In the streets, gaunt-faced men and women, chained to the front of buildings like captured animals. They were the Rebel prisoners the Loyalists had threatened to chain in the line of artillery fire if the attack on Irun was not abandoned. Five or six hundred of them. Some half buried under fallen façades.

  All of them Spaniards, being killed by Spaniards.

  * * * *

  The three Capronis droned in over the defenses on the top of La Puntza. The white-shirted fighters on the top of the hill shook fists and rifles in impotent rage. They fired at the bombers. Machine-guns were uplifted, made a foolish attempt to blast down the Capronis.

  Three bombs fell out of the belly of Captain Jimenez’ ship. He watched them drop, slanting. There was a smear of flame from the top of the hill. Rock lifted a hundred feet in the air. The hilltop shook and shuddered with the violence of the explosion. Bodies whirled around crazily like scraps of paper in the wind.

  Other bombs fell on top of the hill. The whole area was riven, broken, pulverized. Out of the hell, ragged men and women, with streaming hair and screaming voices, fled the destruction which murdered them. Fled down the hillside toward Irun.

  The shining helmets of the Legion were dotting the hillside, going up with a rush, yelling, and the bayonets were at work among the defenders. They were like tigers. They fell among the shock-sodden defenders. The blades of the bayonets no longer glinted, but they were dulled with the red of Spanish blood. The remnant of the attacking battalion of the Legion stood and cheered, and then went on with the business of death.

  From Irun the Loyalist guns opened on La Puntza. New shell concussions rocked the heights. Death struck among the victors. A ragged line of irregular troops swept up the hill.

  Fear, panic swept through the town. The way to France was choked with refugees, swarming, carting impossible bits of personal property.

  The Rebel guns opened on the road, blew great chunks out of that long line of slowly moving people.

  The three Capronis came in over the town. The bombs fell. The houses were seized with convulsions. The men and women, chained in the streets were blown to bits. That was war, one could not hazard the victory for a few hostages.

  Bombs in the road—blasting great craters in space which had a moment before been choked with fear-maddened people.

  * * * *

  One of the Capronis suddenly staggered, weaved about in space. There was a gash in its right wing. The wreckage of its right wing motor hung down grotesquely, seemed suspended on a string. It went down in ugly circles. The gunners were standing up in seats, staring over the side of the ship.

  Suddenly one of them jumped. His parachute opened a hundred feet below the ship. He floated about.

  And on the ground, the milling people forgot to run, forgot to be afraid. They circled around under that falling parachute, they chased it back and forth, their faces turned upward like a white blur. Trotted this way and that with the vagaries of the wind which moved the chute. Their arms were outstretched, hands like claws.

  The gunner drew his pistol. He fired down at the faces under him. Then he touched earth—and the mob was upon him, hiding him from sight—working with hands and feet and teeth. Crushed and stamped and ripped at the body of that gunner. Tore the chute to shreds.

  The big Caproni smeared into the earth, broke its back. The second machine-gunner did not jump. He stayed in his cockpit, held in by his belt. The fuselage of the ship slanted at a crazy angle. The mob charged the ship. He stood up in his seat, brought his gun to bear, fired, coldly, implacably, mowed them down, killed three and four at a time with the same bullet in that crazy press of human bodies.

  Then the mob swept over the ship, rent it with their hands—and the pilot, the bomber and the machine-gunner disappeared in the swirl of hate and blood-lust.

  The ship was reduced to splinters.

  And Captain Jimenez turned his head away, a leaden weight of sickness in his belly. Spaniards rending Spaniards.

  “That was a splendid piece of bombing,” a voice seemed to be whispering. “Just the lift we needed to clear La Puntza. Tonight our men will be in Irun—and then—we will teach them to chain men in the streets like dogs! Heaven help anyone the Legion finds in Irun this night. All day the Legion had been walking over the bodies of its own dead. The Legion will not leave a stone standing in the city—nor a Red alive.”

  Then another voice cried out within him. “But Irun is Spanish! The Legion is Spanish. The people we are killing and who are killing us—are Spanish.”

