their surreptitious journey on foot across the Pyrenees. Having entered Spain, Fullarton was sent for a brief period of military training at Figueres, although this proved to be basic at best: fake wooden rifles were distributed for practice due to a shortage of the real thing. He was then assigned to the Major Attlee Company and in the early summer of 1938 moved to the Chabola Valley in preparation for the republican side's crossing of the River Ebro. Fullarton bonded with his fellow volunteers and attended lectures on political theory and ideology. "People would quote Lenin and Stalin by the yard. I realised how ignorant I was about these things. I didn't know about them at that time." When the Battle of the Ebro began in July 1938, Fullarton was at the centre of the action amidst relentless German aerial bombardment. "Every day we got it – an average of six or seven times. Twenty or 30 of them would come over and give us all they had, then strafe us with the machine guns", he said. Fullarton was at high risk, and during intense fighting he was shot through the stomach. He lay, prone and silent, for several hours so as not to be identified by Franco's Nationalists. Without anaesthetics, doctors probed to find the bullet in his body with a long needle. As he wrote home from his sickbed: "The bullet made an ugly hole but I will soon be OK again. These explosive bullets that the fascists are using make a helluva mess of you. It enters you and only makes a small hole, but when it is inside it explodes and where it comes out it blows all the flesh with it." After a period of convalescence in Catalonia, on 23 December 1938, Fullarton was transported back to Great Britain, aged 19. Back in Glasgow he struggled to find work, his name tainted by association with the Spanish war, an experience repeated when he tried to join the Royal Air Force. Fullarton was eventually able to join the RAF during the Second World War, serving in South Africa. This, however, did not stop the Foreign Office writing to him demanding a fee for the money it had paid towards his repatriation from Spain. Later life Following his war years, Fullarton resumed work as an engineer and started a family. He read assiduously, enjoying the works of