WAR IN SPAIN: Franco to the Sea

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French truck drivers, drawing triple pay, were going out of Leftist Spain last week sporting gold wrist watches, silk socks & shirts, smoking the best cigars. At restaurants just inside the French border they could be seen swizzling champagne, ordering such delicacies as speckled trout, fresh asparagus, vieux cognac. These lusty lads have been driving an average of 200 heavy trucks per day from Republican France over the officially closed frontier into Leftist Spain. The 2,000 tons they took in daily were mostly passed as "agricultural implements" or "foodstuffs." A truck careening down the road at Montauban overturned last week, the French driver was killed, four large cases of "foodstuffs" broke open, and out rolled war plane motors. At Honfleur, France, an overloaded winch, lifting huge cases out of a steamer flying the flag of Panama which had arrived with "agricultural machinery" for Leftist Spain, broke down. This accident smashed against the side of the dock cases which broke open, spilled out six-inch gun carriages and a submachine gun.

Meanwhile, in groups large & small, many Leftist Spanish soldiers came half-famished through the crags of the Pyrenees, stumbling over crests white with eternal snow (see cut). They straggled down the valleys, handed their guns to French frontier guards, entered refugee camps where there was no champagne or speckled trout, only spring water and stew dipped steaming from a bucket. Unsympathetic with these soldiers who had stopped fighting, pugnacious Novelist Ernest Hemingway filed a hard-boiled dispatch from Leftist Spain's sunny seacoast: "In the far north, under the shadow of the Pyrenees, General Franco's troops have advanced steadily north and eastward in a country where positions could be held by determined graduates of any good girls' finishing school!"

Aranda to the Sea! If the Leftist flight in the Pyrenees sector continues, the Rightists will soon have detached Leftist Spain from France, cut off the flood of French and Soviet munitions through France. This is Rightist Objective No. 1, would almost certainly decide the war. Last week Rightist Objective No. 2 was to complete the drive to the sea and definitely cut Leftist Spain in twain, although to all intents & purposes Generalissimo Francisco Franco accomplished this when Italian Fascist Militia fought down the Ebro River Valley, besieged the town of Tortosa (TIME, April 18).