A Moment of War

by Laurie Lee (Author), Laurie Lee (Author), Laurie Lee (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1991

  $4.42

  In December 1937 a naive young Englishman slipped across the Spanish frontier to fight for the Republican cause. In the third volume of his autobiographical trilogy, which began with Cider With Rosie , Laurie Lee describes a winter fighting with the International Brigade. This is a view of the Spanish Civil War from below, a tragi-comic account of rivalry and ribaldry in the ranks. Lee's fellow volunteers were an ill-starred posse of Scots, Cockneys, Welsh miners and Frenchmen who drank, gambled and pursued women when not engaging the enemy. Lee himself fell for the ravishing Eulalia, a passionate young partisan who reappeared in his life with an almost miraculous sense of timing to ease his misfortunes. He was arrested and three times narrowly escaped execution in a war which claimed half a million lives. Reflecting on what had compelled him to fight, Lee reasoned that he had wanted the chance to make one grand gesture of personal sacrifice and faith .

• Used

  Paperback
  1992

  $3.67

  A Moment of War is the magnificent conclusion to Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy begun in Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning . It was December 1937 when the young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees and walked into the bitter winter of the Spanish Civil War. With great vividness and poignancy, Lee portrays the brave defeat of youthful idealism in Auden's 'low dishonest decade'. Writing in the Literary Review , John Sweeney praised the memoir as, 'A great, heart-stopping narrative of one young Englishman's part in the war in Spain ...crafted by a poet, stamping an indelible image of the boredom, random cruelty and stupidity of war'.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $11.73