The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight.
Snow blows through the olive groves, sifting against the tree roots.
Snow drifts over the mounds with small headboards. The olive trees are thin in the cold wind because their lower branches were once cut to cover tanks, and the dead sleep cold in the small hills above the Jarama River. It was cold that February when they died there and since then the dead have not noticed the changes of the seasons. It is two years now since the Lincoln Battalion held for four and a half months along the heights of the Jarama, and the first American dead have been a part of the earth of Spain for a long time now. But in the spring the rain will come to make the earth kind again.