packed in a solid stream men, women, children, mules, donkeys, 
goats, crying out the names of their separated relatives, lost in the 
mob. How could we chose between taking a child dying of disentery 
or a mother silently watching us with great sunken eyes carrying 
against her open breast her child born on the road two days ago. She 
had stopped walking for ten hours only. Here was a woman of sixty 
unable to stagger another step, her gigantic swollen legs with their 
open varicose ulcers bleeding into her cut linen sandals. Many old 
people simply gave up the struggle, lay down by the side of the road 
and waited for death. 
We first decided to take only children and mothers. Then the sepa- 
ration between father and child, husband and wife became too cruel 
to bear. We finished by transporting families with the largest number 
of young children and the solitary children of which there were 
hundreds without parents. We carried thirty to forty people a trip 
for the next three days and nights back to Almeria to the hospital of 
the Socorro Rojo International where they received medical attention, 
food and clothing. The tireles devotion of Hazen Sise and Thomas 
Worsley, drivers of the truck, saved many lives. In turn they drove 
back and forth day and night sleeping out on the open road between 
shifts with no food except dry bread and oranges. 
And now comes the final barbarism. Not content with bombing and 
shelling this procession of unarmed peasants on this long road, but on 
the evening of the 12th when the little seaport of Almeria was comple- 
tely filled with refugees, its population swollen to double its size, when 
forty thousand exhausted people had reached a haven of what they 
thought was safety, we were heavily bombed by German and Italian 
fascist airplanes. The siren alarm sounded thirty seconds before the 
first bomb fell. These planes made no effort to hit the government 
battleship in the harbor or bomb the barracks. They deliberately