"No Talk of Democracy"

After raging furiously for over a fortnight the "Battle of Madrid" simmered down last week to a peevish interchange of inconsequent bombardments. The great Leftist offensive launched "to raise the Siege of Madrid" (TIME, July 26 et seq.) had been broken by the Rightists at Brunete and not a single structure stood last week in that shattered spearhead of the Madrid defenders' advance. As pretty, Polish Mile. Gerda Taro, 25, was taking pictures for LIFE and footage for the MARCH OF TIME of the retreat from Brunete she was killed.

As always happens after a major action has not turned out well, there was such unrest behind the lines last week that Leftist Premier Dr. Juan Negrin used his news-organ Socialista to point up the situation sharply: "Deterioration of the enemy's rear guard will serve us little if we do not guard our own rear. There are defects in our rear guard and silence regarding them serves no good purpose. There is but one duty: to win the War."

Last week Rightist President Francisco Franco, after starting up again the offensive against Santander he had to stop to check the Leftists at Madrid, started another drive against Leftist positions 100 mi. east of Madrid and then turned to statecraft, forming a Cabinet of seven ministers, five of them generals. To Spaniards the name of General Martinez Anido as Minister of Interior, in charge of police, meant that any last vestige of possible compromise with Spain's Communists, Anarchists and Socialists had been deliberately wiped out by the Rightists. Martinez Anido was Vice-Premier under the late Spanish Dictator Don Miguel Primo de Rivera, suppressed with hundreds of executions the proletarian uprising in Barcelona when he was Captain-General of Catalonia.

In what was called the first actual trial on charges of spreading disease germs in warfare, two Frenchmen. Jean Boujennec and Louis Chabrat, were arraigned last week before a Rightist court martial at Pamplona. The Court took note of their confession that they had been paid $3.750, inspected tubes found on them said to contain typhoid and sleeping-sickness germs and viruses. Although Death was the prompt sentence of the court martial. President Franco intervened, delayed the Frenchmen's execution "pending an international inquiry." With Spain's civil war in its 13th month, neither side had yet used poison gas.

At sea last week two unidentified submarines, presumably Rightist Spanish, German or Italian, opened fire on the Leftist freighter Andutz-Mendi, set it ablaze. Up the mast scrambled a sailor to hoist his shirt as a flag of surrender, had his head blown off by a freakish hit of one of the submarine's projectiles. Freakish too was the escape of the Rightist sea-raiding cruiser Almirante Cervera. She was caught by a Leftist air squadron which rained some 20 bombs, some so close that spray from their splashes spattered her decks, but zig-zagging frantically she opened up with her anti-aircraft batteries, escaped.

Emerging from Valencia, the Leftist Capital, Correspondent William F. McDermott of North American Newspaper Alliance added his bit last week to uncensored lore of Spain's Civil War. "I should guess, on the basis of what is clear to the eyes here," he jotted in his notebook before leaving Valencia, "that a Franco victory will result in the creation of the most radical Fascist State that the world has known. A Valencia victory is similarly likely to end in the institution of a Communistic State that will make Russia look like a haven of economic royalists. No one talks here of democracy or modified capitalism."

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