The train carried military personnel of the Spanish Republican Army, men of the 49th Mixed Brigade being transferred to another posting. As it stood in the station, it was ringed by civilians, the ordinary throng of a market town whose railway was its lifeline to the rest of the shrinking Republican zone. Xàtiva itself was old and unremarkable to the war, a place of the Valencian interior with a castle on its hill and no front line anywhere near. There was nothing about that morning to suggest the station was a target worth twenty bombs, and yet it was about to become one.

The attack was carried out at the behest of Francisco Franco's Nationalist government by the Aviazione Legionaria, the expeditionary air force sent by Fascist Italy to fight on his side. Five Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers had taken off from Palma de Mallorca, out across the Mediterranean. At around 10:30 they arrived over Xàtiva and, from a height of 4,200 meters, released twenty bombs of 250 kilograms each onto the railway station below. From that altitude the crews would have seen almost nothing of who was on the platform. The bombs fell on the standing train and the crowd pressed around it.

One hundred and twenty-nine people were killed, one hundred and nine of them instantly, and more than two hundred were wounded. Most of the dead were soldiers of the 49th Mixed Brigade, but the crowd meant the killing did not stop at uniforms. Among the victims were fourteen women and three children, people who had come to the station only to greet the men on the train. The brigade was so shattered by its losses that the Republican command gave up trying to rebuild it, scattering the survivors among other units instead. A fighting formation, and a good part of the crowd that had come to welcome it, were erased in a few minutes.

What makes the morning harder to bear is how little was left to decide. By February 1939 the Republic was collapsing. Barcelona had already fallen in January, and the central-southern zone that still held Xàtiva would surrender within weeks; Franco declared final victory on 1 April 1939. The soldiers of the 49th Mixed Brigade were not defending a threatened front but being shuffled through the wreckage of a losing war. The bombs that killed them and the families around them fell on a town whose fate, and whose country's fate, was already effectively sealed.

For decades the dead of the station were part of a history Spain was slow to speak about aloud. The bombing joined the grim roll of Republican towns struck from the air by Italian and German aircraft during the war, from Guernica to Barcelona, raids that helped make the deliberate bombing of civilians a signature of the conflict. What happened at Xàtiva was, in the end, an ordinary example of an extraordinary cruelty: a rail junction in the Republican rear, a transferring brigade, a crowd of well-wishers, and a formation of bombers willing to release its load on all of them together from four kilometers up. Xàtiva has kept the memory, in local accounts and images that preserve what happened on its platform, and in the quiet arithmetic of 129 names. The station still stands and still runs trains, but for the town, the morning of 12 February 1939 remains a wound that no timetable ever quite covers over.