Business & Blood

Such skyscrapers as Manhattan's are nearly ideal in resisting bombs and shellfire but the low brick buildings of most European capitals are comparative death traps, according to Madrid dispatches last week. The city's only real skyscraper, the Telefonica, had not only taken the punishment of 43 shells and bombs but its automatic Spanish-built switchboards continued efficiently to serve most of the 53,000 telephone subscribers in Madrid and, despite the horrors of a siege now entering its sixth month, the great majority of these Madrid subscribers have continued to pay their telephone bills. When a big shell makes a direct hit against one of the steel girders, the Telefonica quivers, shudders like a liner smacked by a breaking wave, but this week Madrid citizens were still making rushes for shelter into the building whenever a bombardment started. Elasticity has saved it, although shells bursting in a few individual offices have blown furniture to smithereens.

Said returned U. S. Charge d'Affaires Eric C. Wendelin, back from bloody Madrid last week to a desk job in the State Department: "The citizens of Madrid pride themselves on doing 'business as usual' even during air raids and attacks. Before I left about one-third of Madrid had been destroyed. The crescendo of artillery fire never let up. The rumble of guns shattered our sleep--but we got used to it. In Madrid you get accustomed to almost everything."

Offensives. In furious efforts to raise the siege of Madrid last week, its Leftist defenders charged ably and repeatedly, but Rightists, although set back for short distances, put up stiff resistance and Leftist casualties, according to Salamanca reports, were heavy, with gore-glorifying Ernest Hemingway looking on.

South of Madrid the driving Leftists advanced within 65 miles of beauteous Seville, "Queen City of Andalusia," but Rightist forces avoided a "bottling-up drive" launched to entrap them. Some 10,000 Italians were reported defending this rich orange-growing region and the nearby sherry country. According to London trade figures released last week, England continues to buy almost exactly as great a volume of oranges and sherry as last year from "Business as Usual" Spain--the only difference being that this year the British have had to pay cash. North of Madrid last week the Rightist offensive of General Mola against the Basques (TIME, April 12) won through Durango, but slightly behind schedule, and he had not yet taken Bilbao. A Mola objective had been to force Leftists to relax their siege of the Rightists in Oviedo who have held out stubbornly during the whole war, and this Mola accomplished, for thousands of Asturian besiegers had to be withdrawn from Oviedo, rushed to defend Bilbao.

Advantage of morale was still with the Leftists, with Madrid's populace sure the war had been almost won last week. Madrid's defending General Jose Miaja talking in terms of victory within two months if there is not further heavy foreign aid to the Rightists, and foreign military observers predicting two more years of grueling war in Spain--all this according to the New York Times'?, able Madrid Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews.

Intervention. Obviously Spain's Civil War still depended largely on decisions yet to be made by Europe's Baldwins, Blums, Hitlers, Mussolinis and Stalins. Il Duce with a characteristic gesture last week opened the bag of information about Spain which his espionage service keeps replenishing daily, shook out through his press spokesman Editor Virginio Gayda of Giornale d'ltalia whole pages of minute particulars of Soviet, French and other "neutral" aid to the Spanish Leftists. So rich was this shower of charges in detail that only the chiefs of other espionage services were in a position to estimate its exactness. Laymen and journalists noted that Italy's charges amount to saying that Socialist Premier Blum, while prating of neutrality, has been winking at wholesale smugglery of munitions and warplanes from France to the Leftists, permitting Soviet general staffers to direct operations from French soil, enabling Russian bombing planes to arrive nightly. According to Editor Gayda, units of the Soviet Navy were steaming from the Black Sea last week bound through the Dardanelles for Spain and trouble. At Paris the office of the Premier denied nothing in detail, issued blanket denials and blanket charges of Italian bad faith.

The calm British termed "unprecedented" last week the lack of respect for their Navy's traditional might shown by Rightist aviators off Mallorca. They impudently dropped 15 bombs, none of which hit the British destroyer Gallant, were repelled by her shellfire, and when London asked apologies these were profusely given --but still those Spanish aviators had been "unprecedentedly" cocky. The Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin, weary of office and about to retire as Prime Minister, was doing his best to think chiefly of the Coronation, but all Europe realized that Russia, Italy, Germany and France were feverishly cheating on their pledges of neutrality toward Spain, daily running heavy risks that their machinations may touch off a Great War.

"Pirates." Rightist warships blockading the port of Bilbao, and keeping off British ships which were trying to deliver food which the Leftists had bought in England, were "pirates" in the eyes of London which ordered His Majesty's mighty warship Hood to the scene. Excitement over this slumped when the British Cabinet, covertly favorable to Franco, advised British ships not to try to enter Bilbao as the harbor might have been mined. This ingenious supposition enabled His Majesty's Government to achieve much the same blockade objective as that of the "pirates" without being in the least piratical.

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