A NIGHT IN MADRID

The first bombs that fell over Madrid destroyed the provincial
hospital and laid waste the hospital of San Carlos. Most of
the patients in San Carlos were old and feeble men and women.
When the bombs struck, those who were still able to move rush-
ed out of the dormitories, crowded on the stairways, piled into
the cellars; using up their waning strength in a feverish hunt
for safety. The crippled and the lame, those who were too sick
to move, hid under their beds. In the morning six of them
were found there-—alive—but stark mad. ,

The night was filled with horror and confusion. All the build-
ings in the neighborhood were burning fiercely. By the light
of the leaping flames one could see a little, as we stumbled over
stretchers, over wounded.

At the corner of Alcala and the Gran Via a hand grasped
my foot. I freed myself, lit a match and bent over. It was a
young woman. Her face was paling with approaching death.

_Her dress was red with blood. She whispered: “Look——look

what they have done.”

Her hand moved vaguely. My eyes followed. At first I
thought it was a pool of blood on the pavement. -I looked close-
ly among the splinters of glass and I saw the crushed body of
a small child.

The young mother’s hand fell limply to the pavement.

An ambulance passed. I called to it. It stopped and a man
approached. His flash light lit up the corpse.

“Dead,” he said quietly. “She’ll be taken away in the morn-
ing. The wounded come first.”

Then he saw the child’s corpse. Skillfully he brushed the
splinters of glass aside, and laid the little body at the mother’s
right unwounded breast. The light went out and all disappeared
into the darkness of the night.

“MAMA, MAMA”

We were standing near a group of houses in Guadarrama.
Near what was left of them—after the aerial bombardment.

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