A Moment of War: A Memoir (The Autobiographical Trilogy Book 3)

by Laurie Lee

Few acknowledged at the time that it was General Franco, the Supreme Patriot and Defender of the Christian Faith, who allowed these first trial-runs to be inflicted on the bodies of his countrymen, and who delivered up vast areas of Spain to be the living testing-grounds for Hitler’s new bomber-squadrons, culminating in the annihilation of the ancient city of Guernica.

I remember the names and style of some of them still – Jock Cunningham, Pat Ryan, Tom Wintringham, Paddy O’Daire – black-bereted, black-mackintoshed, tight-belted figures; they were the obscure foreshadowers of coming events, the unofficial outriders of imminent World War,

‘Don’t open without reason or close without honour,’

Was this then what I’d come for, and all my journey had meant – to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?

Public schoolboys, undergraduates, men from coal mines and mills, they were the ill-armed advance scouts in the, as yet, unsanctified Second World War. Here were the names of dead heroes, piled into little cardboard boxes, never to be inscribed later in official Halls of Remembrance. Without recognition, often ridiculed, they saw what was coming, jumped the gun, and went into battle too soon.