  Then he was down on the ground, legs dead and belly sick. His major was standing beside him, applauding what he had done, laughing jovially. “Tomorrow we leave this hell hole,” the major said. “We go to Badajoz—to another hell hole. They are fierce there—”

  The word smashed upon Juan Jimenez’ brain like a shrapnel shell.

  “Badajoz?” he asked strangely.

  “Surely! Ah, I forgot. You are from Badajoz. A nest of traitors. The most stubborn, bloody-handed, murdering blackguards in the whole of Spain. We must crush them—wipe them out!”

  CHAPTER III

  End of Flight

  There is was. The House of Cordova, like the bones of a cow that had died of starvation and been burned. Blackened embers, and a nasty hole in the ground. Down there somewhere was a bloodstain against the wall where the peasants of Badajoz had executed Don Jaime de Cordova y Badajoz.

  There were the hills over which Juan Jimenez had trudged the miles between his father’s mud hut and Great House. Those rolling, rocky, plow-scarred hillsides, in ruins, without even the meager crops of yesterday. With the smoke rolling up from a dozen villages and with the bodies of the unburied dead lying in the streets.

  The Capronis soared overhead, dropped the deadly bombs and the mud huts flew into spurts of dust. Along the road there were rifle pits, and craters formed by exploding shells. The bombs were raining down and the scream and blare of airplane engines filled the heights.

  Gushing, flaming death, falling on the crooked backs of the peasants. Death which killed them in droves, and against which they could not fight.

  The steel-helmeted troops, charging fiercely stormed into position after position. Stormed through the streets of that little village in which Juan Jimenez had been born. Rifles spat defiance, even as the bombs fell and blew the defenders into oblivion.

  Smoke drifted and rolled, and the moving wall of flame consumed the village and behind the fire came the steel helmets of the Rebel troops. And the peasants fought from behind breastworks formed by piling up the bodies of their neighbors and children. The bodies of their own dead, and struck, and struck, and struggled until they were cut down, or pierced with bayonets.

  All day the prisoners marched toward Badajoz. The dust in the road was churned by their bare feet. The sweat ran down their naked backs. They marched with vacant eyes and grey faces. Up the hill, down the hill, over the next hill.

  Juan Jimenez in his new major’s uniform and his new decoration stood on the top of a little hill and stared. For La Puntza, Juan Jimenez had been decorated. For the reduction of the Loyalist lines north of Badajoz he had been made major.

  Those dead eyes looking at him—eyes of the prisoners marching by. Now and then a man or a woman in that line turned face and spat at him. Now and then a wild-eyed, sobbing young girl would scream out curses at him.

  All day long he stood there and watched them herded by like cattle. Once Juan Jimenez had stopped a Moorish non-com and had said: “Where are you taking these people?”

  And the Moor had stared almost insolently, and he had answered: “To the bullring, Excellency—where else?”

  “Bullring?” asked Major Jimenez.

  “Ay—La Plaza del Toros,” grinned the Moor. “And it will take many monkeys to sand it after this day’s spectacle. Look at them!”

  And he ran back to catch up with his fellows, leaving Juan Jimenez to stand and stare.

  And then, somewhere in the dust which came up from the column, a voice cried: “Juan! Juan!”

  An insane face broke from the grey of the procession and he felt iron hard hands around his neck and a fever burned, parched mouth was kissing him.

  And he looked down at the face of his mother.

  Her hair, like coiled snakes, fell in wild disorder over her head and shoulders, down upon her half naked body. There was dried, matted blood on her dress and her hands were burned from holding a rifle. And she kissed him, and crooned over him in a cracked, broken voice.

  “Juan—Juan. My baby!”

  And then, as if for the first time, she saw his uniform, and hate and rage filled her eyes and she pushed him away with the flat of her hands, recoiled from him.

  Then he saw his father. Dragging feet, bowed head, making furrows in the dust, as if great weights were attached to his feet. Face too dead to be alive. Set in deep lines. A cruel gash across the flesh of his chest.

  And Juan Jimenez in his major’s uniform walked along the line with the procession of prisoners, and he heard hoarse voices cursing him.

