Mine Were of Trouble: A Nationalist Account of the Spanish Civil War

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Kemp’s illustration of how suddenly a man’s life ends is carried by his dryly English commentary in a number of places. Kemp could on one day be emptying a magazine into an advancing line of charging infantrymen, and a week later be emptying a pot of coffee with an American reporter in a Zaragozan cafe. Kemp, despite having little training or command of the Spanish language, was moved by the Nationalist struggle against international Communism. Most ended up in the Spanish Foreign Legion, among them the Cambridge-educated conservative Peter Kemp. Finally, I was wondering what you thought about the prospects of young men today going off to fight in foreign wars?

Mine Were of Trouble - Peter Kemp and the Spanish Civil War Mine Were of Trouble - Peter Kemp and the Spanish Civil War

Defining men he served alongside during the war as "good hearted" or "good natured" despite them gunning down men who had surrendered to them. Here are a few more quotes to give you an idea, but you should really read the whole book if you’re interested in the topic. His politics appear to have been quite conservative, but he makes only passing reference to his own beliefs.The Carlists were dominant in the north of Spain, in Navarre and the Basque provinces, and were old-fashioned, happy to die for King and country. When I was growing up in the 1980s, a staple belief of socially-correct thinking was that many non-human animals, not only apes but also dolphins, whales, and elephants, had,. In part, of course, this was because the fascist government kept their witch-hunt going for a couple of decades after the war had ended. First, however, Franco asked to see him, and he had a thirty-minute interview, consisting mostly of Franco talking about the dangers of Communism. Ernst von Salomon’s Der Fragebogen is unique, a product of the refiner’s fire, a work forged in the cataclysm of mid-twentieth-century Europe.

Mine were of trouble by Peter Kemp | Open Library Mine were of trouble by Peter Kemp | Open Library

The book does not read like a diary, and instead is more of a lengthy account of his entire time before and during his service in the Spanish Nationalist military. Ex-library, but with few associated defects: library bookplate on the front free endpaper, a number rubber-stamped on the copyright page, and the library's name rubber-stamped on the top edge. This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, however, as Kemp notes rather early in the book how the international efforts of groups like ComIntern had successfully ginned up international support for the Republicans at the expense of the Nationalists. Furthermore Kemp perhaps unknowingly demonizes the Republican side of the war while framing every encounter with people on the Nationalist side as being good and them being grateful for him fighting for their side.

This is worth reading if simply for the perspective it gives but the author for no fault of his own produces a painfully biased perspective.