NEW ZEALANDERS IN SPAIN

Evening Star, Issue 22774, 8 October 1937, Page 7

NEW ZEALANDERS IN SPAIN

VISIT TO LOYALIST FSONTS “ The Government of Spain owes a very-great (debt to the Government of New Zealand; Mr, Jordan has always shown, himself a champion of League principles and international justice,” Senor Don, Julio Alvarez del Vayo, Spain’s Ambassador-at-Large and Chief Political Commissioner for War (he was formerly Foreign' Minister), told, a delegation of British Empire journalists, who interviewed him” in Valencia recently, “ But on the whole,” Senor Del Vayo said, “ the democratic Powers are far less alive to the strategic importance of Spain than the Fascist Powers are. The Fascist Powers are seeking a stronger foothold there for to-mor-row’s world war. In any event we shall win the present terrible conflict, but if we had the right to buy arms—and the denial of this right is a monstrosity—the suffering and bloodshed would be terminated very quickly.” The journalists visited Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona, and other centres, and two of the fronts. All of them in interviews at. Valencia expressed the view that the new Spanish. People’s Army was efficient and democratically organised. They met several New Zealand and Australian members of. nursing units and the . International Brigade, and heard of many more. Sister Una Wilson, of Auckland Hospital, who has been serving with the British medical aid unit since December, was recently reinforced by Sisters Shadbolt, Dodds, and Sharpies, of the New Zealand nursing unit, the last-named of whom drove an ambulance from the frontier to Valencia. Ronald Hurd, a Melbourne seaman returning to England with a badly damaged spine, said that aIT the New Zealanders had shown great fighting prowess, including one Fred Robertson, who was mortally wounded beside him on the Jarama front. Hurd and another Australian, an ex-” digger ” named Ormond Downing, from Boechworth (Mr Savage’s homo town), were the two men selected to leave tho ■ front line in April * to

represent the British battalion brigade dinner in honour’of the sixth anniversary of • the Spanish Republic. In Madrid, where the journalists, were hailed on the first morning ■ by 400 shells, which did comparatively little damage, they met, many friends of Geoffrey Cox, the New Zealand Rhodes scholar who went ■ to Madrid for 'the ‘ News-Chronicle ’ to write ’up the fall of that city,-but who stayed on to write ‘ Defence of Madrid,’ a highly successful book.