DYING SPANIARDS

Evening Star, Issue 22463, 7 October 1936, Page 13

DYING SPANIARDS

HOW HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF A French peasant woman last week peeped apprehensively round the corner of her stone house on the bluff above Behobia, as sweating, barebacked Moors and red-bereted Carlist boys blasted their way foot by foot toward the Spanish border . town of Irun (says the ‘ Literary Digest,’ of September 12). At each dust-spurt kicked up by a stray bullet, she > started. For at that very corner, 63 years before, her grandmother had been killed by a stray. bullet from a battle between a previous generation of Carlists and an earlier Spanish Republic. For four years, those nineteenth-cen-tury Carlists slaughtered other Spaniards in a vain effort to put Don Carlos VII., Duke of Madrid, on the Throne. They destroyed the Republic, though the throne went, not to Don Carlos, but to Alfonso XII. To-day, the Spanish Republic is still, by some miracle, alive. But as the civil war entered its eighth week, tlte cost in human lives piled up. Conservative estimates placed the toll at 70,000 dead (40,000 “ executed ”), 38,000 widowed, 77,000 orphaned. All without decisive gains for either side. In the north t rebel Carlists and foreign legionnaires had at the end of seven weeks shot, bombed, and grenaded their way into Irun, gateway to San Sebastian, swank summer resort of 84,000 population on the Bay of Biscay. Still to clear, before they could turn their backs on the north and their faces toward Madrid, were. 200 miles of coastline, including the cities of Tolosa, Bilbao, Santander, and Gihon, all held by the most fanatically loyal of the Republic’s defenders—the miners of Asturias province. BAYONET DRIVE. But behind the rebels, victorious at Irun, loyalist columns from Barcelona had bayoneted their way into Huesca, in the province of Aragon. And. as Irun is the gateway to San Sebastian, Huesca is the gateway to Saragosa, important rebel-held city of 184,000, on the Ebro River. Rebels winning locally here, loyalists locally there; so it went all over Spain. Rebels were battering their way into Malaga, Government naval base nearest Gibraltar, and city of 188,000; and behind them Government troops had captured the power plant of the stronghold, Granada,, site of the Alhambra, and were within firing-range of that rebel-held city of 118,000. In Central Spain, Colonel Juan Yaguez and a rebel column were inching toward Toledo, where 1,300 of their friends, wasted by. hunger, were besieged by loyalists in the massive citadel, the Alcazar. Progress, Colonel Yaguez insisted; hut admitted that while his men were clearing the hills ahead and along the road on either side near Talavcra 'de la Rema, his rearguard, 30 miles behind, was fight-* ing off attacks near Orohesa. That, even with rapid progress, the rescue would succeed was a dismal hope. Loyalists were mining the heavy walls of the Alcazar, threatening to explode 20 tons of dynamite and blow the structure to dust if the rebels arrived before tneir light cannons crumbled its historic walls. CAPITAL BOMBINGS, In the air, as on the earth, slaughter stalemated slaughter. Certainly rebel planes bombing Irun aided the rebels’ advance in the north-west corner of Spain; and four moonlight bombings of Madrid, in one of which Karl von Wiegand, ace Hearst correspondent, diving for a cellar, found Floyd Gibbons, ace Hearst thrill-hunter, already there, made the Spanish capital as uncomfortable as was Paris under German bombings 20 years ago. But the day after the fourth bombing, Madrid planes ended them by finding and blowing up in great clouds of smoke, the hidden aerodrome from which the rebel bombers came. That huge tri-motored bombers could, incredible as it seems, conceal themselves in mountain folds near the capital is easier to believe when it is known that within 50 miles of Madrid arc valleys of isolation so complete that Spaniards in them have never seen so simple a mechanical device as the wheel of a wheelbarrow, and are probably at this moment unaware of the existence of a war.

Meanwhile Madrid is feting its first air hero, Garcia de LaOalle, credited

with downing in flames two rebel bombers, and with driving a rebel pursuit plane to earth. What de LaCalle’s Elane was, despatches do not say; but is two bomber-victims were identified at tri-motored Italian Capronis, and the pursuit plane pilot, who shot himself to avoid capture, was identified as Ernesto Monico, Italian, in a brand-new Fiat. GAIETY AMID CHAOS. First newspaper men to leave Madrid for the outside world were amazed to hear rebel reports that the city is a bloody, hungry chaos. On the contrary, they report, at least between air raids and until the Government curfew sounds at eleven, cafes and amusement places are full: food, fruit, and drink are plentiful. Life is almost normal, too normal, fact, to please the Government, which, like Governments in the World War, has begun issuing scathing, denunciations of the “ battles of the cafes.” Last week, to restore a proper grimness, they marched 100,000 newlytrained militia troops through the streets, then ordered them away, part toward the south to stem the rebel advance in the region of Toledo, and part to the nearby Guadarrama front, quiet these days,. to relieve yonthtnl veterans of the line complaining that they have not had a change of clothing for weeks. Beyond Spam's frontiers, threat of general, immediate European war has subsided. No one could cap. Mussolini's boast that Italy could instantly, mobilise 8,000,000 men. WARY NEUTRALS. Even Portugal, tongue in. check after flinging nearly 2,000 fleeing loyalists back across the frontier unarmed, to be machine-gunned by rebels in the Badajos bull-ring, agreed to keep hands off. And America, after a last warning that United States citizens could nob be protected (a warning which 154 .in Madrid ignored), gave American, ships instructions (if not orders) to risk no more bombardments by Spanish planes wnich cannot distinguish foreign men-of-war from their own. Nazi Germany, suspected of too strong sympathy with the. rebels, repeated expressions of readiness to “ co-oper-ate ” with the International Non-m----tervention Committee in London, ■‘while eleven refugee ambassadors at Saint Jean de Luz, within earshot of the butchery at Inin, continued attempts to persuade the combatant* that their war should be more humane.