late to save my life. He was a good doctor, very friendly and 
easy to get along with. I called him by his first name, Roberto.

The doctor spent a great deal of time in conversation with 
me. He had graduated in Paris, and spent several months in 
London and Berlin. He was a staunch supporter of the Repub-
lican Party and was keenly interested in the activities at the 
front. When Teruel was captured by the Republican army last 
December he ran into my room, overjoyed, and grabbed my 
hand forgetting that it was still bandaged. This same feeling 
was shared by the entire staff of the hospital.

He worked tirelessly. A little boy, nine years old, was 
brought to our hospital. He was wounded during a bombard-
ment of Madrid. Gangrene had set in. His right leg and 
right arm were affected by it. His arm was amputated at the 
shoulder, and the leg at the thigh, but the good care of this 
doctor saved his life. His mother was killed during that bom-
bardment and his father died at the front some time before. 
He was a very pleasant and intelligent boy. Doctor Roberto 
was very proud of him, bitterly remarking that this young 
Spaniard faces life with the stamp of the Non-lntervention 
Committee on him---a stamp that could never be erased from 
the thousands of other such cases in Spain.

Roger Hargrave, an American University student from 
Iowa, was in the same room with me from the third day after 
my arrival in the hospital. He was an old timer in the hospital 
having been there three months. His condition was serious 
He was unable to move this leg and one arm. On the night 
of December 12th, when the Loyalist offensive had started 
upon Teruel, the fascist artillery began shelling Madrid. Over 
three hundred shells hit the centre of Madrid. About fifty of 
them whizzed over the hospital, one of them exploding ten yards 
away. It is difficult to describe what we felt. We were on 
the third floor, laid up in bed, unable to move, as the shells 
sang their death songs over our heads and around us. 

Roger was smiling. After three months of suffering to 
save his life, was he to be killed by a shell dropping in a 
hospital?

He was a medical student and was a First Aid man. He 

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