  And the dust got into his nostrils and strangled him, and he marched up and down the hills.

  “But why do you fight like this?” he demanded of his father. “What is there to dying that is so holy? What is this thing you fight for? Don’t you know—you are fighting against Spain—your own land?”

  And the old man’s eyes glinted for a moment behind the grey mask of the dust, and he said: “You could not understand. We fight for the land. We are Spain. Our sweat, our blood, our bodies, are Spain. We toil—it is right that we live for our toil, that we own the land. It is ours. It was given to us. We will never give it back. There will be no Spain without us.”

  Juan fell silent, groping to understand. But all he had been taught so painfully, by Don Jaime, was a wall which his groping mind could not pierce.

  And the father said, dully, like a whisper: “Go back—you have nothing to do with us. You are a soldier—you are a ‘gentleman.’ You are a friend of the Foreign Legion criminals, of the Moors! You cannot feel the people and the land. The boots on your feet have drained the land out of your blood!”

  “Faster! Faster!” barked the Moors. Here and there they prodded a stumbling figure with the bayonet.

  They came over the last hill. Into Badajoz.

  “Where are my brothers?” asked Juan Jimenez.

  The croaking voice of the mother sounded. Her face was expressionless. “Dead,” she said. “All dead—fighting. Go look at them, Juan. They are lying in the field in back of the house where the rifle pits were dug—where the bombs were dropped.”

  “And the girls—Dolores and Inez?”

  “Dead. There is no difference between girls and boys now. They are the same—they die the same—they hate the same—they kill the same. You will find them—lying in the same place.”

  There was a little shuddering sigh from the head of the column. Below at the foot of the hill, surrounded by its trees, rose the whitewashed wall of the bullring of Badajoz.

  In other days during the fiesta, the bulls came by this road, the black, sharp-horned fighting bulls, with glossy coats beautifully groomed. Going down the little hill to the bullring, to make a holiday for the people of Badajoz.

  And now the long line, shuffling in the dust, stood and looked down at the bullring, and a strange animal-like cry, almost like the lowing of the bulls broke from the men.

  The Moors, the only men in uniform, moved along the line, prodded bodies with bayonets and rifle butts, grinned, forced the column to move. Until the head of the column went into the bullring. The hundreds of them. Until Juan Jimenez said goodbye to his parents, under the main arch of entrance, and saw them driven into the space.

  An hour passed and he was in the field tent, standing stiff, white-faced.

  General Molo said: “Major Jimenez, I cannot understand your interest in these people. It is dangerous, frankly. It does not become an officer of field rank to show such interest in a mob of ruffians and cutthroats.”

  Juan Jimenez’ voice sounded in his ears as if it spoke from a great distance. “Perhaps, Excellency, it is because the two in whom I am most interested are my father and mother!”

  General Molo stared. “Your father—and—” he said slowly. His face was suddenly dark. “Soldiers have no fathers and mothers at a time like this, Major Jimenez. Bloodlines have been wiped out. This is civil war—brother against brother if necessary—to the last man, to the bitter end.”

  “Because we have guns and money and can kill—are we saving Spain—by murdering Spaniards?” Juan asked dully.

  Molo’s face was suddenly black with anger. “You are overwrought, lad,” he said, with a forced kindness.

  “So—” said Jimenez hesitantly.

  “I ordered a full investigation, Major,” nodded the general. “What I learned—is better spared. It is a blessing that the sons and daughters of your family died fighting. Beyond question, they were the leaders here. They were the core of the whole resistance in this countryside. Your sister—the one called Inez—was the infamous ‘Red Flame.’ She fought and led more fiercely than any of the men. I am sorry—it has all been established—by the prisoners themselves. They are proud of your sisters and your brothers—proud of the part they had in murder and bloodshed. It grieves me that the father and mother of a brave officer, a comrade-in-arms must die, but there can be no exceptions—no favors.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Juan Jimenez in the same dull voice.

  He saluted, turned like a soldier, marched out of the room. The general’s face twitched as he watched him go. Then he went back to work on the papers on his desk.

