May 1938. A member of the Communist Party of Ireland, Eugene Downing from Dublin, sat in the same railway carriage as Irish International Brigaders Jack Nalty and Paddy Duffy. The three men were all traveling through France to fight fascism in Spain.

Downing was a new volunteer, while Nalty and Duffy were returning to the front. Impressed by the veterans, Downing wrote: “It is easy for the new recruit starting out as he is blind to the perils of the battlefield and to the terrible injuries and wounds that people suffer. Both Jack and Paddy were more than aware of the hardships that awaited them, yet they were still keen to return to battle. [ . . . ] They had already played their part and they could have given up at this point. And yet, despite all this, they returned.”

Downing’s words count among the many testimonies in In Spanish Trenches: The Minds and Deeds of the Irish Who Fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War by Barry McLoughlin and Emmet O’Connor. A book twenty-five years in the making, it places the Irish stories within the whole history of the International Brigades, describing the battles and inter-battle periods in a more complete manner and with far more context than other books on the subject.