ROUTED IN SPAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 131, 4 June 1937, Page 8

ROUTED IN SPAIN

ITALIAN DIVISIONS

HEMINGWAY'S ACCOUNT

It was bright and clear in the red hills north of Guadalajara as we stood on the rocky edge of a plateau, where a white road slanted down into a steep valley, and watched the Fascist troops on a tableland that rose sheer across the narrow valley, wirelessed Ernest Hemingway from Madrid to the American Press on March 28.

"There comes one up that trail," said a Spanish officer beside me. "They have a machine-gun nest there. Look, there's three more. Look over there, five more;"

The Fascist soldiers, weaving regular Spanish, army uniforms with flapping blanket capes, plodded unhurriedly about the business of fortifying their position along the; steep bluff. Below us in the valley were the brown huddled houses of the towns of Utande and Mudeux. To the left lay Hita, like a cubist picture against the steep cone-shaped hill. . ■, . The white road below us led around and behind the opposite plateau. After the Brihuega battle an advance along it beyond' Utande,. which is as far as the Government has now gone, would have forced a Fascist withdrawal to at least Jadraque. But the retreating Fascists destroyed this road, so the Government forces decided to stand on their present excellent positions rather than advance further along the main Aragon road and extend their dangerous left flank. A RESERVE DIVISION. While the left plateau is held by Spanish Fascist troops, the line across the main Aragon road is reported held by Italians of a division that was held in reserve and' not used in the Brihuega battle. Except for counter battery fire, with loyalists using captured Italian guns and shells, the front was absolutely quiet and with every prospect of remaining so until the Italian troops have had time to be organised. Ev<*n then, this correspondent doubts whether they will attempt another attack in tho Brihuega sector, as the strength of the Government positions is now fully:: appreciated and the possibilities of defence were brought out in battle, while signs of the Italians' bloodiest defeat in the first battle in this war fought on a world War scale of organisation still cover a ten kilometre-wide battlefield. ' It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of this : battle, where native Spanish' battalions, composed mainly of boys untrained last November not only fought stubbornly in defence with other better-trained troops, but attacked -in a complicatedly planned and .perfectly organised military, operation only, comparable to the finest in the Great War,. '■ . , ''■'' This correspondent has been stuaying the battle for four, days, going over the ground with the.commanders who directed it and the officers who fought in it, checking the positions and following the tank trails and states flatly that Brihuega will take its place in military "-history with the other decisive battles of the world.-. The scrub oak woods north-west o£ the palace of Ibarra, close to an angle in the Brihuega and Utande road are still full of Italian dead which burial squads have not yet reached. Tank tracks lead to where they died, not as cowards, but defending skilfullyconstructed machine-gun and automatic rifle positions, where the tanks found them and where they still lie. The untilled fields and oak fores, are rocky and the Italians were forced to build rocky parapets rather than attempt to dig the soil where a spade wouldn't cut, and the horrible effect of a shell from the guns of the sixty tanks which fought with the infantry m the Brihuega battle bursting in and against these rock piles made a nightmare of corpses. The small Italian tante armed only with machincrguns, weie as helpless against the medmrnsLed Government . tanks, armed wUh cannon and machine-guns as Coast Guard cutters would be against ""to'th, final -»»". ™*V"]£ h,!£ SiTwas sThrfc-o"dlnation of those and the dead. . ■ ' •■