Children of the Days (17 page)

In 1791 another owner of lands and slaves sent a letter from Haiti: “The blacks are very obedient and will remain so always,” it said.

The letter was making its way to Paris when the impossible happened: on the night of August 22, a stormy night, the greatest slave uprising in the entire history of humanity exploded from the depths of the Haitian jungle. And those “very obedient” blacks went on to humble the army of Napoleon Bonaparte that was soon to overrun Europe from Madrid to Moscow.

And it was the year 79.

Pliny the Elder was sailing the world at the helm of a Roman fleet.

When he entered the Bay of Naples, he saw black smoke rising out of Vesuvius like a tall tree opening its branches to the sky. Suddenly night fell at noon, the world shook with violent tremors and a bombardment of fiery stones buried the carefree city of Pompeii.

A few years before, fire had razed the city of Lugdunum and Seneca had written: “A single night lay between the greatest city and none.”

Lugdunum revived and is now called Lyon. Pompeii did not disappear; it lay intact under the ashes, preserved by the volcano that destroyed it.

At dawn on this day in 1944, Paris went crazy.

The Nazi occupation was over.

The first tanks and armored cars had entered the city a few hours before. “Is it the Americans?” people asked.

The names scrawled in white paint on those tanks and armored cars were: “Guadalajara,” “Ebro,” “Teruel,” “Brunete,” “Madrid,” “Don Quijote,” “Durruti” . . .

The first liberators of Paris were the Spanish Republicans.

Defeated in their own land, they had fought for France.

They were convinced that Spain's rescue would follow.

They were wrong.

Ivan the Terrible was born on this day in 1530.

To educate the people in the Christian faith, in Moscow he built the great cathedral of Saint Basil, which remains the loveliest symbol of the city, and to perpetuate his Christian power he sent a few sinners to hell, his rivals, his relatives:

he set the dogs on Prince Andrei and Archbishop Leonid;

he burned Prince Pyotr alive;

with an ax he chopped up the princes Aleksandr, Repnin, Snuyon, Nikolai, Dmitri, Telepnev and Tyutin;

he drowned his cousin Vladimir in the river, as well as his sister-in-law Aleksandra and his aunt Eudoxia;

he poisoned five of his seven wives;

and with a blow from his cane he killed his son, his favorite, the one who bore his name, because the affront was too great.

In 1924 an imprisoned Adolf Hitler dictated his book
Mein Kampf
. On a day like today, he transmitted to the scribe what for him was the fundamental lesson of history:

Fourteen years later, Benito Mussolini proclaimed in his
Manifesto of Race:

On this day in 1963, before an immense crowd carpeting the vast open mall of Washington, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed out loud:

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low . . . ”

At the time the FBI had declared King “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation,” and numerous spies followed his every step, day and night.

But he continued denouncing racial humiliation and the Vietnam War, which turned black men into cannon fodder, and without any hesitation he said that his country was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

In 1968 a bullet split his skull.

Disappeared: graveless dead, nameless graves.

And also:

old-growth forests,

stars in city nights,

the fragrance of flowers,

the taste of fruit,

letters written by hand,

old cafés where there was time to waste,

soccer in the street,

the right to walk,

the right to breathe,

secure jobs,

secure retirement,

doors without locks,

a sense of community

and common sense.

In 1943 during World War II, General George Patton harangued his soldiers:

“You are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight!

“Americans love a winner! Americans will not tolerate a loser! Americans despise cowards! Americans play to win all of the time! That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war!

“Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they are He Men!”

He must have been reincarnated. Before entering the US Army, he had been a warrior in Carthage and Athens, a gentleman at the court of England and a field marshal for Napoleon Bonaparte.

General Patton died at the end of 1945, run over by a truck.

A monument unveiled in Germany in the year 2009 honors soldiers who deserted.

Human history has left many memorials in its wake, but recognition such as this is certainly unusual.

An homage to traitors? Deserters are indeed traitors. What they betray is war.

In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland because Poland was going to invade Germany.

While a million and a half German soldiers flooded the map of Poland and bombs poured down from German planes, Hitler explained his doctrine of preemptive war: prevention is better than treatment; I have to kill them before they kill me.

Hitler founded a school of military thought. From then on, preemptive is the claim made by all digestive wars, when countries devour countries.

A year after the invasion of Poland, Hitler had gobbled up half of Europe and was still on his headlong rampage. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France had already fallen or were about to fall, and the nightly bombings of London and other British cities were under way.

In its edition for today in 1940, the Spanish daily
ABC
reported that “one hundred and sixteen enemy planes” had been shot down, making no attempt to hide its satisfaction at “the great success of the Reich's attacks.”

On the front page Generalissimo Francisco Franco smiled triumphantly. Gratitude was one of his virtues.

In the year 1970, Salvador Allende won the election and was sworn in as president of Chile.

He said, “I will nationalize our copper mines.”

And he said, “I won't get out of here alive.”

He kept his word on both counts.

King Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, was born today in 1638.

The Sun King dedicated his life to glorious wars against his neighbors and the meticulous care of his curled wig, his splendid capes and his high-heeled shoes.

Under his reign, two successive famines killed more than two million Frenchmen.

The figure is known thanks to the mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal half a century before. Known too is the cause, thanks to Voltaire, who some time later wrote: “Good policy relies on this secret: knowing how to let die of hunger the people who allow the rest of us to live.”