A Bar of Chocolate

A quick way for newspaper readers to follow the fortunes of Spain's war is to note on which side correspondents are allowed near the front, for neither Rightists nor Leftists like to let the press come near when they are losing. But last week's end Rightist chances in the Battle of Teruel were bright enough for them to allow five carloads of correspondents to approach the firing line.

As the press cars reached the little village of Caude, five miles northwest of Teruel, they stopped for one which had lagged behind. Cigarets were lit. From one of the cars a young man ran forward to give his friends in a car ahead a bar of chocolate.

As he reached the car and passed the chocolate to the man in the driver's seat a 75 mm. shrapnel shell burst right beside him with a deafening roar. A steel splinter drove through 'his back, killing him instantly. The man beside him crumpled up mortally wounded. Of the two men in the rear seat one writhed with a shattered leg, the other was barely hurt. Before the occupants of the other cars could reach their friends, a second shell, which did little damage, threw them flat on their faces.

Well known to hundreds of newspapermen were all the members of that party. Bradish Johnson, the dead chocolate-passer, was a 26-year-old Manhattan socialite who had spent much of his life in Paris, was taking photographs and sending articles from Spain to Newsweek and The Spur. The other fatality was Ernest Richard Sheepshanks of the British Reuters News Service. A superior young British bachelor, he was once captain of the Eton cricket eleven, followed the armies of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, and won the awed admiration of Italian aviators in Salamanca by dressing for the war in a shepherd's plaid shooting jacket and ponderous suede shoes.

Another veteran of the Ethiopian campaign but on the Italian side was the third casualty, hulking, grey-haired Edward J. Neil, 37, whose boast it was that neither he nor his father had ever worked for anyone but the Associated Press. Long-time a Manhattan sports writer, he won a medal and the title Commendatore from Marshal Badoglio in Ethiopia, went on night raids with Arab sharpshooters in Palestine, reported King George's Coronation, and scooped the world on the Rightist capture of Bilbao by filing his story under fire.

Hustled to a base hospital at Santa Eulalia and then to Saragossa beside his wounded friends, it was found that Correspondent Neil, who nearly died of a chest hemorrhage in Ethiopia was suffering from 34 shrapnel wounds. A Catholic priest gave his blood for a transfusion during the night and none other than El Caudillo Franco took time off from the greatest battle of his life to telephone about his condition. But gangrene had set in. Not realizing the seriousness of his wounds, worrying about his typewriter and still hoping for a glass of beer on the morrow, Eddie Neil died.

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