Men in Battle remains the best descriptive narrative of the Spanish Civil War to be written by a combatant, or by anyone else for that matter. It ranks with the best narratives of war, fictional or reportorial; vivid and honest, it conveys the chaos and cruelty of war, the obscenity and profanity, the filth, the pain, the death, the physical exhaustion and the emotional drain, the camaraderie, the episodes of heroism and the instances of demoralization. If these are universal attributes, Bessie also communicates the uniqueness of the International Brigades, a community of ideologically motivated and committed men, fighting for a cause. But in doing so he refrains from political rhetoric….

[Bessie writes in graphic detail,] and yet, without embellishment or contrivance, he achieves affirmation, both of the cause for which he fought and, as trite as it might sound, of its ultimate triumph on Spanish soil. Except that in 1939 he did not know it would take so long.

This brings us to Spain Again [an account of an eight-week visit to Spain in 1967]. Bessie's passion might be unique but in some measure his commitment to Spain's liberation from Fascist tyranny is shared by a significant portion of his generation. Spain represented the quintessential cause in the time of their youth, and recent news fans the hope that the Spanish people will soon reclaim what they fought for so gallantly in 1936–39. To the degree that American public opinion can contribute to that eventuality, either by supporting the Spanish resistance or by thwarting Washington's efforts to salvage the Fascist regime, Bessie's two volumes have current political meaning.

On another plane, however, the two books bracket the prime life span of an entire generation, and although Bessie is not its typical protagonist (who is?), some of his experience is representative, especially of that generation's Left flank. (p. 789)

Three threads are interwoven in the work. One is memory…. Having very well recorded long ago the things remembered, he prudently refrains from attempting to improve or embroider his recollections. What is new, then, is the emotion that attends remembrance, but Bessie does not probe his emotional responses, which would have required the introspection of a far more self-conscious autobiographical statement than he essayed in this modest volume.

A second thread consists of his observations of contemporary Spain. He has a sense of paradox, an eye for contradiction….

What emerges from his casual yet suggestive experiences is the sense of a volatile opposition beneath the surface and a regime beset by contradictions….

To complement his personal witness of the indications of such a possibility Bessie draws on the available public record, which comprises the third thread of his work, and is capped by a concise summary of the political situation in Spain, of the evidence of a formidable, growing and increasingly united opposition, as well as of the regime's savage reprisals. (p. 790)