DIE, FASCIST, DIE!
A Novella of the Spanish Anarchist Revolution of 1936, Set in the World of Iron Cross
Barcelona, July 19, 1936. The Nationalist coup has begun. Antonio Ferrán is nineteen years old, a metalworker's apprentice in the CNT shop on Carrer de la Indústria, and he does not wait for orders. No one in the CNT-FAI waits for orders. Within hours the workers of Barcelona have seized the armories, thrown up the barricades, and organized columns to march on Nationalist-held Aragon. The anarchist revolution - the one they have been building toward for seventy years - has arrived.
Antonio goes to the front. What he brings with him is not ideology but craft: the ability to read steel, to understand what boilerplate will stop and what it won't, to close the gaps in an improvised armored vehicle built from a Hispano-Suiza bus chassis by workers who have never built a tank before and will not be told they can't. The CNT-FAI's Blindados Confederales are not military vehicles. They are proof that workers can build what they need from what they have.
Beside him is his uncle Pablo - sixty-four years old, who has been in the anarchist movement since before Antonio was born. Pablo knew men who knew Bakunin. He corresponded with Malatesta. He has been shot at by agents of the state before and he has marched to Aragon anyway, because that is where the thing is. He quotes Bakunin on the nature of power and Kropotkin on the limits of the lesser evil, and he believes every word of it with a conviction that has survived forty years of exile, imprisonment, and disappointment.
Die, Fascist, Die! follows Antonio from the barricades of July 1936 through the grinding stalemate of the Aragon front - the improvised armor, the mountain guns, the slow learning of how to fight with what you have - and on through the political betrayals, military reverses, and human losses that mark every year of the war through 1939. It is a novel about skill and belief, about what it means to maintain a machine under fire and what it means to maintain a conviction when the people who were supposed to share it have turned against you. It is about the specific courage of holding still.
Written in a style influenced by Hemingway but wholly its own, with technical attention to the realities of improvised armored warfare and epigraphs drawn from the poetry of Federico García Lorca - murdered by Nationalist forces in Granada in August 1936 - Die, Fascist, Die! is historical fiction that takes both its history and its fiction seriously.
Set in the world of Iron Cross XII: Anarchist Iron Columns vs. Falangist Armor tabletop wargame.
John Stapleton is a writer and designer of tactical wargaming systems for the Iron Cross series.
