Hemingway did not seem discouraged, but Matthews was. Hemingway said, sure, they would get to the sea, but that was nothing to worry about. It had be… - Alvah Bessie

Here were students, dock-workers, clerks and labor-organizers, farmers. Most were unacquainted with each other, but they came together now with the warmth and familiarity of old friends; they told each other of their work in their respective countries; of their friends and families. They spoke of the European political scene, of the imperative necessity for the Loyalist Government to drive the foreign invader from Spain; you felt that with each of them, no matter how diverse his previous training, the Spanish struggle was a personal issue, something deep and close. This in itself, considering the disparity of their origin, was a major political phenomenon. They spoke no word of the actual business of war; they did not speculate on the nature of artillery or air attacks, of machine-gun fire. You felt: many of these men will never see their friends or families again; they don't know what they're getting into; their idealism has blinded them to the reality of what they will have to face. And you knew immediately that you were wrong; that they were so far from being blind that it might be said of them that they were among the first soldiers in the history of the world who really knew what they were about, what they were going to fight for- and that they were ready and eager to fight. Their very presence on the French frontier was an earnest of their understanding and their clarity; no one had made them come, no force but an inner force had brought them.

And towering above each town, generally built on a height commanding it, stood the church, its finger pointed to heaven, its masonry rich and heavy, permanent and menacing, a constant reminder of the domination of the Church down all the ages. For although these deeply Catholic people had been burning their churches for centuries, the Church and its allies had always reasserted their power over the people, and this power was in dispute again to the endless hills, carved from root to summit with stone-shored terraces to hold the olives and the vine fields, quiet evidence of thousands upon thousands of grinding hours of man and woman labor. Sunny Spain, land of mañana, where nothing was done today that could be put off till tomorrow!

Below us there were hundreds of men from the British, the Canadian Battalions; a food truck had come up, and they were being fed. A new Matford roadster drove around the hill and stopped near us, and two men got out we recognized. One was tall, thin, dressed in brown corduroy, wearing horn-shelled glasses. He had a long, ascetic face, firm lips, a gloomy look about him. The other was taller, heavy, red-faced, one of the largest men you will ever see; he worse steel-rimmed glasses and a bushy mustache. These were Herbert Matthews of The New York Times and Ernest Hemingway, and they were just as relieved to see us as we were to see them.