the fallen. You collect them and you bury them. We tried to keep away from such places.
* * *
Sancho’s parents are simple people. Long years of hard work are written on their faces. Their eyes are red. The mother gives the occa-sional loud sob. Then the father claps her lovingly on the back and she falls silent. Sancho was an only child.
A strange character, Sancho. He hated the war from the first day. He laughed at the bit of idealism that we all retained within us. Every day he would prove to us again that we were sacrificing ourselves for a band of shirkers. He had no illusions. And he did his best to destroy our illusions.
"Then why are you still here?" we often asked him. "Me?" he brushed his thin hair back from his forehead in astonishment. "I’m not staying here. They just won’t let me go. As soon as people are needed for a desertion course, I’m gone."
The first course was for radio operators. "That is one month’s life insurance!" said Sancho and volunteered. After one month he came back. And since then he had been going into combat with a thirty-five-pound box on his back.
As radio operator he took part in the bayonet assault in Barchaba. He was one of the very few who returned unscathed. On the next day he told us that he wasn’t going to go on.
"What do you mean?" we asked him.
"Trust Sancho," was all he would say.
The next morning he went to see the battalion doctor, a particu-larly hated character. There would often be people who wanted to shoot him. The story was told of a soldier who went to see him after an Egyptian shell had ripped his head off. "I’m not going to be taken in by shirkers," said the doctor. "I have seen the likes of you. Take an aspirin and get lost before I tell your superior officer to clap you in gaol!"
Sancho went to the doctor and complained of attacks of depres-sion. The doctor gave him aspirin and two days’ rest. Sancho threw the aspirin in the latrine and read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn.
On the third day he went back to the doctor in the best of moods, invited him to a rumba, and danced with him through the medical