In 1938, twenty-one-year-old Francisco Pérez López, born in Spain and raised in France and Algeria, joined the International Brigades to fight the Nationalist armies of Franco and became a part of the bloodiest guerrilla war in Spanish history. His feats were remarkable. As the commander of the Brigades' First Death Platoon, as a jack-of-all-trades prisoner, and as the feared and admired guerrilla leader El Mexicano, Pérez López performed exploits that grew and spread in reputation throughout Spain -- until he became a legend. This is his own book: Dark and Bloody Ground, a terse and factual account of his part in the Spanish Civil War. In simple, spare language it tells a staggeringly dramatic story. With a remarkable feeling for the physical immediacy of people, terrain, and weather, Pérez López tells of months of hit-and-run attacks and day-to-day survival; and of his youth, which helped prepare him for this war by teaching him how to do everything from baking bread to setting bones, from making love to handling knives. He relates the sometimes humorous, often horrifying details of capture and imprisonment by the Nationalists, where his wits were all that kept him alive; and his incredible odyssey of escape, in which as head of a band of guerrillas he hid, attacked, and zigzagged his way to the Pyrenees. There, in the middle of a blizzard in the dead of winter, having lost all his men, he crossed the French border to freedom. His story is at once coldly objective and intensely personal. Pérez López has an innate ability to convey feelings he hardly ever expresses in words -- the physical and emotional weariness brought about by a long, cruel war, the satisfaction of avenging a victim of the Nationalists. Dark and Bloody Ground is not only a unique eyewitness account of a little-understood war, it is a deeply human story of a man whose motivation for fighting stemmed from a sincere respect for human dignity rather than from any political considerations -- and it is a completely gripping tale of chase and adventure, of pure war reduced to the basics of kill or be killed. Death has been very, very close to Pérez López. This stark and powerful narrative is the extraordinary result: Dark and Bloody Ground.
