THE SPANISH WAR

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXVI, Issue 99, 27 May 1938, Page 3

THE SPANISH WAR

EXPERIENCES. OP NURSE SHARPLES. WELLINGTON, This day. Tales of ruthless cruelty, indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations and hospitals, and the horrors of civil warfare in Spain were told by Nurse Millicent Sharpies, who returned to Wellington yesterday by the Awatea after nearly a year of service with the international ambulance brigade behind the Government lines. Nurse Sharpies left Wellington in company with Nurse Dodds and Nurse Shadbolt, who are still in Spain. They travelled under the direction of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. On arriving at Portbou she was immediately given the job of driving an ambulance through to Valencia, three days’ journey, with a convoy of more than a dozen other ambulances. She was afterward stationed for three months at the English base hospital at Huete, where the other New Zealanders still are. She was in charge of the hospital by night. It was the main hospital for casualties from the Madrid front. Afterward she was transferred to the Aragon front, within three miles of the firing line. “This was not what you’d call a proper war,” she said. “It was just an invasion by Germany and Italy. All this non-intervention is an absolute farce. If the Spanish had been left to themselves it would all have been over long ago.” Nurse Sharpies said that she expected to spend about a month in New Zealand. She had been sent with the mission of raising money for a modern field ambulance, to render slightly easier the transport of the wounded as the front line shifted from place to place. She wished to return to the war area as quickly as she could.