I was very interested in the Spanish situation even before the Civil War, and I volunteered in 1936 through the British Medical Aid Association to go out to Spain to help the Spanish people. I went to Spain because I believed in the cause of the Spanish Republican Government. I didn't believe in Fascism and I had heard many stories of what happened to people who were under Fascist rule.

The British Medical Aid Committee was composed mostly of London doctors or British doctors, and Labour MPs, left wing MPs mostly, people like that. It had been set up specially for Spanish war aid.

I arrived at a small Spanish hospital at Huete, more or less on the Barcelona front. Huete was a little village north-east of Barcelona. From the hospital in Barcelona we used to go out in the hospital trains all round the area, behind offensives, and when there was more work to do outside of the hospital than inside. In the hospital train it was pretty gruelling, you know. On one occasion we went under a bridge to operate when bombs were falling.

Hours of duty at the hospital depended on the work, because we had many casualties at one time and not so many at other times. We just worked when we had to even if you had to get out of bed in the middle of the night, you know.

We had a lot of casualties even in the little hospital at Huete, very serious ones, terribly serious ones. Young, young men calling for their mothers. It was very sad, terrifically sad. Many of the wounds were very serious - open holes, stomachs opened up, legs off, arms off, oh, terrible, terrible. I never saw anybody shell-shocked. It was a different kind of war from the First World War. We didn't have any cases of shell-shock in the hospital. We had lots of cases of frozen feet, and that was a terrible thing because when their feet were coming round to get their blood flowing again it was a terrible painful thing. We had an awful job with that, and of course we hadn't really got the equipment to treat that sort of thing very easily. So there was a terrible lot of suffering from frozen feet. It was terribly cold in the winter, very cold up in the hills in the winter where we were, extremely cold.

Most of the casualties in our hospital of course were our own. At least eighty per cent I should think were Spaniards, the remaining were Internationals from all the countries. I met masses of Internationals. Lots of Americans, Germans, Italians, Russians and, oh, every country you could think about that sent volunteers - French, Yugoslavs. I think every country almost you could mention there were volunteers from to the anti-Fascist side.

We mixed with the population in Barcelona and of course the people we met and most of the people in Barcelona in fact seemed to be against the Fascists. I knew there was fighting in Barcelona itself in the summer of 1937 between the P.O.U.M., the Anarchists and the Communists. But we were so busy in the hospital we didn't see much of the outside life really. Oh, I knew the Anarchists! They would shoot anybody if they thought they were well off. Yes, they would just take them round the corner. You could hear the shots sometimes. They weren't very scientific in their approach, you know. We had them working in the hospitals and everything. They were a part of the International Brigade actually. But as I say they weren't very scientific in their approach to the whole cause. Nice enough blokes but they would shoot somebody if they thought they were well off- even just by the way they were dressed, you know.

As we were coming out of Spain - the Fascists were getting to Barcelona as we were getting out - I was with the Spanish surgeon and some of the others as we came through Barcelona. We found a whole lot of children, oh, dozens of them, with their hands off, completely off. The Italians had dropped anti-personnel bombs marked 'Chocolate'. The children were picking up these things - they hadn't had chocolate for years - and they just blew their hands off. This Spanish surgeon that I worked with, he was in tears. We all were. This sort of thing was so horrible. It left a big impression on me.

During the Ebro offensive we had a hospital train in a tunnel near the fighting area and where the number of' wounded was very high. I had the anxious experience of having my brother Tom, a commissar in a machine-gun company of the British Battalion of the International Brigade, and my brother George who had been wounded and recovered on another front. George was number two Company's intelligence officer. It could be understood that when stretchers were brought in I would rush to see if either of my brothers was on one of them. Fortunately this never was the case. Early in the war my - brother George had been wounded at the battle of Jarama by a bullet that went straight through his chest, missing his lungs by quarter of an inch, which kept him at death's door for several months. On the road to recovery he spent part of his convalescence in my hospital and it was of course a special satisfaction that I had the opportunity of helping to restore his usual vitality. Thereafter he went back to the front...

Whilst leaving Barcelona (during the final retreat) we had the horrible experience of witnessing little children whose hands had been blown off while picking up from the streets packets marked "chocolate" in Italian, which were in fact anti-personnel bombs dropped from Italian fascist planes. If there was any experience of the war in Spain needed for any reinforcement of our anti-fascist hatred this was it.