SPAIN: Moors to Lusitania

Along the dusty roads of Lusitania Spanish peasants last week saw a sight that white men had not seen in 450 years: Moorish tribesmen, bearded and burnoosed, swinging their long brass-mounted rifles on the way to fight in Spain. News of the march caused grim chuckles to a ginger-bearded fat gentleman on the Island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. Abdel Krim, Rif chieftain who mocked the armies of Spain for six years until French intervention in 1925 brought about his defeat & exile, knew last week that his own Rif tribesmen were being rearmed by the very officers they had fought, paid four pesetas a day and sent to Spain to war on the Socialist Government.

In a thick fog that covered the Straits of Gibraltar, 3,800 rebel soldiers, of whom 1,000 were Moorish tribesmen, were run past the blockade of Spain’s loyal navy in a fleet of fishing boats, mail boats and tenders. Said the captain of one:

“I had 900 men on my ship. I suddenly saw in the haze 200 yards away the Government destroyer Alcald Galiano. She blazed away with all her forward batteries.

I thought our last moment had come. She missed, but she could have torpedoed us or rammed us. She did none of these things. Our Italian Capronis dived on her and she fled.”

Transporting 3,800 men from Morocco was the rebel command’s highspot of the week. The column thus constituted was expected to makea new attack on Madrid from a new direction, the southwest. Most important boatused in the crossing was the Dato, a rebel gunboat. The lumbering Jaime I, flagship of the loyalist fleet, later discovered the Dato in the harbor of Algeciras, shelled and burned her to the water line while British officers watched through field glasses from Gibraltar across the bay. The bombardment also set fire to odorous piles of cork, waiting shipment to Britain, wrecked the British-owned Hotel Cristina and pinked the wife of the British vice consul in the arm. Cruising off Gijon, the yacht Blue Shadow was shelled by a Spanish rebel warship which killed its British owner Captain Rupert Savile and wounded his wife, whose U. S. passport described her as Eloise Drake of Norwich, Conn.

In North Spain the stalemate of rebel and loyalist forces battling in the Guadarrama Mountains continued. Barcelona remained quiet, but loyalist officers were busy organizing an expeditionary force of 14,700 men, with ships and planes to attempt to recapture the Balearic Islands from the rebels, bomb Palma, Majorca to bits.

Ignominiously back to France last week went Prince Juan, 23, youngest and healthiest of Alfonso XIII’s sons, heir to the empty throne. Last fortnight he had rushed to Rebel General Mola to offer his services, was refused.

Driving to his yacht in Cannes harbor Prince Juan was enthusiastically booed by Communist French fishermen. Next day members of Prince Juan’s family attended the christening of his first child, a daughter.

In the gentle beginning of Spain’s revolution five years ago, Madrid cafe-sitters loved to embroider the idle theory that the person really responsible for the rise of Spanish Socialism was Sosthenes Behn, U. S. board chairman of International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., the man who brought the radio and the telephone to the Spanish provinces.

“Social ideas did not get to the peasants,” they argued, “because they cannot read or write, but now they can all listen.”

On the fourth and fifth floor of I. T. & T.’s Madrid skyscraper building are the offices of the Spanish Government’s press censors. There, ever since the revolt has started, foreign correspondents have flocked to have their stories red penciled, send them out over the one telephone line open to the outside world. When last week correspondents took time off to explore the rest of the building, they found none other than President Sosthenes Behn marooned in his own office by the civil war. The only way Mr. Behn had been able to reach his wife in St. Jean-de-Luz was by telephoning Buenos Aires, having the call switched from there back to France.

This week’s features in Spain’s civil war were hurry-up efforts by South Rebel General Franco to take Madrid with his Moors, and the apparent inability of North Rebel General Mola to save from especially bloodthirsty Red miners the besieged garrison in Oviedo, commanded by especially bloodthirsty Colonel Aranda who, in 1934, butchered many a Spanish proletarian. Snarled the miners’ Red leader: “We will get Colonel Aranda if we have to get him over the dead bodies of our own children!” Actually no children were involved, miner experts at dynamiting merely setting up a catapult from which they hurledhomemade dynamite bombs against the walls of Oviedo.