  * * * *

  Juan Jimenez walked down the hill, to Badajoz, and came to the barbed wire before the bullring. The Moor sentry saluted and looked at him curiously as he passed.

  Inside, three or four hundred people crouched miserably in the dust, red-eyed, starving, dying of thirst. Here and there one of them lay on the ground—dead. Juan Jimenez searched for his father and mother until he found them.

  They were gathered together by the side of the ring. They sat on the ground, side by side. Their dead eyes were staring at the tiers of seats and at the machine-guns which were set up on those banks of seats—muzzles pointing toward the arena.

  And Juan’s voice said: “I am here.”

  Suddenly there was a hunger in his heart. A hunger for that earthen floor and those rocky, rolling hills which were watered by the sweat of all the Jimenez who had labored over them. There was a hunger to feel the sun on his naked back.

  And a voice said in his brain: “Why do you wear that fine coat? You are a part of the land. You were born to it. These are your people. This is your place! Can you walk out of here, and leave them—look on them and fight down the cry of the blood in your veins?”

  And he stood staring at the seamed, pitted faces of his parents.

  With a great sob ripping at his throat, he turned and fled. Ran, like a mad, tormented thing, until once more he stood outside the bullring, and his heart beat like the tumult of a gun within his chest, and the sweat of agony slid down his pale, dust-caked face.

  And a hand touched his arm, and a voice said to him: “Juan—Juan Jimenez—you are here!”

  And he whirled and his mouth fell open and he stared into the face of Isabella de Cordova y Badajoz.

  Her face was soiled with grime, but her eyes were soft and wet with tears of gladness. She looked at his uniform and swallowed a lump in her throat. Her voice, like the deep note of a bell gone husky, said his name over and over again.

  Silently he gathered her in his arms and crushed his mouth against her lips, and she closed her eyes and clung to him.

  “You!” he marveled. “They told me—you had died—with your father!”

  Her eyes flashed fire then, and bold defiance. “No. I fled from them—hid in the cellar—with the dogs, Juan! You hear—with the dogs—in terror—like an animal—while they hunted me—”

  All the fierce pride of her flamed out in that moment, and he was touched with a deep pity that she had been so humbled. Her face was ravaged and torment was indelibly burned into the dark of her eyes.

  She shuddered and buried her face against his breast, and her body trembled and shook with her sobs. “But you came, Juan—the Legion came—and saved me—and now—” Her eyes roved to the huddled, broken mob, crouched in the hot, dry sand of the arena. “And now—” she said, again. The spark of revenge lit her face with a flickering flame.

  “Hush, Isabella,” he said in a voice that cracked. “They are my people—are you forgetting that?”

  She shook her head. “No, Juan. They are your people no longer. You have come too far to retrace your steps. See, you are a major now, an officer—glory lies ahead of you—you have become my father’s son—everything he hoped and prayed that you would be. You can never stand by their side again, Juan—never in this world!”

  And with those words—words that his mind, his ambition, his intellect, told him were sane and true—a deep knell of isolation tolled within him.

  “Never stand by their side—never in this world—”

  The words sounded in his head, again and over again. A chorus of voices took up the strain, sent it hurtling back and forth in his brain, vibrant and repetitious as a long-living echo.

  There was a little moan from inside the building. People stirred, stared, up toward the seats. The machine-gun crews were crouching, white teeth showing through grin-split lips.

  A young girl in the middle of the throng leaped upon the barricade, ripped a great swatch of tattered cloth from her dress, swung it over her head like a banner and like a flag of battle. Her mouth opened wide, she screamed:

  “Viva Espana! Viva el libertad!” A cry of defiance, of unconquerable determination and courage.

  And within Juan Jimenez the tormenting echo answered: “Never—never in this world.”

  Juan seemed to wake from a dream—a dream that had begun on a morning when he was ten years old and a fierce proud gentleman on an Arab steed had looked down at him and promised him great things. The dream was fashioned of those great things, unfolding with wraithlike magnificence, clothing him with glory—a false glory that fit him ill, that wore thin like worthless cloth and fell from him now, leaving him naked. Juan Jimenez, the son of a peasant and the grandson of a peasant.