It was a pleasant spring day. The sun shone
brightly on village and farms; the sheep grazed contentedly on the
outlying slopes.
Soon the sheep would be herded to the high
summer pastures; already some of them had been dabbed with bright
colors on their backs, the dye showing specific ownership. At the
moment a number of ewes and lambs stood close to the gray stone
walls of the houses, feeling most comfortable there.
The nearby town was swollen with country
people, because it was market day, but many others remained at work
in their fields and houses. Someone had to watch the animals,
regardless of the day.
There was the sound of motors. Men and women
paused from their labors, listening nervously. There had been
fighting in the region, and it had been coming closer as the Basque
line was turned by the better equipped enemy. But defeat was
unthinkable. The four insurgent generals--they'd all be hanging, as
the song had it.
Soon airplanes loomed on the horizon, as they
did more frequently these days. The country was at war; young men
from the village had enlisted and disappeared into the labyrinth of
training and dispositioning, and every family tried to suppress the
hideous fear that not all those young men would survive. Normally
the younger sons, unable to inherit, went elsewhere to seek their
fortune, but now there might be need of them here. This was really
a foreign war, but it was forging nearer to this town, like a
poisonous snake that writhed and cast about randomly in search of a
target.
A woman looked up from the letter she had been
writing. Her house was near the main bridge across the river. Her
attention had been attracted more by the cessation of song in the
neighborhood than by the distant motors. These people were always
singing.
Young shepherds would bawl out melodies without
words. Children sang together as they walked home. Young men
regaled each other in groups, hurling songs back and forth. In bad
times older people sang dirges, and the troubadour was highly
regarded. But suddenly all song had ended.
She went to the window, looking out at the
cluster of houses in the near distance. Some had whitewashed walls,
and all had orange tiled roofs. She could just see the spires of
the church.
Beyond it were the airplanes.
No wonder the singing had stopped. Those
machines were coming here! Not passing obliquely, but heading
directly for the village. Yet of course that was probably
coincidence; they would pass over harmlessly. There was after all
nothing to interest a war machine.
She tried to see what kind of airplanes they
were. The Russian ones were all right; they certainly wouldn't
stop. But the others-
These were German planes; the Nazi emblems
were plain. There were the heavy black and white truncated crosses
on the under-surfaces of the wings, and the grim tilted swastika on
the tail. They were traveling north toward the industrial region.
There had been increasing activity there as the Nationalists closed
on that prize.
Apprehension had caused her to look up the
aircraft that had passed before, and now she recognized them at
sight, as she recognized a particular species of bird she had
labored hard to identify.
There were three Italian medium bombers, and a
greater number of German bombers, JU 52s, considered obsolescent.
But these were nevertheless death-dealing machines, the horror of
the civilized world. It was incongruous to see them here over the
peaceful countryside.
She had thought she had escaped such violence
by retreating here to the pastoral hinterlands. She was a pacifist,
opposed to any war, but especially to this one that was ravaging
her beloved country to no purpose she could approve. When the
opportunity came, she had prevaled on her husband to remove his
practice from the big city and set up here, albeit it at a
financial sacrifice.
He had been one of those younger sons who had
done considerably better in the outside world than his elder
brother who had been in line to inherit this farmstead. But that
brother had died relatively young, creating the need for a changed
inheritance, and she had begged her husband to accept it.
But the senseless destruction of war seemed to
be following them.
No region was safe any more.
What was that? There was a plane she didn't
recognize. Smaller than the others, with heavyset, molded wheel
casings, making it look almost like a sea-plane. But it wasn't; it
was some sort of bomber, for she could see the bomb-assembly
between those wheels.
It must be an experimental model. The Germans
were dismayingly inventive in such dread matters.
The woman returned to her letter, since she
had identified the aircraft as well as she was able, and there was
nothing she could do about them anyway. In moments they would pass
overhead and continue on to wreak destruction of the factories to
the north.
She approved of none of this, but was selfishly
relieved that the bombs would fall on other heads than hers.
Her missive was addressed to a correspondent
in distant America with the unusual name Quality, who was working
to master the language she had studied in school by corresponding
with a native. Actually, in this region the natives had their own
separate language that dated back millennia; most of the villagers
spoke it rather than the national tongue. Which was one reason the
woman was glad to correspond; it kept refreshing her own language.
She liked the isolation, physically, but not intellectually or
linguistically, so the letters were valuable.
Quality was another pacifist, and seemed like
the sort of person whom it would be worthwhile to meet despite her
youth. It was easy to write to her about the futility of revolution
and war, the senseless savagery. Yet at this moment the war mocked
them both; the devastating machines that were its minions were
passing almost overhead. Adolf Hitler, the self-styled Führer, was testing his new toys, in violation of
international treaties.
Yet the community of the world clucked its
tongue and did nothing.
Who was most culpable, then: the bully, or
those who let the bully have his way? Yet here was a moral trap:
how could the bully be stopped, except by more violence? It was a
difficult point. Pacifism had no easy answer to the problems of
international aggression.
There was a series of explosions. Oh, no! The
bombs were falling here!
The woman dashed to the door. Her husband
emerged simultaneously from the goatshed, staring at the carnage,
his black beret clinging to his head. The Nazis were bombing the
town, this town!
