was all alone and locked in of course and everybody was running up the street and women
screaming. First I felt haunted as if they were following me, and then I felt glad that
the French were getting a chance to run screaming through the streets for a change. I even
thought they might let me go the next morning as a mark of solidarity or something.
The next morning they took me to Perpignan on the train. Everybody was
talking about it in the train. The Pyranees Oriantele was getting really bellicose. They
were all scared and mad. The Guarde Mobile were extra sympathetic to me—bought
me cognac and tobacco out of their own money and forgot about handcuffs—But that was
as far as the solidarity went.
At Perpignan I found out that I was up against six months. No
alternative, no way out, except pull. I was scared. It was a nice jail and all that but
the prospect of six months made me feel very bad. I wrote at once to Desnos to get in
touch with Martha, who I remembered had some pull with the Radical Socialists at one time,
and also Senator Hollis from N.H. who used to be a friend of my father’s and who practices
now in Paris. They all got started right away and Charley Sweeney, too, went to bat for
me. But here was the funny thing. And if you think a minute—you will see the queer,
uncomfortable position I was in. Father used to have a friend in Paris—a very rich
man named James Johnson who helped father a lot—and I never could abide him. So
Desnos, on Senator Hollis’s advice goes to Johnson. And the first thing I know—the
first thought of Johnson that I have in two years I guess—there he is down at
Perpignan—come all the way down from Paris to help me out of jail.
Evanfrom SANDOR VOROS
Madrid, December 17, 1937
Sweetheart,
"The moon is very big tonight"–this sentence has been on my
mind for days. It is a beautiful sentence, I can’t stop rolling it off my lips. I came
across it in a letter among my documents while searching for material for the book I am
now working on.
A girl in New York started her letter off to her boyfriend in Spain
with that–on the very night her boyfriend was killed. He died very bravely under that
very big moon and that very big moon lit up the whole landscape, throwing a ghostlike
silvery flame on No Man’s Land, silhouetting the rescuing parties against the sky, and the
fascists opened fire, wounding many of the brave volunteers who were risking their lives
trying to bring in the body of that boy who was lying dead out in the field under the very
big moon his girl was writing about in New York. She was very lonesome for him and so she
was looking at the moon in New York and the moon was very big; it reached all the way to
Spain. He never received the letter. I was the one who received it and I read it ten
months later, a few days after I finished my chapter, on the night of the very big moon,
and I never heard till then about the girl. But ever since I read that letter my heart
went out to that girl. I keep on wondering whether she still notices the moon and hope she
is proud of the boy who died a death worthy of his principles and his class. I want to
raise a monument for that boy and girl under that very big moon, a monument of love and
class struggle and of heroism and self-negation and sacrifice that shall be at the same
time a monument of the struggle against fascism in Spain.
The moon has been very big a number of times and I hope the time will
be soon here when it will shine on a free Spain and we, two, will walk arm in arm under
that very big moon, thinking about that other boy and girl….Sanyi
REPRINTED from Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks, eds. Madrid
1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War, copyright
1996 by Routledge.