Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable dandies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet-hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is happening and has been happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being riveted on the Spanish workers under the pretext of resisting Fascism; also that since May a reign of terror has been proceeding and all the jails and any place that will serve as a jail are crammed with prisoners who are not only imprisoned without trial but are half-starved, beaten and insulted. I dare say you know it too, though God knows anyone who could write the stuff overleaf would be fool enough to believe anything, even the war-news in the Daily Worker. But the chances are that you - whoever you are who keep sending me this thing - have money and are well-informed; so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of “democracy” (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends. This is more than six lines, but if i did compress what I kn ow and think about the Spanish war into six line you wouldn’t print it. You wouldn’t have the guts.

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-1918, but i honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of Daily Mail reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm.