We were veterans now and we swanked it ‘a bit when the new boys cam-e into the trenches” We knew how they felt the first few days. You°re nervous at first. You see things you’ve never seen before and never imagined you would see. Men with blood/soaked clothing. Fellows with bullets through their heads are cover-ed quietly. Each bullet that whines over you makes you drop your head in a hurry. You remember -seeing your comrades lying on stretchers, raising their fists in salute, some of them dying, whispering “No Parasani” o-r “Red Front.” Maybe we will ‘be next. We -shake these thoughts out of our heads. What did we expect of war. In time, after your first experience under fire, you either become harden-edsor broken. Most of us became hardened; our convictions kept in us the balance of sanity as we

F watched the insanity of war.

Fascism startedthis and we swear to ourselves that we will finish it.

Station Manana

There is humor, too, in a war. I don°~t mean ghastly kind of humor when -some dead face seems to smile and wink at you. Or the scene of two hands clasped as in prayer, by themselves, severed from the rest of the body . it

Some of the boys had signs on their dlugouts. There" was

i one sign with the inscription “To let. Hot and cold water all day.

No transients wanted, only permanent boarders.” But the

neighborhood wasn’t snooty enough, I guess, and business was a

had. We even had our own radio station. Station Manana, we called it. The “mike” was made out of the casing of a_ gas mask. The post was a bayonet and the station signals were printed rather crudely on a piece of board. Anyone who ever had. any’ thing to get off his chest would amble _over to Station. Manana and in loud, stentorian tones proceed to tell the world, the boys, the fascists, the food kitchen',_,the Nonzlntervention Com’ mittee———~ eve1'ybody———precisely and exactly what he thought of them. - What they said about the Nonrlntervention Committee

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