James Isidore Newman Neugass

Isidore James Newman Neugass (1905-49), a lesser poet of the Lost Generation crowd who published as “James Neugass,” attended Yale, Harvard, and Oxford and worked as a book reviewer, shoe salesman, social worker, and fencing coach before shipping off to Spain when he was 32 to be an ambulance driver for the American Medical Bureau to Save Spanish Democracy. Neugass was present at Teruel, one of the conflict’s bloodiest battles, claiming over 100,000 casualties. Working as a cabinet maker and foreman in a machine shop during the 1940s, he began writing short fiction for popular magazines and concluded a novel based on his New Orleans family. This was "Rain of Ashes," appearing in 1949, the year he died of a heart attack in the Christopher Street subway station of Greenwich Village (NYC).

See also

http://www.alba-valb.org/volunteers/james-neugass

https://smile.amazon.com/-/es/James-Neugass/dp/1595584277/ref=sr_1_...

And now: From Alan Warren's contribution to the Facebook page, The International Brigades Remembered:

"War is Beautiful/La Guerra es Bella" by James Neugass are the diaries of an American ambulance driver in Spain. James sadly died of a heart attack in New York in 1949. He had composed a manuscript, but it disappeared, only to be found by chance in a bookshop only a few years ago and then published through ALBA. It has been compared to Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", and I agree! Available on www.bookfinder.com or in Spanish on Todocoleccion, at a reasonable price.
A few years ago, we took his son, Jim Neugass to many of the places described in the book and made a documentary of his journey of discovery to find his Father who he never really knew. Here is a link to it with English and Spanish subtitles as a sort of early Christmas present for you all (but purely for educational purposes).
War is Beautiful/La guerra es bella"
http://vimeo.com/107910304
Password: WIB2014
https://albavolunteer.org/.../following-in-my-fathers.../
And here is a brief description by James Neugass of Mas de las Matas eighty five years ago, today. The XV Brigade was being held in reserve in this and surrounding villages as the attack on Teruel developed. The Olive and Flour Mill described in the text is the building in the photo below. It is now a Museum displaying the Mill equipment. The village has quite a few silent memories of the British, Mackenzie-Papineau and Spanish battalions in its streets. The neighbouring village of Aguaviva has some very special evidence of the Lincoln-Washington battalion that was in reserve there at this time, too.......
December, 22nd, 1937.
"Behind the car lies a fountain courtyard flanked by an olive mill and a flour mill. Next to the fountain bubble the three and six-foot cauldrons of the Mac-Paps field kitchen, on iron tripods. Pre-Christmas pudding, sewed up in cotton bags, boil in a giant vessel, and two hundred liters of beef stew stirred by a wood shovel gurgle in another. I tasted the oil which was being pressed in the mill . Fifteen minutes old, it was as sweet as butter, and all of it must be exported.
Twenty feet away the Spanish company of the Mac-Paps marches in from maneuvers, singing "Red Flag" and "The Young Guard", one bayonet and one automatic rifle among the hundred of them. Nothing to sing about. English company follows them, singing Hi-ho-jorum and something about "big commisary rats in bowler hats". Six bayonets.
The Mayor of this town and its population are even more strongly anarchist than those of Alcorisa. A certain class of foreign correspondents, and all left-extremist of the Trotskyist splinter groups, believe in common that the Anarchists hate the I.B; but the wish is not always father of the thought, and here in Mas de las Matas, the F.A.I. and the C.N.T. have vacated their headquarters to make room for us. The townspeople, I hear, have killed most of their available pigs for our men. We have imported a truckload of clothing and canned milk as Christmas presents for the children of the village. Most of the anarchists I've talked with seem baffled that the leaders in the big cities have not been able to achieve the unity which exists among the troops at the Front.
It is getting too dark to write.
The good news: this morning we heard that the Listers, after sleeping without fires for three days in the snow, descended on the Alfambra Valley, north of Teruel, and effected a junction with the Vivancos (mostly anarchists}, completely cutting the Teruel-Saragossa railroad and highway, while a mixed division is advancing on the city from the south. Good news for Spain is bad news for the 15th Brigade. So long as the Spanish troops advance, we won't be needed and we won't get to the front.
Almost too dark to write now. If it were not for the patch of blood-red sky that lies low on the horizon over which Lister marched his men, if it were not for the fires of the field kitchen, I shouldn't have been able to write this much.
I think I'll get out of my car and see what I can do about that Christmas pudding."
James Neugass. "War is Beautiful". pp. 67-68.