THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 170 No. 5077

LONDON AUGUST 28th, 1937

SIXPENCE

MAIN FEATURES

GERMANY 1930-1937 The reactions of a typical Catholic family

TWO INTERVIEWS WITH FRANCO

New light on some disputed questions

PARLIAMENT REVIEWED b y P. C. LOFTUS, M.P.

A Personal Study of the Prime Minister and others

T H E W O R L D W EEK B Y W EEK The Surrender of Santander

Santander is now in Nationalist hands. It seems that only a minority among the defending troops had any heart for their task, desertions were frequent, and President Aguirre himself was among the first to flee.

More interesting even than the feebleness of the resistance in this sector was the inability of the Valencia authorities to create a diversion by launching an attack on any of the other fronts. It is not unfair to infer that Valencia has now quite abandoned all hope of a military victory, and is concerned only with propaganda. It can hardly be seriously pretended that in the much advertised saying of Mass by Father Lobo in Valencia the other day, the authorities were concerned with the spiritual welfare of their own people so much as with an effect on world opinion. Attacks on Merchantmen

The aerial and torpedo attacks on merchant ships in the Mediterranean certainly create a serious situation. It is hard to trace down responsibility for these attacks. Flags and markings prove little, and the counterfeiting of them is a notorious ruse of war, which has been employed at convenience by belligerents of all nations throughout history—not least by ourselves in the late war (vide Mr. Winston Churchill). On the other hand, whatever our general sympathies and whoever may be the guilty party, there is no reason why we should tolerate interference with our ships, when they are sailing the seas on their lawful occasions. The whole story does, however, call for a certain enquiry into the methods of ship-registration. We are prepared to run risks for the protection of British sailors and genuinely British ships, but ships that are manned by foreign crews, owned by foreign owners, and possess a merely technical British registration are in a different category. For instance, Tuesday’s newspapers report an attack on a “ British ship.” But the ship, we read, is called the Ncemijulia ; she is owned by the Ncemijulia Shipping Company, and her captain rejoices in the fine old English name of Glinsky. It sounds suspiciously like the sort of ship in which ,Commander Sin and Captain Blood put to sea in Mr. Belloc’s Modern Traveller. The Armies of China

When a Minister for War tells a meeting of Left-Wing politicians in Tokyo that 400,000 Chinese troops are marching northward, we may fairly regard the figures as having propagandist rather than military value. Not even the capacity of Chinese troops for living on their own countryside, and on very little, can make it easy to believe that such numbers are being maintained in the field or, if assembled, are equipped. But that armies of sorts are gathering from all parts of China is probable enough. Moreover, what is of more importance from both the military and the political point of view, there seem to be among them, and in the van of the fighting both in Hopei and around Shanghai, a considerable number of divisions of Nanking’s national army, trained and directly controlled by General Chiang Kaishek.

Politically the significance of this is considerable in view of the persistent assertions of ‘‘old China hands, ’’ now rather out of date in their knowledge, that all armies in China are personal, including the Generalissimo’s, and that Chiang will not risk his in serious fighting. At the same time it is possible that from the military standpoint Chiang’s armies will count for more in the earlier stages of the fighting than in the later if the war is prolonged. This is not because they are incapable of prolonged operations—between them they have held the field against the Chinese Communist armies for nearly ten years—but because they are dependent on a Government which a turn of