: "Bring the Internationals!" The firing squad was waiting for them outside the compound.

As he stood against the wall waiting to die, Geiser saw two black sedans race toward the battlefront. The cars braked as they disappeared around a corner, then squealed into reverse and slowed to a stop in front of the prisoners. One of the drivers stuck his arm out the window and summoned the two Italian officers. As Geiser watched them talk, he thought of the men on the front who would be dead before the end of the day. He desperately wished he could warn them. The cars sped off again, and the officers approached the firing squad. Geiser braced himself for the command to fire, but it never came.

Above, F.G. Lorca and the famous filmaker Luis Bunuel befor Lorca's kodnapping. Bunuel turned his back on Spain evermore after the Fascist coup succeeded.

The gunmen shouldered their rifles and walked away.

He stood frozen with disbelief. One of his buddies, Ed Hodge, broke the silence, blurting, "Well, I'll be doggoned!"

Geiser finds this memory hysterical. His eyes disappear behind his creased, spotted cheeks, and he can't finish the story. It's easy to laugh now, sixty-three years later. It's that much funnier, somehow — knowing that if things had taken a slightly different turn that day, he wouldn't be sitting here, hunched and wrinkled, telling stories.

He later learned that the men in the cars were Italian officers on their way to the battlefront. As they bounced down the dirt road, they happened to see the firing squad lined up in front of the farm and stopped to hastily pass along the order they'd just heard: Between April 1 and April 9, International Brigade prisoners would be kept alive for exchange with Italian prisoners.

Once Geiser was captured, Sylvia stopped receiving his letters. It was impossible to find out what had happened to him. "She didn't know whether I'd been killed or captured," he says. "But she knew it was customary for the Fascists to kill captives." Six weeks later, the Red Cross helped Geiser send her a postcard that would get past the Spanish censors. "This is to inform you that I'm well," was all it read. She scrawled on the other side of the card and sent it back to the camp. Over the next year, Sylvia struggled to bring Geiser and the other prisoners home. She worked with Lincoln Brigade veterans who returned, lobbying Congress and appealing to Eleanor Roosevelt for help. But most of the nation didn't care about a handful...

The Italians finally exchanged seventy-one of the prisoners in April, 1939. A few nights later, a telegram boy knocked on Sylvia's door in New York and handed her a message:

Geiser and the others had crossed the Bidassoa River into France, where a representative of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was waiting to ship them home. It was a bittersweet farewell. France and the United Kingdom had already recognized the Franco regime, and in September, the Nazis would invade Poland. Spain had bid goodbye to the rest of the International Brigade months ago; when the last volunteers paraded out of Barcelona, the city's residents leaned from their balconies, waving kerchiefs and littering the street with roses. Thousands gathered to listen as poet Dolores Ibarruri's voice trembled over loudspeakers:

You came to us from all peoples, from all races.
You came like brothers of ours, like sons of undying Spain
You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend.

Antonio Machada, friend of Lorca. The 2 are considered the greatest of Spanish poets and much of the Flamenco musicaians' lyrics are drawn from them. Machada fled after the Fascist victory and died from the hardships of crossing the Pyrenees into France.

Geiser remembers standing on the deck of the returning ship as it pulled into the harbor in New York. "There were a lot of people on the dock, and we were wondering, 'Who's this important person who's coming back?' Then we realized they were waving at us." He picked Sylvia out of the crowd easily. They went back to her new apartment in Chelsea, where she'd planned a party with all his friends. "She'd been working to get the place ready and get all the people there. They were asking me all kinds of questions," he recalls. "When I looked over, she had fallen asleep in her chair. She could finally rest." He leans back on the sofa and looks out the window, where bare maple branches sift the low winter sun.

For the next forty years, Geiser worked as an engineer at Liquid-O-Meter, making fuel gauges for the manufacturer of planes that fought the Nazis. He and Sylvia had two boys, Jim and Pete. He was busy working and raising a family and had little time to think about the war. He and Sylvia divorced in 1946 but remained friends until her death three years ago. He returned to Spain in 1981 — six years after Franco died — to collect stories from other International Brigade prisoners. Eventually he turned his research into a book, Prisoners of the Good Fight.

On that trip to Spain, he visited Franco's tomb — a looming $15-million monument to fascism built on the backs of prison laborers. The tomb's caretakers eventually had to move Franco's body from the public viewing area, Geiser says, because so many people urinated on it. This thought makes him hunch over, holding his side as dry gasps of laughter escape.

He hates Franco, but when the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of state Cordell Hull comes up, Geiser spits it out like a bitter seed. He believes Hull changed the course of the war the Spanish Republic should have won. He blames Hull for delaying the release of the international prisoners and conspiring with Texaco and General Motors to supply fuel to the Fascists. If it weren't for Hull, he says, the Internationals would have been released sooner. If the Republic had gotten the fuel and trucks instead, surely they would have won. If he hadn't been captured... If he could have escaped... If he could have warned the men...

But Franco rose, and with him Mussolini and Hitler. Millions died in the camps and on battlefronts.

Geiser slumps against the exercise bike. His raspy voice fades. Most of the people he meets now have never heard of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They confuse the Spanish Civil War with the Spanish-American War. The handful who understood, who knew what it was to fight for the dream of the Republic — they're gone now.

He stoops in front of his bookcase. From the bottom shelf, he heaves a grotesquely twisted piece of rust the size of a man's hand. It's shrapnel from a battleground near the Ebro River. He weighs it, the only souvenir left from a time he can't forget. Geiser had to dodge chunks of steel this big in Spain. As they hurtled past him, he must have clutched his ideals close. - from U of O's Influx magazine

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