CUERPO A TIERRA A GREAT NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR BY RICARDO F. DE LA REGUERA

 

I see the return to the homeland of Russian prisoners of war in an exchange with the Ukrainians (terrifying civil war organized by the NWO shining as executors the rickety pimp from Washington and a Ukrainian Jew who vomits hatred from the same eyes) all with scars and scars from the battles at the front: nicks from blows to the forehead, arms in a sling, lame, one-eyed, one-armed, all bearing the stigmata of captivity. My poor father, may he rest in peace, used to tell me about the cold he spent in Teruel all his life, he dragged a frozen knee, or about the fear he suffered in Guadalajara when the reds caught up with them in Guadalajara. War smells of shit, of corpses, of a dead mule, mud, sweat, death, nits, an explosion of cucumbers in the shack, some singing by fandanguillos, a calm and serene night when Stalin's barrel organs were silent for an hour. Yes, the trenches smell bad, it's cold, hungry, fears that make some inexperienced soldier go off the deep end. Teasing in the pants was nothing. The worst when, seized with fear, some of the squad harmed themselves or shot themselves because they did not want to advance. My father was at the Ebro and at the University. One two three Toledo is ours. A two three Madrid will come later. That's what the artillerymen who pulled the rope in the fifteen and a half pieces sang. But the war creates brotherhoods and an indelible fraternity with the trench companions. Spain had as a consequence of that war that we won against the enemies of the country an unrepeatable generation, that of my father, that of Lieutenant Recellado, or that of the La Paz brigade, fraternity of arms. And that is the atmosphere that I have detected when rereading "Cuerpo a Tierra" the book by Ricardo Fernandez de la Reguera, in my opinion one of the best stories about our fratricidal conflagration.

To write my book about the battle of Brunete "Remember Brunete, the battle of thirst" I had to document myself in the extensive biography by hand on such a monographic subject and that has produced literature at large volumes throughout the world. I think that Reguera's text, together with Emilio Romero's, La Paz empieza nunca” and “Todavía” by Rodrigo Royo, are among the best.

Immediately after come others weaker: "The faithful infantry" by Rafael García Serrano, "The shadow of the cypress is long" by Delibes, "A million dead" by Gironella or "The cypresses believe in God" by the same. All of them enjoyed great publicity, but I consider them weaker.

On the Republican side, the trilogy by Arturo Barea as well as those by Ramón Jota Sender are exceptional. But, they suffer from one thing: they are not novels written at the front, they do not smell of the trenches but of the rear.

"Cuerpo a tierra" on the contrary, outlines a thorough portrait of the hardships of a century of phalanx during the three years that the hostilities lasted. Of the hundred uncles - a squad seven men and three corporals, a phalanx 33 and a hundred hundred - only ten survived (the number of fallen in the Falangist squads reached more than twenty thousand) killed by the Reds or killed in the rear.

One of the characters to whom the book is dedicated is Martím Riquer, a distinguished Catalan philologist who died almost five hundred years ago and who left us an indelible work on the relationship between Catalan and Spanish literature. He was a specialist in the first book of chivalry written in the peninsula "Tirant le blanch". He was part of the Ceriñola battalion, he was wounded in the capture of Balaguer.

"Cuerpo a Tierra" is a book out of print by the pontiffs of historical memory in their vain efforts to denigrate, silencing it, the heroism of that generation of '36 that was the best Spain had. And what are our young people reading now? "Well, Almudena Grandes, the red niece of the great General Muñoz Grandes. I haven't been able to put up with her bullshit. I don't like pornographic literature, not even to pass the time. No thanks.