[Corke is an English educator, poet, editor, and translator. In the following review, Corke calls A Moment of War a "remarkable story."]

In December 1937 Spain was tearing itself apart and Laurie Lee could no longer bear to remain outside the country that had given his mind its second birth. He was 'betraying the people of Spain'. Failing to convince the regular recruiters, he made himself into a one-man International Brigade and hiked over the Pyrenees. The closing page of As I Walked Out has him walking with his violin between the two rocks that marked the frontier and knocking at the first door. 'Pase usted.'

That was published in 1969. Now, at last, 22 years later [in A Moment of War], we find out what happened next: which was that his apparently genial host couldn't believe that anyone could possibly be so romantic and impractical as to do what Lee said he had done. A violin! This Englishman was self-evidently a spy. So no sooner had he arrived there than the people of Spain popped him into, literally, an oubliette; where he remained for a fortnight in earshot of the firing-squads, until eventually suddenly released in apparently as inconsequential a manner as that in which he had been incarcerated.

For many of us that would have been enough. To escape by the skin of one's teeth summary death at the hands of the very people whom one has with the greatest difficulty and devotion come to help might well dampen the old ardour. Not Lee's. He was ever 'he who suffers and observes', and he shrugged it off as one of those things that happen in war, happen in Spain. It was not long before he had to shrug off the same again. Another paranoiac politico, another hell-hole jail, another firing-squad, again a miraculous intervention, no doubt by the literary guardian angel who was determined to preserve him to tell the tale. And then a third time; at which point it was decided that too much of the communist war-effort had already been devoted to not quite shooting Lee, and he was deported.

That is the mere frame of this remarkable story, but it is the canvas stretched on it that holds the attention. Lee's great gift has always been, paradoxically, a negative one: he marvellously lacks the veils of hindsight and subsequent reflection that for most people falsify, even though they may embellish, their visions of their own past. Between Lee at seventysomething and Lee at twentysomething there seems to be nothing but shiny air, not even a sheet of glass. He suggests little or nothing of what he feels about it now, that prismatically muddled violence, Looking-glass-land with vipers, that he happily epitomises as 'surrealist chess', though he leaves lying scattered clues from which we may well infer. At the time he simply accepted it as the pure essence of being alive, at that moment, in that place, for that person. He experiences, with brilliantly sympathetic clarity, but he doesn't, so far as the surface of his page is concerned, reflect.

That is therefore left for this moment, this place, and (at the present juncture) this person. And I note first that half the political affiliations in the world are based on the very questionable assumption that my enemy's enemy is my friend. He is not necessarily anything of the kind. Mutual enmity is not a binary and linear thing; it is just as possible for each of the three corners of a triangle to consume in hatred for the other two. Those splendidly idealistic young Englishmen who joined the International Brigade noted only that they had in their sights the grand enemy, Fascism, four years before the total conflict broke out. They hadn't worked out that at the same time they would be joining a vicious conspiracy of lefty riff-raff whose mental gamut ranged from the psychotically violent to the socially inadequate, and who spent more of their energy purging and slaughtering imagined heretics in their own ranks than they did Franco's Moors, who presented much less easy targets. In contradistinction it will be recalled that Evelyn Waugh's persona Guy Crouchback rejoiced at the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, for now 'the enemy stood plain'; and mourned when the thieves fell out and the stirred moral picture became muddied again.

In that same year Louis Aragon and Nancy Cunard (some coupling!) circulated to authors a wondrously angled questionnaire:

Are you for or against the legal government and the people of republican Spain? Are you for or against Franco and Fascism?

Waugh, in almost the sole dissenting voice, replied that

If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils.

Those who failed to perceive the existence of the predicament, and that in trying to suppress a Fascist Germany they were simultaneously attempting to set up a Cuba of Europe, may still occasionally be seen propping up the sad mahogany of certain seedy bars. Sooner or later a toady will indicate to you such a one, whispering that 'He was in Spain.' If that is an epigraph to A Moment of War, it is so in a very different spirit. Lee was 'in Spain' but it was a real Spain, of soil, snow, blood, pals, girls, not that dystopia of diseased politicking in the shadow of, in his own phrase, 'the deadly cynicism of Russia'. His fellow Englishmen, to say nothing of the other nationalities, were ex-convicts, alcoholics, wizened miners, dockers, noisy politicos and dreamy undergraduates busy scribbling manifestos and notes to boyfriends, but he did whatever the powers allowed him to do to aid them, for

we shared something, unique to us at that time—the chance to make one grand, uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith which might never occur again.

But everything between the lines of this excellent book denies the possibility that Lee gave any considered measure of intellectual assent. As to the toady in the watering-hole, perhaps the only comeback at this late date is a soft, 'Ah really? Benidorm?'