(Download) "Hemingway and the Peninsular war (Ernest Hemingway) (Essay)" by Jeffrey Meyers * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Hemingway and the Peninsular war (Ernest Hemingway) (Essay)
- Author : Jeffrey Meyers
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 56 KB
Description
When I interviewed Martha Gellhorn for my biography of Hemingway, she told me that he'd been reading General Sir William Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula (1828-40) while writing For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). During the Spanish Civil War Hemingway made three trips to Spain as a journalist and reported the major battles with a novelist's eye. Fascinated by the patriotic fervor he observed in the peasants and workers, he noticed the striking parallels between the Peninsular War and the Civil War. He looked up Napier's eye-witness account, which led him to later histories. The Peninsular War, in the early nineteenth century, was part of the costly and protracted struggle that opposed Napoleon's attempt to conquer Europe. The British, under Wellington, joined forces with the Spanish and Portuguese armies, raised the blockade of their ports and drove the French from Spain. This war saw the emergence of guerrillas (Spanish for "little wars"), in which mobile bands of freelance fighters harassed the enemy and helped the allies defeat the French. Ronald Fraser's recently published Napoleon's Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War, 18081814 (NY, 2008) describes the valuable contribution of these independent fighters.