EYES ON IBERIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 285, 8 December 1944, Page 12

EYES ON IBERIA

Some Echoes From The . Spanish Civil War

(Written for "The Listener’ by

ELIZABETH A.

MILES

TRANGE things are happening in that corner of the Mediterranean that skirts the borders of France and Spain. While the eyes of the world are on the struggle at the FrancoGerman border, Spanish patriots are making history in the little town of Perpignan, near the Mediterranean coast. According to thé cables, they raised the Republican flag over the Spanish consulate there, and waged some kind of war with General Franco. This is significant. It means that Free Spain is on the march: and if that is the case, Spanish refugees all over the world will be watching for the

appropriate time to strike, They are reported to have declared that the banner of Free Spain will fly over every Spanish city before the end of this winter. The circumstances were different in Stockholm in 1937. Then the officially appointed representative of the legal Government of Spain, Senora Isabella de Palencia, arrived to take over the consulate from the resident representative, who had elected to support General Franco, the Fascist. General Franco’s follower refused to hand over, and Stockholm saw the strange spectacle of two rival consulates trying to transact the business of

their country. Franco, of course, won the civil war, and Isabella de Palencia disappeared. For years very few people heard of her, and then one day a Spanish woman refugee was brought into hospital in Mexico City severely burned as the result of a gasoline explosion. Fourteen eminent. doctors, all fellow Spanish refugees, attended her while her pulse registered 150 and her temperature dropped to three degrees below normal. Isabella de Palencia lived, and the doctors marvelled. Such vitality, they said, in a woman of 61, was miraculous. To England, to Sweden, to Canada Before Isabella de Palencia left Spain for Stockholm, she visited England, walking in on a conference of the Labour Party in that country, and demanding to know what democratic, labour people meant by allowing their Government to choke off supplies of food and munitions to a country whose legal Government was beset by Fascist rebels. Then, together with Senor Domingo, a former Minister of Education; and his wife, and Father Luis Sarasola, Catholic priest, she made a tour of Canada and tried to wake the consciente of the Canadian people to an understanding of her country’s tragic plight. It was there

that I met her standing on a cold, bleak, railway station in North-western Ontario on a chilly night in early spring. A group of citizens had gathered there to meet the train from the east, and on that train were Senora de Palencia and her party. A meeting was held for her in the City Hall, and there I saw her stand, as evidence of her amazing vitality, for three solid hours, first making a speech of her own, in which she described graphically and in perfect English the plight of her beloved Spain, and then translating phrase by phrase the speeches of Father Sarasola and Senor Domingo. It was strange to hear the beautiful, flowing Spanish tongue in a prosaic

paper making, wheatexporting town in the Canadian middle west. Strange to see these romantic figures in the solidly respectable setting of the City Hall, where the portraits of the first mayor, a Victorian pioneer with a frightful beard, stood side by side with that of the Prince of Wales. Elk heads, buffalo heads, moose heads, shot by early settlers looked down on them. In Montreal the party had been attacked and "pushed around" in the corridor of their hotel by Fascist-minded university students. In Fort William we tried to get the mayor and city

council to extend them an official greeting, but the position of the party was obscured by a fog of propaganda. Some of the papers said they were "reds." "Are They to Have No Friends?" But this episode was only one of many that the people who were disturbed by the threat of Fascism in Europe saw in those early days. There was the visit of Dr. Norman Bethune, for instance. Dr. Bethune was an eminent surgeon of Montreal, Chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery of the Sacred Heart Hospital. Dr. Bethune was an anti-Fascist, one of the early ones. Son of a Presbyterian minister, he sympathised, with the underdog, and when the call came from Spain for doctors to tend the wounded, Dr. Bethune threw up his various appointments and travelled to Madrid. There he saw the need for a blood transfusion service, and so he organised one-one of the first blood transfusion units to put into practice under active service conditions the theory of extracting human blood and preserving it at a low temperature until it was needed. Dr. Bethune visited the city in North-western Ontario, too. He arrived

one foggy morning via lake steamer-a forceful, arresting personality. I was present when he Was interviewed in his hotel by the representative of the local press. He showed us snapshots he had taken from the back of his blood transfusion van-snapshots of refugees along the road from Madrid to Valencia, old women holding up their arms and begging to be taken into the truck, which was already overcrowded with people who had fallen exhausted by the roadside. The newspaperman ventured to ask if the Spanish Government were not receiving some help from Russia, Dr. Bethune turned on him in a spasm of anger. "My God, man!" he shouted, "are they to have no friends?" Some of our local Committee in Aid of Spanish Democracy accompanied Dr. Bethune to the next town, 400 miles away. They. said he drove like a man possessed. They stopped on the road at one point and held a council. Then one of their number approached Dr, Bethune and suggested that perhaps someone else had better drive. Dr. Bethune grinned, and informed them that he held the speed record from Madrid to Valencia, dodging shells all the way, and had never upset anyone yet. But he let the others drive after that, From Spain to China And now Dr. Bethune is dead. After his work in Spain was done, he went to China to carry on the fight against Fascism there. And a year or two ago he died of blood poisoning on the battle field. One can imagine the conditions under which he must have died-a handful of overworked, under-trained Chinese medical assistants around him, practically no medical supplies; starvation and filth. And now as the end of the war in Europe approaches, the patriots of Spain are lifting up their heads again, It seems that the fall of Hitler and Mussolini will bring in its train the ruin of many of the lesser lights of Fascism. Refugees in Mexico, in that corner of France that borders on Spain, prisoners in .Franco’s concentration camps, are gathering their forces together and preparing to strike. Franco’s authority grows weaker daily. Gil Robles, wealthy Fascist and former backer and ally of Franco, is reported to have deserted him. At all events, the political pot is boiling again, and big events are impending in the Iberian peninsula.