We go in chains.... Everyone stares and we raise our right fists in salute and more than half of them return the salute. It's swell. My picture was in the Perpignan Independent today, taken as I came out of jail, fist raised.

Throughout the trial Dallet led, and his men followed. This was his finest hour: if Dartmouth had taught him anything, it was how to needle the bourgeoisie. When more volunteers, picked up in the Pyrenees, were brought to Perpignan, Dallet organized a "jail soviet," which won them privileges unheard of in French prisons. He set up classes in Marxist theory and in Spanish, and he orchestrated thunderous songathons that thrilled the crowds milling about outside, craning to catch a glimpse of les voluntaires. With informers, scabs, and weaklings Dallet took a dictatorial line. Among the prisoners were some foreign volunteers who had suffered police torture in Italy and seemed ready "to confess to anything the authorities demanded." When Dallet learned that a badly frightened Italian told police that he had volunteered because the promised him ten thousand francs - a confession so preposterous that even the public prosecutor threw it out-he moved quickly. In front of the other men he denounced and insulted the informer. Proudly he recounted the aftermath to his wife: "He hung his head and was too scared to speak. We all threatened him and I was surprised how well I could curse in French. I found out yesterday that when they got him back to jail they beat him up and completely ostracized him." Yet this same Joe Dallet sat down at the piano in the home of the Ceret police inspector to play Chopin from memory and thereby demonstrate that Communists were men of culture. The reporters loved it. Once more flashbulbs popped. Afterward Dallet begged Nelson, the only American witness, not to tell the guys about it, for he did not want to be mistaken for a "bloody bourgeois intellectual."

The Ceret trial resulted in a pyrrhic victory for the prosecution. The Non-Intervention Agreement was legally intact because the captives were found guilty of border violations. But the sentence mocked the verdict: they were given twenty-day jail terms, with credit for fifteen days already served. The judge warned that unless they left France immediately, he would have them deported, to which Dallet replied, "Then deport us to Spain!" Before their release, Dallet ordered his men to decorate the cell with so many slogans and hammer-and-sickle emblems that the wall would have to be whitewashed after they had gone. It was good college-boy fun. Their exit from prison was triumphant. "Crowds gather around us in the streets," he wrote Kitty. "We are the idols of the YCL and the Pioneers." People "begged" him to come back and promised "to turn their places inside out" if his wife would join him there.

The last peak was a 5000-foot climb over loose and jagged rock, through thick stiff underbrush. And we had to race against sunrise to get over without being seen. I carried a 165 pound guy practically by myself that whole climb. Christ! When we crossed the line we almost cried for happiness. Some people did cry, and I had a hell of a job restraining myself.

Complaints against Joe Dallet became a daily chorus among the men at Tarazona. The high gloss of the Ceret trial had worn off quickly. Adjectives followed him like a swarm of flies. He was cocksure, dictatorial, megalomanic, boy-scoutish and no end of unprintable. With sleeves rolled up nearly to his armpits, a big .45 dangling from his Sam Browne belt (originally buckled on him by Robert Merriman in a quasi-knighthood ceremony), and a big Stalin-style pipe clamped in his jaws, Joe Dallet was the monarch of all he surveyed in two-bit Tarazona. In the name of "Party discipline" he supported the segregation of officers from the rank and file at mess. If a man neglected to salute him, he could count upon a string of insults at best or a cooling-off in the brig at worst. But with Dallet it was not so much what he did as how he did it that pissed off the men. He wore the proprietary air of an overseer inspecting a gang of migratory wretches doing piecework in his grove. They sensed that his authority came not from inner strength but from the delegated power of the Party. He was a warden, not a leader.

Dallet thrived in Spain. To Kitty, his estranged wife, he confided that he had acquired "a pretty good tan from drilling without a shirt," that the battalion had "sung popular songs, smoked, and joked" while being massacred on February 27, and that "one sector of the front is only 90 miles west" (my emphasis). And he shared his experience of how he played war while on the shooting range: "Man, what a feeling of power you have when entrenched behind a heavy machine gun! You know how I always enjoyed gangster movies for the sound of the machine guns. Then you can imagine my joy at finally being on the business end of one." Nearly every line he wrote and every move he made seemed somehow calculated to impress someone his wife, his superiors, his men. He boasted about his accommodations at Tarazona, where he lived "like a real bureaucrat" in a big room all to himself. Between the lines the message was unmistakable a nobody in Youngstown had become a big shot in Spain. Obscurely Dallet understood this change within himself and stood armed with rationalizations. As he wrote Kitty: "You probably have noticed that since I left Paris I have lost some of the rank-and-filest tendencies that I had there and before leaving the States. However, the situation does not permit having them and it's a question of jumping in wherever you can do the most good, no matter what your personal inclination might be." What this really meant was that the "rank and file" had become pawns in his maneuvers along king row.

