The revolt, which began in July 1936, turned Spain into a test of the burgeoning strength of European fascism. Its supporters sought to overturn the social and economic reforms made by the Republic’s Popular Front government and to restore the power of the nation’s elite—wealthy landowners, the Catholic Church hierarchy, the monarchy, and reactionary army officers embittered by the loss of the last vestiges of Spain’s empire. The country had an economy largely dominated by latifundios, semifeudal plantations whose owners treated their peasants as racially inferior and almost indistinguishable from property. Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, an estate owner and press officer for the fascists, described the Spanish peasantry as “slave stock” to a reporter for the Associated Press. “Only when they are used as slaves are they happy.”
Berg traveled to New York by bus, then by ocean liner to France; from Paris he made his way with a group of European and North American volunteers to a fortress near the Spanish border. By then, most foreigners were forbidden by their governments from entering Spain, so a smuggler led them on an all-night hike over the Pyrenees. “I thought we’d be discovered,” Berg told me at his California home in 2015. “Every time we went by a farmhouse, the dogs started barking.”
At dawn they managed to cross the border. After rudimentary training, Berg worked at the front laying communications lines for antiaircraft artillery. In August 1938 fascist planes bombed a monastery in Valencia where he was staying. An Italian comrade was killed, and shrapnel penetrated Berg’s liver. Bleeding heavily, he was put on a truck and taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors saved his life. He was repatriated in January 1939. Like the other dozen or so Lincoln veterans I knew, he only regretted that he couldn’t have done more for Spain.
Berg died in 2016, the penultimate survivor of the Lincoln Brigade. Last May, Josep Almudéver Mateu, a French-born Spaniard and the last surviving member of the International Brigades, died at 101. Although more than 15,000 books have been written about the Spanish Civil War, The International Brigades by Giles Tremlett, a longtime Spain correspondent for The Guardian, is the first English-language history of the brigades in several decades. Berg and Almudéver’s deaths, and the vanishing of the brigades from living memory, underscore the timeliness of this book. It offers an implicit reminder of the importance of leftist internationalism as a political force and of its current absence, even as democratic governments around the world, including in Spain, come under attack from neofascist political parties.