SPAIN EXHAUSTED

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20414, 26 November 1940, Page 2

SPAIN EXHAUSTED

CIVIL WAR DAMAGE FEW REPAIRS DONE BEGGARS AND RATIONING LONDON, Oct. 22. Spain is exhausted, states Lieutenant Z. Litynski, a Polish officer who escaped to London by way of Spain and Portugal, in an article in the Evening Standard. He adds: — I was amazed to find how little work has been done to repair the damage of the civil war. At Port Bou, where I crossed the frontier, the only building that seemed to have been repaired was the station. The remaining ruins were as the Italian bombers had left them. Idle Young Men In some of the villages electric cables still hung listless from broken standards. None of the hundreds of young men that lounged around in khaki shirts and tasselled forage caps appeared to have the slightest desire to get to work and rebuild what war had pulled down. Instead, they stood around showing oil their war medals, gossiping with the old men, throwing out a gallant crack every now and then to girls as they passed arm in arm. laughing and brown-cycd, down the wrecked street. Perhaps they lacked the materials, not the will, to build. Barcelona’s docks and the dockers’ suburb of Barceloncta are still in ruins. The Customs House is just the same mass of tangled iron and fallen masonry which it was after the Germans bombed it two and a half years ago. The port itself is almost deserted. Sadness of Barcelona The road to Barcelona from Port Bou runs along the Mediterranean shore for a good way. But never once did I see the sails of one of those fishing boats of which there used to be ;o many. The Mediterranean is a dead sea. But Barcelona, with its brilliant lights, at first seemed a Paradise. I dined in a restaurant on the Mont Juieh. The food was good, but terribly expensive. The restaurant was almost empty. In the daytime it seemed one of the saddest cities I have seen. The industrial life and the commerce of this great industrial and commercial centre are half dead. I was besieged by beggars. Everything is rationed. The road from Barcelona to Saragossa and Madrid, formerly one of the best in Spain, had not been repaired since the war as far as I could see. But they have built some new bridges in place of those destroyed. The majority were still temporary wooden structures put up by the army engineers during the war. The villages of Aragon were in ruins. Peasants, wretched-looking people, lived among them. But sometimes tlie villages had been abandoned altogether.