what would become the British Section. He served with a machine-gun unit of the Commune de Paris Battalion, and fought alongside a number of other British volunteers in the defence of Madrid through November and December 1936, including Esmond Romilly. Having transferred to the recently formed British Battalion, he was killed in uncertain circumstances at Lopera, near Córdoba. Legacy A memorial volume to Cornford was published in 1938. As Stephen Spender observed in his review of the book, "Cornford's life speaks for itself in a way that burns the imagination ... The fact that Cornford lived and that others like him still live, is an important lesson to the leaders of democracies. It shows that people will live and die and fight for democracy if it gives them the justice and freedom which are worth fighting for." Cornford's poem Full Moon At Tierz (1937) is a literary expression of the anti-fascist cause. It has been said of Cornford, specifically in relation to this poem, that as a poet he was not a modernist. One justification for this claim is the following passage from George Orwell's 1940 essay "My Country Right or Left": Far from being dismissive, this is actually approving. Orwell is claiming that emotions like school spirit and patriotism—deep allegiances—can shift from one cause to another, from conservatism to revolution, and be just as sincere. However, Cornford was never a conventional public-school boy. He attended Stowe, a new and very liberal school, only from August 1929 to January 1933—hardly more than three years. By the middle of his seventeenth year he was living in London, attending the London School of Economics, and was a committed Communist organiser and speaker. British critic Stan Smith, in his essay "'Hard As the Metal of My Gun': John Cornford's Spain", undertakes a detailed reading of "Full Moon at Tierz" that brings out its complexity and ambivalence. The poem begins with a Marxist and modernist vision of history as a mountain glacier where "[t]ime was inches, dark was all" until it reaches "[t]he dialectic's point of change" and "crashes in light and minutes to its fall." Now "Time present is a cataract whose force Breaks down the banks even at its source… And we must swing it to its final course." Certainly, despite its far wider focus and dense philosophical imagery, the poem so far is, like Newbolt's, an expression of determination, as the