Button and bullets

Field-walking on Thursday  : Belchite

Seventy-seven years after the noise, smoke, confusion of the battle here, the archaeologists and descendants walk under a peaceful blue sky ; in a long line across the ploughed field. Looking down, every few paces we find a piece of pottery, shrapnel or a button,  and mark it.We are doing field walking, then a search across the same area with a metal detector. We find a bullet, a coke can.

 Des, from Ireland, finds the big discovery, a hand grenade. He tells me digging brings you much closer to the land than being a tourist. What you find or don't find tells a story: after a battle, Republicans picked up metal because they needed to re-cycle it into new bullets. A mug he found in a trench made that connection to a person.

In this short week we have felt a bond grow, working with people from all over. Frieda from Glasgow lost her grandfather the retreat on March `1938, and the sacrifice changed her family. It was quite a long painful time before he was listed as "died in Spain".  Penny's Greek Cypriot father came to the States, then went to Spain as a volunteer to repair trucks. He came home but never talked to his child about Spain. Hardworking Louis (who biked through Khazakistan) and Morgan come from opposite ends of Canada, Sue and Bethan share the experience and stories of many digs they've been on.

Tonight we had our last dinner at the cafe, before we come home and they stay on another week.
After paella of rice with mussels and calamari and other mysteries, Wendy jokes ,"Oh look I found a bullet in my paella-Oh, no, it's a shell~!"

The boy from the Basque country sang his national song, and we replied with "Valley of Jarama",  and then sang our departure, from a song of the Internationals..."We will leave Spain...to fight on other fronts"
"Ya salimos de Espana, por luchar en otras frentes"

Wednesday, 16 September
In the early morning light, Codo's streets are empty. Only the chattering of birds, and the distant tinkle of bells on the herd of goats walking to pasture. An old woman in a pinafore sweeps the  street in front of her house and disappears. All through the hot afternoon, the streets are silent. In the bar, there are few customers ; only a spaghetti western on televison, whose dry landscape seem very like Spain.
The clock tower strikes the hour, then strikes again four minutes later- all through the day and night.
And the older people look,and return a cautious, "Hola", after they have gone past. We wonder, does history sit heavily here?

We started digging early today, high on the plateau above town,with the sparse ground dampened by last night's thunderstorm and rain. The previous day's diggers had been forced to wrap bandanas around their faces to keep off the fine dust blowing in eyes, nose and ears, whipped up by the wind. Today, a mechanical digger made good progress clearing debris from the trenches; while we volunteers scraped the floor and walls of the sheep shelter. Traces of several cooking fires were found, along with fragments of glass and coal, to add to the remnants of meals found earlier- a few lamb bones and barley.

The journalist Alvaro Minguito and his cameraman David Fernandez interviewed the volunteers to find out why we had come to spain to take part in the project. In Belchite we  talked in the ruins of the town about our uncle Sidney Shosteck's death there. Elaine spoke of how his going to Spain had influenced our family; in our grandmother's grief, and the silence and loss of  family history caused by the McCarthy era in the US.  In the fifties, Brigaders such as Sidney were marked "premature antifascists" and fear for our father's job  cut us off from our mother's communist relatives.

Sidney was always there in the background, unspoken and unknown but someone whose deeply held convictions and desire to make the world a better place  served as a model for us.

Wendy described how we  reconstructed Sidney's story like a jigsaw puzzle from photos, letters, and newspaper clippings, . In the past  20 years, she had been privileged to meet many Brigadistas, and hear their moving testimony.

 The narrative now was given shape by being able to identify the streets Sidney walked down.Our job when we return will  be to fill out the picture.

In Belchite we laughed and sang with the 2 journalists. A very moving moment came when we stood  in a bombed out church. Near here, German planes had flattened many houses. We sang "Gehat hob ikh a heym", a deeply felt song of loss of home, written in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.

"Once I had a home to comfort me..
the years I spent to build it, in one breath,
to rubble smashed it in a moment's time"