Tyrants & Liberty

Catalonian anarchists supporting the Leftist Government of Premier Dr. Juan Negrin asked leave to stage anti-Fascist rallies and parades on the first birthday of Spain's civil war last week, but were sternly repressed. Catalonia's President Luis Companys cared to risk no street riots among his Communist, Anarchist, Socialist and Republican supporters, and anyhow Leftist Spain was grimly straining every resource in its first large offensive of the war.

Starting fortnight ago, this "Big Push" cut a swath nearly ten miles wide and ten miles deep into Rightist positions west of Madrid (TIME, July 19). By last week the Rightists had had to halt their own offensive against Santander on the North in order to release enough troops and planes to check the Leftist drive. They had it retarded after nine days.

Meanwhile, after a week in which Franco's fighting planes had had much the worst of it in daily dogfights, 21 Franco bombers escorted by 66 pursuit ships hurled 50 tons of bombs down upon a four-mile-square, area of the ten-mile-square advance Leftist positions, huge 200-lb. bombs gouging enormous craters, destroying the point of the Leftist spearhead. This week, grimly determined to follow up their advantage the Rightists reportedly massed 42,000 men on the Madrid front, another 80,000 in reserve. Newshawks were already beginning to talk in anticipation about the "Battle for Madrid."

Flags all over Rightist Spain went to half-staff early last week. This marked the first anniversary of the assassination in Madrid last year of Rightist Martyr No. i, onetime Finance Minister Jose Calvo Sotelo who was taken-for-a-ride by uniformed guards of the Madrid Government. Its head then as now was President Don Manuel Azana who last week was in Valencia. Few days after the Rightists mourned Calvo Sotelo, they celebrated with bullfights and fiestas last week the day on which they rose against Republicans, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists of Spain. Last week British-owned ore mines near Bilbao (now Rightist) had taken from them the first shipload of ore dispatched to Adolf Hitler.

Gibraltar. British Laborites failed last week to arouse His Majesty's Government with the disclosure, not challenged in the House of Commons, that German technicians have now installed for General Franco a semicircle of heavy howitzers on Spanish soil commanding Britain's Gibraltar. When Labor M.P.s got to pressing His Majesty's Government uncomfortably, one of the most remarkable diversions in Parliamentary history was created by new First Lord of the Admiralty Alfred Duff Cooper who drawled: "It may interest the House to know that a British ship was captured [by the Rightists] while attempting to enter Santander this morning." At this the Conservative M.P.s who formed Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's majority raised shouts of laughter, and only the impotent Laborites of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition cried: "Shame! Shame!"

This scene in the House of Commons disclosed the underlying sympathies of the British Cabinet, but their handsome young idealist, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, busied himself meanwhile bringing in one more proposal to occupy the International Committee on Non-intervention of 27 states in London. This British scheme was to take steps to have volunteers withdrawn from the Spanish conflict and grant "belligerent rights" to each side in the civil war.

"Non-Intervention/' Members of the Non-intervention Committee, while privately describing their proceedings as a "farce," also privately maintained that this is the best way to keep the war now stewing in Spain from bubbling over and stewing in Europe generally. In a bitter war-birthday speech at Valencia, Spanish Leftist President Azana cried: "The only intervention the London Non-intervention Committee has prevented is that of the League of Nations for peace!" Same day General Franco made a speech strongly implying that he would favor restoring the Spanish Throne, not to Alfonso XIII but to his third son the Infante Don Juan, adding. "Certainly if the Monarchy is restored it will be very different from that which left in 1931, both in character and in person."

First Year. Statistically the first year of the civil war ended with a loss to Spain conservatively estimated by United Press at least 350,000 lives and 30 billion pesetas ($1,725,000,000) although many authorities put the figures much higher. Pope Pius vouched last week for the statistic that 80% of all Jesuit priests in Spain have been slain by the Leftists. Spain's outstanding neutral and longtime representative on the League of Nations, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, appealed from Switzerland to Rightists and Leftists to sign a truce. "Spain can never be either Communist or Fascist" he postulated. "Both are moved by noble patriotism toward a better Spain--in their eyes. But while fighting for an ideal Spain, are they not destroying that real Spain without which their ideal nation cannot materialize? . . . The real Spain will not be committed to a victory which--whoever wins --will be a foreign victory! . . . Lured by somewhat shallow parallelisms, foreign men, institutions and even governments have been adding fuel to the fire which is consuming our unhappy country."

Meanwhile the George Washington and Abraham Lincoln battalions of U. S. citizens fighting for Leftist Spain were joined last week by enough more U. S. volunteers to form a third battalion. According to dispatches the new arrivals fell to "arguing angrily" over whether to become the Thomas Jefferson Battalion with the slogan "The Soil of Revolution Must be Watered by the Blood of Tyrants" or alternatively the Patrick Henry Battalion with the slogan "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death."

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