Dark and Bloody Ground : A Guerilla Diary of the Spanish Civil War - Hardcover

F. Perez Lopez

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316699268 ISBN 13: 9780316699266

Publisher: Little Brown & Company, 1972

Synopsis

From dust jacket notes: "'To get through the enemies you had to attack without cease. A man who was running away was a dead man. You must always be the hunter, never the rabbit. Only as guerillas could we make it to the frontier, and for that we had to gather a band...' In 1938, twenty-one-year-old Francisco Perez Lopez, born in Spain and raised in France and Algeria, joined the International Brigades to fight the Nationalist armies of Franco and became part of the bloodiest guerrilla was in Spanish history. His feats were remarkable. as the commander of the Brigades' First Death Platoon, as a jack-of-all-trades prisoner, and as the feared and admired guerrilla leader El Mexicano, Perez Lopez performed exploits that grew and spread in reputation throughout Spain - until he became a legend. This is his own book: Dark and Bloody Ground, a terse and factual account of his part in the Spanish Civil War. In simple, spare language it tells a staggeringly dramatic story. With a remarkable feeling for the physical immediacy of people, terrain, and weather, Perez Lopez tells of months of hit-and-run attacks and day-to-day survival; and of his youth, which helped prepare him for this war by teaching him how to do everything rom baking bread to setting bones, from making love to handling knives. He relates the sometimes humorous, often horrifying details of capture and imprisonment by the Nationalists, where his wits were all that kept him alive; and his incredible odyssey of escape, in which as head of a band of guerrillas he hid, attacked, and zigzagged his way to the Pyrenees. There, in the middle of a blizzard in the dead of winter, having lost all his men, he crossed the French border to freedom. His story is at once coldly objective and intensely personal...."

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Company
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 0316699268
• ISBN 13: 9780316699266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 281
• Editor: Victor Guerrier