A retired professor of English, Eby is no stranger to the Spanish Civil War. He has already published The Siege of Alcazar (1965) and the appropriately titled Between the Bullet and the Lie (1969), on American volunteers in Spain. He has now returned to this subject with a comprehensive full-scale study based on impressive evaluation and use of volunteers' papers, interviews and the official records of the Lincoln Battalion held in Moscow; all interwoven with published sources to create what he modestly calls “a consensus of narratives based upon scraps and fragments” (xiv). He has also visited the relevant battle sites, still finding some artifacts and bones only seven years ago.

The battalion was recruited essentially from activists of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and its members were smuggled into Spain under Comintern auspices. The party and the veterans' association called the unit mythically the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, thus giving the impression that it was four times bigger than the (approximately) 2,800 Americans who served in this component of the XV (International) Brigade. How the first rough, tough volunteers got to Spain by January 1937 is well recounted, as is how the Battalion Commander Merriman (quickly nicknamed by his men “Murderman”) led the inexperienced, untrained and badly armed unit, in Eby's words, “out of confusion into catastrophe” (39). In the militarily scarcely justifiable attacks ordered by General Gal and Brigade Commander Copic on the Jarama front on 23 and 27 February 1937, some 150 out of four hundred volunteers were slaughtered, the beginning of this story of death, demoralization, mutiny, desertion and executions. Volunteers could not legally leave Spain as their passports had been confiscated, some for use by Soviet intelligence.

Here, as in the subsequent bloody and disastrous engagements in Aragón in 1937–38, Eby provides excellent detailed accounts of the fighting, sympathizing with the unfortunate rank-and-file individuals but critical of the incompetence of those in command as well as of the lies of the CPUSA. The battalion was reinforced with young Spanish conscripts, who were treated as second-class members. All in all, it is a sorry story, thoroughly researched and vividly written. As the author says, because of the shortcomings of the source material, a definitive history of the battalion will never be possible. This volume, however, is as near to one as we are ever likely to get.