Shock Delivered

Alvah Bessie's Men in Battle (1939) delivers a riveting non-fictional account of the Spanish Civil War from a soldier's or "worm's eye" (as he terms it) point of view. It goes perfectly well with Pablo Picasso's epic 1937 masterwork, Guernica. Here's one small sample:

'They brought the Fascist pilot in, and he was a Spanish youngster in a beautiful Italian flying suit, with a bullet wound in his arm and a broken face. The Spanish company commander in the sector where he landed had smashed him in the jaw in a fit of rage (and we all agreed that while this may have been humanly understandable, it was politically incorrect). . .'   ~~ From the 1977 Pinnacle Books version, page 273.

'[The pilot] was a native of Majorca and had been a pilot before the war. When the Fascists took Majorca, they had asked him to fly for them, and since there is nothing a pilot would rather do than fly, he had accepted. He had raided Barcelona many times. Like most pilots everywhere, he had no political convictions whatsoever, and it is relatively easy to drop high explosives on people you cannot see . . .' (Ibid.).

Guernica -- an impressively large painting (eleven feet high and between twenty-five and twenty-six feet long) -- was moved from New York City to Madrid in 1981 (Casón del Buen Retiro), then on to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 1992. A tapestry version created by Madame J. de la Baume Dürrbach is temporarily on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas, USA (until March 8, 2015) -- I saw this version in the 1980s at United Nations headquarters. In the parlance of our day: WOW.

Today's Rune: Fertility.