No one detected the change in Joe Dallet more quickly than the men in the Mac-Paps. They were mystified by his mercurial behavior bullyragging and threatening one moment and fawning and apologizing the next. His tantrums may have derived from his upbringing as a spoiled child, alien to most of the men. Whenever his followers failed to gratify his need to be worshipped, Dallet could become ruthless and irrational. No one ever doubted that he drove himself harder than the men he commanded, but often his instructional devices smacked of nursery games. He instituted, for example, a military game patterned on the spelling bee, in which recruits competed for prizes by answering such theoretical questions as How many bullets does a Maxim fire per ininute? How many seconds elapse between pulling the pin of a Mills bomb and its explosion? How many machine guns are necessary to set up a crossfire? He encouraged galas and was delighted by the table decoration at a party held by the machine-gun company, as conveyed to Kitty: "Tables and walls decorated with slogans, and in the center of a square of tables, freshly cleaned and beautifully draped in red, was their pride and joy, their love, their machine gun." As proof that one was a"right guy," Dallet insisted that every man participate in the horseshoe-pitching tournament he whipped up, and he demonstrated the right stuff by advancing to the semifinals himself. (One wonders whether he was a natural horseshoe jock or whether his competitors sensed his need to win.) It was a moot point whether Tarazona was patterned on Fort Leavenworth or Camp Unity. (And some recruits, organizers in the National Guard, knew both places well.) In a letter he alluded to his superiors promising a "cleaning out" of Anarchists in the camp and noted that he was supervising a "trial of deserters" with hints that a few of these had been executed.

Late in May, Kitty began to apply pressure to join him in Spain. After all, Andre Marty and Bob Merriman had their wives with them, and Marion Merriman had become an official member of the International Brigades. But at this stage Dallet still retained enough egalitarian scruples (or fear of disapproval) to veto the idea: "It's this way the boys up in the front lines are naturally prey to all the rumors that at the base the officers are eating, drinking, smoking, etc., that they have their wives or other women, etc., etc. Actually the boys up front get better food, they get first crack at cigarettes, etc., but we must lean over almost backward to deprive them of any excuse for the above stories." But Joe did not lean over backward very long. In mid-July reports circulating in the camp about the killing fields at Brunete he lost his squeamishness about exercising the prerogatives of power. Eagerly he wrote Kitty: "Wonderful news. You can come. Get in touch with Jack [Arnold Reid] in Paris, for whom I enclose a note, and he will put you through." Part of this change stemmed from a hardening of opposition toward him by men of his battalion. A grievance committee, supported by many officers and minor commissars, wanted to depose him.

The last time I met him (Joe Dallet) was in early October 1937, just before the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion was scheduled to meet its baptism of fire by going into an attack at Fuentes del Ebro. It was around ten o'clock at night by the time I located him. I found him sitting alone in a small hut by the dim light of an oilwick. He was very lonely; he greeted me with genuine warmth this time, grateful for my presence. I had come to learn his immediate orders and plans pertaining to the impending battle but Joe was more interested in recalling the past, our personal exploits in Ohio, confiding that he felt completely isolated from everyone.

Although I assured him that in my observation his battalion was in far superior battle shape than any of our other battalions on the eve of their first battle, which could be attributed mainly to his unflagging efforts, he knew that his men were not appreciative and that he was unpopular with them.

He kept repeating he would now prove to them by his personal example that he had had only their welfare in mind in driving them hard to become good soldiers; he would be the first over the parapet to demonstrate he was not one of those "safe behind the line Albacete generals," but a leader who fully shared the dangers to which he exposed his men.

I tried to reason him out of that obsession. I remonstrated that it was a poor way to provide leadership for an entire battalion, that by jumping off with the first wave he would lose control of directing the battle, which was his main responsibility. But Joe was adamant. He insisted on proving himself to his men and I left him with a heavy heart.

He saw me shivering in the cold outdoors and presented me with his own poncho, a charcoal black, warm woolen one, far superior to those issued by the Loyalist Army, also with a pistol. Pistols sold at a high price and I couldn't afford one. Despite my position I ranked as a private and my pay was only six pesetas a day. Before we parted, Joe indulged in a, for him, unusual gesture. He put his arm around me and told me to remember him.

Joe Dallet remained true to his promise. He was the first one out of the trenches after giving the signal for the attack and was cut down immediately after advancing but a few yards toward the Fascist lines. He was hit in the groin and suffered agonies, yet he waved back the First-Aid men, refusing to let them risk sure death in an attempt to reach him. He was trying to crawl back unaided when a fresh burst from a machine gun blasted life out of him. Joe knew he had to die to redeem the prestige of a commissar, to justify in his own eyes the path he had followed in Spain - a victim of his own Communist training.

Joe Dallet had come to Spain a few months before, but I had not seen him since Youngstown. Dallet had become part of a newly-formed Canadian battalion, the Mackenzie-Papineau, commanded by Robert Thompson, a young American from Oregon. But the day I arrived in Albacete to take up my new duties, Joe was killed in action.

It happened at Fuentes de Ebro and up there I heard the story. Joe was battalion commissar and it seems that during the training period he had been a strict disciplinarian, rubbing many of the men the wrong way. On the eve of the battalion's first action, the Brigade staff met to discuss whether Joe should not be removed from his post because of his unpopularity. He was not removed. But he had been very hurt over the criticism and determined to prove himself to the men the next day. Anyone knowing Joe well could have guessed what would happen. At the signal for attack, he was the first to jump out of the trenches. He was killed a good distance in front of the rest of his men.