They gave up everything, their homes, their country, home and fortune — fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters and children, and they came and told us: "We are here, your cause, Spain's cause, is ours. It is the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind." Today they are going away. Many of them thousands of them, are staying here with the Spanish earth for their shroud, and all Spaniards remember them with the deepest feeling.
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Referring to the foreign volunteers who joined the Spanish Republican forces' International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, in a speech in Barcelona on 15 November 1938, as the Brigades were being disbanded by Republican President Manuel Azana. As quoted by Hugh Thomas in The Spanish Civil War (1961), p. 558