dread of death.

This is a beginning under siege: An image of anarchist militia members bearing the coffin of Buenaventura Durruti, draped in the red and black flag. Barcelona still stands behind them, its walls and columns intact even if the government and society had splintered apart under the duress of fierce military and aristocratic reaction to the liberatory desires of many ordinary Spaniards. Madrid, where Durruti had died, already reflected this national cataclysm. Its buildings were smashed by artillery and bombing. Madrid and its occupants were subject to Nazi enthusiasm for an expendable laboratory to test their new Fascist war-things. Durruti had led an exhausted column of anarchist volunteers to come to the aid of Republican soldiers and common folk defending Madrid from the onslaught of Franco's Fascist troops, recently recalled from suppressing colonial territory in Morocco. While new technologies of mass warfare were being hurled from the sky, Durruti died a prosaic and singular death when his pistol went off accidentally. He was carrying his own bullet all along.

More than a half-million people crowded the streets for his last turn beneath the black flags. Within three years the horrors of right-wing terror that Durruti had fought against his entire life would reach even that last radical bastion in Catalonia. The mass graves would fill with the punctured and rent bodies of Franco's violence. It is a kind of unearthly dread, to struggle against what seems without end: the twined monster of militarism and capitalism.

[@]