Safe Return Doubtful

When war comes to our most beautiful places it seems even more tragic than in cities and towns; countryfolk whose lives prior to the invasion hadn’t changed for hundreds of years, should they survive, will never be the same again – Civil war pitting one part of a remote mountain village against another. The landscapes scarred for years to come, haunted reminders of the terror, often strewn with landmines.

Many aspects of war are terrifying, but the stark contrast of such beauty and horror appalls me, incomprehension as to how this could have happened. And so I read such books in an attempt to fathom out why, and if I still can’t, I need tovisit these places to see if that sheds any light.

Such books are, for example,

Bausch’s Peace, Forna’s The Hired Man and Mingarelli’s Four Soldiers. 

But it’s Pushkin’s powerful words always come to mind, from Ruslan and Ludmila…

The stunned knight came upon a field
Where nothing lived, just scattered skulls and bones.
What battle had been fought, what did it yield?
No one remembers why the screams and groans.

Why are you mute field?
Why overgrown with grasses of oblivion?

To add to those wonderful books is

Wolf Moon by Julio Llamazares

(translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts), which is the story of four ex-soldiers from the central mountain region near León in the Civil War, evading capture after Franco’s defeat of the Republican Army, and is spread over 9 years from 1937.

Llamazares’s writing has a distinctive lyrical quality, which is most apparent in his descriptions of the natural elements; landscape, weather, flora and fauna all play key roles. Nature is the condemning protagonist throughout; an aid yet a threat, and always a force to be reckoned with. The years the soldiers spend isolated in this wild environment enhances the sense of their desperate plight.

A lengthy afterword explains that Llamazares book was inspired by actual resistance fighters who survived for 9 years in the Curueño and Torio mountains of Calabria.

(5/5 stars)