Miguel Cuesta,
is the author of "Routes of the Spanish Civil War" (Ed. Anaya Touring).
With him we tour the trenches and shelters where soldiers such as Santos Cortés, whom we visited at his home in Madrid, fought.
While one shows us the scenarios, he has traveled 200 fronts, the 102-year-old veteran tells us how people lived there.
Miguel criticizes that "with few exceptions, the trenches and shelters on the battlefields are in a lamentable state, as it was one of the most important episodes in our history."
In the Jarama valley,
the same olive trees that served as a parapet for Spaniards killing each other are still standing
.
Everything seemed like a rehearsal for what would come two years later with World War II.
So that this is not forgotten,
Gregorio Salcedo created the museum of the Battle of Jarama
, in Morata de Tajuña (Madrid).
Although he had problems at first, "they denounced me once because they thought I had an arsenal, when what is kept here are, as you can see, from casings to sardine cans that were used as oil lamps, everything to illustrate how people lived in the trenches".
The one who did understand him was a German brigade member, Fritz Eikermeir, and his daughter, Renate, who offered him financial support, and there were also Germans who fought for the Republic.
In the memorial located in a large space ceded by the city council we can see everything, including
letters from the unknown "godmothers" who wrote to the recruits
to lift their spirits, a collection of picks used to dig trenches and tunnels like the ones that lead us Miguel Cuesta.
Santos Cortés, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, turns 102 in March
.
His life is one of those things that starts quickly: at the age of 10, his mother put him to work as an errand boy, "then there was no money to go to school," he recalls.
At the age of 15 he was already mobilized to fight.
The Civil War had begun.
He joined the 70th Mixed Brigade, IV Machine Gun Battalion.
His first mobilization was to defend Madrid in the Jarama Valley, east of Madrid.
The rebel army intended to surround Madrid, besieging it and cutting off communications with Valencia, where the Republican government had fled, precisely at the beginning of February (4 to 27).
Here the first modern battle of the Spanish Army took place and possibly also the first in Europe because the infantry, artillery, armored vehicles and aviation met in the same theater of operations in a number that had never occurred before.
And whose traces, little by little, deteriorate until their disappearance.
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Spanish Civil War