Blood in Chaco

Over the noisome brown Gran Chaco, battling doormat of Bolivia and Paraguay, ominous silence has lain for more than a month. Paraguayan soldiers, backed against their Verdun, a hummock topped by French-built Fort Nanawa, have had nothing to do but scratch hard-biting Chaco lice. In far-off Geneva, where they could not see the smile on the face of Bolivia's German General Hans Kundt, complacent League statesmen thought their efforts to promote a truce were bearing fruit. But ingenious General Kundt had set his Bolivian soldiers to the sort of work Bolivians do best--digging deep and dark as if for silver, copper, tin.

Last week when the League of Nations was almost ready to arbitrate, General Kundt's mines were entirely finished. His sappers, tunneling under the Paraguayan positions, had sewn them thick with dynamite. To England, France, Italy, Spain and Mexico the League dispatched requests that each appoint an arbiter, announced that the arbitral board would be constituted within ten days. General Kundt was quicker than that. Bram! went his mines. The earth heaved. Paraguayan soldiers were lofted into the air like so many clods.

General Kundt sent tanks and flame throwers clattering into the Paraguayan shambles. As Bolivian troops poured in. thousands of little brown men fought back & forth in furious hand-to-hand combat. The sun went down and the moon came up. Two outlying Paraguayan forts were raked by merciless Bolivian machine gun fire. Paraguayans, famed as South America's fiercest fighters with bayonet and machete, rallied under the leadership of White Russian commanders, a stiff match for Bolivia's German officers under General Kundt. Soon in the jungle grass 2,000 men lay dead. Above & below Fort Nanawa the Bolivians had broken through but Nanawa--Paraguay's Verdun--still stood after the Gran Chaco's bloodiest battle.

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