"Later I'll read you Tabio's speech. Or at least the high lights, in English. You'll get a pretty good idea of the things I believe in."
"What was it like on the other side, Matt? In the war, I mean. Or don't you want to talk about the war?"
It's now or never, he thought. Tell her about the war, tell it to her straight. If she's ever going to see it, she's got to see it now. "I don't like to talk about it," he said, "but I will. I guess I owe it to you to talk about it. I was there when it started, and I kept hollering that it had started, but no one would believe me."
"In Poland?"
"Hell, no! In Madrid. The summer of '36. I reached Madrid in the fourth week of July, and by September I'd seen enough of the Nazis and the Italians to know it was World War Two." The words came easily, the whole fabric. Tabio had told the story as a historian. This was the other way it could be told, the way of the eyewitness, of the partisan. He told her everything, about the fighting in Spain and about the slaughter of the innocents; about the grotesque ballets of death and disintegration on the green tables of Geneva; about the arrows of Falange, reaching out from the festers of Spain to the New World. Everything but the role of Ansaldo.
"Now," he said, "I think you can guess why I'm so bothered about this war, why I sometimes act as if I have a very personal stake in it. Please try to understand what I mean, Jerry."
She was silent for a long moment. "I think I do," she said. "For the past few days I've been thinking about the war. Ever since—oh, you know since when. I've been thinking that if I don't do anything else, maybe I'll join the Army as a nurse when we leave here."
"You've got it bad, haven't you?"
"I don't know what I've got, darling. All I know is that I don't have the right to be a Me Firster any more. Do you think I'm right about that?"
"Baby, listen to me. You don't have to go to Bataan to get into the war. It's spread everywhere. The front stretches from Murmansk to Manila to San Hermano. And it's the same front."