The Hunt

Thomas Jefferson

Rudman walked down through the ruins of Alicante. The city was virtually leveled. There was hardly a wall more than five feet tall still standing. The civilians were gone. The dogs had been eaten. There was nothing left but the rats and a tattered battalion of Loyalists who were holding the town because it was a port and controlled the main coast road.

It was sweltering hot and there were flies everywhere. Some of the more recent dead had yet to be collected for burial.

Rudman had been in the same clothes for six days, since the hotel had been bombed out. He had bathed naked in the ocean every night but his clothes were stiff with dirt. His beard was beginning to show some gray and he had a slight limp from a piece of shrapnel which had buried itself in his calf months before.

Only one or two restaurants were still open, along with the telegraph office from which Rudman and other journalists covering the civil war filed their daily dispatches. Rudman carried his story into the disheveled telegraph office and the telegraph operator, an old man with thick white hair and a drooping mustache, gave him a weary smile.

“Senor Rudman,” he said, “what have you got for me today?”

“Same old stuff,” Rudman said wearily. “I’ve been here off and on since 1935. After three years of writing about this butcher shop it’s all beginning to sound the same.”

He stood at the counter and read over the hand-written piece once more, marking out or changing a word here and there.

ALICANTE, SPAIN, June 22, 1938. The last remaining Loyalist troops are facing annihilation in this southern coast town today as the Fascist forces of Generalissimo Franco move closer to the city.

There is little left of this town that was once a holiday haven for the rich of Europe. But it is no different from most other villages that have been destroyed in this three-year war, the worst civil strife since the American Civil War.

This morning, vultures have replaced Nazi bombers in the skies above, circling the devastated town in search of a feast.

Looking in horror at this fratricidal holocaust, I am reminded of a time in Africa when I saw a gut- shot hyena, nature’s most efficient scavenger, eating its own insides.

In this war, which has pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, church against state, Spain, too, is devouring itself while its German and Italian “friends” sit on the sidelines crying “Ole!”

They have provided the most modern and efficient machines of death to Franco. What a cynical gesture—turning Spain into their private testing ground and using Spanish blood for their grisly experiments. The weapons perfected here will be the weapons used in the next world war..

He put down the pencil and pinched his eyes.

“Oh, the hell with it,” he said, “just send it on, Pablo.”

“Si Senor,” the operator said.

Rudman went back outside. A Loyalist soldier was sitting on a pile of bricks, digging beans out of a can with his bayonet which he used as a fork. He was thin as a palm leaf, his pale eyes buried deep in black sockets. He wore a rag of a white shirt and torn cord pants and had a bandolier around his shoulder. His toes were sticking through the end of his Loots. His rifle, an old Mannlicher, was leaning on the bricks near his leg.

“Americano?” Rudman asked.

“Yeah. You too?” the soldier answered.

“Yep. Join you?”

“Sure, pull up a brick and sit down.”

Rudman sat down and took a swig of water from his canteen.

“What’s your name?”

“What’s the dif? I’m just a soldier.” His voice was hoarse from the dust that drifted up from the ruins.

“Are you a Communist?” Rudman asked.

“Hell, no. I just hate these Fascist bastards. You don’t stop them here, they’ll be in Coney Island next. Least that’s what I thought when I came over here.”

“You don’t think so anymore?”

“Hell, I don’t know what I think. Y’know, I never seen a dead body before I came over here? Some education.”

“Sorry you came now?”

Soldier laughed. “Shit, is anybody ever glad they came? It’s something you think you ought t’do. You can’t complain when it doesn’t go right, can you?”

“Where you from?”

“Boston. Boston, Mass. Land of liberty. You ain’t in the Brigade, are you?”

“No, I’m a correspondent.”