Debris was flying up, smoke roiling, and fire
bursting in the dry bracken that was used for animal bedding. The
stone houses were tough, but some direct hits were tumbling the
walls, and the slate tiles were flying from the roofs. What hideous
devastation even a single bomb could do!
"Why are they doing this?" she cried. "There
are no soldiers here!"
Her father ran in from the field--technically
her father-in-law, but she had adopted the fine old man--clasping
his gnarled walking stick. This was still his farm, until he died;
every aspect of it was his personal responsibility. He yielded
chores only grudgingly, beginning with those his late wife had
done. He was not fleeing the bombs, he was coming to protect his
house.
A fighter-plane swooped low on a strafing run.
The bullets kicked up little gouts of dust. The man cried out and
fell, face down, his beret flying from his head. Even from this
distance she could see the blood.
Her husband, ordinarily of sedentary bent,
caught up a pitchfork and hurled it at the passing plane. The
gesture was pathetically futile. The craft took no notice; it was
strafing the sheep in the pasture. The animals milled about and
fell, bleating in bewilderment.
She screamed, somehow feeling the horror of
the pointless slaughter of the sheep more than that of the man. She
was numb to her father's fate; her emotion could not yet compass
it; it wasn't real. But the sheep--their deaths were real, if
incomprehensible.
Dully she watched the bombs falling on the
town. Every house was being hit, systematically. She heard the
screams of the people caught in collapsing homes. Her neighbors,
her friends. . .
Yet more terror came plunging out of the sky.
It was the strange, small plane, diving down in a collision course
with the ground.
It must have gone out of control--but it was
falling directly toward her own house!
She ran outside. The noise of the descending
plane became deafening.
A bomb sundered the house, behind her. Stones,
plaster, slate and burning wood showered about her. That strike had
been intentional!
She was a pacifist, yet she felt primitive
rage.
The plane's motor sputtered even as the bomb
scored. The machine tilted, dangerously near the ground. The pilot
tried to pull it up, to level it, but could not quite succeed. The
plane stalled; then with seeming slowness it dropped to the ground
beyond the sheep, bounced, plowed a furrow in the turf, and came to
rest almost intact.
The woman ran toward it. It would be a miracle
if the pilot survived, and a part of her mind marveled that God
should allow such miracles to such undeserving people. She knew
that airplanes were apt to burst into flames because of surplus
fuel. Panting, she caught up to the smoldering craft. The pilot was
moving slowly, dazed. She scrambled up on the broken wing and to
the open cockpit, amazed that the man hadn't been cut to pieces
when that bubble cracked apart. She caught hold of one of his arms
and half-hauled, half-urged him out. Like a child he came, a
uniformed German, the swastika on his left arm. No--that was bright
red blood; her imagination had transformed it into the dread symbol
of Nazism.
"Why are you helping me?" the pilot asked. He
spoke in German, a language she hardly understood, but she grasped
his meaning. What else would he be asking? "I was aiming for the
bridge, but lost control."
And she found herself baffled. This man, this
foreign criminal, had bombed her house, destroying it. One of his
companions had killed her father and decimated their herd of sheep.
She had every reason to hate the Germans! Why did she try to help
this monster? It was not that she valued life, even of enemies,
though she did; she should have run first to her father-in-law, far
more deserving of aid. Why aid the enemy?
Then she realized what it was. She had a
correspondence with a foreign person, one she respected. The pilot
was a foreign person. There was really no similarity between the
two; her correspondent was a pacifist woman while this pilot was a
killer in the notorious Kondor Legion. In the stress of horror, her
emotion had made a wrong connection, identifying the foreign enemy
with the foreign friend.
Now the surviving villagers were charging
toward the downed plane, carrying staves, pitchforks and kitchen
knives. Innocent victims had been transformed by the brute alchemy
of violence into savage remnants; here was the only possible object
of their vengeance.
The German pilot, his head evidently clearing,
looked at the horde. He glanced down at his arm as if considering
whether to run. How fast could he proceed while his strength was
being drained by that wound? Where could he go without leaving a
telltale red trail? "Donnerwetter!" he
muttered.
He brought out his wallet and gave it to the
woman; perhaps she could notify his next-of-kin. He thumbed it open
and showed her where his name was: Hans Bremen. She nodded to show
she understood.
Then Hans Bremen drew his pistol, put it to
his head, and fired.
His body crumpled silently. Vengeance had been
denied the villagers.
The woman stood, somehow unsurprised. War was
madness; why would she expect otherwise? Sanity had departed when
the first bomb fell on this village.
As the villagers arrived, one more airplane
came. It dived out of the sky and planted a bomb in their midst.
Bodies flew wide, and one of them was that of the woman. The German
airman's wallet tumbled through the smoke and was lost in the
debris. There would be no notification of the next-of-kin by this
route.
At last the remaining planes lifted away and
departed to the south, leaving the smoldering ruin of the village.
This was merely another incident in the year 1937, in the course of
the civil war in Spain, in which Germany, Italy and the Soviet
Union tested some of their equipment. The headlines of the world
never reported this test run against a Basque town, and the dead
were lost among the three quarters of a million that were the final
toll of this vicious civil war.
But this incident foreshadowed, in significant
respects, the greater conflagration soon to come. The hundreds who
perished needlessly here would be eclipsed by the millions who
would die in World War Two. This was in fact an omen, a
warning--that was ignored.
