SPAIN: Everybody's War

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By agreement of the London Nonintervention Committee of 27 States, these will supply a total of 900 "agents" or observers to be stationed around the land and sea coasts of Spain, together with such equipment as warships for the agents to peer from, guards to ensure their reasonable safety. Although the international patrol was supposed to be all set to come into effect, little more had been made public this week than the fact that 260 agents will observe on the land frontiers, the rest on warships whose nationality has been fixed (see map). Undisclosed, apparently undecided, was exactly what the goo agents are to do except observe. Strong was an impression that at first they will merely report what look to them like cases of the entry into Spain of men or munitions, recording these violations of the London Non-intervention Agreement, leaving to statesmen any action.

Inside this ring of observers everybody will continue to fight "everybody's Spanish Civil War" and this week nationality and numbers were, according to best sources: Leftists, 40,000, comprising 5,500 Italians, 18,000 French, 7,000 Russians, 5,000 Poles, 2,500 Americans, 2,000 British; Rightists, 79,000 comprising 30,000 Italians, 20,000 Moors, 14,000 Germans, 9,000 Irish, 6,000 Portuguese. This counts Moors as foreigners, as that is how Spaniards count them, although they are citizens of Spanish Morocco. Spaniards added to each of the above forces brought the Rightists under arms up to a grand total of some 349,000, Leftists to a grand total of 240,000.

Whole Hog, Abruptly from Rome this week came official press outbursts which many Fascists thought presaged whole-hog intervention in Spain by Italy to wipe out the stain of the "Little Caporetto." Il Duce's newsorgans smeared Russia, France and Mexico with charges that those Governments have run arms to the Spanish Leftists in a whole list of instances which the Rome press hotly particularized, roasting especially "France's flagrant violations of the neutral Non-intervention accord signed at London."

These charges, Rome thought, laid the "juridical basis" for an Italian walkout from the 27-nation phalanx of Nonintervention, raised the risk of Italian action as heedless of Geneva as the Ethiopian war. Meanwhile in Spain, the big Russian air fleet of the Leftists machine-gunned Rightist trenches in one fell swoop along 330 miles of the fighting front.