Read Bonnie Toews

Laughter echoed skyward. Even this far up the mountainside, Lee Talbot could hear the faint babbling of tourists and townspeople bartering over the produce, craftwork and wares on display in the small town tucked in the foothills to the southeast. When Lee arose at dawn, she had listened from the window of her hotel room to the clip-clop of horses’ hooves over the cobblestone streets beneath and watched the people from surrounding hillsides haul their loaded carts to the market square just in front of her hotel. There, they set up stalls. Now, the peace of this moment, so removed from the din of air raids in Madrid, washed over her like a healing spring. She basked in its serenity and smiled with satisfaction as she drew the white brow of Mont San Miguel peeking over the farthest Pyrenees range directly ahead of her.

       Earlier, she had climbed the southern ridge with another war correspondent, Quinn Bergin. He told her Mont San Miguel was the oldest mountain in Northern Spain. From here, on a bluff overlooking the valley protected between rocky escarpments, the panoramic view humbled her. For a moment, she doubted her drawing could capture its true magnificence. She frowned at a flaw, picked up her charcoal pencil once more and, using the edge rather than the point, firmly retraced the Rio Mundaca winding along the valley floor toward the small town rising from the river's southern shore.

A twinge of hunger reminded her she hadn’t eaten. She glanced at her wristwatch. Four-thirty. Time to return to the hotel. Again she examined her work, this time at arm's length, before she scribbled on the lower right-hand corner of her sketch: Monday, April 26, 1937. GUERNICA. 

     A deep-throated roar sprang at her from behind. Startled, Lee jumped to her feet and spun around. She knew that sound. A twin-engine aircraft. Cupping both hands over her eyes, she squinted against the sun’s glare in search of the intruder.

     Vibrating air whipped from above, pinning her feet to the ground. She raised and pressed the palms of her hands upward against the slipstream. Her neck arched backward and her gaze froze on the underbelly of a twin-engine Dornier Do 17. For a split second, the German bomber hung as if suspended overhead, engines whistling in her ears, before it swept screaming down the valley and veered onto a south-to-north track barely above the trees. With its nose pointed towards Guernica, the Dornier cast the shadow of an eerie cross rippling over the Mundaca River.  

     And then the bomber banked and circled back. Its nose aimed at her heart in a game of chicken between the pilot and Lee. She stood mesmerized. At the last moment, she ducked as the Dornier rocketed over her head towards the towering peaks behind her. She turned in time to watch it vanish.

     Lee gasped, dumbfounded. Had she imagined it, or did she see darts pinned in racks under the bomber’s wings? Only this morning Quinn had told her about an incendiary bomb the Nazis had developed. It could produce massive fires wherever it landed, but he had no idea what the new bomb looked like. Could the cone-shaped canisters the Dornier carried be test incendiaries?

      The thought chilled her. Maybe the pilot was looking for a place to drop them because the Nazis were forbidden to test such weapons on German soil. Though the Treaty of Versailles banned Germany from ever arming again after World War I, Hitler now manufactured the most advanced weapons in the world. Who would care about his testing bombs in a civil war the League of Nations ignored? 

     But this was Basque country. As yet, the Basques had not joined the Republican government to quell the Fascists even though the Republicans had finally granted them home rule. There was no reason for the German Luftwaffe to be flying over Guernica.

     She had to find a phone and report her sighting to The London Times, the newspaper she now worked for. Her former paper, The Chicago Tribune, had refused to assign her to their overseas bureau in London. It still infuriated her. Just because she was a woman, she didn’t qualify as a war correspondent. Well, she was showing them. Her dispatches on the Spanish Civil War in The London Times were read throughout Great Britain and Europe as well as in New York and Washington. 

     Lee jammed her sketchpad and charcoal pencil into her shoulder bag, flung its straps over her head and looped the bag behind her back, out of the way. As she scrambled down the steep slope, she tripped and sprawled on all fours. Cursing, she pulled her skirt under herself and slid down the rest of the way to her bicycle waiting by the roadside. No sooner had she yanked the bike upright than she heard the warning rumble again.

     She checked the sky behind her. There, the same bomber, but this time, it slipped over the southern ridge further west of her and followed the same northern heading above the Mundaca River, but now higher. Maybe four thousand feet. Damn! Fear knotted her stomach. Something dreadful was about to happen.

     Lee ran the bike down the road before mounting it and pedaled off. At the S-turn, she misjudged the sharp angle and almost lost her balance. The bike skidded on the left rim of the front wheel before she righted it. For a split second, it wobbled. She then regained control and carried on cycling downhill, dangerously careening from side to side at breakneck speed.

     Her mind raced in sync with her pedaling. She had met Quinn in Madrid. She immediately liked him, because, unlike most newsmen who continually tried to seduce her, he didn’t. Instead, he invited her to join him on a trip to Guernica to study the Basques. She would never have gone alone because her Spanish was still very awkward, and the Basques didn’t speak English. Quinn acted as her Spanish translator. According to him, in Spain’s Civil War, if the rebel Fascists under Francesco Franco were to defeat the Madrid government, they had to beat the Basques first. The question for him was: How vulnerable were they to attack?

    This morning, anticipating war strategies was her last concern. When Quinn selected the spot where she could enjoy the best view of the valley for her sketching, she thought he might join her on a picnic and suggested he bring back a boxed lunch from the hotel. He never returned. What held him up? Where was he? She pedaled faster.

    POP! Pop-Pop! The sounds echoed up the hillside like fire crackers exploding one after the other, while green fluorescent flares splintered skyward from the valley below. Recklessly jamming on her brakes, Lee locked the wheels and nearly flew over the handlebars.  Pop! Pop-pop pop! The strange eruptions continued. She jumped off her bike, using her feet like drags to bring it to a standstill.

    In horror, she gazed downward from the roadside at the fires smothering Guernica’s heart. The market! Her fingers squeezed the handlebars, while the steeple bells of the Santa Maria church rang like banshees pitching their strident warnings over the pass.

    BANG! BOOM! The familiar thudding of bombs dropping rocked the countryside. Their pounding burst inside Lee’s head. She gagged on a mixed odor of sulfurous eggs and burnt wood rising from the village basin.

    The hotel! Quinn!

    Lee remounted and resumed her frantic pedaling down the mountain road to the Renteria Bridge. She crossed it and headed toward belching flames rising from the town’s center. After trying to ride through mounds of rubble littering the streets, she gave up, jumped off, and pushed the bike ahead on foot.

    The town square lay in shambles. The Julian Hotel—its front—sliced away, its four stories as bare as the back of a doll’s house. Quinn’s room was at the rear of the hotel, but that was no comfort. He could have been caught somewhere else at the time of the attack. Across from it, the flattened Train Station Plaza left a mangled mess of shingles, bricks and mortar. Desperate survivors scrambled over the ruins searching for loved ones, and when they found them dead, their screams split the shrill din of emergency-response sirens. 

    As more parts of buildings crumbled, murky sheers of red dust settled over the debris, while rivulets of flames kept breaking out everywhere, disrupting rescue efforts. Lee choked on the stench and doubled over fighting an urge to vomit.

    The fumes and intense heat from the fires burning in the square finally drove her from further searching for Quinn. Coughing, she pushed her bike onto the undamaged Calle de la Estacion and paused to catch her breath. She peered through the late afternoon shadows shedding desolate darkness over the lane ahead. From above, a sliver of sunlight pierced the gloom, illuminating the plaid shirt of a figure lying on the ground.