During the long weeks of stalemate, however, his eccentric side emerged. This is a man who refused to shoot a retreating fascist because the man was struggling to hold up his trousers after a toilet visit and was therefore “visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him,” yet was so alarmed by a rat that he blasted it with his rifle, thus alerting the enemy and triggering a fierce firefight which ended up destroying the militia’s cookhouse and two of their buses.
