coldhearted scientist وداد

I found this place by chance; then it got written up. Here is Gilberto Bosques, in conversation with Elena Poniatowska, on watching British planes come in at night over southern France, en route to Germany during the second world war. Look at the prose he speaks:

Muchas veces no bajé, en la noche era un espectáculo ver las luces de las formaciones de aviones cruzando el cielo, sus reflejos sobre el agua, los reflectores cruzándose en el espacio…. Repito, el espectáculo era formidable. Volaba primero una escuadra pionera que iba a soltar las bengalas sobre Colonia, y señalar los puntos de bombardeo. En Alemania donde fuimos prisioneros después, toda la cantidad de luz de esos aviones sobre el río Rhin y después con los incendios de Colonia que oíamos a unos 20 kilómetros así como veíamos caer los aviones cuando los enfocaban los grandes reflectores, es algo que jamás se me ha olvidado.

He, and the Spanish exiles he was hosting, were to go into bomb shelters but he often didn’t because “at night it was a spectacle to see the lights of the planes’ formations cross the sky, and their reflections on the water, and the searchlights crossing each other in space…. In Germany where we were prisoners later, all the light of those planes on the Rhine and then from the explosions in Cologne, which we heard from 20 kilometers away, and the sight of the planes descending when the great searchlights focused on them, I have never forgotten it.”

Axé.