A small Spanish town lay quietly couched in the hills of the Basque country. The first late April fruits were beginning to fill the thick mountain trees. At the bottom of the hill, just below the town, the reedy flat of el Juncal was calm after its first spring floods, and the streams that had choked it with torrents after the early snow thaws were now seeping in more placidly.

It was market day for the surrounding countryside, and the peasants left their vine trellised cottages and farms to come into town and exchange the spring produce. They cared little that the nearby hermitage of N. Sa. de La Antigua had formerly been the meeting place of the Parliament of Basque Senators. They knew of the ancient oak in its courtyard--time honored symbol of the free Basques--but they marveled not that Ferdinand and Isabella in 1476, and Charles the Fifth again in 1526, had sworn to uphold the Basque Fueros under its overspreading canopy.

At 4:30 the market place was full and peasants were still coming in, when the church bells rang the alarm for approaching airplanes. The towns-people who crowded the narrow streets knew the alarm meant that something horrible would follow, but many of them had never seen an airplane. They milled about in hopeless confusion till a Catholic priest took charge and told them to seek refuge in cellars and dugouts.

Five minutes later a single German bomber appeared, circled low over the town, dropped six heavy bombs on the railroad station, and left. After another five minutes a second bomber came and pounded the center of town. Fifteen minutes passed in quiet, then three Junkers 52s arrived 10 continue the destruction and from then on the bombing grew in intensity. Seven thousand inhabitants and three thousand refugees were first stampeded by hand grenades and heavy bombs, driven below the ground by machinegun strafing, and then buried beneath the houses that were wrecked and burned by incendiary bombs. Many were killed in the fields or in the street leading down to Casa de Juntas. Sheep and cattle, as well as the humans who had brought them to market, were wiped out. The only retaliation measures were performed by the Basque clergy, who blessed and prayed for kneeling crowds in the crumbling dugouts.

At dusk, the bombers left the town a horrible mass of red, heaping ruins whose flames could be seen reflecting in clouds of smoke above the moutains for miles away. Many survivors took their carts, piled high with such household goods as could be saved, and crowded the roads all night long to the northern seaport town of Bilbao. But many, unable to get away, stayed round the burning town, lying on mattresses or searching for children and other relatives.

The next morning, April 28, 1937, papers all over the world reported that the Basque town of Guernica had been destroyed by German bombing planes flying for General Franco in his rebel offensive to take the Bilbao front.

A day later, on May 1, Pablo Picasso, strong Loyalist, began work on a mural depicting that first and most ruthless bombing of an open town which was not a military objective, for the Spanish Government Building at the Paris World's Fair. His mural is now in the Fogg Art Museum, and will hang there till the 20th of October.