Original subtitles

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- This Spanish earth is dry and hard,

and the faces of the men who work that earth

are hard and dry from the sun.

This worthless land with water will yield much.

For fifty years we wanted to irrigate,

but they held us back.

Now we will bring water to it

to raise food for the defenders of Madrid.

The village of Fuenteduena,

where 1,500 people live

and work the land for the common good.

It is good bread stamped with the Union label.

But there is only enough for the village.

Irrigating the waste land of the village

can give 10 times as much grain for bread,

as well as potatoes, wine, and onions for Madrid.

The village is on the Tajo river and the main highroad

that is the lifeline between Valencia and Madrid.

All food for Madrid comes on this road.

To win the war, the rebel troops must cut this road.

They plan the irrigation of the dry fields.

They go to trace the ditch.

This is the true face of men going into action.

It is a little different

from any other face that you will ever see.

Men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death.

The villagers in Fuenteduena

hear this noise and say, our guns.

The frontline curves north to Madrid.

These were the doors of houses that are empty now.

Those who survived the bombardment

bring them to reinforce the new trenches.

When you are fighting to defend your country,

war, as it lasts, becomes an almost-normal life.

You eat, and drink, and sleep, and read the papers.

The loudspeaker of the People's Army.

It has a range of two kilometers.

When these men started for the lines three months ago,

many of them held a rifle for the first time.

Some did not even know how to reload.

Now they are instructing the new recruits

how to take down and reassemble a rifle.

This is the salient, driven into Madrid itself

when the enemy took University City.

After repeated counter-attacks,

they are still in the Casa de Velazquez,

the palace on the left with the pointed towers,

and in the ruined clinical hospital.

The bearded man is Commander Martinez de Aragon.

Before the war, he was a lawyer.

He was a brave and skillful commander,

and he died in the attack on the Casa del Campo

on the day we filmed the battle there.

The rebels try to relieve the clinic.

Julian, a boy from the village, writes home.

Papa, I will be there in three days.

Tell our mother.

The troops are called together.

The company is assembled to elect representatives

to attend the big meeting

celebrating the union of all the militia regiments

into the new brigades of the People's Army.

Enrique Lister, a stonemason from Galicia.

In six months of fighting, he rose from a simple soldier

to the command of a division.

He's one of the most brilliant young soldiers

of the Republican Army.

Carlos, one of the first commanders of the Fifth Regiment.

He talks of the Army of the People,

how they are fighting for Spanish democracy

and for the government they themselves have chosen.

Fighting together, we shall win a new strong Spain.

Jose Diaz, he used to work 12 hours a day as a typesetter

before he became a member of the Spanish Parliament.

Gustav Regler, one of the fine writers of Germany,

who came to Spain to fight for his ideals.

He was gravely wounded in June.

Regler praises the unity of the People's Army.

The defense of Madrid will remind men always

of their loyalty and courage.

The most famous woman in Spain today is speaking.

They call her La Pasionaria.

She's not a romantic beauty or any Carmen.

She's the wife of a poor miner of Asturias,

but all the character of the new Spanish woman

is in her voice.

Living in the cellars of that ruined building are the enemy.

They are Moors and civil guards.

They are brave troops, or they would not have held out

after their position is hopeless.

But they are professional soldiers

fighting against a people in arms,

trying to impose the will of the military

on the will of the people, and the people hate them,

for, without their tenacity and the constant aid

of Italy and Germany, the Spanish revolt would have ended

six weeks after it began.

This battalion goes on leave, and Julian, who is with them,

has three days leave to the village.

The Duke of Alba's palace is destroyed by rebel bombardment.

Treasures of Spanish art are carefully salvaged

by government militia men.

Madrid, by its position, is a natural fortress,

and each day the people make its defenses more impregnable.

You stand in line all day to buy food for supper.

Sometimes the food runs out before you reach the door.

Sometimes a shell falls near the line,

and at home they wait and wait,

and no one brings back anything for supper.

Unable to enter the town, the enemy try to destroy it.

This is a man who had nothing to do with war,

a bookkeeper on his way to his office

at eight o'clock in the morning.

So now they take the bookkeeper away,

but not to his office or to his home.

The government urges all civilians to evacuate Madrid.

But where will we go?

Where can we live?

What can we do for a living?

I won't go, I'm too old.

But we must keep the children off the street,

except when there is a need to stand in line.

Recruiting is speeded up by the bombardment.

Every useless killing angers the people.

Men from all businesses, professions, and trades

enlist in the Republican Army.

Meanwhile, in Valencia, the President.

- Julian catches a ride on an empty truck

and comes home sooner than he expected.

Julian drills the village boys in the evening,

when they come back from the fields.

In Madrid, a future shock battalion

of bullfighters, football players, and athletes is drilling.

They say the old goodbyes

that sound the same in any language.

She says she'll wait.

He says that he'll come back.

He knows she'll wait.

Who knows for what, the way the shelling is.

Nobody knows if he comes back.

"Take care of the kid," he says.

"I will," she says, and knows she can't.

They both know that when they move you out in trucks,

it's to a battle.

Death comes each morning to these people of the town,

sent from the hills two miles away.

The smell of death is acrid,

high-explosive smoke and blasted granite.

Why do they stay?

They stay because this is their city.

These are their homes.

Here is their work.

This is their fight, the fight to be allowed

to live as human beings.

Boys look for bits of shell fragment

as they once gathered hailstones.

So the next shell finds them.

The German artillery has increased their allowance

for battery today.

Before, death came when you were old or sick,

but now it comes to all this village.

High in the sky and shining silver,

it comes to all who have no place to run, no place to hide.

Three Junkers planes did this.

The government pursuit-planes shot one Junkers down.

I can't read German, either.

These dead came from another country.

They signed to work in Ethiopia, the prisoners said.

We took no statements from the dead,

but all the letters we read were very sad.

The Italians lost more killed, wounded, and missing

in this single battle of Brihuega

than in all the Ethiopian war.

The rebels attack the Madrid-Valencia road again.

They've crossed the Jarama river

and try to take the Arganda bridge.

Troops are rushed from the north to the counter-attack.

The village works to bring the water.

They arrive at the Valencia road.

The infantry in the assault,

where cameras need much luck to go.

The slow, heavy-laden, undramatic movement forward.

The men in echelon, in columns of six,

in the ultimate loneliness of what is known as contact,

where each man knows there is only himself

and five other men, and before him, all the great unknown.

This is the moment that all the rest of war prepares for,

when six men go forward into death

to walk across a stretch of land

and, by their presence on it, prove this earth is ours.

The counter-attack has been successful.

The road is free.

Six men were five, then four were three.

But these three stayed, dug in and held the ground,

along with all the other fours and threes and twos

that started out as sixes.

The bridge is ours.

The road is saved.

The men who never fought before,

who were not trained in arms,

who only wanted work and food, fight on.