THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 168 No. 5039

LONDON DECEMBER 5th, 1936

SIXPENCE

PRINCIPAL CONTENTS

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK

. 765

A NEW PHASE IN SPAIN ; THE FRENCH DILEMMA ; LORDS AND COMMONS ON SPAIN ; RUSSIA AND FRANCE ; THE RED ARMY ; LORD HALIFAX’S EXPOSITION ; PAN-AMERICA ; THE LORDS AND EUTHANASIA ; THE CRYSTAL PALACE ; THE FRENCH PRESS THE KING’S MATTER .............................. 768 IRISH LITERATURE.......................................... 769

By SEAN O’FAOLAIN SOUTH WALES, H .......................................... 770

By a TABLET INVESTIGATOR GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, IV .. . . 772

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION ROME LETTER .......................................... 774 DUBLIN LETTER .......................................... 775

THE CHURCH ABROAD .............................. 776 THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL .. . 777

A Recapitulation by G. M. GODDEN THE TABLET LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

(28 pp.) 779

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR......................807 PRIESTS FOR WESTMINSTER .809 TOWN AND COUNTRY .............................. 810 O B IT U A R IE S ............................................. 813 CHESS AND CROSSWORD......................814 THE CALENDAR .......................................... 816

THE W ORLD W EEK BY W EEK A New Phase in Spain

The Broadening Issue

Madrid has so far been held against Franco through the presence of battalions of the International Brigade, and it is not surprising that anti-Communists should be appearing in numbers on the other side. The efforts, in which the British Government has played a leading part, to maintain the non-intervention agreement and to prevent the war from spreading beyond Spain have not been wasted ; but we have to recognise that the Spanish struggle has entered a new phase, and that Spain is becoming a trial battle ground where the Soviet and its declared adversaries are alike committed, and cannot now withdraw without a serious loss of prestige. To the horrors of a pitiless civil war, fought with the ferocity and the cruel courage which has marked all previous wars in Spain, there is now added something which makes much more remote any chance of a quick decision. The last week has seen a number of indications of the new tactics which General Franco will follow. He has not taken Madrid by frontal assault from the west, and with each day that passes the fortification, under the skilled direction of the foreign commanders now in charge for the Caballero Government, increases the difficulties of assault. The Red forces have taken the offensive at a number of points, both around Madrid and further afield, and the fighting has once again become more generalised. These attacks by the Red militia do not, as a rule, achieve much, but they have a nuisance value, particularly while the great mass of the Castilian volunteers who rallied to the Nationalist cause in August and September are still undergoing military training, because professional generals hate to use under-trained troops. Franco’s failure to take Madrid by assault has several parallels in recent history : the White Russians, under Yudenitch, failed to take St. Petersburg, and the Bolsheviks failed to take Warsaw in 1920. Trained soldiers lose much of their advantage in street and house-to-house fighting.

It seems probably that Franco's strategy will make him seek to envelop Madrid and to strike straight at Catalonia. These tactics mean a prolonged struggle with both sides more dependent on outside help. It is an enhancement of the tragedy that even should Franco gain rapid victory, it will no longer have been achieved as a single-minded national uprising, and the bitterness will be the greater. There was a moment when Soviet activity was so patent, and the Soviet direction in Caballero’s Government so plain, that the full implications of what the Third International exists to do were penetrating even the heads of those who had for long bemused themselves with talk of democracy and constitutional government in Spain. But the scale and effectiveness of a Communist direction of the war has made participation by Germany and Italy assume dimensions which enable the real Spanish issue to be clouded again. What is spreading through Spain and what may creep across Europe is not what is loosely called the international class war, but the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism, the latter representing every class and every interest that is challenged by the doctrinaire aggression of organized Marxism.

The French Dilemma

The centre of interest is likely, in the near future, to be found in Paris, and it may be said that in the next few years what happens in France is going to settle the future for Europe. Everything depends upon the extent to which the French Communists can play upon the deep abiding fear of German aggression which Frenchmen feel. Frenchmen of the Right, wholeheartedly engaged in resisting the subversion of the national life of France by the agents of Moscow, nevertheless feel profoundly uneasy when they hear of