ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we take a detour from the quick pace of the war to glimpse at everyday life in three fronts that remained largely static through the winter of 1938: Badajoz, Guadalajara and Zaragoza. Soldiers ate, drank, played, drew graffiti, wrote, got ill, and dug trenches, but about this historians have had little to say as a rule, concerned as they are with the large operations and political maneuvers that decided the conflict. Archaeology can counterbalance the focus on the dynamic by taking a look at quiet, secondary frontlines. Soldiers also died there: static does not mean that there was no fighting. Men stationed in the rural fronts of Extremadura and Zaragoza experienced artillery attacks, night raids and even local offensives. Through our archaeological surveys in Mediana de Aragón we were able to reconstruct with precision several small raids launched by both Republicans and Nationalists in the vast steppe between Belchite and Zaragoza. Eventually, calm was shattered to pieces in Aragón, where the Nationalists launched an offensive after winning the Battle of Teruel, which ended on 22 February 1938. The Republicans retreated en masse, leaving a trail of corpses behind that archaeologists have in some cases found and exhumed.
