DAVE Marshall's war lasted just ten weeks, but in that brief time he would witness savagery which would stay with him for the rest of his days. The young idealist was only 20 when he forged his father's signature and left his job as a dole office clerk in Middlesbrough to fight against the forces of Fascism in Spain.

Slightly-built and bespectacled, with a lifelong love of poetry, the young Dave made an unlikely warrior. Yet, within weeks of arriving in a nation torn apart by the most ferocious of civil wars, he was plunged straight into action.

Just over two months later, he was shot and injured in a failed assault on a hill held by Franco's forces - an heroic failure which could be seen as a metaphor for the history of the Brigades in Spain.

The Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 when right-wing Army officers, including General Franco, led a military uprising against the newly-elected left-wing government in Madrid.

Franco's forces included Nationalists, monarchists and Fascists, and were ranged against forces loyal to the government, including democratic Republicans, socialists, anarchists, communists, Catalans and Basques.

The Nationalists seized control of parts of northern and southern Spain, while the heart of the country, including Madrid and Barcelona, remained in the hands of the Republicans.

A vicious fratricidal civil war broke out - but what began as a purely Spanish conflict soon became embroiled in the conflict of international ideologies which marked the 1930s and became a military training ground for the approaching Second World War.

Fascist Italy sent 100,000 men to fight for Franco and Hitler ordered thousands of troops and 600 Luftwaffe aircraft, practising Blitzkrieg on the plains of Spain.

In response, Stalin sent 900 Soviet tanks and 1,000 aircraft to shore up the faltering Republican forces.

Into this battleground were thrown the 35,000 men of the International Brigades - committed communists, intellectual idealists, hardened street fighters and romantic poets who flocked to Spain to fight against the march of Fascism.

Despite a strict government policy of neutrality, around 2,000 British volunteers went to fight, including 100 from Tyneside and Wearside and a smaller number from Teesside. At least 20 of the North-East contingent never came back.

Among them were George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and Laurie Lee; famed French Communist Andre Marty and future British trade union leader Jack Jones.

Some went to Spain independently or joined one of the other factions fighting for the Republican cause, but most of the working-class volunteers joined the International Brigades.

Among them was Dave Marshall. The son of a Methodist railway worker and a lady's maid, at school he excelled at Latin and maths and developed a deep love of Keats' poetry. In 1934, aged 18, he passed the civil service entry examination, taking a job in the local Ministry of Labour - the dole office for thousands of unemployed Teessiders during the Depression.

When he started work he was, by his own account "utterly ignorant of the world, wrapped in my bookishness". But his exposure to the misery of the Hungry Thirties completely changed him.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he abandoned his job and set off for Spain, arriving in Barcelona on September 4, 1936, and joined a small British unit called the Tom Mann Centuria.

In late October, he was sent forward to Albacete where the International Brigades were being formed and where his unit was amalgamated into the Thaelmann Battalion, largely made up of German refugees from the Nazis. After just a few days of training, he was given a rifle and sent into action to halt Franco's march on Madrid.

The Nationalists launched their assault on the capital in October and, by the first days of November, had reached the outskirts of the city, forcing the government to flee to Valencia. It was partly due to the arrival of the International Brigades that the advance was halted on the edge of Madrid.

After five days of bitter fighting, the Thaelmann Battalion was ordered to counter attack and retake a strategically important hill held by the Nationalists.

Cerro de los Angeles - the Hill of Angels - stands above the Madrid to Toledo road, a steep hill with an ancient monastery at the summit.

On the morning of November 12, International Brigade volunteers launched a frontal attack on the hill, supported by four brigades of Spanish Republican troops.

Before they went into action, Dave and his comrades - Italians, Germans, Belgians and 18 Englishmen, including Esmond Romilly, the nephew of Winston Churchill - had to march ten miles into their position and were exhausted before the assault began.

The attack was a fiasco. There was no artillery support and orders from the Hungarian commander became confused as they were translated into a dozen tongues. The members of the Brigade had no idea where the entrance to the monastery was and, while some of the Spanish made it inside its walls before being forced to withdraw, the Thaelmann Battalion tried to scale a near vertical cliff face using ladders, under fire from Fascist snipers.

In mid afternoon, Dave Marshall was shot in the ankle.

He recalled: "It was a b******s of a battle, but you don't see that at the time. A sharpshooter put four or five bullets around me, you could hear them hitting the soil nearby, then I got hit in the foot. It went clean through.

"I was panicking by then. I was doubly frightened because they said that our flank was open and there were Moroccan troops on that side.

"I crawled back to some olive trees and sat down and a bloke came at me with a fixed bayonet. Luckily, it was one of our Brigade, a Belgian, who was as disorientated as I was. A lad helped me limp back until we met stretcher bearers and they put me on the floor of a lorry.

"We drove back for quite a long time until we got to a field hospital. I spent the night shivering."

After treatment in Alicante, Dave was shipped back to England where he spent the rest of the civil war campaigning for aid to the republic.

Tthe slaughter went on for three years. The International Brigades fought with distinction at the battles of Jarama, Brunete, Teruel and The Ebro before being ordered home by the republican government in October 1938.

Almost one in four Brigade volunteers died on the battlefields of Spain - men like Frank Airlie from Newcastle, Bob Mackie from Sunderland and Harry Smith from Gateshead.

Albert and Cliff Lawther, from Chopwell, brothers of the miners' leader Will Lawther, went to Spain, but only Albert returned.

Back in England, Dave Marshall married Joyce Ritson, with whom he had a daughter and a son, and served in the Second World War - taking part in the Normandy Landings and the liberation of Belsen.

After the war, he returned to Middlesbrough, and set up a base for the local Communist Party and Young Communist League and, for ten years, was secretary of Middlesbrough Trades Union Club.

In 1961 he moved to London were he built stage sets for the theatre and, after the death of his wife in 1975, bought a Thames sailing barge which became his home.

He lived on the river for 17 years until 1992, when he moved in with his partner, actress Marlene Sidaway. A book of his poetry - The Tilting Planet - was published in 2005, just months before his death at the age of 89.

Although released almost seven decades after the end of the Spanish Civil War, many of his poems vividly recall its horrors and its heroism.

I wish I were back

I wish I were back in the trenches round Madrid

Along with the chicos, among the strangeness of tongues:

Strong in my body, testing it thus and thus,

Half wondering that my flesh can bear these things.

Glad in my loneliness, wrapt in my alien thoughts;

My quaintness cloaking me, like cold air

Stirring on the skin when putting off familiar clothes -

Just as I stepped out of my time-pocked life

Into this.