George Nathan had made such a good reputation for himself in command of the English Company on the Toledo Front that he had now been appointed Chief of Staff of the newly-formed XVth Brigade. He is the only personality serving with the International Brigades who emerges as an authentic hero figure, with a mythology of his own. A number of individuals of all nations behaved magnificently but none of them had the essential larger-than-life quality that distinguished George Nathan. However, the legends which have grown up around him bear little relation to the man as he really was. The myth of his gold-topped swagger-stick which appears in practically every book on the Civil War is a typical example. What he really carried was a good, solid walking-stick - a very practical and useful object for climbing over rough mountain territory. Another myth continually recounted of him is that he rode around the hills of Jarama on a "magnificent charger". In fact he always travelled around at the Front on the pillion of a despatch rider's motor-cycle, simply because that was the most effective transport available. Naturally there were no roads up on the hills amongst the rough scrub and olive groves, but a good and determined rider could always find a route - albeit a rough one - anywhere over the hills, far more quickly than someone on horseback or in a car could. It is true that Nathan was something of a showman, but most certainly there was nothing of the clown in his make-up. He was always immaculately clean and well turned out in the Spanish Regular Army uniform without embellishments of any kind, as befitted the totally dedicated, military professionalism which was the basis of his life.

Physically, he was well above normal height, broad-shouldered and slim, with a very erect and military carriage. His features were unmistakably Semitic: long-faced, with a rather hawkish nose and black, curly hair. He had the most tremendous stamina and appeared to be completely impervious to physical exhaustion. I never saw him carry a weapon of any sort and although the wearing of large pistols had become a status symbol among those in positions of power, he regarded it more as an encumbrance than an asset. He had an excellent and ready sense of humour, together with enormous charm. Probably his greatest merit was his magnificent air of authority and decision. His self-assurance was so complete that he never felt the need to shout or to give orders in anything other than a quiet and normal voice. And I have never heard of his orders being questioned, as he possessed the gift of being able to instill into others the unquestionable certainty that he knew what he was doing and that it was for the best.

It has often been said that he was a homosexual. While it is true that he did build up a personal entourage of chauffeur, batman and so forth which may have been suspect, he always behaved with such admirable personal discretion that there was certainly never any overt suggestion of homosexual tendencies. Thirty years ago people felt much more strongly about these things than they do today, and had there been any serious hint of something of this sort at the time, he would have never emerged with such an untarnished image from the history of the period.

He was neither a Communist nor a mercenary. It was not in his nature to think deeply on political questions but was content to trust his own feelings, and I knew him well enough to know that he believed strongly in the justice of the cause for which he thought he was fighting. He was a Jew of working-class origins but was almost totally unconcerned with Judaism or class sympathy. I am quite certain that when he resigned his hard-won commission in the British Brigade of Guards, after the First World War, he can only have done so as a matter of principle - his exceedingly strong sense of sympathy for the under-dog. Nathan's special quality was his pride, which he nursed as other men nurse their most precious possessions, and it was the greatest form of pride that I have ever known for it would not permit him to perform any action which was below the immaculate standard of perfection which he had set himself.

All this may seem a little bit too good to be true but the man was well known by several thousand officers and men over a period of two years. Most of them were very tough characters indeed. Many of them were fanatical Communists whose very instinct caused them to mistrust a man whose characteristics of speech and behaviour derived from essentially upper-class attitudes. Nathan made no attempt to conceal his lack of political enthusiasms in any Party sense. The whole army was riddled with intrigues between factions out to destroy one another, but in spite of all these things Nathan emerges from the history of these events as the only person who was universally admired.

A motorcyclist speeded down the Marmalejo road with orders for Captain Nathan, The Captain took over the parade from Comrade Palmer. All were present and correct, Nathan ordered the quick march. No lorries apparently were available so we set out to march to the firing line.

At first sight Nathan, in Madrigueras, had looked to us like a man that had been humbled by poverty, wearing as he was a mixture of military and civilian clothes. In an old sweater and cheap shoes - he had not impressed the leadership in Albacete; but then there were not any alternative candidates, and he was given the No. 1 Company. In Andalusia something that was similar to a Kafkaesque transformation changed Nathan’s appearance. Ryan’s top boots, given a spit and polish brush-up by Maguire, glittered in the sunlight. The Captain was well shod. His army great coat looked as if it had been tailored for him. His collar and tie were neatly set, and even his helmet had been cleaned. The chin-strap was at the correct angle, and we detected a clearer ring to his obviously acquired upper class accent particularly when he was delivering statements which Campeaii translated for the French. The affectation that he had developed all of twenty years before had arisen from the ashes.

