You'd hear the double boom of the guns, then the whirling cloth- ripping incoming rush and dirt would fountain brownly up among the grapevines. Seeking a Vantage Point War had the pointless and dangerless dumbness that it has when guns first come into action, before there is proper observation and the shooting is accurately controlled, and your correspondent walked down along the railway track to find a place to watch what Generalissimo Franco's men were doing across the river. Sometimes in war there is a deadliness which makes all walking upright within a certain range either foolishness or bravado. But there are other times, before things really start, when it's like the old days when you walked around in the bull ring just before the fight. Up the Tortosa road, planes were dicing and machine-gunning.
German planes are absolutely methodical, though.
They do their job, and, if you are part of their job, you're out of luck. If you are not included in their job, you can go very close to them and watch them as you can watch lions feeding. If their orders are to strafe the road on their way home, you will get it. Otherwise, when they are finished with their job on their particular objective, they go off like bank clerks, flying home. You crossed a stretch of road that in another day would be worth your life to sprint across, and headed for a white house that stood above a canal that paralleled the Ebro and dominated all the yellow town across the river where the Fascists were preparing their attack.