BEGINNINGS : Where A Life Begins ------ I. GENESIS & RESURRECTION

Chapter Eight

                                                                     EIGHT 

 A man who looked to be in his mid-forties moved stealthily through the dense undergrowth along the steep southern bank of the Bidasoa River quickly putting as much distance as possible between himself and the scene of the shooting at the metal bridge. His name was Alphonso Zuidilla. He was accompanied by his seven-year old son Yann, who shadowed his every step. His left hand gripped his aging single-shot, bolt action rifle, though today, it had served its purpose well enough. He had not intended to engage the enemy on this occasion but events had taken their own course. His primary mission had been observation and reconnaissance. That was his daily brief. It had become more difficult over time as it seemed that more and more of his countrymen and women were fleeing into France as refugees. 

He would likely have joined them in their flight had he known that within the next several months as many as half a million Basques, Catalans, Republican fighters and the foreigners who had fought alongside them in the International Brigade would make their way across the border to France. They'd escape either over the mountains or through one or another of the border control points along the ragged Spanish-French frontier that stretched all the way from the Mediterranean Sea in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. 

But it was perhaps better that he did not know about the coming exodus, as large numbers of those escapees, including his wife and young son, would soon find themselves exiled and in deplorable conditions in hastily built internment camps across the border. There they would suffer and starve until, if they had the chance, fortune turned in their favour and they would be released. Others were not so lucky. Their hardships continued throughout the long years of the Second World War in the company of Jews, gypsies, dissidents and others who the Nazi occupiers considered to be undesirables. Many people were sent to these camps as 'first ports of call' before being train-loaded to labour or extermination camps back in Spain, in Germany and in Eastern Europe. 

Zuidilla swore under his breath as he and his young son hastily retreated away from their hiding place near the old bridge, hunching their bodies to be closer to the ground and slipping quickly from one bit of camouflage to the next. He was furious that he had put his son in unnecessary danger, though he had known almost from the moment that the young pregnant woman started to run across the bridge that her destiny was in his hands. 

"What else could I do?" he asked himself in desperation, as he scrambled along the riverbank. 

He knew that the woman could expect no mercy from that Guardia officer and his men. He had seen them in action before. A pretty young woman like that, even though heavily pregnant, would have been whisked away and secreted in the barracks for the eventual enjoyment of the officers then passed on to the enlisted men until they tired of her and she disappeared quietly and completely. Nor should he or his son expect anything other than torture and mistreatment if they were to be caught by their enemy. 

And here he was, shooting the enemy as if the war was still on. But in a sense it was still on. Republican sympathizers were still being hunted down, executed or persecuted despite all the talk of reconciliation, fair treatment and the freeing and rehabilitation of war prisoners. Yes, the war was supposedly over, but even if that was true, it wouldn't have mattered. War prisoners, ex-soldiers and even non-combatants who did not support the victorious nationalists could expect only persecution, torture and an unhappy death at the hands of the fascists. 

"It had not been like that after the Great War" he thought aloud, "war prisoners went home when it was over". Spain had of course been neutral in that war but had played an important role in facilitating communications between prisoners of war and their families. 

"This is not how it's supposed to be!" he complained bitterly. 

Alphonso was not an educated man but he had heard talk of the Geneva Convention and the rights of prisoners of war to humane treatment. On those rare occasions when leaders of the International Brigade had visited his sector, he heard them discussing it with the foreign intellectuals and communists accompanying them. It seemed that this supposedly esteemed legal document was barely worth the paper it was written on, at least insofar as the victors and vanquished in the Spanish civil war were concerned. 

Now that he and his son were well out of sight of the bridge Alphonso slowed down so they could rest for a bit. He crouched down beside Yann who was breathing heavily from the exertion. 

"What a joke is this Geneva Convention that is supposed to protect us!" he whispered bitterly to his son. The boy really had little idea what he was talking about but he could see the effect it was having on his much-loved father. 

"There's a world of difference" Alphonso said, "between the words of the politicians and lawyers in their meetings and what happens on the field of battle!" Alphonso turned to the side and spat; then went on. "They tell you one thing and then do another." 

After a couple of seconds, the father and son resumed their escape alongside the riverbed towards safety. 

Of course, Yann did not reply to his father's comments about the failure of the Geneva Conventions to protect soldiers in the civil war. Indeed he did not really understand what his father was talking about. However, in his mind, seeds were being planted that would later bear fruit. On that day and in purely practical terms, the lacunae in the Geneva Conventions' protections for combatants and non-combatants were all too clear to Alphonso. And it was perhaps ironic that in the not so distant future, his son would come to scrutinize every word of these conventions closely and in detail in the course of his studies in Paris after the end of the next world war that would transform all of Europe. But that would be in the future. 

Alphonso, would not himself live to know it, but before the end of the next decade, despite or perhaps because of the several years of war horrors that lay ahead, a new Geneva Convention of 1949 would replace the three earlier documents and would extend, not only to captured and injured soldiers but also to civilians, like him, all these wartime protections that prohibited murder, torture, hostage-taking and any extra-judicial sentencing and executions - at least in theory! Nor would he ever know of the 1949 Geneva Convention's eventual adoption by almost every nation, though still some of the stark disparities he saw then, in 1939, between the law of nations and practical realities of armed conflict and grubby politics would remain and haunt humanity for generations to come.