The volunteers is a memoir of Steve Nelson's time with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. He describes the process of getting into Spain illegally from France and his service as political commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, in action at Brunete and Belchite, amongst other places. The purely military part of the book gives quite a vivid description of what it must have been like actually to fight in the war — a lot of the more literary accounts are by people who didn't see any front-line service — and there are some touching portraits of friends who were killed in action. But he also still seems to be busy with his work as political commissar, so there is a lot of bitterness about the evil Trotskyites, anarchists, syndicalists, socialists and liberals who undermined the unity of the Republican side. Nelson's informal style, full of working-class American idioms of the time, reads a little oddly to start with, but you soon get used to it.

The book comes with a Foreword by Joseph North summarising the circumstances of Nelson's arrest and conviction in 1953 under trumped-up sedition charges — it's notable that when Seven Seas published this book in Eastern Europe in 1958, they conveniently forgot to update it to mention that the charges had been dropped in the meantime, after Nelson took the case to the Supreme Court, or that Nelson had been one of the many people who left the Party in 1956 after the Khrushchev speech and the Soviet intervention in Hungary. ( )