The transport ship's motor rumbled with a low, growling sound, like some sort of beast, as it pushed against the tide into the port of Barcelona. The sky overhead was a brilliant blue, different only from the sea by the lightness of its color, unsullied by clouds. Chutes of spray towered up into the air as the ship plowed itself through the crashing waves, the foamy white briefly flashing against the city, before it returned to the waves, and once more the ship rose and fell, rose and fell, a pendulum swaying through the waves. The heat of the day suffocated, like a great vast oven, with only the wind which swept in from the great blue expanse behind as a reminder of green and cool.
On the bridge of the leading ship, pulling ever closer to the harbor, a man stood apart from the rest of the activity of the buzzing work to bring the ship into port. He puffed on the cigar, on the bridge of the ship, watching the city draw closer, while naval officers scattered themselves around the bridge, at their tasks as ordered were shouted in the harsh language of seamen, their occasional gaze of fear at the man in their midst in the uniform of the army, with an obedient and watchful staff watching him from behind, as if looking for the slightest sway in the erect figure, standing pillar-esque against the movement of the sea. An expression of hunger, like something out of some creature of the deepest depths of the sea, of of a wolf, lined the faces of men who had seen and known war, men who had even come to enjoy it, for men whom blood spilled all too easily, for men who did their job and did it well, for men who searched for a challenge and knew to find it here.
A long line of ships followed behind them, the hulking metal masses and the otherwise clean decks covered with the panoply of war - guns with their blueish grey steel barrels glinting in the sunlight, trucks with the roundels of Spain on their side, rifles stacked in their serried rangs, sabers for cavalry brilliant like silver, anti-aircraft guns with their long and graceful muzzles pointed up at the sky as if waiting for some plane to arrive, or just the more modest but infinite array of tents, of uniforms, of great stacked piles of food, of boxes of ammunition with the wooden slats hiding inside the round after round of heavy ammunition, the bronze kept cool from the sun, those terrible, inhumane, bullets and shells. Horses whinnied from some ships, down in the holds most often, unsure of themselves in this strange and new environment, knowing themselves surrounded by water somewhere in their innocent and simple souls, unaware that they arrived at their destination at last.
It was not this which filled the people of the city with terror as they watched the long lines of ships crossing the foam-specked waves, watching from the elegant apartments built in the great famous courtyards of Barcelona, from the mountains outside the city flung up like a rampart around the second greatest of the metropolises of Spain, from the poor worker quarters where families were crammed into tiny apartments, choking in the heat of summer while their stomachs growled with hunger. It was the men, those men of Morocco, those men with their hard bodies, those men used to violence and bloodshed and death, their faces tanned by the sun, hardened by a callous disregard for life - it was these men they feared, not the guns they carried upon their shoulders.
Morocco! They had heard the news a few days ago, those inhabitants of the city, heard it as the troops of the government patrolled the city, as fighting passed intermittently between the anarchists and the communists and the soldiers, the petty war of ambushes, of knives, of execution. Heard it announced on the radios, heard it in the newspapers, those that still published, their stories tamed by the government censors, heard it in the whispering that crossed a city that seemed besieged, besieged from without, the sound which leaps from lip to lip, which grows with every recounting - but even just the initial word was enough to send a shiver up one's spine.
Morocco, the land of butchery, of barbarism, of the war to the knife. Fathers had fought there, fought against the Rif, and now they and their sons looked to the sea, looked at the bitter fruit their work had borne, as the hard man of a hard land crossed the sea to deal with the forces of rebellion. Some of the mothers of the city had already begun to tell it to their children, to be good, to be polite, to behave well - to do so, or the Moroccans would get yet! But most did not, for to talk about monsters under the bed or some mythical creature had the comfort of knowing that it wasn't really real, that when the boy broke down in tears, crying, that one could hold him to one's breast, hold the heaving child as his eyes ran red with tears and whisper, cradle him, tell him that it wasn't real, that it wasn't true, that he was good - that good children would never be punished, that the monsters would stay away.
But the Moroccans were coming, and that they knew, was real.
The first ship, with tugs maneuvering it into its berth, stopped in the port, the engines falling silent and the sounds of the seagulls and the lapping waters of the wave suddenly seeming so loud as to be deafening, against a silent and quiet city, the busy metropolis, the second city of Spain, the city of science and industry and learning, that city which now simply waited, waited in fear and agony, the maiden of the Mediterranean, the pearl of its Western reaches, so elegant and beautiful, as she fell silent and watched upon her wave-lapped shores the ships move like toys into her harbor, as hardened men talked and laughed from the gunwhales of the ship, watched a city the likes they had never before seen as it grew first from a dot on the horizon, and then become real, elegant, beautiful - but they were here, the ones to patrol it, the ones who would have power. Perhaps the waves that washed against the shore, perhaps the sound of the water, perhaps that was the city as she wept, the city which had for nearly a thousand years not known the footsteps of the men of Africa, of the men of the crescent, as they arrived in the name of the Cross to defend against the enemies of European civilization.
It was him of course, to come ashore first, as soon as the sailors had tied the ropes and put down the gangplank, the oak wood rich and dark against the gentle tossing of the waves, connecting the ship of steel to the land of stone. He stepped ashore onto the land, swaying slightly as he adjusted back to the firmness of the soil, while the strains of the Marcha Real - not the Spanish anthem - played out into the sweltering air. The musicians hands' shook as they played it, shook as they gazed upon the man who had come, this commissar of this supposed Republic based from Madrid, sent by distant men to bring order to their city, to restore peace - this man who came from the sands of a desert, and called it too peace. They watched, and they wondered, wondered what the future held, wondered what fate destiny intended for their city.
For General Francisco Franco, at the head of the Army of Morocco had arrived to Barcelona, and their orders were to exterminate the enemies of Spain, of Catholicism, and of Civilization. And in that, as they had done in a thousand villages, a thousand points of resistance across the distant land of Morocco, where they had by the sword and by the gun destroyed the fierce men of the sands of the Rif and brought their warriors into the service of Spain, to them themselves return in hand to crush in turn the enemies of Spain - in that, they would succeed. In that, there could be no doubt. The price of defeat was too great.
In the battle between civilization and barbarism, between Christianity and atheism, between loyalty and treason, between Spain and separatism, there could be no compromise, there could be no retreat, there could be only victory.
Franco would triumph, of that there could be no doubt.
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