I became aware of the silence. Our swift footsteps were bringing the proximity death ever closer and for me fear, the agent of the well-armed overlord, was in our midst. He marched in step with the cold-hearted one that they called Sergeant Death. Now no aircraft was crossing the sky and it was only the step of the volunteers marching that went sounding from the tree-lined road over the golden coloured fields to the lush margins of the Quadalaquivir.

It was then that the steadiness of Nathan’s splendid shoulders displayed for me that serenity which we were all striving to acquire.

George Nathan was a superb soldier, both as a tactical planner and as fearless leader in the field. His debonair behaviour under fire became legendary. His brass gleamed like gold; his leather might have just come from Swaine and Adney's; his good-looking batmen kept his uniform perfect; his swagger-stick was said to be gold-tipped - but that was how his brass was polished. In 1937 such turn-out was unique in the whole of Spain. He had been a CSM in a Guards battalion in 1918 and had decided to stay on in the Army. He was perhaps the first Shoreditch Jewish NCO in the whole Brigade of Guards and, so he told me, he had been determined to make a good job of it which he certainly did. He cleaned up his accent and eventually on sheer merit, was selected for a commission.

Thora and I got to know George Nathan well; he used to come to our Unit and have tea when the line was quiet. One day, very early in our friendship, he said, "Kenneth, what do you think of my accent", to which I replied, "But you have not got one". After a pause he went on "Well, you may be right, because I was just about to try and reply in the English of my own home ground when I found that I can no longer do it." I had been assuming that, like some of my own old school-fellows, he could also speak with an Irish or a Scottish lilt, so I asked him where he had been to school. He roared with laughter and replied "In the gutters of Shoreditch mostly.

He was very well set-up physically and when he had volunteered for the Army in 1916, he had only been 16 years old but he could have easily passed for twenty. Half way through the war the Recruiting Offices were scraping the bottom of the barrel and would have been only too happy to take George Nathan's six foot four with its proportionate muscle.

Nathan's mature view of military life was expressed succinctly. "Once in the Guards, they ask a lot and they give a lot. If you perform they do not let go of you, that’s the way to run a regiment and that's the way I want to do it out here."

George Nathan had been commissioned in the early 1920s. Looking at his then situation with today's eyes, I do not see how, on a subalterns pay, he could have managed to live the life of an officer in the peace-time Brigade of Guards. There is one factor that did not occur to us in the more innocent atmosphere of 1937. It could explain the accent and much else: George Nathan was without any question homosexual. His whole social recasting may well have been the result of a military friendship with someone of means and influence, dating maybe from the very day of his recruitment.

The 1926 General Strike revealed a line of cleavage running through British society - the split ran vertically not horizontally, as is so often implied. The Guards had been assigned duties in support of strike-breakers and the day came when five rounds of ammunition were issued to each man of George Nathan's platoon; Nathan got into a conversation in the ante-room of the Officers Mess about the appropriateness of using English soldiers for armed confrontation with their fellow citizens. The tone rose and Nathan's implied doubts left him in a minority of one. A more senior officer said, "Well none of us will have any compunction in putting this dock-land scum in its place. If we have to fire, we cannot have any shilly-shallying in front of the men. George here seems to have some qualms." Turning to George Nathan he said, "I think that you should not forget that, wherever you came from, now you are one of us. You must know that you have been very lucky. If you do not appreciate this, you had better get back as soon as possible to wherever you came from."

I have repeated Nathan's account as he gave it to me. I asked him how it all ended. He said that he saw in a flash that for years he had been deceiving himself; not only was he no longer a member of that family of "brother officers", but most probably, and this was a bitter realisation, he had never been "one of us". The conversation had taken a turn for the worse. The next day he was put on an infantry training course at some place in the country; as soon as he arrived there he resigned his commission. Then followed some bare and bitter years; he learnt what it meant to be jobless. He swallowed his pride and became a doorman at Peter Jones; he got involved in an attempt to form a union and lost his job. He was not political in the usual sense of the word, but he had a very strong feeling for the underdog. I do not know how he arrived in Spain, but he had found his place in the International Brigade. Everything that he had ever learnt in his old life took on a new meaningfulness so, as an officer, he shone with a rare brilliance.

