SPAIN: I run’s Fall

Irun’s Fall

Spanish workmen of the Red Militia, desperately battling to save Madrid, outnumbered two-to-one last week the advancing spearhead of White professional soldiers 67 miles from the Capital. Ensued a conflict savage in the extreme, with Madrid claiming that the Whites had been pushed back 15 miles, and Seville headquarters of the Whites saying they had defeated the Reds. But the week brought one decisive action in Spain’s bloody stalemate.

Ever since civil war burst over Spain, European military experts have been saying that a crucial test was whether the White forces of Generalissimo Francisco Franco would be able to take Irun on the French frontier and thus cut off the Madrid Government from receiving covert aid from the French Front Populaire.

In defending Irun the proletarian militia supporting the Government, which had been deserted by most of its Army, carefully mined the terrain over which it was thought Generalissimo Franco’s forces must advance. This trap was betrayed to the White forces by their sympathizers in the Government camp fortnight ago, and last week they were able to avoid it and get down to straight fighting.

Untrained, the Government militia made such a mess of trying to use their artillery that finally a sympathetic French reserve officer undertook to direct their fire. The French Ambassador, bold Jean Herbette, meanwhile undertook to take out of Spain a mysterious individual whom the Red guards at the Spanish frontier viewed with so much suspicion that they threatened to open fire. Cried M. Herbette from his Ambassadorial car flying the Tricolor, ”Fire if you dare, Messieurs—upon the French Ambassador!” As the Reds hesitated he dashed to safety in France.

Next day the battle opened in earnest, with General Emilio Mola personally commanding the White forces against Irun. They advanced under withering fire and at the last moment the Communist defenders of Irun broke and ran but not the Anarchists. With their philosophy of “direct action” it seemed to defending Anarchists that the thing to do before giving up Irun was to set torches to this ”Wool Capital of Spain” and burn it to the ground. Newly famed Anarchist Buenaventura Durruti sounded the keynote when he cried ”We are not in the least afraid of ruins. It is we who built these palaces and cities here in Spain. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are going to inherit the earth. There is’ not the slightest doubt about that.”

Thus Irun was a blazing pyre when the White forces took it last week and pressed on to seize swank San Sebastian. Their victory was reflected in Madrid by a complete upheaval of the Cabinet. Thus far sympathizers with Madrid had been able to claim that “not a single Socialist or Communist” sat in the Cabinet under President Manuel Azaña. Though the secret was long since out that this Cabinet was powerless, that Madrid was dominated by Red militia and “People’s Tribunals” similar to those which asserted themselves during the French Revolution, the fagade of the Republic was maintained. It crumbled as Irun fell and the Reds grew desperate. Almost a prisoner in his own Presidential Palace, scared Don Manuel Azana appointed as Premier last week not Spain’s moderate No. 1 Socialist Leader Indalecio Prieto (TIME, Sept. 7), but the extreme radical No. 2 Socialist Leader Francisco Largo Caballero who has spent most of his time in recent weeks dressed in blue overalls fighting with the Red militia amid the Guadarrama Mountains in efforts to keep the Whites from capturing Madrid. New Premier Largo Caballero announced weeks ago that the Madrid Government, if victorious, would proclaim in Spain “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and essentially a Spanish Soviet regime.

In the new Cabinet of onetime Housepainter Largo Caballero this week newly appointed Socialists and Communists assumed the Government of Spain—the sole regime in Western Europe now to contain even a single Communist member of the Cabinet. This did not change but did regularize existing authority in Madrid. At latest dispatches the Capital had by no means fallen, although Generalissimo Franco was leading his main army in person against it from the south and was advancing toward Toledo.

Spain, with a total population of only 29,000.000, was estimated to have lost in seven weeks of civil war 85,000 dead and 300,000 wounded, with many small towns totally wiped out by succeeding massacres as they changed hands between merciless Whites and Reds.*

Diplomats of the Great Powers had high hopes last week of getting the Madrid Cabinet and the provisional President of its foes, General Miguel Cabanellas, to sign their solemnly drafted pact for “humanizing the Spanish Civil War,” ending both Red and White atrocities. Before General Cabanellas could be heard from, new Premier Largo Caballero flatly rejected for Madrid all “humanizing,” took for the Spanish Government the position that this is a fratricidal struggle so desperate that everything goes and must continue to go.

This left the Great Powers rebuffed and helpless, unless they were willing to intervene. Only voice of note to speak up on this risky point was that of the Primate of All England, the Most Reverend Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury. “Mediation? Who can undertake the task?” he asked. “It would be a great thing if the leading European powers would attempt it, but this might lead only to dissension among themselves. . . . ‘Disquieting signs that the world seems to be going mad have come from this horrible civil war in Spain.”

*In the U. S. Civil War died 600,000, of whom 185,000 were killed in battle, on both sides in four years, at a time when the country’s population was 33,000,000.