Bombing Casualties: Spain

Dolls' faces are rosier but these were children their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle dark lenses in whose quicksilvery glances the sunlight quivered. These blenched lips were warm once and bright with blood but blood held in a moist bleb of flesh not spilt and spatter'd in touseled hair. In these shadowy tresses red petals did not always thus clot and blacken to a scar. These are dead faces: wasps' nests are not more wanly waxen wood embers not so grely ashen. They are laid out in ranks like paper lanterns that have fallen after a night of riot extinct in the dry morning air.