In 1931, Nellie Campobello published Cartucho. Nine years later, in 1940, a second edition appeared, about which not much has been said. With the exception that it is usually mentioned to assert that Campobello modified it under the influence of the author of El águila y la serpiente, the 1940 edition was left somewhat erased by the third edition (1960), in the same way that each edition’s corresponding characteristics were also erased. This piece reviews some of the features that characterize both editions, with the intention of showing what was already present in the first edition, and what the author added or enhanced afterward. It also presents the context in which the second edition emerged (Campobello’s interest in history, her relationship with Austreberta Rentería, the publication of her book Las manos de mamá), and it questions the author’s motives to propose Cartucho (1940) as a set of “true tales” in opposition to the revolutionary “legend” stated in official history. In the conducted analysis, we can appreciate the expansion of some of the literary strategies present in the first edition (the multiplicity of testimonial voices and the contribution of women as witnesses to the facts) and the permanence of others that appeared in 1931 (the infantile narrative voice, the poetic images associated to the war and to the infantilization of the men that fought in the Mexican Revolution). The premise in this article is that both editions defy the concepts of truth, history, and fiction, in the way we usually conceive them, but that in 1940, Campobello expanded some of the literary strategies that she used in 1931 as a function of the emphasis that she put in the testimonials of a multitude of women and men that lived the civil war in the North and to whom, in the process of officialization and institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution, the truth of their own history had been denied, according to the author.