The year was 1943 and the fall had brought with it the changing of colors along the Catalonian mountain pass through to Col du Pourtalet in the Pyrenees. The Basque Maquis’ heart would have reveled in the crisp cool air of this landscape but he was thinking about how the summer of 1940 had brought bad news in Biarritz as the Maginot line collapsed under the relentless forces of Hitler’s blitz. Gotson had crossed the Pyrenees many times from 1936 to 1939. He and Dominic Fournier, Adrian’s father, had been in Guernica during the infamous fire bombing, retreating to Bilboa… surviving the War of the North and eventually held out at last in Madrid. Nightmares of squadrons in waves… Junkers, Dorniers, Heinkles, Fiat and Messerschmitt fighters … he could still see the bombs dropping and the strafing. Joining a handful of students led by Francisco Oscuro and his “Dark Ones” they stood up to the Condor Legion as long as they could in Madrid and then slipped out, or melded with the population. The confusion and rubble the fall of Madrid, the Republican dream, his hopes for a liberated Basque Country, all was crushed along with it and he returned to Biarritz.
Having set up a chocolate shop in Biarritz, Gotson retired from the revolution but still longed for the overthrow of Franco’s Falangists. Dominic left the struggle then too and went on to Paris. Both were disillusioned with the betrayals by the Stalinists and the constant infighting... the power struggles between one faction or another in Madrid. Being a witness to the atrocity; the murder of over a thousand Nationalist prisoners ordered by the Stalinist advisor, Koltzov, Gotson became more loyal to his people, the Basques of northern Spain and southwest France, than any allegiance to political ideology. Political ideals all sounded good in the propaganda of the time but the sight of such brazen disregard for human life was what he’d been struggling against in the dust and ruins of Guernica and Madrid. The crimes of the Republic under Soviet usurpation equaled those of General Mola on the other side… No pasaron, indeed.
He'd seen Paris fall to the insanity of another form of fascism and he also saw this as an opportunity to gather forces sufficient to wrest Basque country from Franco. While at the same time he did this, he could put a thorn into the Nazi’s on the French side of the Pyrenees. Nazi oppression would make it easier to organize a guerrilla movement now that France itself had been occupied. After all, Gotson was more talented at organizing guerrillas than he was at managing his chocolate shop. He'd left the shop the year before to a cousin and disappeared from Biarritz before the Gestapo would surely ferret him out and, took up the fight he’d abandoned in March of 1939.
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