Publisher's Synopsis
On July 19, 1936, Mateo Arbeloa left for the war as a Carlist volunteer from Mañeru (Navarra), leaving at home his wife Josefina Muru and his little son Manolín, only six months old. The requeté and his beloved Josefina exchanged, in the following months, a hundred letters in which, in a sincere and moving way, they captured the daily reality of the conflict from two different perspectives: the harshness of the northern front and the experience of a family rearguard trying to get ahead. The common thread between them is the overflowing love of a young married couple, full of projects and illusions, who must face the trances and internal debates that emerge in the face of the horrors of the conflict, the absences, the ideals and the sense of duty. As a permanent backdrop, the trusting faith of two sensitive and deeply believing people. Mateo died on April 27, 1937 from his wounds in combat and left, with Josefina, perhaps the best and most complete epistolary legacy of our civil war. This careful edition, annotated and illustrated with documents and numerous unpublished photographs, offers us an intimate and direct vision of the tragedy that transcends the war and takes us, through his story, to the forgotten ways of living, thinking, feeling, and also dying, in rural Spain in the first half of the twentieth century.
