Desertores. Los españoles que no quisieron la Guerra Civil

Soldiers who fled in terror from a conflict that was foreign to them; deserters from both sides during the Civil War, who today explain their reasons for doing what they did: brothers who found themselves pitted against each other in opposing factions, combatants forcibly recruited by the side contrary to their beliefs... All of them offer their harrowing testimony, having been victims of persecution and punishment. This book reveals to the reader a Spanish Civil War devoid of epic grandeur and idealism, in which thousands of men defied conscription and saw desertion as the only escape from the horrors and atrocities of the front. Pedro Corral has traced the footsteps of the Spaniards called up who escaped by the hundreds to the mountains, or who sought recommendations behind the lines to avoid mobilization; combatants murdered in their own trenches while trying to escape; soldiers who shot themselves in the limbs to be evacuated; the elderly and children imprisoned because of their relatives' desertion; Fathers sent to combat to fill the positions abandoned by their sons... It is the Civil War that nobody wants to talk about and that calls into question many of the clichés that have dominated the collective memory of the conflict.