Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Civil War

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I wonder what the generation of Kemp and Orwell would think about men living now, whose adventures mostly amount to the meaningless flickerings on the screen of some video game. But within the next 3 years, he would acquire fluency in Spanish and become intimately connected with Spain through contacts with fellow soldiers and people who befriended him there, both Spanish and foreign.

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Indeed, Kemp would become an officer and would sustain grievous wounds in the summer of 1938 while leading a platoon in a major offensive launched by the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, which - with an overwhelming number of aircraft, artillery, tanks, and troops - would shatter Republican defenses and bring about the cutting of Republican Spain in two.Through this had to come all our food, water, ammunition and supplies; through this we must evacuate our wounded. Kemp fought in the Battle of Teruel, which was bitter and more of the same, featuring hand-to-hand fighting in olive groves and the intermittent appearance of light tanks, often turning the tide at the last minute, including once when Kemp’s unit was about to be overrun.

Mine Were of Trouble - Peter Kemp and the Spanish Civil War Mine Were of Trouble - Peter Kemp and the Spanish Civil War

But you know as well as I do that this war would have been over by the end of 1936, when we were at the gates of Madrid, but for the International Brigades. This is the attention-grabbing opening line of Red Rising, the first book in a popular young-adult science. My legs would hardly carry me back to La Marañosa, where I drank nearly half a bottle of Roth’s brandy before I began to recover. Is a Caesar, an authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions, soon to step onto the American stage?It was a war in which the Republican government (a popularly elected leftist government which drew support from workers and the Communist Party) in Madrid was pitted against a coterie of high ranking Spanish Army officers who formed the Nationalist faction, which was dedicated to overthrowing the Republicans and putting Spain back on a more conservative and traditional footing. I do wish Kemp had included some of his reflections regarding his philosophy of war, his ideologies, but maybe I’m just being picky. He [Franco] had always admired the English, he said, especially their system of education with its emphasis on self-discipline, breeding the spirit of adventure that had made so small a country the ruler of so great an empire. The bright sun shone golden on the fields and the olives; it shone also on the huddled corpses of the Frenchmen, heaped around the bridge where we had expected to find them. The World War II years and thereafter were no picnic, especially if you were known to be from a family that was on the left during the Civil War.

Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.

updates Sam Quinones’s seminal 2015 Dreamland, about the American opioid epidemic, focusing on the synthetic opioid fentanyl, the use of which has exploded in the past five.