Madrid Digs In

Women and children, 12.000 of them, stood in crowds all day long before Madrid's railway station last week to be herded into trains and sent off to Valencia and safety. All night long picks and pneumatic drills echoed in the streets. Spain's Radical Government was digging trenches, building pill boxes for the bloody last battle with the Whites which was coming as inevitably as Death. As soon as the street trenches were finished they were manned with taxi drivers, shop clerks, bricklayers, shoemakers, who were ordered to stay at their posts, eating and sleeping there until the attack on Madrid should come. A rigid 11 p. m. curfew was clamped on the capital. Every light went out. even privileged newshawks being forbidden in the streets. For a few paralyzing hours word flashed through the city that White bombers had broken the rail line to Valencia. that Madrid was completely cut off. German and Italian aviators, the only people on the Iberian Peninsula who seemed to know how to set a bomb sight, had indeed struck the embankment of the Madrid-Valencia line in their strafing for Spain's Whites, but 90 minutes later traffic was resumed.

In the mountain passes to the north of Madrid, where the improperly trained conscripts of White General Emilio Mola have been brawling with the even more improperly trained Government militia for three months, cold rains turned to sleet, then to snow, choked the mountain passes.

Sloe-eyed, soft-spoken Generalissimo Francisco Franco of the White Armies, realizing the difficulty of moving on Madrid through the Guadarrama Mountains of the North, transferred his headquarters within easier distance of the main line from Toledo to Madrid. Government troops, disorganized and poorly led, made brave counter-attacks that got nowhere, abandoned well-constructed trenches for villages impossible to hold, were shot down in their tracks while retreating, and occasionally deserted in groups.

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