In Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas takes us through the emotional and mental struggle of war, and in particular the Spanish Civil war. While the title of the book, and indeed the setting of the novel would suggest to us, the audience, that the war described in the book takes place vaguely in the Mediterranean sometime between c. 480 BC – 1938 AD, we are first introduced to the narrator and protagonist, also named Javier Cercas, in the year of 1994 while he recounts his time as a journalist, symbolically in an impartial position, where he interviews important military figures of the Nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War. He later encounters a former Republican soldier, who we get an almost entirely different view of that struggle for national identity. I believe that the goal that Cercas’ the real person, wanted to achieve with this writing, was to portray war and the consequences of war, not as something to glorify but rather as something that we should see as a last resort to used only when the values and traditions that we identify with are threatened. To Mazas, the war was necessary to preserve his perception of Spain and what a National Spain should be. For Miralles, the war which was ultimately lost, was for the protection of liberty and the survival of those that had little importance and were murdered in an authoritarian Spanish state. The title that Javier Cercas uses is a reflection of these two competing ideals of what the remembrance of war should be, while the battle of Salamis was fought more than two millennia prior to events of the book, the heroes and the background of the struggle are still relevant to European society. The actual battle of Salamis was fought by Europe’s first democratic state against a foreign empire from another continent, this reflects Maza’s paradoxical view of strong military strength, which he argues for the use of to protect the state against perceived enemies thus the state should serve the military because the state would not exist without it, and is contrasted with the life that Miralles lived continuing to fight against authoritarianism even after the bloodshed had ended in his own country.

My question is, who do you think had the more ethical view of society, was Mazas right in his participation and actions during and following the Spanish Civil War? Should we accept the use of arms as a necessary evil for the protection of the nation’s citizens? Or should we abandon the use of military arms, as they fuel a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction?