A Moment of War

‘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’