Deadly Embrace

Drawing on documents buried in archives for decades and interviews with war veterans, some over 100 years old, Sebastian Balfour demolishes traditional interpretations of the Spanish colonial and civil wars. Throwing fresh light on military cultures, racism, and the experience of the soldier in war, from the early twentieth century to the 1930s, he reveals the extraordinary brutality of the colonial war in Morocco and the export of that brutality to Spain in the Civil War. Above all the author exposes for the first time the story of the chemical warfare waged by Spain against Moroccans resisting the invasions of their lands.