Collins leaned against a ruined doorway and retched in the early Spanish dawn.

In the doorway across the street, a brown abused body of a young woman half lay, half sat.  Clothes had been ripped from her.  A bayonet still clung in the hideous wound between two cold breasts, the butt of the heavy rifle causing the body to sit half-erect.  Rigor mortis had set in long ago.  The nude corpse swayed grotesquely.

Well, this is a new kind of story for this collection.

Ken Collins, the one-eyed soldier-of-fortune is surveying the bombed out town square, but only in 2D.  When three men drive up, Collins goes a little nuts and immediately fires on them.  As two lay dead, he recognizes one of them as his commanding officer, General Gonzalez.  D’oh!

Two women haul the distraught American out of the street just before the man who escaped brings a group of soldiers to seek revenge.

Something just really turned me off on this one.  Maybe it was the knife between the cold breasts, maybe it was our hero murdering his commanding officer, maybe it was the war-time setting.  It just wasn’t the breezy romp with scantily-clad living babes that typifies this collection.

Meh.

Post-Post:

• First published in March 1937.
• Also that month:  HP Lovecraft dies.