I did not quite know what I was going to find, as this was our first experience of actual warfare … I imagined we might come to a wrecked city and find a terror-stricken people, haggard and worn … with rioting and looting and feelings running high … What we did find surprised us all … Everything is perfectly normal, life is going on almost as usual … people thronging the streets, sitting in cafes, laughing and talking with far from long faces … the liberty of the individual has impressed me greatly … There are no secret courts here. During the raids the same calmness and normal behaviour continues … people go quietly to a shelter, there is no sign of panic. But they realise what it all means, as people who have never seen them never can realise … the destruction of defenceless men, women, and children, bombed in unprotected villages, is most ghastly … I have seen the planes 200 feet above my head, heard the bombs, and the village I had passed through five minutes before was in ruins … Yet still the morale of the people is untouched.
Mes: julio 1938
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Azaña propone «paz, piedad y perdón»
La guerra civil está agotada en sus móviles porque ha dado exactamente todo lo contrario de lo que se proponían sacar de ella, y ya a nadie le puede caber duda de que la guerra actual no es una guerra contra el Gobierno, ni una guerra contra los gobiernos republicanos, ni siquiera una guerra contra un sistema político: es una guerra contra la nación española entera, incluso contra los propios fascistas, en cuanto españoles, porque será la nación entera quien la sufra en su cuerpo y en su alma.