After Nelson's wound at Belchite and Doran's stunt with the loudspeaker at the parish church (his speech was later called "the heavy artillery of the science of politics"), Doran assumed the post of XVth Brigade commissar. He had done well indeed. Within four months of his arrival in Spain, he had become the highest-ranking American in the International Brigades, for as political adviser to Copic he held a rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel. He was only twenty-six. What no one knew at this time-and how they would have shuddered had they known was that Doran's ambition was to assume military command of the brigade. That moment would arrive in time, but in September 1937 it was still in the future. For the moment he had to be content with nearly absolute political power. Men had followed Nelson because they believed in him; they would obey Doran because , they feared him. Most of the draconian measures, the persecutions, and the executions carried out in the XVth Brigade, belong to the Doran period.

I had known Dave Doran well in the States. He was a brilliant and audacious young man in both politics and battle. At Belchite, the brigade had surrounded a fascist unit but its destruction : would have been a long and costly process. Doran got his hands on a loudspeaker and had a young fascist, just captured, broadcast an appeal to surrender-which the enemy unit did.

Another exploit of Doran's came during the visit to Spain by Major Clement Attlee, the leader of the British Labor Party. Since that party had not yet made up its mind about Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's non-intervention policy, Doran thought it would help matters if Attlee visited the British Battalion. This the Labor Party leader had no intention of doing but this did not faze Doran who proceeded to set things into motion. Attlee, too busy to come to the Brigade, was touring all sorts of installations in Madrid. One day as he emerged from a government building, he found a delegation waiting for him. He was quickly escorted to an automobile, and before Attlee knew what was happening and believing this was still part of the official tour, he was brought before the British Battalion already waiting for him and lined up in full dress parade.

The band played "God Save the King," the British commander saluted Attlee in the snappiest manner, presented him with the battalion colors of Spanish and British flags and ceremoniously announced that the machine company, best in the battalion, would henceforth be the Attlee Company. What could poor Attlee do but respond in kind? Overwhelmed, he accepted the honor and promised to do all in his power to aid the cause of democratic Spain.

And indeed, after Attlee went back to London, the Labor Party did launch a campaign against the appeasement policy of Chamberlain. Of such small and unheralded incidents important his¬tory is sometimes made. Never was there a more benevolent kidnapping with such good consequences as the one master-minded by Dave Doran. The Attlee Company never cast any discredit on its illustrious namesake, later to be Britain's Prime Minister. On many occasions he was to talk with pride of the company that bore his name.

His answer was revealing, far more revealing than I was in a position to judge then. Although he had been in his post less than three months he had become fully impregnated with that exalted feeling of self-importance which, as I had occasion to learn later, characterized most of those comrades in Spain who had suddenly found themselves elevated from obscure party posts into positions of great authority. Trained in the dictatorial practices prevailing in all Communist Parties these comrades became drunk with power and gloried in the knowledge that here in Spain at last they were in a position to enforce their dictates by jail sentences and even the firing squad.

I cannot think of a more shocking illustration of the above point than the remark made by Dave Doran, then newly appointed commissar of the XV Brigade, at a banquet hortoring a visiting delegation of the American League Against War and Fascism. Those delegates, mostly well-meaning, liberal American women of the middle classes, were particularly intrigued by Dave's youth, he was twenty-eight, and the important position he held. They plied him with questions about the power he, as Brigade Commissar, wielded. Dave, who was visibly expanding under their adoration, straightened up in his chair and, surveying that huge table where, besides the delegates, most of the brigade staff were seated, asserted with pride:

"Well, I can have anyone seated at this table shot!"

The visiting delegates received this information with rapture, that was really something to take back home, to impress their friends with the importance of an American commissar they had encountered in person in Spain. It did not occur to any of them to inquire what could possibly have distorted the mind of a man that young to think of his position in those terms; to entertain the idea that it was within his power to order anyone in his sight, civilians and military personnel alike, placed before a firing squad and executed at his whim. The terrifying fact was that although Doran had no such authority, he had the actual power to do so and he could easily have excused such an action by charging his victims with, let's say, "counter-revolutionary Trotskyism," and even earned a further promotion thereby.