Flight from Madrid

On the 114th day of this year's Spanish Civil War, the Radical Madrid Cabinet were driven to flee from the capital last week by the conquering White Armies of singularly humorous and carefree Francisco Franco, a commander who even in the darkest days of his campaign surprised correspondents by keeping up an ebullient and ever-smiling mien to be compared only to that of President Roosevelt.

The grim and intense proletarian defender of Madrid, Premier Largo Caballero, and his Cabinet climbed into automobiles, drove rapidly away to Valencia on the seacoast 24 hours after he had declared, like a Chinese general: "Under no circumstances will I abandon Madrid alive! If the insurgents break through, I will shoot myself."

Arriving in Valencia, 190 miles from Madrid, the Radical Cabinet manifestoed that they had "sacrificed everything to efficiency." Their flight they declared "does not imply any abandonment of the defense of Madrid, but on the contrary gives greater impulse to the final struggle."

This impulse Premier Largo Caballero gave by fairly burning up the wires in a telephone conversation from Valencia with luckless General Jose Miaja who had been left behind to defend the capital. He rushed from the phone to issue a blustering manifesto: "Courage! Our victory is certain. My mission is to defend Madrid at all costs. You must give up your lives before yielding another inch of ground!" Meanwhile Madrid syndicalist newspapers excitedly explained the Government's flight. If the Whites were able to catch and imprison its members, they argued, then foreign powers would have no choice but to recognize Generalissimo Franco as actual head of the Spanish State. Only this consideration, the journals exclaimed, could overcome the Cabinet's reluctance to abandon the capital, move to safety.

By this time the forces of Generalissimo Franco, consisting of tough Spanish Foreign Legionnaires, non-Spanish speaking Moors who had put on layers of sweaters against the high-altitude cold, and regular Spanish Army troops had advanced into the suburbs of Madrid over a terrain on which battling females of the Red Militia had abandoned vanity cases, high-heeled slippers and powder puffs. This proletarian resistance was brave but it was scarcely war. When a wave of advancing Moors were suddenly faced by Red machine guns which popped up out of a trench they simply flung themselves prostrate and waited calmly. The White artillery "bracketed" by dropping one shell behind and another in front of the Red trench, got the range and then blew Reds methodically to bits until survivors ran up white flags.

Again and again Madrid proletarians were driven in mad, screaming retreat, but again and again their shattered lines reformed to attempt fresh resistance with Spanish stubbornness, then suffer another rout. Meanwhile, smiling Generalissimo Franco was exhibiting his other distinctive characteristics: caution, thoroughness, quick decision, forehandedness. The steep-banked Manzanares River still lay between him and the capital and he knew its six bridges were heavily mined, but along with attending to military details he was also ready with his own White police force and his own skeleton force of civil servants ready to install them in the Government buildings which his artillery was "dusting" with light shells. Franco police were trimly attired and wore the hard, tricornered hats which to Spaniards are the normal symbol of law & order. The Generalissimo's program was Back to Normalcy for Spain.

As the main White bombardment opened at 8 a. m., shells dropped into the office of Brown Boveri Co., scaring the charwoman who was awaiting the arrival of the staff. Other shells plunked into the famed Oriental Cafe in the Puerta del Sol, heart of Madrid. The Ministry of Interior, police headquarters and the French Embassy were all barely missed by screaming shells, but a small one landed in the onetime Royal Palace of Alfonso XIII, now the Palace of the President. Don Manuel Azana, who fled last month not to Valencia but to Barcelona (TIME, Oct. 26).

About 3 p. m. came an infernal five minutes which seemed to Madrid citizens like hours. Out of low, heavy clouds which had concealed their approach, four big White planes thundered to bomb the slum district of Madrid while three small White pursuit ships strafed the streets with machine guns. Six defending pursuit planes were soon diving on the Whites and anti-aircraft guns spat up at them from Madrid, but all got safely away.

The Soviet Ambassador to Madrid, Comrade Rosenberg, had meanwhile departed with his staff to open up again as the Soviet Embassy in Valencia. This week courageous diplomatic underlings at the U. S. and British Embassies used their short-wave radios to get out of the besieged capital the only uncensored and even approximately trustworthy dispatches. Time and again they corrected rumors that Madrid had fallen, and although what they sent could not be printed, editors were kept posted by the State Department in Washington and the British Foreign Office. Madrid's defenders appeared to have more airplanes and more ammunition than anyone in the journalistic camp had expected. Cautious Generalissimo Franco, with the Red Militia finally driven back across the Manzanares River, which opposed the Whites like a gigantic trench, swung his Moors around to a point where the bank sloped more easily and the water was shallower, then resumed bombardment and bombing which observers estimated to have killed and wounded 200.

Unamuno, Stalin & Mussolini. Since Spain's best-known intellectual is the great Unamuno,it was heartening to the White cause this week that Premier Largo Caballero and his Valencians were arraigned as follows by Philosopher Mieuel de Unamuno, Rector of the University of Salamanca : "The University, while not mixing in politics because of its spiritual mission extending through centuries of tradition, feels itself in duty bound to express in a virile manner its condemnation of the crimes of the [Caballero] Loyalists of Spain."

Intellectuals of a Socialist or Communist stamp meanwhile in Paris made life miserable for Premier Leon Blum who continued his harassed attempts to remain neutral. In French Communist circles it was said that Communist Deputies supporting the Socialist Premier's coalition or "Popular Front" had received orders from the Moscow Comintern that Barcelona, the great stronghold of Spanish Radicalism, "must be saved at any cost, even if it means French intervention in a form which would provoke war with Germany, and irrespective of the fate of Madrid?' It was even said in Spain that Joseph Stalin might admit to his Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a new Soviet Socialist Republic to consist of the Spanish provinces not yet in White hands and having Barcelona as its capital.

In Europe circulated rumors that the Italian flag had already been hoisted over the Balearic Islands, that this Spanish territory had been taken by Italian forces as their payment for having helped the Whites. Wrathful in Rome this week, Dictator Mussolini, permitting himself to be quoted, categorically denied that he and Generalissimo Franco had ever made or even contemplated any deal involving the Balearics.

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