Foreign News: Blood

Since it was last week’s decision of the Great Powers that Spaniards should stew in their own blood, this fearless, heroic and cruel people continued the appalling exhibition which makes modern historians write after each war in Spain that the country is “still in some respects medieval.”

While the churches of Barcelona were being pillaged by Reds who dragged out even the mummified corpses of long dead nuns, in Seville the local White commander General Queipo de Llano broadcast this fantastic exhortation:

“The common people are swine. They must be ripped up like swine! . . . We do not want to be bothered again in our lifetime by Bolsheviks. These seducers of the people must be made to feel the pangs of Hell before they die. . . . Spain must again be made a country fit for caballeros to live in!”

Most painstaking bit of lurid reporting of the week was Toronto Star Correspondent Pierre van Paassen’s reconstruction in Barcelona of how the Citadel of Huesca was captured from the Whites:

“The Bakunin battalion made up entirely of dockworkers from Barcelona, broke into Huesca at nine in the morning, but was checked for four hours by 26 machine-guns installed on a church roof and belfry, which vomited livid death into the front ranks of the Popular Frontists as they entered the main square. Shortly after noon two Anarchists, Amadeo Salvan and Fernández Ubarri, loaded themselves with sacks of dynamite weighing 40 lbs. each, and made a dash for the church, each with a split fuse held in one hand and a lighted cigaret in the other. Fernandez Ubarri was hit, for he was seen to fall twice; nevertheless he crawled up to the church wall. Half a minute later both charges went off with a sharp crack, tearing the two volunteers limb from limb. This was immediately followed by a dull, heavy roar as one wall of the church collapsed inward in a tornado of dust and pulverized masonry, bringing the roof partly down. Some of the defenders were miraculously unhurt, but all those living were captured.

“New resistance was met at the medieval citadel-barracks, where a full regiment of infantry, seven batteries of artillery and massed machine-guns burst into action. Here again dynamite came into play, being hurled in packets of 25 lbs. with short-cut fuses, sizzling and whirling over the walls and battlements. At the same time the workers’ militia stormed forward with bayonets fixed, the women putting up a barrage of hand grenades. The antique iron-plated gate was blown from its hinges with dynamite, and the sweat-streaming, half-naked advance guard poured into the greatest stronghold but one on the northern front.

“Incredible hand-to-hand encounters followed, in which men threw themselves on top of each other in utter disregard of danger, perfectly contemptuous of death, bombing, slashing, stabbing and firing; forcing themselves forward step by step into the labyrinthine maze of underground passages in the old fort; climbing over the bodies of slain and wounded, both sides, howling and crying in a scarcely human way.

“The captured rebel officers, who were responsible for the mass murder of the loyal citizens in the casemates, were executed within 20 minutes after the flag of Catalonia and the red banner of Socialism went up over the ruins, from which poured a dense column of black smoke at the moment that I arrived on the scene.”

Oceans more of blood flowed elsewhere in Spain last week but there was no decisive battle. Government militia still besieged the White citadels of Oviedo and Toledo which had already held out longer than seemed humanly possible. In the North the most vigorous White onslaughts to take Irun were withstood by Red militia in a series of battles distinguished chiefly by poor marksmanship—one despatch reporting an engagement in which 80,000 bullets killed 100 Spaniards.

In the South, the strategy of Generalissimo Franco was to concentrate all efforts on the push of his Whites to take Madrid. Air bombing of the capital was carefully worked out with a view to frightening the Cabinet into surrender if possible without inflaming the people of Madrid against the Whites any more than could be helped. At first White planes dropped only leaflets, next bombs directed solely at Madrid’s military airport outside the city, finally showed expert marksmanship by putting a few bombs straight down into the Wall Street of Madrid, the famous Calle de Alcala, which runs between modern steel buildings of skyscraper construction. These few bombs wounded not hundreds but exactly 17 persons and killed nobody.