Prolog
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.