SPAIN: Death of Mola

High over the rolling mountains northeast of Burgos, a twin-motored Rightist plane dodged last week through thick patches of fog. It was far from any battle front. A young shepherd on a hillside idly watched it come out of the clouds. Few minutes later he stumbled excitedly into the little village of Briviesca. The plane had crashed into the mountainside.* Help was wanted.

Sweating painfully uphill, rescuers soon found the wreckage. All the occupants were dead, two officers, the pilot, and mechanic. Twenty-five yards away they found the mangled body of still another officer, wrapped in a worn tan waterproof coat. Round his waist was a general’s sash. It was some time before he could be identified: General Emilio Mola, second in command only to Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Longlegged, broadnosed General Mola was in his stocking feet, for ever since a gypsy told him that he was to die with his boots on, Rightist officers explained, he alwrays took his shoes off in airplanes.

Here was the most serious blow to Rightist chances in mary months. Of all the Rightist generals who have thrown in their chances with Franco, spectacled, bateared Emilio Mola was the one whom officious German and Italian staff officers treated with most respect.

Like many another Rightist leader,Emilio Mola, 49, was not born in Spain. His father was a Spanish officer in Cuba, his mother Cuban. After a mildly distinguished career in the Spanish army he won distinction and his general’s sash fighting Abd-el-Krim in Morocco in 1926. Just before Alfonso XIII’s flight from Madrid, Emilio Mola was chief of police in Spain, won the title of “the most hated man in Spain” for ordering Civil Guards to fire on the students. No monarchist, he was placed on the retired list in the early years of the republic, was in and out of favor depending on whether the Cabinet was Leftist or Rightist at the time.

When the civil war broke last July, Mola was virtually in retirement at Pamplona. One of the first leaders of the rebellion was General José Sanjurjo who was also killed in an accident, flying from Lisbon. Mola was among the first to recognize the leadership of Francisco Franco, who gave him command of practically the entire northern sector of Rightist activity. At the time of his death, Mola was responsible not only for the siege of Bilbao but for the siege of Madrid as well. With no capable successor to hand, Generalissimo Franco split Mola’s command in two. To the Bilbao front went General José Fidel Davila, a desk officer who had been head of the “technical junta.” Put in charge of the Madrid, Aragón and Soria fronts was bleary-eyed old General Andres Saliquet, who looks very much like Cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather’s famed Old Bill.

Still in command of the southern armies was hoarse-voiced General Queipo de Llano whose persistent personal broadcasts from Seville have been one of the high spots of the civil war.

“Mola is dead, but his spirit will remain. His death can change nothing!” cried General Queipo de Llano last week.

At Burgos, Generalissimo Franco led the funeral march through the streets while Rightist sympathizers scattered rose petals from the balconies and a muted brass band played Sueño Eterno (Eternal Sleep).

In Leftist Bilbao, Basque officials snapped: “May God have mercy on his soul.”

Spurred by the death of Mola, Basque Leftists counterattacked viciously around Bilbao, regained much precious ground with heavy losses to the Rebels. To celebrate his new command Rightist General Fidel Davila ordered a massed attack on the important peak and town of Lemona. At the end of 24 hours Basque forces were still holding out. Star witness of the Lemona attack was Archduke Otto von Habsburg, pretender to the thrones of Austria and Hungary.* At the front to visit his youthful uncle. Prince Gaëtan of Bourbon-Parma, and accompanied by another uncle, Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, he wore in their honor the red beret of the Carlist royalists, spoke fluent Spanish.

That most colorful of Spanish capitalists, illiterate Juan March, onetime tobacco smuggler, chief civilian backer of General Franco’s armies, was back in Gibraltar last week after a hurried trip to impoverished Italy with the Duke of Alba in search of more aid. Loudly he reassured nervous Rightist supporters with the statement that he had authorized General Franco to spend $1,500,000,000 “subscribed abroad,” by whom Juan March would not say.

As usual when things were not going too well, Rightists retaliated with a bloody shelling of the centre and working class district of Madrid. The New York Times’s Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews had just emerged from the correspondents’ hotel when one of the first shells smashed into it. Quickly he popped into Alfaro’s haberdashery shop and began inspecting gloves. Shelling continued. Correspondent Matthews decided to look at handkerchiefs.

“Because I was glad to be alive,” he wrote, “I bought more handkerchiefs than I needed. . . . Another shell broke in the street, and this time we heard a boy screaming six or eight times, each time weaker than the last. . . . ‘Show me some scarfs,’ I said to the clerk.”

This week General Fidel Davila, taking over the Bilbao sector for the Rightists, won praise from Franco by loosing a thunderbolt attack on the Basque defenses. A monster fleet of 63 airplanes sent bombs whistling into the suburb of Lezama, more into the trenches at strategic Lemona Mountain. After heavy artillery preparation and machine gun strafing from the air, 30 tanks lumbered up the slope followed by Rightist infantry. Announced the Insurgents: “The hill is entirely in our hands.”

After a day of dreamlike quiet in Madrid during which not a shot was heard another furious bombardment was launched in which correspondents counted a shell every ten seconds. Across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spanish Morocco, Generalissimo Franco rushed 14,000 more troops, some of them foreign volunteers and tatterdemalion striplings. In a few weeks he will sidetrack great numbers of troops to reap the July grain harvest if he wants his soldiers to have enough to eat this autumn.

*Loyalist sources claimed the plane had been exploded by a time-bomb.

*In Budapest last week Archduke Albert, 39, another Hungarian pretender with small stomach for the job, was granted a divorce from his commoner wife, the former Irene Lelbach, who divorced her diplomat husband to marry Albert in 1930. Archduke Albert’s pretensions are chiefly due to his ambitious mother, the Archduke Isabella. Twice he has sorely disappointed her, once by marrying a commoner, again by hurrying to his young cousin Otto and swearing fealty to him before Isabella could intervene.