"In a salad one mixes various greens, salted meat, fish, olives, pickles, preserves, egg yolks, and borage blossom," writes an early seventeenth cenutry Spaniard in an attempt to explain the musical genre of the Ensalada. At its heart, the type of piece is musical mixed-green, with sections in different meters, contrasting popular song quotations, and even changing languages. Mateo Flecha the elder deserves credit for contributing most enthusiastically to the genre, which offers a Spanish answer to the Italian Quodlibet and the French Fricaseé. Flecha composed at least 11 of these tonal mixed grills, and his elaborate compositions were probably sung at Christmas for the liberal court of Ferdinand of Aragon in Valencia. Flecha's nephew published a collection of seven (with some letters and other works) decades after Flecha's death. The Ensaladas, though, including La guerra, attained marked popularity far earlier, and appeared in several widely distributed collections of Spanish secular music; three known Masses, one by no less a figure than Morales, parody these pieces.

Flecha's La guerra takes as its topic the "wonderful battle" between Christians, following their Captain who came to Earth on Christmas to lead them, and "Luzbel," Lucifer himself. The evocative set of lyrics tossed in a bowl for it use Castillian, Catalan, and Latin verses, as well as nonsense syllables that depict the sounds of warfare via onomatopoeia. The vanguard in this war comes from the Old Testament, while the Church serves as rearguard; all who are victorious will receive their soldiers' wages in heaven. The text also makes frequent reference to the soldiers' munitions, and modernizes the Apostle Paul's "armour of faith" to include muskets and the "artillery of pious thoughts."

Musically, La guerra proceeds in a continuous string of contrasting sections. The meter changes over a dozen times, the language changes, even the tonality must shift once, as the composer sets up a quotation of one popular song in a different mode. Several popular songs in a more homophonic vein mingle with more "serious" counterpoint and madrigal-esque sections depicting the action of war. Even a three-voiced devotional piece in the vernacular intrudes its contrasting flavor. The sounds of musketry and cannon crash and rattle; both these and the cries of "Victoria!" clearly echo Janequin's simpler piece La Battaille. After the noble victory, and shouts of thanks to the Spanish patron Santiago, Flecha closes with an understated choral thanksgiving, in a brief Latin motet, suitable dressing for such a mixed salad.

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