Product Description

‘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’

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17769 in Books
• Published on: 1992-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Beautifull and haunting
This is Lee's third and final installment of his autobiographical trilogy.
Unlike Orwell, Borkenau or Hemmingway, Lee was not a middleclass young man with a private income. He was a worker-poet, and this life experience, combined with his remarkable talent with the english language, brings across an incredible clarity and immediacy to his writing that earlier english authors all too often lacked.
They say a picture paints a thousand words, but a book such as this tells much more than pictures ever could.
This book paints a worms eye view of a country 'at war with itself', the suffering and brutalisation of the the experience of the people he meets is all the more vivid because it is banal - theres no melodrama. Its just there, just a fact, like mud.
If you have an interest in the Spanish War then this is a vital addition to your library, but if you just enjoy good literature then this is also a book you shouldn't die without having read.

Words that say more than pictures
This is a beautiful book. It paints a picture of a country 'at war with itself', it doesn't preach, contain prose of sluttish empathy, but it does bring across the misery and degradation of moments captured on the page - moments that echo in the reader, reminding us that the grinding misery, boredom and callous cruelty of war is not contained within the dramatic, brief flash of cannon and rattle of sabres, but is steteched out in such a way that it becomes mundane, banal, and utterly smothering of the humanity that we take for granted.
I can't reccomend this book more highly.

A Fine Conclusion to a Towering Trilogy.
I have sat in the Woolpack Inn at Slad in the Cotswolds, the village where Laurie Lee was brought up, and the area he so beautifully evokes in his hymn for a lost countryside "Cider with Rosie". The pub licensee informed me that Lee was once a regular and I imagined him telling tales by a crackling winters fire to a spellbound audience. I have a feeling he would have been good entertainment. I also paid my respects at his grave in the nearby churchyard. Perhaps not having the two pear ciders before would have been more respectful, but I am sure Laurie would have understood. I feel some kinship to him as he was a west country man through and through, and came from humble origins. When I recently walked the Cotswold Way I passed again close to Slad and so I decided to read "A Moment in War" the last short book in his trilogy that has taken me 20 years to complete.

After Lee's bittersweet childhood, at the age of nineteen he travelled to Spain with his violin in a sort of rights of passage journey. He travelled mostly on foot and came to know and love the country and its people intimately. At that time the country was on the brink of civil war. He decribes this journey in his book "As I walked out One Midsummers Morning". In "A Moment in War" he returns to Spain to fight in the International Brigades against Franco. This follows his adventures as he crosses the Pyrenees in winter to join the fight. If you are looking for action then you will find nothing apart from one brief skirmish. But if you want a truthful depiction of the realities of war, then look no further. War means hunger and poverty. Lee arrives in Tarazona to find the only food he can purchase are beech nuts. The following passage sums things up neatly. "In our state of mind, I don't think there was one among us who wouldn't have burnt a rare church carving, a relic of a thousand years piety, to have gained himself five minutes warmth". Some of Lee's prose is hauntingly beautiful as one might expect from a poet of his stature.

Recently some critics have cast doubt on the veracity of Lee's account and they may well have a point. Lee has a few too many brushes with death and "Les liaisons Dangereuses" with the opposite sex, which can push credulity to the limit. But the arbitrary nature of his spells in captivity make up for this and the sincere way in which he captures the sheer boredom and stupidity of war. At the end of the day does it really matter if Lee has embellished or made up large parts of his book? He isn't the first and won't be the last. There is a famous line from the western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance". "When the legend becomes the fact print the legend". An excellent conclusion to a wonderful trilogy.