 Brecht makes use of a dramatic situation to show how Teresa Carrar, the wife of a fisherman, intends to keep her two sons from going off to war. She fails, because for the fascists the worker s cap that her oldest son wears when he goes fishing is a sufficient reason for shooting him as a suspected red. Those aren t human beings, Señora Carrar concludes, That s leprosy, and it has to be eradicated. She hands out the rifles that she had hidden from the fascist forces, and together with her younger son she herself heads for the front.