George Nathan fell in the last stages of the Battle of Brunete in July 1937. At the end of a day when, ignoring the fire directed at him, he once again, swagger stick in hand, strolled down a faltering, badly defended, Battalion position. He had been showing the crumbling Spanish infantry that holding on was easy. As always he was impeccable in his turn-out and that day, true to the tradition of the Brigade of Guards, he died with his boots clean. Hit by mortar fragments, he knew that his number was up and he asked those near him to sing him out with the marching songs of his second and final love, the International Brigade.

Quickly Captain Nathan was at the head of affairs. He was unperturbed by the rifle fire. Playing it by ear, as it were, he knew that the bullets were harmlessly going high. I did not know that on Christmas Day the XIV International Brigade’s own half squadron of cavalry had carried out a reconnaissance of the area. Our horsemen had found Lopera, a substantial pueblo on high ground, to be abandoned by its population. Nor was it occupied by the foe. The shooting was taking place in the vicinity of a large farmhouse (Cortijo de Valenzuela). Nathan, taking council with Colonel de La Salle, ordered his men off the road. On the ploughed earth that lay on the left La Salle watched Nathan arrange the four Sections so that the Company would go forward with its formation diamond-shaped. The Colonel shared Nathan’s professional fearlessness; but he signaled to some of the men to keep closer to the ground. He symbolically pressed the palm of his right hand downwards Then he retired to the rear.

Reacting to the situation psychologically many tended not to stay in the extended cum-blob formation, and got themselves into crowds. Nathan shouted, ordering the to get back into extended order. "Don’t be bloody fools!" he shouted at them.

Sharper invective was hollered by him at those who tended to fall behind and be stragglers. The men that were taunted by him and rose to the occasion were afterwards proud of themselves; and the others who stayed as stragglers later took his reprimands. Naturally they found the fault was in the Captain and not in themselves. One of them in after years spoke of Nathan as a vainglorious drunk; but this was the least of the charges and was easily disposed of when it was recalled that once there was another that was called a vainglorious drunken lout at another time and in another place who was prepared to lay down his life in Freedom’s battle, without knowing that his name would be immortalised in verse and story.

Nathan’s awareness of the individual and collective weaknesses which men can fall to when they are called upon to advance into the teeth of a machine gun defensive system made him a leader who kept a finger on the pulse of the Company.

For a little while he let the Sections come into line to rest on high ground where a windbreak of tall trees gave them cover. The Saklatvalas, each out of breath and sweating, cast off poncho-blankets or greatcoats whilst shoals of bullets raked the branches, showering them with twigs and leaves.

Then, gesticulating vigorously with his stick, Nathan led a race downhill to a stream that flowed past the base of a mighty ridge. We leaped across the water and, again out of breath, reached the lee of the ridge.

Gaining its crest, Nathan went over the skyline on his belly like a lizard. Elsewhere on the slopes he was mostly to be seen on one knee, using his field glasses. At one point during this advance the Irish were first to gain the crest of one of the ridges, and "Kit" Conway called for a volunteer to scout ahead. The general attitude was please let us have a breather and on the instant none volunteered. Taken aback Conway instantly handed the command over to Jack Nalty and, upholding the precept that a leader should not ask his men to do what he was not prepared to do himself, set off to scout the ground. However, he was soon back and Nathan, having reached the crest, ordered the general advance to continue.

Low on the next down slope, safe from the bullets, Captain Nathan stopped. From the crouched running position he rose to his full height and, by spreading his arms, he called upon the Saklatvalas to halt.

George Nathan was a remarkable person. He joined us through the Jewish anti-fascist movement. The strange thing about Nathan was he was a Jew and a member of the Guards. He was very proud of his membership of the Guards. I liked him. Hugh Thomas suggested he was a homosexual. I was close enough to him and as far as I was concerned he was nothing like that. I never saw any suggestion of it and if there had been Tony would have told me anyway, as Tony was very close to Nathan. He went over to the 14th Brigade with him as his interpreter because Tony was bilingual. Nathan died on the eve of the Battle of Brunete. It was in an air raid, not in the actual battle itself. George Aitken was heartbroken because Nathan was the one man who could have become the military leader of the English-speaking brigade. The English-speaking brigade broke up after that because there was no one of Nathan's capability.

A major loss for the brigade was the death of Major George Nathan, killed by a random bomb from a Junker as the XVth was withdrawing from the battle. Spiffy and regimental to the end, during lulls in the battle he entertained visitors at lunch under shaded oak trees, offering them sliced tomato salad and fruit jam, served on a table carefully laid by his batman, whom he kissed and fondled openly. His funeral drew a distinguished crowd, for he was admired by Soviet "observers" for his "cool arrogance under fire," even though he had been refused membership in the Communist Party because of his sexual orientation.