LAST week’s edition highlighted Andy Johnston’s stained glass window in Prestonpans Labour Club that celebrates four local miners who were among the 520 Scots who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Most served in the 15th International Brigade, which saw tough fighting. But all four survived to return home. Many comrades did not.

Eighty-five years on, it is hard to appreciate the world then. Post-Great War, intense political divisions, with the Russian Revolution, tanks on the streets of Glasgow, a General Strike in 1926 and widespread unrest leading to the rise of fascism in Italy (Mussolini in 1922) and Germany (Hitler in 1933). Spain teetered between extremes until a socialist government deposed King Alfonso XIII in 1931 and declared a republic. This triggered revolution by monarchists and the army under Franco in 1936.

This civil war became a proxy for the struggle between left and right, with the fascist dictators supporting Franco’s Falange, and socialists, particularly the Soviet Union, supporting the republican government. Because the sides were evenly matched, the war lasted three years. Hitler and Mussolini sent in arms and ‘volunteer’ units. The Comintern steered a flow of Soviet arms and organised ‘International Brigades’ of socialist volunteers.

Like their comrades, the East Lothian miners had to make their own way to Spain and suffered the same brutal hardships at the front as their Spanish comrades.

Despite often finding themselves short of food, shelter and ammunition, the Brigades were among the most effective fighting units, often used as shock troops and earning distinction during the siege of Madrid, at the battles of Brunete and Teruel, and leading the Ebro offensive.

Unlike the Falange, who enjoyed unified command, regular supplies and the novelty of air support, the republicans suffered from fragmented command, friction among units, an arms blockade by France and a succession of defeats that drove them east and north. It all came to an end with the fall of Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia in 1939.

Our four miners suffered deprivation, danger and hardship in a foreign cause because they believed that fascism could not be appeased and had to be challenged directly. They were right.

As they came home to well-deserved acclaim from fellow miners, Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War was less than six months away.