THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WESNESDAY, JANUARY 6, 1937 SPAIN'S DESPERATE STRIFE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22619, 6 January 1937, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS WESNESDAY, JANUARY 6, 1937 SPAIN'S DESPERATE STRIFE

Reliable news of the Spanish war deepens the sense of horror that has spread throughout the world since the conflict began. The situation in and around Madrid, while not alone in its prompting of painful reflection, is desperately terrible. Reports in the British press, kept well informed by correspondents in touch with events, reveal an intensifying of the insurgents' attack and of the loyalists' defence. On Christmas Day the city suffered the long-dreaded outbreak of an epidemic of typhoid fever expected to follow the protracted endurance of siege conditions. In recent months these conditions have become steadily worse, moving the Archbishop of Canterbury to say, in a diocesan message broadcast at the New Year, " No one can read the accounts of the sufferings of the people of Madrid without a sickening of the heart." This reaction is the more inevitable by reason of the

disclosures made in the report of the six members of the British Parliament who recently visited the city. The party, which went unofficially, consisted of four Labour members, one Conservative and one Liberal, and if it was dominated by any prejudice this would naturally be favour of the established Government, so professedly democratic. Yet the report, issued a M eek before Christmas, emphasised the appalling state of affairs in the Madrid prisons, where thousands of victims of political animus have been interned, most of them without being tried or even formally charged. Fully 14,000, according to the report, were then supposed to be in the official prisons, and for certain decreases in the number it gave a harrowing explanation: on many occasions bodies of armed men have forcibly entered, thrusting the sentries aside, and carried off internees to a summary doom —"it is stated by reliable people that between August 15 and the end of November thousands of persons have been done away with in this manner." These occurrences were, it is reported, honestly admitted, being attributed to one only of tho five sections of the Popular Front; they were excused as reprisals by a rank and file that had got out of hand. Even so, they indicate a ghastly state of things ; and nothing is more certain than its going from bad to. worse as the struggle becomes increasingly ruthless.

To describe the conflict as a " Spanish war" is to use a merely convenient misnomer. The report of these parliamentarians gives utterance to what is largely common knowledge : "No Spaniard in Madrid believes that he is still witnessing a simple civil war, but that a war is being fought on Spanish soil by foreigners for their own purposes." To complete this qualification it must be added that, even apart from the foreign intervention that has become a conspicuous menace, the human elements involved are an intricate confusion. On both sides there are strange assortments of factions. The Popular Front striving for the cause of the Government is, as the British observers have noted, composed of sections difficult to discipline into an orderly whole. Thus is continued in the war a situation long threatening Spain with furious disruption. And the revolutionary forces are no more firmly cohesive in perpetuity. They have adventitiously combined in rebellion, but neither in their insurgence nor in their eventual purpose do they offer any guarantee of permanent accord. At the moment one emotional enthusiasm may link Navarrese and Basque, Carlist and Constitutional Monarchist, Fascist (Falangista) and Liberal Republican, clerical enthusiast and freethinker; but no deep sentiment binds them. " Viva Espana!" may rally them with perhaps more fervent comradeship in arms than it does the varied forces of the Government, some of these with a cosmopolitan creed only outwardly in abeyance ; yet even the revolutionary " Nationalists," as they proclaim themselves to be, have long-standing and bitter enmities which cannot be more than temporarily forgotten. Never was a civil war so lacking in clear-cut antagonisms of principle. It is waged with merely a frenzied zest for fight in too many instances to be lifted above a brutish level. And this has given foreigners, " for their own purposes," a deplorable opportunity. In detail, a special correspondent of the Times has shown that it is entirely wrong to suppose that the defenders of Madrid are all Communists and their opponents all Fascists, although foreign intervention has largely increased the influence of these groups on the contending sides. One effect—and fundamentally the worst—is to turn what might have been a " Spanish war" into a war in Spain between irreconcilable tendencies, Communist and Fascist, competing in equal infatuation for ideals imperilling the world. And the only certain outcome is twofold—an unscrupulous battle for advantage on this field and a sequel of dire hatreds whichever way victory should fall. This entry of alien interests prolongs the conflict and fills it with a menace that seems destined to lay Madrid and much of all Spain in red ruin and to impose a legacy of enduring strife.