My favorite passage from Peter Kemp's Spanish Civil War memoir "Mine Were of Trouble"

Cozy

I’ve been through a lot of lows. I suspect many people have. When things are bad, it can be easy to feel sorry for yourself and accept your miserable condition. In a way, it’s comforting to believe that you’ll never get out of what you’re going through: You don’t have to think about it anymore or feel the need to do anything about it. The pressure is gone, it’s just over. I’m sure everyone has encountered people who are simply broken by the world and their choices in it. Their neuroplasticity is exhausted, all they can do is lash out in bitterness at others.

I often find myself thinking about one passage from Peter Kemp’s Spanish Civil War memoir “Mine Were of Trouble.” Kemp was very young when he decided to volunteer for Franco’s Nationalists in their battle against the Soviet-backed Republican force, and participated in nearly every stage of the war. He was seriously wounded during the closing days of the conflict.

Kemp recounts his near-fatal injury here:

On the 23rd July my company was occupying the trenches on the left flank of the bridgehead, a hundred yards from the enemy. It was a day of intense heat. During the morning I had mortared the opposing trenches at Cancela’s request, trying to silence a troublesome machine-gun. I lunched as usual with the other officers of the Company in Cancela’s dugout. Afterwards I remained behind to discuss an operation he wanted me to undertake after dark—to lead a patrol against an enemy working party which we had heard the previous night in no-man’s-land in front of us. While we were talking the enemy started to mortar our position—I suppose in retaliation for my effort in the morning. Their trenches were so close we could hear the thuds of the discharges long before the grenades burst; they were using 50 mm. mortars, not the more lethal 81 mm. I excused myself in order to go and see that all my men were taking shelter; then I returned to Cancela’s dug-out. He was lying on his bed, and I sat down on a packing-case by the table in the middle of the floor just inside the entrance. I had started to explain my plan, using my hands for gestures, as one does when speaking Spanish, when a grenade burst in the opening beside me.

I barely heard the explosion: I was conscious of it only as a roaring in my ears, a hammer blow on the left side of my face and a sickening dizziness as I fell to the floor. My mouth seemed to fill with a sea of pebbles; as it fell open the sea resolved into a deluge of blood and the pebbles into fragments of my back teeth; twice more the floor welled up into my mouth to pour in a widening pool across the floor. I watched with a detached bewilderment, changing to near-panic. ‘Oh God!’ I prayed, ‘don’t let me die like this, in terror!’ I took a grip on myself, remembering how someone once said to me, ‘You’re never dead till you think you are.’ Cancela, on the bed, was unhurt; he provided a comic interlude by standing over me, exclaiming in tones of sincere and horrified concern:

‘Are you hit, Peter? Tell me, are you hit?’ He pulled himself together; faintly through the singing in my ears I heard his strong voice calling for stretcher-bearers. Slowly I rolled over my back, then painfully raised my head to examine my wounds; my mouth and throat felt numb and soggy, I could not speak, my jaw hung loose—I realized it was shattered; there was a bloody gash across each hand, another at the top of my right arm and something at the back of my head. Cancela examined my body and assured me that the haemorrhage was not internal. Heartened by this news and filled with exhilaration that follows shock and precedes collapse, I motioned away the stretcher-bearers and walked three or four hundred yards down to the Bandera Headquarters. On the way I stopped to rest: leaning against the parapet I looked out north-eastwards along the shimmering band of the river to the old stone citadel of Lérida dancing in the heat haze. Somehow the sight of that harsh and alien landscape drove into my fuddled mind the firm resolve that I would not die there, far away from my home.

At Bandera Headquarters Larrea and Ruiz were busy with other casualties from the bombardment; but as soon as they saw me they shouted to an orderly to lay me on a mattress and make me comfortable. They had their hands full, and it was nearly half-an-hour before they could attend to me. I lay on the mattress, my head propped up on a haversack and greatcoat, watching the black clusters of flies settle on the wounds in my hands and feeling the movement of their buzzing through my jaw; I watched them with interest, even fascination, as though from a long way off. By the time Ruiz came to look at me the flies were congealed into the wounds; he worked on me quickly but with surprising gentleness, cleaning and bandaging while he talked to me about the wonderful time I was going to have in San Sebastian when I was well again. Larrea came to help him, and then they tried to cheer me by a discussion of the joys of leave and love of a cool climate. I was soon to hear what they really thought. After giving me injections of anti-tetanus and anti-gangrene serum and a shot of morphia, they went away to arrange the evacuation of the wounded. After a while I heard them whispering; they probably thought I was asleep, but in fact I seemed to hear everything with increasing clarity:

‘It’s no good sending Peter back,’ one of them said, ‘he won’t live more than a few hours.’

In my mind flooded that view of the Segre and the ruined citadel of Lérida, filling me with the determination to overcome this death that threatened me. Slowly I raised myself on one elbow; painfully I turned my head, caught their gaze and held it. Larrea smiled:

‘Send him in the first ambulance.’

Peter Kemp would eventually recover and go on to become a decorated British commando during WW2. He lived a long life full of adventure, but could have easily just been another nameless casualty in a conflict full of nameless casualties. It’s not every day that living or dying comes down to making a conscious decision, but he definitely chose well.