The meadow behind our house was warm and sunny. We had a large sandbox there. Next to it was the barbecue place with a foundation made of many reddish square stone plates, located in the shade of two birch trees Grandma had planted before the war. 

When Mom had guests for tea time, my sister and I played either in the sandbox or around the barbecue place. We kids knew that ants were living between the stone plates, both large black ones and also red nasty fire ants. They built their tunnels under the moss covering the spaces between the reddish sandstone plates. Poking a hole into the fluffy soft moss would lead to an eruption of ants, rushing out to defend their territories.

We sometimes killed a few, but Grandma became very upset when she saw us doing this. Both Mom and Grandma taught us to respect animals and plants.

One summer evening my sister and I played on the sandstone plates. We removed some of the moss just to peek into the crawly underworld, as we always did. But what we saw on that day was an unforgettable picture, so dramatic that it is still in my mind after some forty-two years.

Bathing in the purple evening light two armies were engaged in a bitter fight for life-and-death. The red and black populations fought each other. Increasingly curious, we removed a few feet of moss cover. As we did, we saw thousands of ants emerging from underground supply lines between the interstices of the square bricks, and heading to the front line, where they engaged in a wild, prolonged combat of courage and fate. At the battle line thousands of red and black ants agglomerated, and were biting each other to death. 

We were deeply shocked by what we saw, but we couldn’t disengage our attention from the desperate battle scene. Reds were killing the blacks, and blacks were killing the reds, yet the frontline seemed to be static.  

Then, as dusk fell, we played God and drowned the battle zone with two bin loads of water.