A Long Petal of the Sea

by Isabel Allende

Get ready, lads, To kill again, to die once more And to cover the blood with flowers. —Pablo Neruda “Bloody was all the earth of man” The Sea and the Bells

The young soldier, though, never forgot the name of his savior. As soon as he could sit up and drink water on his own, he was told about the feat performed at the Estacion del Norte by an auxiliary who had brought him back from the land of death. He was assailed with questions: everyone wanted to know whether heaven and hell really existed, or had been invented by the bishops to instill fear in people. The boy recovered before the end of the war, and two years later in Marseilles had the name of Victor Dalmau tattooed beneath the scar.