FRANCO'S ADVANCE

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 138, 14 June 1938, Page 13

FRANCO'S ADVANCE

LIFE AT ALICANTE.

A RATIONED EXISTENCE. THE GRANARY OF SPAIN. (By KRXKST HK.MIXt;WAY.) CAST ELLON, May 9. A thousand feet below the blue sea crawled lazily and there were o:ilv two passengers in the 22-passenger 'plane. You were flying past the stretch of Spanish coast that General Franco's forces hold. Those two white towns 'were Yiliaioz and Benicarlo, and that brown range of hills that slid down into the sea like a dinosaur come to drink was the liue holding up General Franco's advance towards Castellon. On the left Elliot Paul's island of Iviza, of "Life and Death of a Spanish Town'' fame, jutted rickily out of the horizon. But the motors of the 'plane never missed a bc-at. You saw no Franco 'planes nor warships, and the only excitement was geographical.

Alicante, where we landed, was full of British and French shipping. Trampa chartered by the Spanish Government purchasing agency were discharging cargoes,'grain. coal, and there were others we were not allowed to investigate owing to lack of time to get Customs parses. Alicante has been put on a xtrict war basis, all hotels and restaurants serving a uniform meal costing five pesetas, which bought at noon a bowl of stew, ration bread, two pieces of cheese, and for dinner a bowl of soup, fish winch may have swum through at one time, one fried egg and one orange. Valencia Eats Well. Tn Valencia the prices of a meal were the same, but the food much better. Six varieties of hors d'oeuvres, excellent meat stew and unlimited oranges. For the first time Valencia seemed to know that a war was really on, and although the cafes were still crowded, men of military age were now all in uniform.

Driving past the great rice lands of Albuf era and the green over-abundant richness of Valencia's famous Huerta, en route for the front. I realised why Valencia eats well. There is no richer stretch of country in the world and the Government holds Spain's granary in La Manclia and Spain's kitchen garden, fruit orchards and a big part of the olive orchards, with the Province of Murcia, Alicante and Castellon.

Driving through Castellon, T found it looking as though some race of gigantic moles had been let loose. Every street was dotted with new piles of dirt from

a tunnelled interlocking system of underground refnires against air bombardment. So efficient are these that the day before Italian raiding 'planes from Majorca dropped over 400 bonilw. destroyed 03 houses and killed only three people. Inhabitants of Castellon do not evacuate the town, but sit outside their houses, the women knitting, the men in the cafes, but when the siren sounds everyone dives into holes like a colony of prairie dogs. A Stubborn Defence. We found the front lipe finally, heavily entrenched along the dry river bed which runs into the sea at Punta Cabicorp, and walked it from the sea until where it curves up into the hills we had seen from the air. From the top of an old medieval tower built to defend the coast against pirates, I studied the enemy positions. The commander of this section had excellent third and fourth line entrenchments and great natural defensive positions in his rear towards Oropesa.

"The ponic is all over," said the commander, who had been fighting constant attacks every day since they broke through to the sea. "But we are defending this coastline a foot at a time. Not a foot on the map," he grinned, "as it went the first day. To drive us out from the last position we lost, they brought four cruisers and five destroyers within three miles of the coast to Rhell uh from tlie rear, controlling them first by observation 'planes. General Franco has only two cruisers, and we believe one of the four was German and the other Italian. But we are not sailors, so we cannot identify them positively. Maybe you will be here if they try to use them again."

"Yes," I answered, "I would certainly like to be."—N.A.N.A.