Crumbling Republic

In the greatest victory of Spain's present Civil War, swift-marching, ruthlessly bayoneting White regulars of the Spanish Army, the polyglot Foreign Legion and their tough Moorish mercenaries drove up to the city of Toledo by the back way last week, shot and stuck and butchered through Red Militia fighting like wildcats in the narrow streets with machine guns chattering on every corner, finally burst into the bloodier streets of the Old City and forced their way to its rocky heights to relieve the besieged Alcazar Fortress, the heroic West Point of Spain (TIME, Sept. 28).

The Alcazar's 1,400 cadets and soldiers under obstinate Commandant Jose Moscardo had withstood Red Militia assaults for the whole period of the Civil War. Against the six-foot walls of the Alcazar more than 6,000 four-inch projectiles and more than 4,000 six-inchers had been vainly fired by the Madrid Cabinet's untrained proletarian artillery. The Government's trained miners had failed to blow up the Alcazar's rock foundations with dynamite charges totaling four tons. Futile were thousands of gallons of gasoline shot from Red flame-sprayers. Futile were hundreds of Red air bombs. Just before the final White assault last week, the Red Militia touched off six more tons of dynamite, but this too was such a clumsy job that Alcazar Cadets in the last desperate struggle made a rush from their fortress, so that the militia were caught between two fires.

When the Whites had finally won, Spain's young West Pointers were found to be not the half-starved "human scarecrows" the Madrid radio had been calling them, but adequately nourished and mostly wearing beards that had grown during the 71 days of the siege. Of 1,800 persons in the Alcazar, including white women and children who had taken refuge with the Cadets, only 80 were found to have lost their lives and only 500 had suffered wounds of various sorts, though the entire upper structure of the Alcazar had been pounded to jagged chunks. Never could even superbly trained West Pointers have thus held out had not much of the Toledo Fortress been hewn out of living rock and its enormous cellars kept fully stocked with food, wine and munitions by Commandant Moscardo.

In Madrid, with advancing White Armies closing in all around and only some 30 miles away as the week opened, the facade of the "Spanish Republic" was noticeably crumbling. At Geneva last week the diplomatic representative of Premier Largo Caballero, "The Spanish Lenin," made shrill speeches about Democracy being at stake in Madrid, but uncensored dispatches brought by courier pictured the Capital as ruled in fact by proletarian Terror. Estimating that between 10,000 and 15,000 persons have been executed by Government firing squads in Madrid or simply butchered in their homes and on the streets by mobster adherents of Premier Largo Caballero, a courier dispatch from the New York Times correspondent declared: "A majority of Madrid's 850,000 inhabitants apparently hope that the military [White] insurgents will enter soon in order to save the Capital from proletarian misrule and Red Terror."

Atrocity-of-the-Week was reported from the north coast of Spain where mixed Anarchist-Basque-Red forces were still holding Bilbao (TIME, Sept. 21). Indignant at White air bombing of the city, Anarchist Militiawomen swarmed onto one of the three "prison ships" in the harbor aboard which White hostages were kept. Flying at these unarmed prisoners with knives, bayonets, and guns, the lady Anarchists killed a total of 220 of whom 30 were priests, mutilating and gashing until finally stopped by the intervention of Spanish Civil Guards. Theoretically these Guards were as much against the Whites as were the Anarchist harridans but in practice they intervened for Order.

During the week Madrid denials made no impression on Argentine authorities who affirmed at Buenos Aires that the President of Spain, corpulent regular Republican Manuel Azana was about to seek refuge in the Argentine Embassy. They said he had appealed to have the Argentine cruiser Veinticinco de Mayo stand by at the Spanish port of Alicante, ready to rescue the President, his pretty young wife and other prominent Republicans from the expected fury of Madrid's proletariat. Dressed always in proletarian blue overalls, Premier Largo Caballero was said to be holding President Azana virtually a prisoner. Desperate, the Spanish Cabinet issued a manifesto appealing to the "people of Madrid" to somewhat paradoxically "organize and perfect the defense of the Capital, so as to be prepared for somethings even so incredible as the capture of Madrid by the Rebels!"

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