the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt five)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

As he took over the training of the Americans, Merriman lectured them on what he could remember from ROTC: scouting, signaling, map reading (though they had no proper maps), throwing grenades, and digging trenches. He showed the recruits how to take apart and reassemble machine guns and some bulletless Canadian rifles, more than 30 years old, they had been given for training.

The unit’s morale was low: endless lectures about politics were no substitute for live ammunition, there were too few blankets for the winter nights, and some men were beginning to feel uneasy because Marty’s staff had confiscated their passports “for safekeeping.” A few weeks earlier, Pat Gurney, more savvy than these newcomers, had managed to hide his own. Eventually, some 580 American volunteers would report “lost” passports to the State Department. The Soviets wanted these for their own purposes. A Canadian volunteer’s passport, for example, would be used by the Soviet agent who assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.