observed the rise of fascism in Europe. He was also motivated by the Non-Intervention Agreement signed by the British government, which prevented the Second Spanish Republic from purchasing arms internationally. The CPGB gave Lesser money for a ticket to Paris and an address to report to when he arrived; from the Paris-Gare de Lyon he travelled by train to Perpignan. He took the pseudonym "Raimundo Casado" while crossing the Pyrenees, and travelled to Figueres, then Barcelona, then to the headquarters of the International Brigades in Albacete, where he trained. It was at this time that he took the name "Sam" and reversed "Lesser" to form "Russell." Alongside Lesser in the first group of British volunteers were John Cornford, Bernard Knox and Jock Cunningham. After the nationalists broke through the Madrid Front, Lesser travelled overnight to Madrid. His first experience of combat came as part of a British unit in a French battalion in the Casa de Campo university campus in Madrid in October 1936, where his unit, which also included Cornford, Knox and writer John Sommerfield, was stationed on the front line close to the Philosophy and Letters building. The building had previously been occupied by Moroccan soldiers who had overrun Buenaventura Durruti's anarchist Durruti Column. As the British unit advanced into the building they fought alongside members of Durruti's militia and a group of miners from Asturias, and occupied the building for a week. Of the original 30 members of Lesser's unit, only six survived until mid-December, when they returned to Albacete. Lopera and injury In December 1936, Lesser joined a reconstituted British company alongside the other four English survivors of his former unit. They were sent across Spain to Andújar then went south to Lopera, where in January 1937 (having previously suffered a shrapnel-inflicted head wound) Lesser was hit by bullets in the back and foot, likely to have come from his own machine gun company. "I didn't know at the time where I'd been wounded – in which part of my body – except that when I tried to get up I couldn't. I just fell down", he later recalled. As his comrades had been forced to withdraw, Lesser remained in place until his friend Cunningham, who had insisted on looking for him, found him and, unable to locate a stretcher, dragged him away from the fighting. He was driven to a hospital in Linares. Cornford and