Books like A Moment of War

An absolutely remarkable memoir, I guess continuing from Cider with Rosie but a world away in subject, tone and style despite being the same author.I was struck throughout by the tone:"I found I'd stood out in the open and watched this air-raid on Valencia with curiosity but otherwise no emotion. I was surprised at my detachment and lack of fear. I may even have felt some queer satisfaction. It was something I learned about myself that night which I have never quite understood" (p.53)Detachment is the dominant note and is carried throughout the book despite or because of mid-winter crossing of the Pyrennes, abrupt arrests and imprisonments, absurd experiences in camps, air raids and artillery shelling, and one intense experience on the front line - around twenty pages from the end of the book - that two an oddity a memoir of war in which the main business of war always seems to be taking place away from the fighting, in that way it is distinct from Homage to Catalonia, indeed because of that statement of detachment Lee's book put me in mind of Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood says that he is a camera, but it is Lee who achieves something cameralike in his narrative voice. Isherwwood's theme is the outsider observing the rise of Fascism, Lee a participant in the fight against Fascism, a fight which rapidly seems essential but naive, never before has the horror and brutality of the Democratic states non-involvement in the Spanish war ever struck me so profoundly "we displayed perhaps a harmonious gathering of oddities and a shared heroic daftness. Did we know, as we stood there, our clenched fists raised high, our torn coats flapping in the wind, and scarcely a gun between the three of us, that we had ranged against us the rising military power of Europe, the soft evasions of our friends, and the deadly cynicism of Russia?...Though we may have looked at that time, in our wantonly tattered uniforms, more like prisoners of war than a crusading army, we were convinced that we possessed an invincible armament of spirit, and that in the eyes of the world, and the angels, we were on the right side of this struggle. We had yet to learn that sheer idealism never stopped a tank." (pp90-91). The whole story is adrift in time, everything seems to take place in a perpetual winter, there are shortages of everything except defeat, the paragraphs stink with the smell of further war, in Barcelona before leaving Spain Lee works on a card index of international volunteers: "Here were the names of dead heroes, piled into little cardboard boxes, never to be inscribed later in official Halls of Remembrance. Without recognition, often ridiculed, they saw what was coming, jumped the gun, and went into battle too soon" (p.174).