A Moment of War Book

"In December 1937 I crossed the Pyrenees from France - two days on foot through the snow." Aged 23 Laurie Lee crosses into Spain, to fight alongside other volunteers in the International Brigade, against Franco and his Nationalist army. This book is small in size, but in the course of Lee's 'Moment Of War', he is arrested three times, and thrice accused of being a spy. Each time he is saved from incarceration and a firing squad by luck.

I started Lee's story a month ago, and after the first couple of chapters I put it down, not particularly drawn to war-torn Spain, and the shenanigans of the volunteer soldiers. At the same time I was reading Ngugi's Petals of Blood, and struggling with it. And so I picked up 'A Moment of War'. I read a sentence or two: realized exactly what was missing from Ngugi's writing; gorgeous, precise, elegant prose. Lee is one of those writers who doesn't cheat in his descriptions.
He works in clear, precise statements slowly building the panorama and action, so that you can see, feel and hear what he sees and feels; stark, vivid, pictures of scenes, events and people, a country destroyed by war. Lee's writing is so honest and skilled that I read this book for his writing, and only later realized there was an understated narrative.

First a look at the descriptive writing: Lee, along with the hundreds of other men, collected at Figueras Castle are transported south to Valencia. Just as their train arrives, German and Italian warplanes fly in from Majorca, and bomb the city.

"The airplanes swung casually over the city, left now to their own intentions. Just a couple of dozen young men, in their rocking dim-lit cabins, and the million below them waiting their chance in the dark. A plane accelerated and went into a dive, followed by the others in a roaring procession. They swooped low and fast, guided perhaps by the late moon on the water, on the rooftops and railway tracks. Then the bombs were released - not from any great height, for the tearing shriek of their fall was short. There followed a series of thumping explosions and blasts of light as parcels of flame straddled the edge of the station. I felt the ground jump at my feet and smelt the reek of burnt dust. A bomb hit the track near the loading sheds, and two trucks sailed sideways against a halo fire, while torn lines circled around them like ribbons. Further off an old house lit from inside like a turnip lamp, then crumpled and disappeared."

The book is structured around the movements that Lee makes from the north border to various encampments, where he is billeted, and finally he is sent to the mountainous city of Teruel, which has become a critical position in Franco's front line as he tries to move north and east. If Franco captures Teruel, he will divide the Republicans to the north and south; as Lee explains, the loss of this fortified city in the mountains is the beginning of the retreat for the Republican army. There is a map of Spain, at the front of the book, marked with all the relevant towns and cities, and the text is interspersed with line drawings by Keith Bowen which complement Lee's descriptions perfectly.

The front cover of my book, I think shows a picture of Teruel, but Lee's writing far outweighs the cover photo:

"As the daylight came, I left Serrano huddled by the fire, and went outside and got my first view of Teruel. It stood some five miles distant and slightly above us, a gleaming city of ice, its cathedral, castle, turrets, towers, all dusted with silver, shimmering light. A city of silence, without dimension; it could have been a life-sized mural, or an intimately carved ivory for some medieval Cardinal or Pope. A perfect relic, in its brilliant stillness, chaste and bloodless as a martyr's tomb. Yet already, I was to learn, within the last few days, its citizens were walling up and massacring each other."

Lee reports many disturbing sights, and relates stories of atrocities which are told by the other soldiers and recruits, but through-out he maintains a sort of impassive calm; he never indulges his writing with his own sentiments or fears. He writes as if he is there to report and report he will do even if he is in the direct path of bullets and grenades. He describes the endless privations: nowhere to sleep, insufficient clothes to keep warm, potatoes which are black from frost, beans and bits of donkey to eat if they are lucky. But we never at any point hear him complain, even when he is locked up in a gaol for three weeks, in Barcelona, all he says is this:

"I was sick now, shivering on the concrete floor, scraping the mould from the wall with my finger-nails. An escalating series of panics broke away from each other and led nowhere except back to my head. Only night, the black skylight, and the noon-whispering of the nun bearing the half sandwich in her small lace-lined basket, looped the empty silence of the sprawling jail."

In the chapter entitled - 'Death Cell: Albacete' this is the second time where Lee, is singled out and held in confinement. His passport is the cause of the problem; a year previously he had travelled to Morocco, visiting the exact places where Franco and his generals were plotting.

"Sping '36. Melilla. Ceuta. Tetuan. That's where it was all cooked up, wasn't it?" says the Intelligence officer, Captain Sam. The officer allows him to write letters to his next of kin. He is given the comfortable treatment of a man on death row. He is taken to a small courtyard, "snow falling from a sunset sky."

"One of the guards gave me a cigarette, the other touched my arm. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'It's easy, brother.'... Then I heard a murmuring of voices in the next room, ... Faces peered at me briskly, one by one ... then, framed like some fake Van Gogh freakishly elongated, appeared the unmistakable face of the giraffe-necked Frenchman who had guided me the last steps across the mountain frontier. One look at me and he covered his eyes in mock horror.
'Oh, no!' he groaned, 'not him again, please. Turn him loose - for the love of heaven.'

Lee manages to covey intimately, the muddle, the mistakes, the hierarchy, the comeradary of men at war.

Only because I returned to this book, did I discover the narrative, but I think I was put off at the very beginning because of a lack of internal or personal style. Just after he crosses the border Lee is arrested, interrogated, and accused of spying. He thinks he is about to be shot, along with a young deserter, but he is instead brought to the recruiting centre at Figueros. He describes in detail all the other men collected there and then is seduced by Eulalia of the "long Spanish-Indian" eyes. I felt such a jarr between his internment in the hole and then this youthful seduction that I put the book down.

It's only as I complete the book that I stop to consider a couple of facts. Lee wrote this in 1991, almost 54 years after his experiences in this war. It is considered the third book in his autobiographical series which began with "Cider with Rosie", and then "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning". In "A Moment Of War", he barely touches on his personal feelings and yet the experience was deeply etched in his memory - he wrote it so much later.

I suspect that his purpose in writing the book was to bring home the horrors of war, and he does this remarkably well with his beautiful descriptive writing. His personal story is related as a very minor secondary element, which is how he wanted it. It also helps to explain why I was dismayed at the beginning; there was such an emotional gulf after the execution of the young deserter, and then his detailed account of the volunteers at Figueras. Nothing about his own feelings at almost being executed.

If you come new and fresh to this book, then don't be put off, every sentence is worth it. And I will leave you with this short description of the bugle player at the barracks in Tarazona.

"Before light next morning, I was awakened by the sound of a bugle - a sound pure and cold, slender as an icicle, coming from the winter dark outside. In spite of our heavy sleep and grunting longing for more, some of us began to love that awakening, the crystal range of the notes stroking the dawn's silence and raising one up like a spirit. There were certainly those who cursed the little bleeder, but the Brigade was proud of its bugler; he was no brash, brassy, spit-or-miss blaster of slumber, but one who pitched his notes carefully to the freezing stars and drew them out like threads of Venetian glass."

Don't you want to run for your copy of 'Cider with Rosie'?