THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 172 No. 5139

LONDON NOVEMBER 5th 1938

SIXPENCE

IN THIS ISSUE

AUTUMN BOOK SUPPLEMENT Reviews by James Brodrick, Andrew Beck, T. S. Gregory, Christopher Hollis, Philip Hughes,

David Mathew, Robert Speaight, Michael Trappes-Lomax, E. I. Watkin

FRIENDSHIP WITH ITALY

Editorial

THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN ROME An account of the recent Exhibition of the Roman Empire by Eugenie Strong

RUMANIA TODAY Her Minorities and Her Neighbours

ON LATIN THE SAD CASE OF MADAME TABOUIS By Hilaire Belloc By Christopher Hollis

Full List o f Contents on page 584.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK Mr. Eden’s Argument

Mr. Anthony Eden’s speech opposing the Italian Agreement was quite just when it said that over NonIntervention, Britain and Italy spoke two languages. But it would have been juster, because more complete, had he added that the British were alone among the great Powers in meaning by Non-Intervention, taking no part in the civil war. To all the other great Powers, membership of the Non-Intervention plan and Committee meant co-operating to circumscribe a conflict in Spain, which only called for these exceptional measures because it deeply concerned the different Powers and to prevent it from spreading beyond Spain. That essential purpose the Committee has achieved. Mr. Eden knows as well as any man that, under M. Blum and M. Chautemps, the French consistently and abundantly intervened in Spain. They did not formally send men, bu t they sent every kind of weapon. I t is now fashionable among the Opposition, and in this Mr. Eden joined them, to lay all the emphasis on weapons, particularly aeroplanes, as being much more important than men. So, indeed, they are. Both sides in Spain, a country where conscription is taken for granted, have adequate populations on which to draw for soldiers. What both sides lack is adequate plant for the manufacture of the very elaborate, expensive and perishable implements which the modern soldier employs. Both in the numbers of men and in the industrial centres available for local manufacture, the Nationalists have a certain advantage. They have the foundries of Bilbao and Malaga, as against Sagunto, but their real superiority is that they possess not only far more of Spain, but far more of the settled provinces and the provincial capitals. The war may be seen, with much truth, as essentially the assertion of the real Spain, whose life is centred in these provinces, and provincial centres, against the great cities. I t is not an accidental thing that men speak always of

Salamanca or Burgos, as against Madrid or Barcelona. The centres express the underlying tru th about the warfare between the older Spain and the proletarian revolutionary doctrines, which have been nourished over two generations in three or four great centres. It is highly misleading for foreign governments to take consular reports from Malaga or Bilbao as truly reflecting either the strength or the feeling of National Spain. The centres in which, for purposes of business, the agents of foreign governments commonly reside are not, in this issue, the best centres of observation. The Spanish War

One of the lessons of the Spanish war has been the small effect of enormous and exceedingly costly bombardments, whether by artillery or aeroplanes, when delivered against competent earthworks and cement fortifications, manned by seasoned defenders, who can hold on under cover and then repel attack with their machine guns. In the latest phase -of the Ebro fighting, General Franco is trying new tactics which rely much more on the infantry and on hand-to-hand fighting, without intense preliminary bombardments. The Spanish front is of such enormous length that it has always been possible for sudden and surprise attacks to penetrate a certain distance. The difficulty has been to reduce strongly fortified points. The progress must be slow, as hills and ridges are captured one by one, each little capture making some further enemy position untenable. A War of Endurance

The tactics which answered so well in the spring, and carried the Nationalists to the Mediterranean, have had to be replaced by much slower methods. The winter now approaches, during which the war will increasingly become a struggle of endurance, each side hoping to detect signs of war-weariness or disaffection behind the