We were veterans now and we swanked it a bit when the 
new boys came 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 covered 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 Parasan" or "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 hardened or broken. Most of us became 
hardened; our convictions kept in us the balance of sanity as we 
watched the insanity of war.

Fascism started this 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.

Some of the boys had signs on their dugouts. There was 
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 
bad. 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 Non-Intervention Com-
mittee---everybody---precisely and exactly what he thought of 
them. What they said about the Non-Intervention Committee

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