A Wide-Eyed Witness to War : A MOMENT OF WAR, <i> By Laurie Lee (The New Press: $17.95; 178 pp.)</i>

Laurie Lee’s memoirs are little known in the United States, though in English schools his first two volumes occupy about the same place thaD. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” has filled here. “A Moment of War,” the third volume of Lee’s story, had a substantial run on the British bestseller list last year--five decades after the first volume appeared.

Lee’s prose has much the same kind of spare elegance and direct, heart-wrenching clarity of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and both Lincoln and Lee are dealing with that most painful of all types conflict: civil war. This book is Lee’s account of his efforts to join the International Brigade in Spain in December of 1937.

Lee was born in 1914 in a village in Somerset. He has recounted the story of his adolescence in “Cider With Rosie,” a memoir of gentle humor and great charm. At 19, he walked out of Somerset with little money and a fiddle to confront the world, going first to London, where he managed to earn enough money to get himself to Vigo, Spain. From there, he walked across Spain in the blazing July that saw the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War. His account of that was called “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning,” published in 1969; he recorded the life he found in the villages of Spain, for it was in those that he spent most of his time, detailing indelibly the life and tone of a country poised on the brink of disaster. Now, almost a quarter of a century later, comes this memoir of the look and taste and feel of that disaster.

I don’t know of any book that captures as clear-eyed and desolating a view of the realities of war. Christopher Isherwood in his “Berlin Stories” referred to himself as a camera, but Lee is far more genuinely just that. Lee is a poet (he has published verse along with his newspaper writings and memoirs), and he writes with the care of a poet who must weigh each word to find the precise one that will be the most telling and the most true. The language is always simple, direct and unornamented. In the entire work, there is not one cliche, no easy, borrowed phrase. Each word rings as true as though newly minted for this one purpose, fresh and clear as a winter morning.

There are no judgments, no romanticizing, no attempts to explain what is inexplicable. He simply records with the bleak honesty of a recording angel what he saw. Beside this work, George Orwell’s account of this Civil War is angry and judgmental. Hemingway’s is romantic and soft, for all of the Hemingway macho bravado. This is the reality of a land numbed by bitter cold, starvation and so much death that death no longer holds any meaning.

Lee was then, and has remained, a Socialist, based on his absolute faith in the simple goodness of people; and it was that belief that led him to walk into Spain in December over the snow-covered Pyrenees to the aid of the embattled Republicans, carrying a camera, which was taken from him immediately, and his violin, but no gun. He describes himself: “I was at that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck and a charmed life, without which illusion few wars would be possible.” Knowing virtually nothing of the real situation in Spain, he arrives in a paranoid, brutalized, totally disorganized world with few means of simple survival, much less any hope of waging a war against an enemy that is fully equipped, organized and supported by massive aid from a Germany and an Italy eager to use the Civil War as a testing ground for the new weapons and tactics with which they will launch World War II.

Nothing is ever explained to him. At one point he is put in a prison cell to await execution as a spy, though for no reason ever given to him. There he spends three weeks, with one sandwich a day to keep him alive, only to be released as mysteriously as he had been arrested. He is shipped to Tarazona, close to the front at Teruel. There, now as a member of the Brigade, he is shown a photograph “of a slight, round-shouldered youth, with dark, fruity lips and the wide, dream-wet eyes of a student priest or a poet. His brow was smooth and babyish, his long chin delicately pointed.” No one knew the name of the boy, so they called him Forteza, which was written on the back of the photograph.

Lee and another soldier are told only that the boy was a hero of the Barcelona uprising; a gunman, dynamiter and killer of three leading Trotskyists; had been kidnaped, tortured, condemned to death and had escaped and headed south. It is their job to find him and give him protection before any others find him, for he has lost his nerve. The boy is located, being cared for by a girl Lee has met before:

“On her rumpled bed, shaking with fear or fever, was the youth we instantly recognized from the photograph, except that the once smooth face of the priestlike dreamer was now savagely and bitterly scarred. When he saw Rafael and me, he shrank back on the bed, doubled up, and drew his knees to his chin. He broke into a paroxysm of coughing, while Eulalia soothed him, and wrapped a ragged blanket around him. . . . Forteza grew quiet, then pulled himself into a sitting position. He asked if we had any cognac. Rafael was carrying a flask and gave him some, which he drank in little birdlike sips. Then he smiled and let us draw him to his feet. Rafael grew hearty and wrapped his arm around Forteza’s shoulders. ‘We were worried about you, man,’ he said, guiding him toward the door. ‘For God, why d’you take such risks?’

“I saw the panic slowly fade from Forteza’s eyes as he struggled to find his balance. Eulalia lightly touched the back of his neck, then put her cold hand to my cheek. ‘He could be you, little brother,’ she said. We helped the lad down the stairs and supported him through the streets. Forteza’s skeletal fame between us was as light as a bundle of sticks.

“When we got him back to the house, Kassell was drinking coffee by the fire. Jean and Pip left their chess game, the Dutchman stopped writing, and all joined Rafael and me by the door. Then Kassell got up and strode forward, crinkling in his black leather mackintosh, threw his arms around Forteza and kissed him.

“Forteza stood quiet, neither shivering nor coughing now. ‘Welcome, comrade,’ said Kassell, with his watery smile. ‘We thought something bad had happened to you.’ He ran his hands quickly over the boy’s thin body, and led him into the inner room. Jean and Pip returned to their chess game, and the Dutchman to his writing. A little later we heard the sound of a shot.”

There it is, a fair sample, no editorializing, no sentimentalizing, no excuses, a bleak report of a fragment of war. Lee was not yet a poet, or a writer, when he experienced these events, which were burned into his memory like a brand, still indelibly there to be written in this book more than 50 years later. It is a look at the kind of human tragedy that continues to exist today in places such as Bosnia; that seems to be eternal.

For anyone who wants to understand what war is actually like, when it is not being dramatized, hyped, heroized or propagandized, this is the book. For those who still cherish the beauty and the flexibility of the English language, this book and Lee’s other two memoirs are a treasure.