CNN - He remembers Papa - July 16, 1999

(SALON) -- Soon after the American soldiers were pulled out of the civil war in Spain in 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote this description of Milton Wolff, commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion: "Twenty-three years old, tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg. He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed."

Now 83, Wolff will leave his small apartment outside San Francisco this week and fly to Illinois to pay his own tribute to Hemingway. The ceremony, at the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, marks the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth and coincides with the publication of Hemingway's last "posthumous novel," "True at First Light."

Wolff first met Hemingway when Wolff was a 22-year-old private in the International Brigades, a force made up of volunteers from more than 50 countries who went to Spain to fight alongside the troops of the liberal government of the Republic against Gen. Francisco Franco's military revolt. While the two men would call each other friend until Hemingway's death, their first encounter was not promising. Wolff stole Hemingway's girlfriend.

Tall, dark-eyed, a thatch of black curls atop his handsome head, Wolff marched into the swank Café Chicote in Madrid and lured away a raven-haired beauty who was Hemingway's mistress.

"He didn't object," Wolff recalls, one of his dozen or so pipes held between his teeth. "He didn't say anything. Never brought it up with me."

Wolff admits, though, that for a while he did feel a hint of pride at having taken Hemingway's girl. "He was a bull, a big strong guy. She was just hungry."

Wolff says he forgot the woman's name long ago but does recall that she spoke little English. "She didn't know what they were bullshitting about and neither did I. They were talking tactics and strategy and I couldn't care less."

On leave from the front, Wolff knew only that the burly man seated among a group of well-dressed women and men that evening had invited him for a drink. The bar was one of the poshest meeting places along Madrid's Gran Vía, and it was the drink that he'd come for.

"I hate to admit this but I had not heard of him," says Wolff, who sketched the scene in "Another Hill," his 1994 novel about the Spanish Civil War. "I had not read his books. I had not read 'A Farewell to Arms.' I had not read 'The Sun Also Rises.'"

Wolff, understandably, had more important things on his mind. Arriving in Spain from Brooklyn in March 1937, he'd served first as a medic, then as a machine-gunner in the Washington Battalion. He fought in fierce battles at Brunete, Quinto, Belchite and Fuentes de Ebro. By the battle of Teruel he was captain of a machine-gun company. When his commander was killed, Wolff took charge of the battalion of 3,000 Americans and led an offensive into the Sierra Pandols. Altogether more than 45,000 volunteers from Europe, Canada, the United States and Mexico fought in the war against Franco. Some 16,000 of them died before the force was disbanded and sent home as Franco's army, backed by the fascist governments in Germany and Italy, closed in on victory. Wolff went on to fight in Italy and Burma during World War II, but in the '50s he and other Americans who had served in Spain were marked for persecution in the anti-Communist fervor of the day.

Wolff still speaks in support of the beliefs that took him to Spain, but he is not an idealist. "There are no heroes in this Balkan war," he says. "There are villains but there are no heroes. In the Spanish Civil War it was different. And as far as the International Brigades were concerned, there was nothing like it in history. We were all volunteers, there were no mercenaries. There wasn't a pot to piss in. There were no rewards, no medals. There was nothing. We got our asses kicked in Spain and then we came back. It's been called the pure war, but nothing's pure in life, I've decided. But it's the closest thing to it that I know of."

Despite the fact that Wolff had snatched his girl, Hemingway later summoned the newly promoted officer to his room at the Hotel Florida, in Madrid, and asked him to read a rough draft of his play "The Fifth Column." From there a fractious friendship evolved, an on-and-off connection between Hemingway and "El Lobo" (Wolff's nom de guerre) that often erupted in harsh words but lasted until the writer's death in 1961.

Wolff and other war veterans criticized Hemingway's novel about the war, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which was later made into a movie starring Gary Cooper. "Here was a guy who among all the correspondents knew more about what the hell was going on there," Wolff says. "We expected him to write the definitive book on Spain, not a goddamn Hollywood production. So there was keen disappointment on my part. I called him a tourist in Spain and he called me a tool of the Communist Party and a lot of other bad things in an exchange of letters. Then we made up. But he called me every name under the sun. He cursed me out. What got him was that I called him a tourist."

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