Street-Fighting in Belchite 

The Church was captured by us sometime in the afternoon. With 
this important point in our possession the fight began for the control 
of the town. 
We were organised into groups to clean up the town street by street, 
house by house. Each group had grenadiers, riflemen, and men carrying 
dry twigs and gasoline to set fire to houses where they encountered re- 
sistance. When a house was occupied we would put a red blanket, mat- 
tress, or bunting in the window to show that the house was ours. Ma- 
jor Merriman and Captain Phil Detro, both good pitchers, could be seen 
all over the place handgrenading the Fascists. 
It was a tough job. The Fascists were resisting fiercely and we 
were fighting our way from street to street all that night and all next 
day. We didn’t have a minute’s rest for two or three days and nights 
in a row, and we were all groggy with sleep. 

*

Carl Bradley (he was later made Captain for his work here) and his 
men charged uphill some 350 yards under enemy machine-gun fire, and 
lost three dead and seven wounded out of their original 29 men. As he 
tells the story: 
“We took a street to a point where Charlie Regan was killed. Char- 
lie was a World War veteran, a fighting Irishman with a burning ha- 
tred for Fascism. We named the place where he was killed Dead Man’s 
Point. We built a barricade here of bags of grain taken from the cellars 
of abandoned houses and fought the Fascists from there with rifles and 
hand-grenades. 
After a while we decided to move the barricades forward, a few 
feet at a time. Two volunteers were needed for this; two stepped for- 
ward immediately. One of them was Ephraim Bartlett of Denver, Co- 
lorado, a man of 45 with some Indian blood, a miner who had served 
with the U.S. Cavalry and saw a lot of duty on the Mexican front. With 

269