Miguel Hernández, singer of the trenches

According to Vittorio Vidali (Comandante Carlos), this photograph of Miguel Hernández (Orihuela, 1910-Alicante, 1942) speaking and reciting his poems while standing on a truck, was taken in the town of Castro del Río near Córdoba in 1937. It is not the only image of the poet among Republican soldiers. The daily newspaper ABC published some taken in similar circumstances, when a pause in the fighting made it possible for the word to be heard above the rattle of the machine gun. 

The years before the war were a time of clear-cut conflicts, as in children’s stories: “heroes and villains” or “goodies and baddies”. In this context, and under the influence of his new comrades: Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, the Argentinian poet Raúl González Tuñón, and Chileans Pablo Neruda and his lover Dalia del Carril, Hernández abandoned his Catholic beliefs and joined the Communist Party. 

Miguel Hernández was no home-front intellectual. He made his social and cultural commitments irrefutably clear. In 1935, he took part in the Pedagogical Missions that carried culture to the villages of Castille and Andalucía. In September 1936, shortly after the war started, he enlisted in the El Campesino battalion of the Fifth Regiment as a sapper and later became its cultural commissar. In that role he was very active in propaganda, literacy, and educational work, including joining other intellectuals in producing magazines like Ataque for soldiers on the Madrid front. 

Then, at Castuera on the Extremadura front in 1937, he collaborated in the Loudspeaker of the Front (Altavoz del Frente) group’s Frente Sur magazine, which was aimed at the home front as well as the front lines. His writing, which evoked emotional responses in favour of justice, equality, liberty , solidarity and dignity, appeared in countless publications, including Milicia Popular, La voz del Combatiente, Acero, Frente Sur, Nuestra Bandera, and Pasaremos. 

During a break from this activity at the front, Hernández attended the Second International Congress of Intellectuals in Madtid and Valencia. There, according to Ian Gibson, he had an emotional encounter with Antonio Machado. He also met the Afro-Cuban poet  Nicolás Guillém, who wrote this about him a few months later: “The loud, sharp voice; the skin browned by the fierce Levantine sun. All that  hidden in a pair of worn corduroy pants and Brand-new rope soled sandals… This Singer of the trenches, this man who came from the deepest guts of the people, makes an energetic and simple impression”. 

Hernández was imprisoned after the war, and the dictatorship allowed him to die in jail in horrible conditions.