The Evening Star TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 1937. THE SPANISH WAR.

Evening Star, Issue 22735, 24 August 1937, Page 8

The Evening Star TUESDAY, AUGUST 24, 1937. THE SPANISH WAR.

The next act in the Spanish drama promises to be not a final decision by the onlooking Powers on how non-interven-tion can be made a reality, but the fall of Santander to General Franco’s forces. The Non-intervention Committee is due now to meet again, after attempts to thrash out difficulties in informal discussions that were insoluble in formal ones, but it has had so many postponements that small hopes will he felt of it. Meanwhile the rebels have been closing in on Santander, which is 50 miles west of Bilbao on the Bay of Biscay, capturing villages and taking prisoners, in the last phase, at a rapid rate. It is a desperate battle which the Basques are waging, virtually without aeroplanes and cut off from the Loyalists’ main forces and resources which have Valencia as their headquarters, and the small strip of territory that remains to them can only he further reduced. But the insurgents may not he free to divert all the troops they would like against Madrid when Santander has been occupied. They took too long in their capture of Bilbao to obtain the fullest value from that success, and it is two months now since Bilbao fell. In some% ways the Basque army will he aided when it is fighting on a shorter front, and, while that army remains undestroyed in its own mountainous country f.vhich lies behind the Biscay coast, it will always remain a thorn in the side of the insurgents. Like most places in Spain, Santander has known war in the past, the town having been sacked by Soult during' the Peninsular struggle. The Basques are fighting for their own hand in this conflict—for selfgovernment for the Basques, which they would never get from the Franco party with its creed of an undivided Spain. The issue of Fascism against Communism gives them "the least concern. Their strong Catholicism would incline them to the insurgents’ cause. The general issues and rights and wrongs that are at stake in this warfare, not easily determinable in any case without a considerable knowledge of both the more recent and also the earlier history of Spain, have been confused further by the propaganda of both the main parties. The issues are much the same, according to a writer in the ‘ Nationalist Review,’ as they were a hundred years ago, when war was raging in the same Basque country, “The ideal of democracy—a method of government obviously suited to the phlegmatic British temperament —still haunts the imagination of Spanish Liberals and still remains, like Tantalus’s grapes, beyond their reach. The nineteenth century is strewn with the wreckage of Spanish Constitutions which proved in practice too extraneous to succeed among so individual-minded a people, whoso outstanding characteristic is their inability to appreciate the other man’s point of view.” Even the claim that the Valencia Government, as reconstituted under Senor Negrin, is less Communist in its outlook than that of Senor Caballero, who, though nob of the Communist Party, had been known as the “ Spanish Lenin,” is not universally admitted. “ The trick,” it has been said, “by which the Communist Party does not appear in the new Government with any greater preponderance than before is too naive to be admitted;” Only two things seem to be agreed upon—that time fights on the side of the Government and against the insurgents, and that neither side has much chance of successes that would make an early end of the war. As Europe is divided at the present time it is a good war for Europe to keep out of.