 The family has a mother. The mother. I don't want to be with you. I don't want to stay with you. I don't want to be with you. Julian drills the village boys in the evening when they come back from the fields. A future shock battalion of bullfighters, football players and athletes is drilling. They say the old goodbyes that sound the same in any language. She says she'll wait. He says that he'll come back. He knows she'll wait. Who knows for what the way the shelling is? Nobody knows if he comes back. Take care of the kid, he says. I will, she says, and knows she can't. They both know that when they move you out in trucks, it's to a battle. Comes each morning to these people of the town, sent by the rebels from the hills two miles away. Explosive smoke and blasted granite. Why do they stay? They stay because this is their city. These are their homes. Here is their work. This is their fight, the fight to be allowed to live as human beings. Boys look for bits of shell fragment as they once gathered hailstones. So the next shell finds them. The German artillery has increased their allowance per battery today. Before, death came when you were old or sick. But now it comes to all this village, high in the sky and shining silver. It comes to all who have no place to run, no place to hide. Aviation! Aviation! Three Junker planes did this. Pursuit planes shot one Junker down. I can't read German either. His dead came from another country. They signed to work in Ethiopia, the prisoner said. We took no statements from the dead. But all the letters that we read were very sad. The Italians lost more killed, wounded, and missing in this single battle of Brawaga than in all the Ethiopian war.