Brigadistas

Xavier Smith entered squalling, screaming
- in 1914 - an England safe and dreaming:
to parents of the upper-middle class
who spurned a wedding as bourgeois farce.

At the callow age of twenty three,
he came to Spain with Vic and me.
With a spade for a gun and a workers tan
We drilled and marched saying ‘no pasaran!’

But pass they did, through and by.
Vic lost a leg and I lost an eye
Xav was lucky and made it through
just to die on the Kwai in ’42.